Showing papers in "Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2013"

The costs and benefits of mind-wandering: a review

Abstract: Substantial evidence suggests that mind-wandering typically occurs at a significant cost to performance. Mind-wandering-related deficits in performance have been observed in many contexts, most notably reading, tests of sustained attention, and tests of aptitude. Mind-wandering has been shown to negatively impact reading comprehension and model building, impair the ability to withhold automatized responses, and disrupt performance on tests of working memory and intelligence. These empirically identified costs of mind-wandering have led to the suggestion that mind-wandering may represent a pure failure of cognitive control and thus pose little benefit. However, emerging evidence suggests that the role of mind-wandering is not entirely pernicious. Recent studies have shown that mind-wandering may play a crucial role in both autobiographical planning and creative problem solving, thus providing at least two possible adaptive functions of the phenomenon. This article reviews these observed costs and possible functions of mind-wandering and identifies important avenues of future inquiry.

Wandering in both mind and body: Individual differences in mind wandering and inattention predict fidgeting.

Abstract: Anecdotal reports suggest that during periods of inattention or mind wandering, people tend to experience increased fidgeting. In four studies, we examined whether individual differences in the tendency to be inattentive and to mind wander in everyday life are related to the tendency to make spontaneous and involuntary movements (i.e., to fidget). To do so, we developed self-report measures of spontaneous and deliberate mind wandering, as well as a self-report scale to index fidgeting. In addition, we used several existing self-report measures of inattentiveness, attentional control, and memory failures. Across our studies, a series of multiple regression analyses indicated that fidgeting was uniquely predicted by inattentiveness and spontaneous mind wandering but not by other related factors, including deliberate mind wandering, attentional control, and memory failures. As a result, we suggest that only spontaneously wandering thoughts are related to a wandering body.

Comparing comprehension measured by multiple-choice and open-ended questions.

Abstract: This study compared the nature of text comprehension as measured by multiple-choice format and open-ended format questions. Participants read a short text while explaining preselected sentences. After reading the text, participants answered open-ended and multiple-choice versions of the same questions based on their memory of the text content. The results indicated that performance on open-ended questions was correlated with the quality of self-explanations, but performance on multiple-choice questions was correlated with the level of prior knowledge related to the text. These results suggest that open-ended and multiple-choice format questions measure different aspects of comprehension processes. The results are discussed in terms of dual process theories of text comprehension.

Parsing the role of consonants versus vowels in the classic Takete-Maluma phenomenon.

Abstract: Wolfgang Kohler (1929, Gestalt psychology, New York, NY: Liveright) famously reported a bias in people’s choice of nonsense words as labels for novel objects, pointing to possible naive expectations about language structure. Two accounts have been offered to explain this bias, one focusing on the visuomotor effects of different vowel forms and the other focusing on variation in the acoustic structure and perceptual quality of different consonants. To date, evidence in support of both effects is mixed. Moreover, the veracity of either effect has often been doubted due to perceived limitations in methodologies and stimulus materials. A novel word-construction experiment is presented to test both proposed effects using randomized word- and image-generation techniques to address previous methodological concerns. Results show that participants are sensitive to both vowel and consonant content, constructing novel words of relatively sonorant consonants and rounded vowels to label curved object images, and of relatively plosive consonants and nonrounded vowels to label jagged object images. Results point to additional influences on word construction potentially related to the articulatory affordances or constraints accompanying different word forms.

Mind wandering in sentence reading: decoupling the link between mind and eye.

Abstract: When people read, their thoughts sometimes drift away from the task at hand: They are "mind wandering." Recent research suggests that this change in task focus is reflected in eye movements and this was tested in an experiment using controlled stimuli. Participants were presented with a series of sentences containing high- and low-frequency words, which they read while being eye-tracked, and they were sometimes probed to indicate whether they were on task or mind wandering. The results showed multiple differences between reading prior to a mind-wandering response and reading when on task: Mind wandering led to slower reading times, longer average fixation duration, and an absence of the word frequency effect on gaze duration. Collectively, these findings confirm that task focus could be inferred from eye movements, and they indicate that the link between word identification and eye scanning is decoupled when the mind wanders.

Construction, integration, and mind wandering in reading.

Abstract: In two experiments, we investigated how text recall was related to moment-to-moment variations in mental state while reading, and how both recall and mental state were related to the interest value of the text. In both experiments, subjects read either an interesting text (a segment of Rice's Interview with the Vampire [A. Rice, 1997, Interview with the vampire, New York. NY: Ballantine Books] or a less interesting text (a segment of Thackery's The History of Pendennis [W. M. Thackery, 2009/1914, The history of Pendennis, Project Gutenberg, Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7265]). The texts were read sentence-by-sentence on a computer screen, and subjects were periodically interrupted to answer a probe question. In Experiment 1, the probe asked whether subjects were attending to the text; in Experiment 2, the probe asked whether subjects were engaged with the story world. After reading the text, subjects were asked to recall as much of the story as possible. Recall of the material just prior to the probe was examined as a function of the whether the ratings were high, medium, or low. As expected, both on-task ratings and engagement ratings were higher for Interview than for Pendennis, but there were a substantial number of medium ratings given to both stories. In Experiment 1, there was a clear effect of story on recall over and above the effect of on-task rating. However, in Experiment 2, recall was purely a function of engagement rating. The results were interpreted in terms of a model in which recall is largely determined by the situation model representation of the narrative and in which engagement ratings (but not on-task ratings) provide a relatively pure index of the allocation of resources to processing of the situation model.Keywords: mind wandering, construction and integration, reading, situation modelThe present article builds on recent research on mind wandering in reading that demonstrates that with some frequency, readers fail to attend to the reading task. For example, readers report "zoning out" while reading with frequencies as high as 23% (Schooler, Reichle, & Halpern, 2004). Such inattention has, of course, negative implications for processing and later memory for the text (Schooler et al., 2004; Smallwood, McSpadden, & Schooler, 2008). However, in the present research we argue that in a complex task such as reading, the simple distinction between attending to the task and not attending to the task fails to capture important determinants of later memory. In particular, there is a range of different mental processes in reading to which one may allocate attentional resources. As a heuristic, we distinguish between construction processes that identify the meanings of words and sentences and integration processes that connect that information to long-term memory and build a situation model (Kintsch, 1988; Kintsch, Welsch, Schmalhofer, & Zimny, 1990). The two experiments reported here provide evidence on how the allocation of resources to off-task processes, construction processes, and integration processes affects subsequent memory.In what follows, we first elaborate a characterization of mind wandering as the allocation of attentional resources to mental processes unrelated to the text. Second, we discuss the relationship between resource allocation and subsequent memory. While it is intuitive that poor memory would result if one is not devoting resources to the task, the details of the relationship between how resources are allocated and what is remembered may be more complex. Finally, we describe the potential role of textual interest value in determining resource allocation and subsequent memory. The manipulation of the nature of the text provides the tool used in the present pair of studies for distinguishing different models of the relationship between resource allocation and memory. The first experiment demonstrates that interest value has an effect on subsequent memory that is not mediated purely by attention to the task. …

