The role of stimulus-based and response-based spatial information in sequence learning.

In 4 experiments, relational structures were independently varied in stimulus and response sequences in a serial reaction time task. Moreover, the use of spatial and symbolic stimuli and responses was varied between experiments. In Experiment 1, spatial stimuli (asterisk locations) triggered spatial responses (keystrokes); in Experiment 2, spatial stimuli triggered symbolic responses (verbal digit naming); in Experiment 3, symbolic stimuli (digits) triggered keystrokes; and in Experiment 4, digits triggered verbal responses. The results showed that there is a remarkably stronger effect of relational structures in spatial sequences than in symbolic sequences, irrespective of whether stimulus or response sequences are concerned. This suggests that learning is particularly effective for sequences of spatial locations. It is argued that spatial learning is a critical determinant for the debate on perceptual and motor learning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Pattern memory involves both elemental and configural processes: Evidence from the effects of hippocampal lesions.

The formation of an integrated memory for a pattern of stimulation could be based on the elements of that pattern becoming directly linked to one another, or by each of the elements becoming linked to a shared separate configural representation. These 2 accounts have proven difficult to discriminate between. Here, rats received exposure to four patterns of stimulation, each consisting of an auditory stimulus, a visual context, and a time of day; and we examined whether pre-training lesions to the hippocampus influenced memory for the patterns. These lesions abolished pattern memory that required configural processes (Experiments 1A and 1B) but had no effect on pattern memory that could be supported by elemental processes (Experiment 2). This dissociation provides support for the views that elemental and configural processes ordinarily support pattern memory and that rats with lesions to the hippocampus are left reliant on elemental processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Categorization processes in mental comparisons.

Five experiments explore categorization and category-based congruity effects in mental comparisons. The first 4 experiments concentrate on categorization of infinite-set small items. The experiments vary the additional items presented and whether those items appear once (Experiments 1-2) or repeatedly (Experiments 3-4). Additional items include other small items (Experiment 1), relatively large items (Experiments 2-4), and items involving nonsize dimensions (Experiment 4). The critical small items show a complete congruity effect only in Experiments 1 and 3. Results suggest that categorization of infinite-set items may be based on range information alone (Experiment 1) but that multiple categorizations based on multiple ranges (Experiment 2) may require attentional effort. Results implicate categorization as a central process in mental comparison, despite differences in ease of categorization across paradigm. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effects of partial pairing on scale values derived from the method of paired comparisons.

How can the measurement of attitudes and opinions, by the use of scales involving the method of paired comparisons, be improved? An attempt was made to describe the relationship between scale values derived from partial and complete paired comparison judgments. "One complete and five partial pairing schedules were used, and 60 Ss, who had been randomly assigned to one of these six conditions, scaled the names of 30 nationality groups. The results of the study indicated that partial pairing scale values rather closely approximated those obtained from a complete pairing when the number of observations was reduced as much as 50% of the complete pairing matrix. Beyond this point further reduction seemed to yield a more drastic modification in the scale values obtained. The rating task implications of partial pairing were discussed." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Phonological priming in auditory word recognition: When both controlled and automatic processes are responsible for the effects.

The phonological priming paradigm provides an interesting methodological tool for studying various components of the speech recognition process. However, concerns about response biases distorting the effects have been repeatedly voiced. This article reviews the main studies on priming and aims to distinguish effects under automatic processes from those under some level of strategic control. Both controlled and automatic processes appear to be responsible for the effects observed in phonological priming experiments. Nonetheless, with careful procedures, it is possible to separate them. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Arousal and attraction: Evidence for automatic and controlled processes.

A meta-analysis, a review, and an experiment investigated the effect of arousal on attraction. The meta-analysis examined experiments that manipulated arousal level. Results indicated that arousal affects attraction even when the arousal source is relatively unambiguous. In contrast, a review of experiments that manipulated arousal source ambiguity suggested that arousal exerts a stronger influence on attraction when arousal sources are greater in ambiguity. The authors proposed a judgment and adjustment model that states that arousal automatically affects judgments of attraction but that individuals can correct (i.e., adjust) for this automatic effect when the arousal source is unambiguous. Consistent with this model, an experiment provided evidence that cognitive busyness interferes with the adjustment process. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Simultaneous contrast: Evidence from licking microstructure and cross-solution comparisons.

