Attentional bias is associated with incentive-related physiological and subjective measures.

Drug cue reactivity is theoretically and clinically important. The modified Stroop task has been widely used to assess attention capture by drug cues (attentional bias). Attentional bias to drug cues is assumed to reflect the incentive value of those cues, but this has not been directly tested. The authors examined whether the smoking Stroop effect was associated with facial electromyography (EMG) assessed in real time. Heart-rate (HR) and skin conductance (SC) responses were also assessed. Smokers (n = 79) attended up to four experimental sessions. Presession Abstinence state and within-session Smoking were manipulated across sessions. Over all assessments, participants exhibited a robust smoking Stroop effect. Using Generalized Estimating Equations (GEE) analyses, the smoking Stroop effect was positively associated with zygomaticus major activity but not with corrugator supercilii activity, HR, or SC. The smoking Stroop effect was also positively associated with self-reported positive outcome expectancies from smoking and with craving. In sum, attentional bias was more strongly associated with appetitive responses (zygomaticus major activity, positive outcome expectancies) than with withdrawal responses (e.g., corrugator supercilii activity) or measures of physiological arousal (e.g., HR, SC). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attentional persistence for features of hierarchical patterns.

Priming for perceptual wholes and parts was examined in 4 experiments involving patterns arranged in a spatial hierarchy (D. Navon, see record 1978-11488-001). Previous studies have demonstrated "level-specific priming" across successive trials for these patterns (L. C. Robertson et al, see record 80:40200; L. M. Ward, see record 69:02582), and studies in neuropsychology have shown an absence of this priming effect in patient groups with parietal damage (R. Rafal & L. M. Robertson, 1995). The present experiments demonstrate that level-specific priming is linked to the spatial frequency differences between global and local forms in hierarchical patterns. They also show that level-specific priming is present even when the stimulus as a whole changes location. The effects last for up to 3 sec without diminution and are not affected by changes in color, polarity, or contrast. These findings are discussed as they relate to spatial attention, object perception, and memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Motive patterns and risk preferences associated with entrepreneurship.

The relationship between n Ach and risk preference of managers was studied. The trends in the results demonstrated that there was a positive relationship between the 2 variables, but that mangers with high and low degree of policy power (entrepreneurship) could not be differentiated. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Learning a new bimanual coordination pattern: Reciprocal influences of intrinsic and to-be-learned patterns.

Examined the following questions: (1) How do previously learned coordination patterns affect new learning (Exp 1)? and (2) How does new learning affect the performance of intrinsic coordination patterns (Exp 2)? In Exp 1, 12 20–24 yr olds practiced either a 45° or a 135° relative phase pattern for 4 days; in Exp 2, 7 21–24 yr olds practiced a 90° relative phase pattern over 6 days. Retention tests were conducted 4 wks after the last practice session in both experiments. Performance on both the in-phase (0°) and anti-phase (180°) patterns was also measured on each day. Results reveal that reciprocal effects between the intrinsic patterns and the new pattern were only temporary, and did not affect learning in any permanent way. Learning a new pattern was not differentially affected by its relation to an intrinsic pattern. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A comparison of cognitive load associated with discovery learning and worked examples.

This article reports experimental work comparing exploration and worked-examples practice in learning to use a database program. Exploration practice is based on discovery learning principles, whereas worked-examples practice arose from the development of cognitive load theory. Exploration practice was expected to place a considerable load on working memory, whereas a heavy use of worked examples was hypothesized to lead to more effective processing by reducing extraneous mental load. Students with no previous domain familiarity with databases were found to substantially benefit from worked examples in comparison to exploration. However, if students had previous familiarity with the database domain, the type of practice made no significant difference to their learning because the exploration students were able to draw on existing, well-developed domain schemas to guide their exploration. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attentional and ocular movements.