Encoding structure in holographic reduced representations.

Abstract: Vector Symbolic Architectures (VSAs) such as Holographic Reduced Representations (HRRs) are computational associative memories used by cognitive psychologists to model behavioural and neurological aspects of human memory. We present a novel analysis of the mathematics of VSAs and a novel technique for representing data in HRRs. Encoding and decoding in VSAs can be characterised by Latin squares. Successful encoding requires the structure of the data to be orthogonal to the structure of the Latin squares. However, HRRs can successfully encode vectors of locally structured data if vectors are shuffled. Shuffling results are illustrated using images but are applicable to any nonrandom data. The ability to use locally structured vectors provides a technique for detailed modelling of stimuli in HRR models.Keywords: holographic reduced representations, vector symbolic architectures, associative memory, Latin squares, permutationFirst proposed by Longuet-Higgins (1968) and Gabor (1969), a holographic associative memory is a computational memory based on the mathematics of holography. Holographic associative memory has been of interest to cognitive psychologists because of the following:(i) Associative memories are content-addressable, allowing items to be retrieved without search, in a manner similar to the fast, parallel retrieval of memories in the human mind.(ii) Just as human memory can store complicated and recursive relations between ideas, holographic associative memories can compactly store associations between associations.(iii) Holographic associative memories have what is called "lossy" storage, which is useful for modelling human forgetting.The mathematics of holography has long been suggested as the principle underlying the neural basis of memory (Pribram, 1969). Cognitive models based on holographic associative memory, such as TODAM (Murdock, 1982), TODAM2 (Murdock, 1993), and CHARM (Metcalfe-Eich, 1982), can explain and predict a variety of human memory phenomena.Holographic Reduced Representations (HRRs; Plate, 1994) are a refinement of Gabor's holographic associative memory. HRRs have also been used to model how humans understand analogies (Plate, 2000b; Eliasmith & Thagard, 2001) and the meaning of words (BEAGLE; Jones & Mewhort, 2007), how humans encode strings of characters (Hannagan, Dupoux, & Christophe, 2011), and to model how humans perform simple memory and problem-solving tasks such as playing rocks, paper, scissors (Rutledge-Taylor, 2010) and solving Raven's progressive matrices (Rasmussen & Eliasmith, 2011).Research into HRRs and HRR-based models has been motivated by limitations in the ability of traditional connectionist models (i.e., nonrecurrent models with one or two layers of connections) to represent knowledge with complicated structure (Plate, 1995). In traditional connectionist models, an item is represented by a pattern of activation across a group of neurons. Mathematically, the pattern of activation is represented by a vector of numbers that stand for the activations of the neurons. Relationships between pairs of items are defined by the connection weights between groups of neurons. The connection weights between two groups of neurons can be represented as a matrix of numbers. Relationships between more than two items can be defined using more connections, represented as tensors of numbers (i.e., multidimensional arrays; for psychological theory see Humphreys, Bain, & Pike, 1989; for computational theory see Smolensky, 1990). Smolensky's tensor memories provide a powerful approach to representing and manipulating relationships between items that differs substantively from traditional connectionist models. In particular, tensor memories (and, in fact, HRRs) do not need to be trained. However, as the number of items bound together into an association grows, the size of the tensor needed to represent the relationship grows exponentially. …

Working memory capacity does not always support future-oriented mind wandering.

Abstract: To evaluate the claim that mind-wandering demands executive resources, and more specifically that people with better executive control will have the resources to engage in more future-oriented thought than will those with poorer executive control, we reanalyzed thought-report data from 2 independently conducted studies (J. C. McVay & M. J. Kane, 2012, Why does working memory capacity predict variation in reading comprehension? On the influence of mind wandering and executive attention, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Vol. 141, pp. 302-320; N. Unsworth & B. D. McMillan, in press, Mind-wandering and reading comprehension: Examining the roles of working memory capacity, interest, motivation, and topic experience, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition) on working memory capacity (WMC), mind-wandering, and reading comprehension. Both of these individual-differences studies assessed large samples of university subjects' WMC abilities via multiple tasks and probed their immediate thought content while reading; in reporting any task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs), subjects indicated whether those thoughts were about the future or the past, if applicable. In contrast to previously published findings indicating that higher WMC subjects mind-wandered about the future more than did lower WMC subjects (B. Baird, J. Smallwood, & J. W. Schooler, 2011, Back to the future: Autobiographical planning and the functionality of mind-wandering, Consciousness and Cognition, Vol. 20, pp. 1604-1611), we found only weak to modest negative correlations between WMC and future-oriented TUTs. If anything, our findings suggest that higher WMC subjects' TUTs were somewhat less often future-oriented than were lower WMC subjects'. Either WMC is not truly associated with mind-wandering about the future, or we have identified some important boundary conditions around that association.