The microstructure of rats' licking responses was analyzed to investigate both “classic” simultaneous contrast (e.g., Flaherty & Largen, 1975) and a novel discrete-trial contrast procedure where access to an 8% test solution of sucrose was preceded by a sample of either 2%, 8%, or 32% sucrose (Experiments 1 and 2, respectively). Consumption of a given concentration of sucrose was higher when consumed alongside a low rather than high concentration comparison solution (positive contrast) and consumption of a given concentration of sucrose was lower when consumed alongside a high rather than a low concentration comparison solution (negative contrast). Furthermore, positive contrast increased the size of lick clusters while negative contrast decreased the size of lick clusters. Lick cluster size has a positive monotonic relationship with the concentration of palatable solutions and so positive and negative contrasts produced changes in lick cluster size that were analogous to raising or lowering the concentration of the test solution respectively. Experiment 3 utilized the discrete-trial procedure and compared contrast between two solutions of the same type (sucrose-sucrose or maltodextrin-maltodextrin) or contrast across solutions (sucrose-maltodextrin or maltodextrin-sucrose). Contrast effects on consumption were present, but reduced in size, in the cross-solution conditions. Moreover, lick cluster sizes were not affected at all by cross-solution contrasts as they were by same-solution contrasts. These results are consistent with the idea that simultaneous contrast effects depend, at least partially, on sensory mechanisms. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotion and working memory: Evidence for domain-specific processes for affective maintenance.

Working memory is comprised of separable subsystems for visual and verbal information, but what if the information is affective? Does the maintenance of affective information rely on the same processes that maintain nonaffective information? The authors address this question using a novel delayed-response task developed to investigate the short-term maintenance of affective memoranda. Using selective interference methods the authors find that a secondary emotion-regulation task impaired affect intensity maintenance, whereas secondary cognitive tasks disrupted brightness intensity maintenance, but facilitated affect maintenance. Additionally, performance on the affect maintenance task depends on the valence of the maintained feeling, further supporting the domain-specific nature of the task. The importance of affect maintenance per se is further supported by demonstrating that the observed valence effects depend on a memory delay and are not evident with simultaneous presentation of stimuli. These findings suggest that the working memory system may include domain-specific components that are specialized for the maintenance of affective memoranda. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Strategic failure in social interaction: Evidence for expectancy disconfirmation processes.

Two experiments were conducted to test the idea that individuals may fail strategically in order to lower the expectations that others hold for their performances. In a pilot study, participants reported that, when lacking confidence, they would be particularly uncomfortable and anxious with high expectations and would attempt to lower them strategically. In Experiment 1, socially anxious and nonanxious participants were led to believe that an interviewer's high or low expectations were due to a prodigious amount of effort or to very little effort. Socially anxious individuals tended to fail strategically when confronted with high as opposed to low expectations presumably based on a prodigious amount of previous effort. In Experiment 2, individuals high or low in social anxiety were led to believe that an interviewer held either high or low expectations for them. High-anxiety participants, led to believe their initial performance would affect high expections, showed much poorer initial performance relative to all other groups. These findings show that individuals who are particularly doubtful about their ability to perform up to par will sometimes fail strategically at the outset of social interaction as a means to create lower and safer standards. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Inferences of ability and effort: Evidence for two different processes.