The relationship between eye movements and movements of attention was examined in a series of 6 experiments. A temporal order judgment technique was used to index attentional allocation. The results showed that endogenous movements of attention were slower than movements of the eyes and that the participants were able to hold attention at one location while executing an eye movement to another location. Under conditions of exogenous cueing, attention moved rapidly to the cued location, in advance of the eyes. These findings challenge the prevailing view that ocular movements must necessarily be preceded by a movement of attention. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Why listeners hear less than they are told: Attentional load and the teller–listener extremity effect.

Prior research (T. Gilovich, 1987; M. Inman, A. Reichl, & R. Baron, 1993) indicated that individuals (tellers) who directly observe an actor (on video tape) rate that actor less extremely than other individuals (listeners) who hear the tellers' secondhand accounts of the actor's actions. Evidence has suggested that this teller–listener effect is due at least in part to listeners' failure to encode and consider mitigating circumstances contributing to the actors' actions (Inman et al., 1993). The present research examined several explanations for this phenomenon. Study 1 found stronger teller–listener differences (and less recall of mitigating information) when listeners heard the teller's account in the presence of noise. Studies 2 and 3 found listener's interpretations to be more extreme when the verbal accounts they heard were verbally disorganized. These results support an attentional load explanation for teller–listener differences. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attention and handedness in bimanual coordination dynamics.

Predictions concerning the effects of handedness and attention on bimanual coordination were made from a dynamical model that incorporates the body's lateral asymmetry. Both handedness and the direction of attention (to the left or right) were manipulated in an inphase 1:1 frequency locking task. Left-handed and right-handed participants had to coordinate the planar oscillations of 2 handheld pendulums while 1 pendulum oscillated between spatial targets positioned over either the left or right hand. Predictions from the model were that participants would show a phase lead with the preferred hand, and that, although the phase lead would be greater when attention was directed to the preferred hand, the variability of relative phase would be lower. Confirmation of these predictions suggests that the dynamical perspective offers the possibility of studying handedness and attention without compromising theoretical precision or experimental control. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attentional capture with rapidly changing attentional control settings.

The classic theory of spatial attention hypothesized 2 modes, voluntary and involuntary. Folk, Remington, and Johnston (1992) reported that even involuntary attention capture by stimuli requires a match between stimulus properties and what the observer is looking for. This surprising conclusion has been confirmed by many subsequent studies. In these studies, however, the observer typically looks for the same property throughout an entire session. Real-world behavior, in contrast, often requires frequent shifts in attentional set. The present study examined whether such shifts weaken attentional settings, allowing task-irrelevant objects to capture attention. Surprisingly, fluctuating control settings did not increase vulnerability to capture by salient stimuli (color singletons and abrupt onsets). We conclude that the attention control system is remarkably flexible, able to rapidly and fully adopt new settings and abandon old settings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

能力谱与侧向荷载分布模式的关系

根据结构动力学理论证明了能力谱曲线的确定与侧向荷载分布模式间存在对应关系,指出对于不同的侧向荷载模式,应采用不同的能力谱曲线转化公式并给出了具体的表达式.分别采用本文方法、传统方法和弹塑性时程分析对一个六层钢筋混凝土框架结构进行了计算,证明了本文方法计算精度更高.利用该方法,采用多种侧向荷载模式对结构进行静力弹塑性分析,能将侧向位移反应可能范围限定得更小,使人们把握实际地震反应大小的准确性得以提高.     

Development of Attentional and Oculomotor Control.

The present study was conducted to examine the development of attentional and oculomotor control. More specifically, the authors were interested in the development of the ability to inhibit an incorrect but prepotent response to a salient distractor. Participants, who ranged in age from 8 to 25 years, performed 3 different eye movement tasks: a prosaccade, an antisaccade, and an oculomotor capture task. The time required to initiate a saccade decreased with age across all 3 tasks. Consistent with previous reports, accuracy was relatively age invariant in the prosaccade task. Performance improved with age, asymptoting at 16 years in the antisaccade task. It is interesting to note that despite the superficial similarity of the antisaccade and oculomotor capture tasks, performance was relatively age invariant in the latter. These results are discussed in terms of developmental differences in the interaction of goal-directed and stimulus-driven processes in the control of attention and action. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Termination, appointment use, and outcome patterns associated with intake therapist discontinuity.