Semantic richness, concreteness, and object domain: an electrophysiological study.

Abstract: Results from previous event-related potential (ERP) studies of semantic richness and concreteness effects have been mixed. Feature production norms have been used to derive one measure of semantic richness, the number of listed semantic features (NOF) for a given concept. Whereas some ERP studies have found evidence for a semantic richness continuum from abstract concepts, to concrete concepts with few features, to concrete concepts with several features, other studies have not. The present study assessed the effects of NOF (within concrete concepts) and concreteness (concrete vs. abstract concepts), on ERP amplitudes and behavioural decision latencies during a concrete/abstract decision task. It is important we also manipulated object domain, which has been found to influence ERP amplitude and topography. High and low NOF concepts were selected from animal and nonliving thing categories and all four conditions were matched on several potential confounds. We show that although decision latencies support a semantic richness continuum, electrophysiological activity does not. Whereas concrete concepts produce a larger negativity than abstract concepts, low NOF concepts are associated with larger negativities than high NOF concepts. We also replicate an increased posterior positivity for processing animal concepts, and report an interaction between object domain and semantic richness such that the NOF effect is larger within animal concepts.

Nondecomposable idiom understanding in children: recursive theory of mind and working memory.

Abstract: Which skills are required to start understanding ambiguous, unfamiliar nondecomposable idioms in context? In this study, we examined the contributions of both second-order false-belief understanding and working memory to the understanding of unfamiliar nondecomposable idioms in children aged 6. 7 and 8 years old. We assumed that, in order to process these idioms, children would have to be able to (a) take a double perspective (Perner & Wimmer, 1985), (b) maintain both literal and figurative meanings as being different from the expression itself, and (c) take the context into account. Six-, 7- and 8-year-old children performed three, second-order false-belief tasks and three working-memory tasks, and listened to 15 nondecomposable idioms inserted into a context, before performing a multiple-choice task. Results indicated that nondecomposable idiom understanding was explained by theory-of-mind skills.Keywords: idioms, theory of mind, working memory, children, decomposabilityIdiomatic expressions are fixed expressions, such as to skate on thin ice. They can often be given both literal and figurative meanings, and require children to take the context into account in order to disambiguate them. Investigating the factors that affect idiom comprehension contributes to our understanding of how young people understand idioms. Several factors have been identified in the developmental literature, including the context, from which inferences can be drawn with a view to disambiguating the idiomatic expression (Cain & Towse, 2008; Cain, Towse, & Knight, 2009), and several characteristics of the idiomatic expressions that have been shown to affect their understanding, such as familiarity (Nippold & Taylor, 1995), literality (the degree to which an idiom can be given a literal interpretation; Titone & Connine, 1994) and compositionality. The compositionality dimension is of interest because it particularly affects developmental changes in idiom understanding. It corresponds to the degree to which the meanings of the constituent words contribute to the meaning of the idiom as a whole (Gibbs, Nayak, & Cutting, 1989; Tabossi, Fanari, & Wolf, 2008; Titone & Connine, 1994). For example, to speak your mind is rated as a decomposable idiom because its figurative meaning, to be frank, can be derived from a compositional analysis of the meanings of to speak and mind, whereas to kick the bucket is deemed to be nondecomposable, as the meanings of kick and bucket do not contribute to its figurative meaning, to die. In other words, there is a clear overlap between the literal and figurative meanings for decomposable idioms and a strict dichotomy between the two for nondecomposable expressions.Developmental studies have demonstrated that decomposable idioms are easier for children to understand than nondecomposable ones. It has been shown that children start to grasp the figurative meanings of decomposable expressions presented in context as early as 5 years, whereas they needed to be 6 or 7 years old to start understanding nondecomposable idioms in context (Caillies & Le Sourn-Bissaoui, 2006, 2008; Gibbs, 1987, 1991). Within the framework of the global elaboration model, Chiara Levorato and Cacciari (1999) highlighted the importance of developing the ability to infer from context in order to derive the meaning of idioms and retrieve their speakers' intended meaning. Five-year-old children can grasp the figurative meaning of decomposable expressions by drawing semantic inferences, based on the meanings of the constituent words and the supportive context. For nondecomposable expressions, however, the link between the literal and figurative meanings is semantically opaque and no inference can be drawn solely from the contextual features of the utterance and/or the meanings of the constituent words (Le Sourn-Bissaoui, Caillies, Bernard, Deleau. & Brule, in press). Consistent with this interpretation, Cain, Towse, and Knight (2009) found a significant correlation between an independent measure of semantic analysis skills and the comprehension of familiar and novel decomposable idioms-referred to as "transparent" in their paper-in the presence and absence of context. …

Differential involvement of knowledge representation and executive control in episodic memory performance in young and older adults.

Abstract: Craik and Bialystok (2006, 2008) postulated that examining the evolution of knowledge representation and control processes across the life span could help in understanding age-related cognitive changes. The present study explored the hypothesis that knowledge representation and control processes are differentially involved in the episodic memory performance of young and older adults. Young and older adults were administered a cued-recall task and tests of crystallized knowledge and executive functioning to measure representation and control processes, respectively. Results replicate the classic finding that executive and cued-recall performance decline with age, but crystallized-knowledge performance does not. Factor analysis confirmed the independence of representation and control. Correlation analyses showed that the memory performance of younger adults was correlated with representation but not with control measures, whereas the memory performance of older adults was correlated with both representation and control measures. Regression analyses indicated that the control factor was the main predictor of episodic-memory performance for older adults, with the representation factor adding an independent contribution, but the representation factor was the sole predictor for young adults. This finding supports the view that factors sustaining episodic memory vary from young adulthood to old age; representation was shown to be important throughout adulthood, and control was also important for older adults. The results also indicated that control and representation modulate age-group-related variance in episodic memory.