In 2 experiments, 295 undergraduates judged either ability (given performance and effort information) or effort (given performance and ability information) where both the reliability and value of the given information varied. Ss made judgments of IQ (or study time) based on information about the effort a person expended in studying (or IQ), student's performance, or both. Individual differences were found in the judged relationship between ability and effort. Some judged ability and effort to be positively related, whereas others judged ability and effort to be negatively related. These groups also differed in the way information reliability influenced their judgments. The positive group showed effects that agree with either an averaging or correlational model: Higher reliability of one type of information was correlated with a lesser effect of the other type of information. For the negative group, an increase in the reliability of one type of information actually increased the effect of the other type of information, a result that is inconsistent with the averaging model. Both an expectancy-contrast model and a correlational model can account for the results of the negative group. The different effects of information reliability for the 2 groups can be interpreted as evidence of 2 different inference processes. Results show flexibility of human judgment strategies and the need for research considering variables that influence strategy use. (24 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Episodic and semantic knowledge in emotional self-report: Evidence for two judgment processes.

Three studies involving 3 participant samples (Ns = 39, 55, and 53) tested the hypothesis that people retrieve episodic emotion knowledge when reporting on their emotions over short (e.g., last few hours) time frames, but that they retrieve semantic emotion knowledge when reporting on their emotions over long (e.g., last few months) time frames. Support for 2 distinct judgment strategies was based on judgment latencies (Studies I and 2) and priming paradigms (Studies 2 and 3). The authors suggest that self-reports of emotion over short versus long time frames assess qualitatively different sources of self-knowledge. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Contrast and accentuation effects in category learning.

This study examines the accentuation of perceived intercategory differences. In Experiment 1, 2 sets of trait adjectives were presented, a neutral set and a set of either favorable traits or unfavorable traits. Ss estimated the mean favorability of each set. The mean favorability of the neutral set was then increased or decreased by adding new traits. As predicted, the estimated mean favorability of the neutral set changed more when the set became more distinct from a contextual set than when it became more similar. In Experiment 2, estimated category means were displaced away from each other (contrast effect), and they moved even farther apart when new information increased the variability of trait favorability (accentuation effect). This change was illusory because the actual category means remained constant. Experiment 3, in which trait adjectives described members of 2 novel groups, replicated Experiment 2. The relevance of contrast and accentuation effects to the development and maintenance of differentiated intergroup perceptions is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Control of cost in prospective memory: Evidence for spontaneous retrieval processes.

To examine the processes that support prospective remembering, previous research has often examined whether the presence of a prospective memory task slows overall responding on an ongoing task. Although slowed task performance suggests that monitoring is present, this method does not clearly establish whether monitoring is functionally related to prospective memory performance. According to the multiprocess theory (McDaniel & Einstein, 2000), monitoring should be necessary to prospective memory performance with nonfocal cues but not with focal cues. To test this hypothesis, we varied monitoring by presenting items that were related (or unrelated) to the prospective memory task proximal to target events. Notably, whereas monitoring proximal to target events led to a large increase in nonfocal prospective memory performance, focal prospective remembering was high in the absence of monitoring, and monitoring in this condition provided no additional benefits. These results suggest that when monitoring is absent, spontaneous retrieval processes can support focal prospective remembering. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Contrast effects in spontaneous evaluations: A psychophysical account.

In the affective-priming paradigm, target stimuli are preceded by evaluatively polarized prime stimuli and then are to be classified as either good or bad as fast as possible. The typical and robust finding is assimilation: Primes facilitate the processing of evaluatively consistent targets relative to evaluatively inconsistent targets. Nevertheless, contrast effects have repeatedly been observed. The authors propose a new psychophysical account of normal (assimilative) and reversed (contrastive) priming effects and test new predictions derived from it in 5 studies: In Studies 1 and 2, the authors' account is shown to provide a better explanation of contrastive effects in a priming paradigm with two primes than the traditional attentional account does. Furthermore, as predicted by the new account, contrast effects emerge at an intermediate stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA, Study 3) and even with short SOAs when target onset takes participants by surprise (Study 4). Finally, the use of extremely valenced primes triggers corrective efforts (Study 5) as predicted. Implications for priming measures of evaluative associations are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Evidence for distributivity effects in comprehension.