Psychotherapy clients often experience intake therapist discontinuity: meeting first with an intake therapist, then entering therapy with a different treating therapist. The authors compared such discontinuity clients at a university’s counseling center (55.6% of 15,137 clients) with continuity clients, who continued therapy with their intake therapists. Discontinuity clients were twice as likely as continuity clients to terminate by missing the appointment after intake. Improvement among discontinuity clients lagged behind improvement among continuity clients at Sessions 2 and 3. Though more likely to terminate by missing Session 2, discontinuity clients attended 2 sessions more than continuity clients, on average, making treatment of discontinuity clients 19% more expensive than treatment of continuity clients in terms of sessions attended. The extra sessions attended by discontinuity clients did not yield overall better outcomes. Intake therapist discontinuity appeared to disrupt the beginning of psychotherapy, dissuading some clients from returning after intake, slowing early improvement among those who did return, and unproductively lengthening their treatment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Personality patterns associated with heavy cigarette smoking in male college students.

Hypothesized that male heavy cigarette smokers would evidence (a) personality traits of defiance, impulsivity, and danger seeking; (b) oral preoccupations; (c) manifest distress; and (d) perception of having experienced minimal warmth, protection, and affection while growing up. 108 male undergraduate nonsmokers and 42 heavy smokers completed the boston university personality inventory, the parent-child questionnaire, the manifest affect scale, the adolescent conflict test, and the family interaction test. On all measures, the heavy smokers scored significantly higher than did the nonsmokers. Results are interpreted as support for the view that although people smoke for a variety of reasons, the habituated or addicted smoker often engages in the practice as an extension of his personal style and utilizes it to deal with characterologic as well as situational aspects of his life which may engender tension, irritation, or boredom. (15 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attentional task aptitude and performance anxiety.

Anxious responding (trait, state, and test anxiety) has a negative impact on overt performance. Researchers have used a unidimensional method of assessing anxiety and performance, although a more informative approach would involve a comprehensive assessment battery and multiple performance tasks. Incorporating this strategy, the authors measured the impact of anxiety on 4 attentional processing tasks. Results revealed that "types" of anxiety symptoms were differentially related to attentional task performance; test anxiety accounted for the most variance in predicting performance on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Third Edition (D. Wechsler, 1997) letter-number sequencing and digit-span subtests, trait anxiety and fear of negative evaluation were more significant in predicting Stroop performance, and math anxiety accounted for the largest variance toward understanding Paced Auditory Serial Addition Task (C. W. Lejuez, C. W. Kahler, & R. A. Brown, 2003) scores. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cerebral dominance and asynchrony between bimanual two-dimensional movements.

The asynchrony of bimanual movements was investigated. Right- and left-handers traced simple geometrical patterns (ellipses) continuously with both hands. All combinations of the direction of rotation in each hand were executed at different rhythms. Geometrically, performances were largely independent of manual dominance. However, by comparing the passage times at homologous positions, the authors found that the dominant hand led the nondominant one by about 25 msec. The asynchrony was affected by neither movement type nor rhythm. The variability of the asynchrony varied along the trajectory, with well-defined maxima and minima. The variability profiles for movements that engaged homologous muscles differed markedly from those that engaged nonhomologous muscles. The authors discuss the hypotheses that bimanual periodic movements are timed by a lateralized functional module and that asynchrony is due to the necessity of transmitting time-keeping information to the other hemisphere. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attentional processing and the subjective contour illusion.