Penetrating the fog of the decoupled mind: The effects of visual salience in the sustained attention to response task

Abstract: An absence of coupling between cognition and perception can mean that the mind neglects the careful processing of information relevant to the task at hand and errors can ensue. Given that highly salient perceptual events can automatically capture attention, the current study explored whether the same neglect of task-relevant information was possible for stimuli with high levels of perceptual saliency (e.g., identifiable by colour). In four experiments, participants performed a go/no-go task with a low frequency of no-go events. Across all experiments, response inhibition was more successful for coloured no-go targets than for stimuli that shared the same colour as the go targets. In addition, the response time (reaction time [RT]) for rare, coloured go targets was slower than when the same events were noncolored. Together, these results suggest that in relatively simple go/no-go tasks, highly salient perceptual events capture attention in an automatic fashion. Increased visual salience is argued to be beneficial when associated with no-go targets because it momentarily enforces coupling between attention and perception, disrupting ongoing behaviour at the precise moment when not responding is the correct action to take. These results suggest that although the mind may at times neglect events in the environment, salient perceptual events cannot be ignored in the same way.Keywords: perceptual decoupling, top-down control, bottom-up, perceptual salience, mind-wanderingEffective action can be hampered when the coupling between thought, perception and behaviour breaks down (Robertson, Manly, Andrade, Baddeley, & Yiend, 1997; Smallwood & Schooler, 2006). When the mind fails to effectively supervise behaviour, errors occur that could have been avoided if taskrelated attention was maintained in a thoughtful manner (such as driving past the supermarket when you had intended to stop and pick a pint of milk on your way home from work). Because these errors occur in awake, healthy people who are aware of what they should be doing, they represent a situation when the top-down control of external behaviour has failed. Given the value of understanding suboptimal goal states, in conjunction with the practical importance of understanding errors in everyday life, exploring why these mistakes occur and how they can best be mitigated is an important research question.Perceptual Decoupling and Task ErrorIn the context of lapses on both simple and complex tasks, evidence indicates that one contributory factor is the absence of a thoughtful consideration of task-related perceptual information (Smallwood, 2011; Schooler et al., 2011; Smallwood, Brown, Baird & Schooler, 2012; Smallwood, in press[a], in press[b]). In a state of perceptual coupling, attention is focused on sensory input, and so when employed in an appropriate manner for a task the processing of goal-relevant information will be improved and behavioural success facilitated. By contrast, during states of perceptual decoupling, attention is no longer directed to perception, and so information relevant to an external task is not biased with the same degree of efficiency. Attention can be decoupled from perception in a sustained manner, such as when we pursue an internal train of thought on a train journey or when we engage with a task using a strategy that is either superficial or careless. It can also occur transiently, such as when we mind wander and lose track of the goal of the task we are performing.1 Importantly the decoupling hypothesis is not an explanation for why we neglect the external environment; rather it is a description of what takes place when attention ceases to focus in a detailed manner on sensory information (Smallwood, in press[a], in press[b]).There are several lines of research demonstrating support for the decoupling hypothesis. A growing number of researchers have documented that the so-called default mode network (DMN; Raichle et al. …

Individual differences in working memory, secondary memory, and fluid intelligence: evidence from the levels-of-processing span task.

Abstract: Individual differences in working memory (WM) are related to performance on secondary memory (SM), and fluid intelligence (gF) tests. However, the source of the relation remains unclear, in part because few studies have controlled for the nature of encoding; therefore, it is unclear whether individual variation is due to encoding, maintenance, or retrieval processes. In the current study, participants performed a WM task (the levels-of-processing span task; Rose, Myerson, Roediger III, & Hale, 2010) and a SM test that tested for both targets and the distracting processing words from the initial WM task. Deeper levels of processing at encoding did not benefit WM, but did benefit subsequent SM, although the amount of benefit was smaller for those with lower WM spans. This result suggests that, despite encoding cues that facilitate retrieval from SM, low spans may have engaged in shallower, maintenance-focused processing to maintain the words in WM. Low spans also recalled fewer targets, more distractors, and more extralist intrusions than high spans, although this was partially due to low spans' poorer recall of targets, which resulted in a greater number of opportunities to commit recall errors. Delayed recall of intrusions and commission of source errors (labeling targets as processing words and vice versa) were significant negative predictors of gF. These results suggest that the ability to use source information to recall relevant information and withhold recall of irrelevant information is a critical source of both individual variation in WM and the relation between WM, SM, and gF. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).

The impact of text repetition on content and function words during reading: further evidence from eye movements.