In the current article, we introduce a new methodology for detecting whether a word in a sentence is conceptually represented as plural and use it to shed light on a debate about whether comprehenders interpret singular indefinite noun phrases within a distributed predicate as plural during online reading. Experiment 1 extended a methodology previously used by Berent, Pinker, Tzelgov, Bibi, and Goldfarb (2005) to test individual words or word pairs by having readers judge, at a critical word, whether 1 or 2 words appeared on a computer screen while performing self-paced reading on a sentence presented in 1- and 2-word chunks. In line with Berent et al., Experiment 1 indicated that participants were slower to judge that 1 word was on the screen when the word was plural (e.g., cats) than when it was singular (e.g., cat). Experiment 2 used this paradigm to show that readers build different conceptual representations for distributed versus collective predicates and interpret a singular indefinite noun phrase within a distributed predicate as plural (e.g., Kaup, Kelter, & Habel, 2002; but cf. Filik, Paterson, & Liversedge, 2004; Paterson, Filik, & Liversedge, 2008). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Repetition of semantic comparisons: Temporary and persistent priming effects.

Two experiments tested the involvement of both abstract semantic memory representations and instance-specific memory for feature encoding in repetition effects for a semantic processing task. Experiment 1 showed that a relatively small amount of facilitation (10%–25%) was attributable to memory for instance-specific features (typography) of repeated trials. Although small, this effect showed no decay over repetition lags investigated, suggesting persistent memory for encoded features or encoding processes. Experiment 2 showed that facilitation for semantically related repetitions was short-lived compared with facilitation for lexically exact repetitions. This suggested that priming of abstract semantic memory may be involved in temporary but not persistent repetition effects. Individual differences analyses supported the conclusion that despite the increased semantic complexity of this repetition priming task over those previously used, abstract semantic memory representations were not involved in persistent repetition effects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Contrast effects in priming paradigms: Implications for theory and research on implicit attitudes.

Contrast effects have been studied in dozens of experimental paradigms, including the measurement of attitudes in the social psychological literature. However, nearly all of this work has been conducted using explicit reports. In the present research the authors employed a variety of different types of priming tasks in order to gain insight into the nature of contrast effects and the role that automatic processes might play in their emergence. They report 6 experiments. In Experiments 1 and 2 the replicability and robustness of automatized contrast effects across 2 types of implicit tasks are established. Experiments 3–6 were conducted in order to further understand the nature of these effects and whether they are best understood in terms of spreading activation vs. response-based models of priming. In the course of accounting for their findings, the authors propose and validate a response-mapping framework, which provides insight into some longstanding ambiguities in the priming literature. Implications for theories of contrast and models of evaluative priming are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Auditory perception of conspecific and heterospecific vocalizations in birds: Evidence for special processes.

Budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus), canaries (Serinus canaria), and zebra finches (Poephila guttata castanotis) were tested for their ability to discriminate among distance calls of each species. For comparison, starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) were tested on the same sounds. Response latencies to detect a change in a repeating background of sound were taken as a measure of the perceptual similarity among calls. All 4 species showed clear evidence of 3 perceptual categories corresponding to the calls of the 3 species. Also, budgerigars, canaries, and zebra finches showed an enhanced ability to discriminate among calls of their own species over the calls of others. Starlings discriminated more efficiently among canary calls than among budgerigar or zebra finch calls. Results show species differences in discrimination of species-specific acoustic communication signals and provide insight into the nature of specialized perceptual processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Adaptive decision processes in perceptual comparisons: Effects of changes in global difficulty context.

Adaptive decision processes were investigated in experiments involving an unexpected change in the global ease or difficulty of the task. Under accuracy stress, a shift from an easy to a difficult context induced a marked increase in decision time, but a shift from a difficult to an easy context did not. Under speed stress, a shift to a more difficult context induced lower accuracy and rated confidence, depending on the difficulty of the decisions. A view of caution developed in D. Vickers's (1979) accumulator theory--whereby one seeks to base decisions on more information--is compared with a view based on slow and fast guessing theory (W. M. Petrusic, 1992; W. M. Petrusic & J. V. Baranski, 1989a)--whereby one seeks to base decisions on more diagnostic information. On balance, the findings support the latter view. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)