To distinguish between bottom–up and top–down (TD) accounts of subjective contour (SC) perception, the present investigation used a dual-task paradigm to test the relative attentional demands of real SC perception. In the primary task, 16 undergraduates made speeded same–different discriminations of either paired SC forms or their real contour analogs. Half the Ss performed this primary task in conjunction with a 6-digit short-term memory load secondary task. If subjective forms impose a greater limited-capacity processing load than real forms, then the need to share processing capacity with a secondary task was expected to produce a greater increment in RT for subjective relative to real forms. Results indicate that the expected enhanced RT increment for subjective relative to real forms with the addition of a concurrent memory load was limited to same trials. This result implies that the nature of response indicators must be considered in assessing capacity requirements with the sort of dual-task paradigm used in the present investigation. Nevertheless, the fact that the increment in same RT with the addition of a concurrent memory load was greater for subjective relative to real forms accords with expectations derived from the notion that the perception of SCs is more attention-demanding than that of real contours. A comprehensive theory of SC perception will most likely be formulated within the TD perspective of conceptually driven visual information processing. (90 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attentional and nonattentional forms of sequence learning.

Investigated the hypothesis that sequential patterns of behavior can be learned by 2 independent mechanisms. One requires attention to the relation between successive events, whereas the other operates independently of such attention. In 4 experiments, Ss learned visuospatial sequences in a serial reaction time (RT) task. The relation between attentional and nonattentional learning was explored by assessing the extent to which learning transferred between conditions with or without distraction. Results suggest that attentional and nonattentional learning operate independently, in parallel, do not share information, and represent sequential information in qualitatively different ways. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attentional capacity dysfunction and arousal in schizophrenia.

Criticizes 2 influential premises underlying most of current research on schizophrenia and attention: (a) belief in the existence of a specific information-processing deficit and (b) acceptance of a framework of "cold cognition." Capacity theory is proposed as an alternative theoretical framework within which the various phenotypically diverse attentional deficits in schizophrenia reflect a deficit in the control function that governs the mobilization and allocation of attention. Attentional deficits, therefore, are most manifest when effortful processing in short-term storage is required. Research on short-term memory processes in schizophrenics shows that the magnitude of the attention deficit correlates positively with the attentional requirements of the cognitive operations involved. The dysfunction is thought to reflect the high levels of arousal characteristic of schizophrenics. Parallels in the performance of schizophrenics and essentially normal but hyperaroused Ss are outlined in support of this hypothesis. The failure to consider the possible mediating effects of hyperarousal in attentional performance of schizophrenics is an omission in the research on schizophrenic cognition. Causality between arousal and information processing is addressed. (101 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attentional absorption in marijuana and alcohol intoxication.

On a measure of psychological "absorption," alcohol users asked to refer to the alcohol-intoxicated state reported significantly lower mean absorption scores than did marihuana and alcohol users asked to refer to the marihuana-intoxicated state or to nonintoxicated occasions. Control conditions utilizing the Addiction Research Center Inventory scales showed that Ss (162 undergraduates) were capable of accurately accessing both the marihuana- and alcohol-intoxicated states. Responses indicative of cultural stereotypes of the drug states could not account for the results. Other results indicate that marihuana users scored significantly higher than either nondrug users or exclusive alcohol users on ratings of the affective pleasantness associated with those absorbing experiences reportedly characteristic of the marihuana state. The apparent reciprocal relationship between alcohol and marihuana intoxication with respect to psychological absorption, in conjunction with the affect results, may suggest differential reinforcing values associated with the alterations in consciousness produced by each drug. (4 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attentional consequences of object appearance and disappearance.

This study compared the attentional effects of object appearances (onsets) and disappearances (offsets) in moderately complex displays. Four experiments showed that onsets produce the inhibition of return (IOR) effect that has been found with simpler displays. In contrast, although offsets did produce inhibitory effects, these effects did not follow the spatial or temporal pattern of IOR. Two further experiments used a very salient object disappearance to determine whether the typical pattern for IOR could be instantiated; it was not. The results indicate that object appearances are more potent perceptual events than object disappearances. In addition, object disappearances have different attentional consequences than object appearances: Disappearances provoke earlier and spatially narrower inhibition. The results are consistent with the view that inhibition serves a functional role in increasing the efficiency of visual search processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)