Abstract: There is ample evidence that reading speed increases when participants read the same text more than once. However, less is known about the impact of text repetition as a function of word class. Some authors suggested that text repetition would mostly benefit content words with little or no effect on function words. In the present study, we examined the effect of multiple readings on the processing of content and function words. Participants were asked to read a short text two times in direct succession. Eye movement analyses revealed the typical multiple readings effect: Repetition decreased the time readers spent fixating words and the probability of fixating critical words. Most importantly, we found that the effect of multiple readings was of the same magnitude for content and function words, and for low- and high-frequency words. Such findings suggest that lexical variables have additive effects on eye movement measures in reading.Keywords: text repetition, reading, word class, word frequency, eye movementsWhen readers read the same text more than once, they become faster at reading it (e.g., Raney & Rayner, 1995; Raney, Therriault, & Minkoff, 2010; Levy, Di Persio, & Hollingshead, 1992; Levy, Masson, & Zoubek, 1991). This phenomenon, known as the text repetition effect or the multiple readings effect, is particularly of interest since rereading is a common behavior, especially used to learn new information. Moreover, the study of text repetition provides an avenue for exploring the effect of text difficulty on the cognitive processes involved in reading. Although the multiple readings effect has been extensively investigated over the past decades, only a few studies have examined how text repetition influences the processing of individual words. In the present study, we tested this issue by contrasting eye movement measures for content and function words in two successive readings of the same text.Linguistic distinctions between function and content words are found in all languages and are thought to play a critical role in the acquisition of language (Shi, Werker, & Morgan, 1999). Function words provide grammatical relations between content words and consist of closed-class words that are primarily structural such as articles, prepositions, and auxiliaries. Most of the time, they include only one syllable and are very frequent in natural language (e.g., the, of, and, to). In contrast, content words convey the meaning of a sentence and correspond to open-class words such as nouns, verbs, adverbs, and adjectives. They are usually longer than function words and are less frequent in natural language. The linguistic distinctions between content and function words have been extensively studied. However, as pointed out by Schmauder, Morris, and Poynor (2000), the extent to which linguistic distinctions translate into psychological representations and processing distinctions has received much less attention.A number of studies have shown that content and function words might be processed differently during normal reading (e.g., Carpenter & Just, 1983; Drieghe, Pollatsek, Staub, & Rayner, 2008; Gauthier, O'Regan, & Le Gargasson, 2000; O'Regan, 1979; Schmauder et al., 2000). Using eye movements as a measure of cognitive processes involved in reading, those studies revealed that function words are less likely to be fixated than content words (but see Schmauder et al., 2000), a phenomenon called the "the-skipping effect" (e.g., Gauthier et al., 2000; O'Regan, 1979) or the word class effect (e.g., Levy, 1983; Roy-Charland, Saint-Aubin, Klein, & Lawrence, 2007). For instance, Carpenter and Just (1983) found that among three-letter words, function words received a lower proportion of fixation (.40) than content words (.57). This finding has been replicated recently by Drieghe et al., who showed that the French article "les" was skipped much more than three-letter verbs (see also Gauthier et al. …

You can't Stroop a lexical decision: is semantic processing fundamentally facilitative?

Abstract: It is well documented that related prime words facilitate target processing in lexical decision (e.g., doctor facilitates nurse), but interfere with target processing in the Stroop task (e.g., the word blue slows the time to name the colour red). Five experiments explored several potential explanations for these differences. In Experiments 1 and 2, all stimuli were novel (as in a typical lexical22 decision design). Participants were faster both to make lexical decisions and to read colour words aloud that were primed by incongruent associates (e.g., banana) relative to a neutral prime (e.g., knot). Experiments 3 and 4 used a small set of repeatedly presented stimuli (as in a typical Stroop design). Incongruent colour words facilitated lexical decisions to target colour words, but interfered with identification (reading aloud). Experiment 5 further showed that interference is still observed in identification when the distractor set size is large but the target/response set size is small. These findings suggest that semantic connections are solely facilitative and that response competition only occurs when there is a small set of repeated responses and identification (rather than lexical decision) is required. The more general problem of research fragmentation is briefly discussed.Keywords: Stroop, lexical decision, facilitation, inhibition, task differencesAs with any discipline, research fragmentation can be a problem in cognitive psychology. Various fields tend to splinter over time and can often become so isolated from one another that we frequently fail to address obvious questions arising from similar manipulations producing different results across tasks. We investigate one such question here. Specifically, why does the presence of a distracting colour word (e.g., black) slow identification of a different print colour (e.g., blue) in the Stroop task, but speed judgments of the same colour target (e.g., blue) in the lexical decision task? This is not a trivial issue and these types of cross-paradigm comparisons are important (relatedly, see Besner, Davelaar, Alcott, & Parry, 1984). In both literatures (lexical decision and Stroop), researchers are looking to answer the same higher order questions about semantics (e.g., how it is organised, how one concept activates or affects another, etc.), yet they seem to differ in their answer to one of the most basic questions about the impact of semantically related information on performance (i.e., does it facilitate or interfere?). The work reported here provides some tentative answers to this question.The Stroop TaskIn the Stroop task (Stroop, 1935), participants are presented with a colour word that is displayed in a colour (e.g., blue printed in red; bluertd) and are asked to ignore the word and identify the colour that it is printed in (typically by naming the colour or pressing an assigned key). In the typical configuration, there is a small set of distracting words and target colours that appear repeatedly throughout the course of the experiment. For instance, a typical experiment would present the words blue, green, red, and yellow repeatedly in each of the colours blue, green, red, and yellow for several hundred trials. The standard finding is that participants are slower on incongruent trials (where the word and colour mismatch; e.g., blueKd) than on congruent trials (where the word and colour match; e.g., redred) or neutral trials (e.g., movercd\ Dalrymple-Alford & Budayr, 1966; Logan & Zbrodoff, 1979; Schmidt & Besner, 2008; Sichel & Chandler, 1969; see MacLeod, 1991, for a review). This effect has also been observed with colour-associated words (e.g., sky, which is related in meaning to blue). Participants respond slower to incongruent colour associate trials (e.g., skyr

The impact of facial emotional expressions and sex on interpersonal distancing as evaluated in a computerized stop-distance task.

Abstract: This study utilizes a novel computerized stop-distance task to examine social space preferences of young adult female and male participants (18-23 years old) who envisioned being approached by others of both sexes who were displaying different facial emotional expressions. The results showed that those displaying anger were kept furthest away, followed by those displaying fear, then sadness, and then neutral expressions, leaving those displaying happiness closest to the participant. It was observed that female participants maintained greater distance from approachers than male participants, and that female approachers were allowed to come nearer than male approachers. These sex differences were observed for most of the emotional facial expressions.

Failures to replicate hyper-retrieval-induced forgetting in arithmetic memory.

Abstract: Campbell and Phenix (2009) observed retrieval-induced forgetting (slower response time) for simple addition facts (e.g., 3 + 4) immediately following 40 retrieval-practice blocks of their multiplication counterparts (3 × 4 = ?). A subsequent single retrieval of the previously unpracticed multiplication problems, however, produced an retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) effect about twice as large for their addition counterparts. Thus, a single retrieval of a multiplication fact appeared to produce much larger RIF of the addition counterpart than did many multiplication retrieval-practice trials. In several subsequent similar studies, however, we failed to observe this hyper-RIF effect. Here, we attempted an exact replication of the Campbell and Phenix experiment, but found no evidence of hyper-RIF. We conclude that the hyper-RIF effect reported by Campbell and Phenix is an elusive phenomenon; consequently, it cannot at this time be considered an important result in the RIF literature.

Intelligence as it relates to conscious and unconscious memory influences.

Abstract: We examine the relationship between a measure of intelligence and estimates of conscious and unconscious memory influences derived using Jacoby's (Jacoby, L. L. [1991]. A process dissociation framework: Separating automatic from intentional uses of memory. Journal of Memory and Language, 30, 513-541.) process-dissociation procedure. We find a positive relationship between intelligence and conscious memory, and no relationship between intelligence and unconscious influences once the impact of conscious influences are removed (Experiment 1). We also find that when participants cannot engage in conscious strategies, such as when there is insufficient time for learning, the relationships observed in Experiment 1 are eliminated (Experiments 2A and 2B). Our results support the notion that individual differences in intelligence reflect differences in conscious strategic processes (Karis, D., Fabiani, M., & Donchin, E. [1984]. "P300" and memory: Individual differences in the von Restorff effect. Cognitive Psychology, 16, 177-216.) and not differences in mental speed (Eysenck, H. J. (1984). Intelligence versus behavior. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 7, 290-291; Jensen, A. R. [1982]. Bias in mental testing. New York, NY: Free Press).

Syllable priming with pseudowords in the lexical decision task.

Abstract: This study investigated the processes underlying the effect of masked syllable priming in French with pseudoword primes and word targets Two lexical-decision task (LDT) experiments examined whether the syllable priming effect depends on syllable frequency and might rely on a general abstract structure The results of Experiment 1 revealed an inhibitory priming effect, with pseudoword primes and word targets sharing a high-frequency first syllable, which was not due to the abstract syllable structure In contrast, no inhibition was observed with a low-frequency first syllable in Experiment 2 Syllable frequency appears to be an important factor determining the speed of target processing in masked priming This is attributed to variations in the respective contributions of sublexical activation and lexical inhibition processes

Effects of homograph meaning frequency on semantic satiation.

Abstract: This study examined the effects of homograph meaning frequency on semantic satiation within an ambiguity resolution paradigm. Participants received 3 homograph conditions: the concordant (QUICK-FAST-SPEEDY), discordant (HUNGER-FAST-SPEEDY) and neutral (CEILING-FAST-SPEEDY). On each trial, a prime (e.g., QUICK) was presented for various numbers of repetitions. Afterward, the prime was removed and participants made relatedness judgments about a homograph and target. On half of the trials, the prime was related to a high-frequency meaning of the homograph, and on the other half of the trials, the prime was related to a low-frequency meaning. The concordant condition yielded evidence of semantic satiation across meaning frequency conditions (QUICK-FAST-SPEEDY), but the discordant condition only yielded evidence of semantic satiation when the prime activated a subordinate meaning of the homograph (HUNGER-FAST-SPEEDY).

Dissociations among judgments do not reflect cognitive priority: an associative explanation of memory for frequency information in contingency learning.

Abstract: Previous research on causal learning has usually made strong claims about the relative complexity and temporal priority of some processes over others based on evidence about dissociations between several types of judgments. In particular, it has been argued that the dissociation between causal judgments and trial-type frequency information is incompatible with the general cognitive architecture proposed by associative models. In contrast with this view, we conduct an associative analysis of this process showing that this need not be the case. We conclude that any attempt to gain a better insight on the cognitive architecture involved in contingency learning cannot rely solely on data about these dissociations.Keywords: contingency learning, probability learning, statistical models, associative models(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)Inferring the causal structure of the environment is an invaluable skill for survival in an ever changing environment. As first noted by Hume (1739/1964), we are unable to directly perceive the link connecting causes and effects, which means that causal relations can only be inferred on the basis of indirect evidence. Unfortunately, it is not easy to determine when a given event is a real cause of an effect because some events can co-occur regularly without any causal link between them. Psychological models of causal learning try to explain when and how humans can learn new causal links.Following the advice of Marr (1982), some authors have focused on developing computational models of causal learning (e.g., Allan, 1980; Cheng, 1997; Cheng & Novick, 1992; Holyoak & Cheng, 2011; Pearl, 2000). According to the popular levels-ofprocessing framework, computational models do not aim at specifying every step that the cognitive system has to give to solve a problem. Instead, these models should clarify, for a given task, what is the function that maps the input of the cognitive system with its output, while being agnostic about the algorithm involved in that computation. Following this general perspective, several statistical models of causal learning have been proposed to describe what input allows us to determine that two events are causally related. These models usually consist of simple mathematical equations that provide a numerical index of the strength of the relationship between a candidate cause and an effect: Values different from zero usually indicate that a causal relation exists. Note that, in principle, computational models are not concerned about how humans actually acquire this causal knowledge: Computational models only establish when a causal link must be inferred (if the system works well).However, some authors have gone one step further suggesting that the statistical calculations proposed by these computational models could also be appropriate theories about how humans actually learn new causal associations. According to these authors, the mathematical formulas of statistical models of causal learning could also be considered algorithm-level theories of causal learning that specify the real steps that people give when they solve a causal induction problem. From this algorithm-level viewpoint, people act as intuitive statisticians who first gather information about the joint occurrence of two events and then combine this information following certain rules to decide whether there is an statistical connection between those two events. For instance, when faced with a sequence of trials in which a cause, C, and an effect, E, appear together or in isolation, people are assumed to first encode this information in a mental representation to some extent isomorphic to the 2 X 2 contingency table depicted in Table 1 (Beyth-Marom, 1982; Busemeyer, 1991; Shaklee & Mims, 1982). This contingency table would summarise the evidence experienced by the participant regarding the joint occurrence or absence of the target cause and effect, including the number of occasions in which both the cause and the effect have appeared together (a), the number of occasions in which only the effect or only the cause has appeared (b or c, respectively), and the number of occasions in which both the cause and the effect have been simultaneously absent (

Observation and action priming in anticipative tasks implying biological movements.

Abstract: The purpose of this study was to assess the effect of short-term priming in perceptual anticipation tasks involving point-light biological motions. After the production or the observation of a relevant or an irrelevant movement (action vs. observation priming), 11 right-handed volunteers were asked to anticipate, as quickly and accurately as possible, the end point of a pointing movement after the stimulus vanished upon completion of 60% of the total movement. Our results indicate that perceptual accuracy is significantly affected only with relevant observation priming. This suggests that perceptual anticipation tasks' involving point-light biological motions implies specific perceptual competencies.Keywords: anticipation, biological motion, action priming, observation primingDecades of research have demonstrated the remarkable capacity of humans to detect and recognize biological motions. Reduced depiction, based only on dots of lights placed on the limbs of an actor (i.e., a point-light display paradigm), is sufficient to identify the produced action (Johansson, 1973) and to resolve both the gender (Kozlowski & Cutting, 1977) and identity of a person (Beardsworth & Buckner, 1981; Loula, Prasad, Harber, & Shiffrar, 2005). One of the most remarkable abilities is that humans are able to anticipate subsequent components of a human motion sequence. For instance, in a two-forced choice handwriting task, Kandel, Orliaguet, and Boe (2000) show that adults are able to predict the second letter of a digram ("1" or "n") after observing the first letter ("1"). This capacity for perceptual anticipation also manifests itself when observers are asked to point with a mouse the final position of a simple arm movement in which the last segment of the trajectory is hidden (Martel, Bidet-Ildei, & Coello, 2011; Pozzo, Papaxanthis, Petit, Schweighofer, & Stucchi, 2006). In this case, participants are able to estimate the terminal location of the reaching movement after the stimulus vanished, even though only 60% of the total movement duration was observed (Martel et al., 2011).The most common theoretical explanation for this visual anticipation capacity is based on the motor theory of perception, which suggests that an individual's motor competencies are connected to their perceptions of movements of other humans (Hommel, Musseier, Aschersleben, & Prinz, 2001; Jeannerod, 2001; Prinz, 1997; Rizzolatti & Craighero, 2004; Schiltz-Bosbach & Prinz, 2007). This point of view is illustrated in various neurophysiological, behavioral, and neuropsychological works that demonstrate that the motor system is significantly involved in the anticipation of perceptual events. In this context, brain-imaging studies have shown that the anticipation of sequential patterns activates specific brain areas involved in the production of motor sequences. For instance, Chaminade, Meary, Orliaguet, and Decety (2001) show that the left premotor cortex and the right intraparietal sulcus are activated during anticipation of pointing movements while the left frontal operculum and the superior parietal lobule are activated during the anticipation of writing movements. Moreover, increased premotor activation is revealed when observers have to anticipate the final state of an occluded human action (Stadler et al., 2011). Additionally, Graf et al. (2007) show that the capacity to judge whether a static image corresponding to a well continuation of a motor sequence previously observed improves when the timing of the visual presentation of the static image matches the timing of the execution of the motor sequence. This suggests that predictive competencies are based on real-time, covert motor activation. Recently, Springer et al. (2011) have shown that the efficiency of this real-time process increases when the perceptual anticipation task is associated with the simultaneous execution of an action. Finally, recent experiments show that anticipation of a human's movement goal improves when predictions are made on biological point-light motions (Eisner, Falck-Ytter, & Gredeback, 2012; Martel et al. …

Age-related changes in sensitivity to global speed.

Abstract: We examined the effect of speed magnitude and range on the sensitivity to global speed in two different age groups. Stimuli consisted of band-pass dots whose speeds were perturbed by time-correlated or -uncorrelated random noise. The observer discriminated which of two sequentially presented stimuli moved faster. We found that the Weber fractions significantly diminished with increasing the speed of standard. The older observers had higher discrimination thresholds in all experimental conditions. The noise level did not significantly affect sensitivity to global speed differences, except for older observers' performance at the highest noise level. The temporal noise correlation differently impaired the performance of the younger and the older observers. The results are discussed in relation to speed-coding mechanisms and age-related changes in motion perception.

Exploring the mental representation underlying familiarity assessment.

Abstract: A new method was used to explore the role of perceptual information in familiarity-based recognition. The method uses a pairwise recognition task to compare recognition judgments to a test word when that word is related and unrelated to an immediately preceding word. If the false-alarm rate to the test word is greater when the two words are related, this is interpreted as reflecting an increase in the likelihood of positive familiarity assessment to the test word (Ngo, C. T., Sargent, J., & Dopkins, S. [2007]. Level of discrimination for recognition judgments reduced following the recognition of semantically related words. Journal of Memory and Language, 57, 415-436. doi: 10.1016/j.jml.2007.05.007). The occurrence of such an increase for a given sort of preceding word-test word relatedness is taken as indicating that information of the sort in question is involved in familiarity-based recognition. Whereas previous work with this method has failed to find evidence that perceptual information is involved in familiarity-based recognition, the present study observed such evidence, under conditions in which previous work with other methods suggested that perceptual information would be likely to be involved in familiarity-based recognition. Thus, the study helped to validate the method and produced converging evidence that perceptual information is sometimes involved in familiarity-based recognition. The results of the study suggest that perceptual information is more likely to be involved in familiarity-based recognition when the lists for the recognition task are short.Keywords: familiarity, recognition, perceptual, dual processDual process theories distinguish two aspects of recognition. First, an item may be recollected as having occurred previously in a certain context. Second, an item may be experienced as familiar in a sense that is detached from context (Jacoby, 1991; Mandler, 1991). Recognition on the basis of familiarity is of particular interest because it inhabits a gray area between explicit memory, in which past experience is consciously remembered, and implicit memory, in which past experience affects present behaviour, in the absence of awareness.Proponents of the dual process view disagree regarding the mental representation underlying familiarity-based recognition. In early work, the familiarity representation was seen as recording perceptual information (Mandler, 1980). In subsequent work, some writers have argued that this representation records only conceptual information (Brainerd, Reyna, & Mojardin, 1999). Other writers have argued that this representation records perceptual as well as conceptual information (Jacoby, 1991).The properties of the familiarity representation are of theoretical interest. An influential view of recognition holds that familiarity-based recognition reflects the long-term knowledge system whereas recollection reflects a system that preserves experience over the shorter term so that long-term knowledge can be adjusted to reflect this experience (McClelland, McNaughton, & O'Reilly, 1995; Norman & O'Reilly, 2003). Under this view, one would expect conceptual information to be more important than perceptual information in the familiarity representation.The empirical record regarding the familiarity representation is mixed. When perceptual and conceptual information have been pitted against one another, as potential bases for familiarity-based recognition, conceptual information has generally prevailed. Specifically, a number of studies have demonstrated higher levels of familiarity-based recognition following conceptual as opposed to perceptual processing at encoding. For example, the process dissociation procedure has been used to show higher levels of familiarity-based recognition following conceptual tasks (rating the pleasantness of words, solving anagrams, studying to-be-remembered items in pictorial form) than following perceptual tasks (counting syllables, rating the difficulty of generating rhymes to words, studying to-be-remembered items in word form; Jacoby, 1991; Toth, 1996; Wagner, Gabrieli, & Verfaellie, 1997; Yonelinas, 2001). …

Human perception: a science of synergy.

Abstract: This article is loosely based on an address given to the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Science at their annual meeting on June 7, 2013, in honor of being named the 2013 Donald O. Hebb Distinguished Contribution Award Winner.Keywords: attention, visual perception, action, emotion, social collaborationI was honoured to receive the 2013 Hebb Award in recognition of my research efforts in the field of human perception. My first reaction to this news was to question whether I had really been working long enough to be considered for this award. I did not consider myself in the same company as previous winners, who I saw as a really impressive lot. My second reaction was to develop weak knees when I realised this meant delivering the annual Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Science lecture. When I told my wife of my apprehension, she asked, "What's the big deal? You give talks on your research all the time." My response was, "Yes, of course, but this home audience really knows!" I therefore humbly accepted this honour, with the understanding that I would deliver the talk as a summary of my research efforts over several decades. In my mind, it is still very much a work in progress. I look forward to your feedback.I am old enough to have personally met Donald Hebb one time. But I hasten to add that I am not so old as to have counted him as a friend. He insisted on it. Let me explain. I was introduced to Professor Hebb just after coming to Dalhousie University as a newly appointed assistant professor in 1984. As I recall, he had an office that he used occasionally in his status as an Emeritus Professor, just inside the main entrance to the Department of Psychology, and not far from a steady flow of student and faculty pedestrian traffic. Richard Brown introduced me as a new hire at Dalhousie, and Professor Hebb, after saying "hello" and a few other pleasantries, leaned in and said, "Please don't be surprised if I don't say hello next time you pass by. At my age. I'm just not in the business of making new friends." "Deal," I said, as I backed out of the door. The comment took me aback at the time, but I have come to respect if for the cogence it highlighted in this aging, and yet deeply self-reflective, scholar and scientist.The theme of this paper is that synergy-or, equivalently, interaction-is what makes the science of human perception exciting. I am referring to synergy in at least three different senses when I say this, including statistical interactions in human behavioural data, neural interactions between specialized regions in the brain, and collaborative interactions among research scientists and other scholars.Statistical InteractionsLet me begin with statistical interactions. Among all the statistical tests that behavioural researchers have available to them, the one that is still used most frequently is the elegantly simple and straightforward t test. It answers a centrally important question for many researchers, namely, "Is there a difference between the outcomes in two conditions?" The t test was developed over 100 years ago by William Gosset, a reportedly shy and exceptionally brilliant person who worked for the Guinness Brewing Company in Dublin, Ireland. Gosset developed the test in order to solve the very practical problem of how to come to sound conclusions about differences between conditions, especially when the data in each condition were based on relatively small sample sizes. This approach to answering scientific questions by focusing on differences has led to many successes, including the development of a better-tasting pint at Guinness, one we still enjoy today. But the question "Is there a difference?" also has its limits. For example, it is not a very efficient way to answer questions about dynamical or adaptive systems, such as the human nervous system, a system that routinely changes its sensitivity to events and its processing priorities, depending on its recent history and the environment in which it finds itself. …

Emotional perception of elemental movement. Study on a population of school age children

Abstract: Our goal is to examine the emotional influence of perceived basic motions on cognitive processes in childhood. The main hypothesis of this study proposes that the perception of motion will subsequently influence cognitive processing in a specific, emotional manner. We studied 90 children aged nine to 12 years old. On a screen they were shown a black-shaped disk moving in one of three different directions associated with positive, negative and neutral valences. Furthermore, both before and after the children had seen the motion, they were asked to perform a writing speed task (numbers counting down). The results show that (1) children attribute an emotional valence to the "positive" motion and (2) the writing speed cognitive task is influenced by the "negative" motion. Thus, we suggest that basic motions can elicit changes in emotional manner in childhood to perceptive and executive processes according to their specific trajectory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).