Extraversion and rapid tapping: reactive inhibition or general cortical activation as determinants of performance differences

Two samples of subjects (n_tot = 22) scoring high or low on EPI-E tapped a morse-key as fast as possible over a 2-min period. As predicted, extraverts showed a lower tapping performance than introverts with differences between groups increasing significantly over time due to greater delays among the extraverts. Within the E dimension tapping differences could be shown to depend significantly only on the subfactor impulsiveness but not on sociability. There were no differences between groups, however, in frequency of involuntary rest pauses. Therefore the effects of extraversion on tapping performance should be explained more in terms of underlying differences in cortical arousal level than in terms of intermittent blocks as part of inhibitory potentials.     

Experience,Effectiveness, and Perceptions Toward Sport Psychology Consultants: A Critical Review of Peer-Reviewed Articles

The first scientific papers on sport psychology consultants (SPCs) focused primarily on the professional practice of experienced SPCs. Since then, the scientific literature on SPCs has greatly diversified. The purpose of this review is to summarize and critically examine the findings of three scientifically studied topics on SPCs: SPCs' experiences, perceptions toward SPCs, and SPCs' effectiveness. Peer-reviewed scientific articles published in English were found in the main sport and psychology databases. The primary results in relation to each topic and the limitations of these papers are presented. The discussion examines future avenues from which to develop research on SPCs.     

When preschoolers follow their eyes and older children follow their noses: visuo‐olfactory social affective matching in childhood

Recognition of emotional facial expressions is a crucial skill for adaptive behavior that most often occurs in a multi‐sensory context. Affective matching tasks have been used across development to investigate how people integrate facial information with other senses. Given the relative affective strength of olfaction and its relevance in mediating social information since birth, we assessed olfactory–visual matching abilities in a group of 140 children between the ages of 3 and 11 years old. We presented one of three odor primes (rose, fish and no‐odor, rated as pleasant or unpleasant by individual children) before a facial choice task (happy vs. disgusted face). Children were instructed to select one of two faces. As expected, children of all ages tended to choose happy faces. Children younger than 5 years of age were biased towards choosing the happy face, irrespective of the odor smelled. After age 5, an affective matching strategy guided children's choices. Smelling a pleasant odor predicted the choice of happy faces, whereas smelling the unpleasant or fish odor predicted the choice of disgusted faces. The present study fills a gap in the developmental literature on olfactory‐visual affective strategies that affect decision‐making, and represents an important step towards understanding the underlying developmental processes that shape the typical social mind.     

Spatial inattention abolishes voice adaptation

Adaptation to male voices causes a subsequent voice to be perceived as more female, and vice versa. Similar contrastive aftereffects have been reported for phonetic perception, and in vision for face perception. However, while aftereffects in the perception of phonetic features of speech have been reported to persist even when adaptors were processed inattentively, face aftereffects were previously reported to be abolished by inattention to adaptors. Here we demonstrate that auditory aftereffects of adaptation to voice gender are eliminated when the male and female adaptor voices are spatially unattended. Participants simultaneously heard gender-specific male or female adaptor voices in one ear and gender-neutral (androgynous) adaptor voices in the contralateral ear. They selectively attended to the adaptor voices in a designated ear, by either classifying voice gender (Exp. 1) or spoken syllable (Exp. 2). Voice aftereffects were found only if the gender-specific voices were spatially attended, suggesting capacity limits in the processing of voice gender for the unattended ear. Remarkably, gender-specific adaptors in the attended ear elicited comparable aftereffects in test voices, regardless of prior attention to voice gender or phonetic content. Thus, within the attended ear, voice gender was processed even when it was irrelevant for the task at hand, suggesting automatic processing of gender along with linguistic information. Overall, voice gender adaptation requires spatial, but not dimensional, selective attention.     

Colour specificity in episodic and in perceptual object recognition with enhanced colour impact

In three experiments we investigated the perceptual specificity of explicit (old-new object recognition) and implicit memory (word-picture matching) for colour. In order to enhance the impact of colour on processing, we increased the number of colours per object and we impaired shape information. We presented multicoloured pictures (Experiment 1), blurred and partially occluded pictures (Experiment 2) and coloured line drawings in visual noise (Experiment 3). Experiments 1 and 2 had an intentional study phase; the study phase of Experiment 3 was an incidental colour or category naming task. Changing colour from study to test always had negative effects on episodic recognition although colour was irrelevant. In contrast, in the matching task old pictures were generally matched faster than new ones independent of their colour congruence. In Experiment 3, an additional small advantage of congruent colours and of semantic processing occurred. We conclude that two different memory representations contribute to these tasks. Changes of an achromatic, more abstract representation, that is used in normal object recognition, and a representation of the specific exemplar that includes colour. This latter token is used in episodic recognition as well as in unusual perceptual tasks (Experiment 3).     

What people believe about memory

Two representative samples of adult Norwegians (n=2000) were asked a set of general and specific questions regarding their beliefs and opinions about human memory. The results indicate that on many questions, such as time of the earliest memories, inhibiting effects of collaboration, and memory for dramatic versus ordinary events, the views of the general public concurred with current research findings, and people in general had realistic views about their own memory performance. On other questions, such as the reliability of olfactory as compared with visual and auditory memory, the memory of small children in comparison with that of adults, the likelihood of repression of adult traumatic memories, and on more general questions such as the possibility of training memory and the capacity limitations of long-term memory, a large proportion of the participants expressed views that are less supported by scientific evidence. Implications of these findings are briefly discussed.     

Anticipatory and event related changes in heart rate as indicators of attention processes

The present study was concerned with the question of whether phasic event-related heart rate (HR) changes under easy intake conditions account for the association between anticipatory HR deceleration and task performance in a choice reaction time (RT) task with a fixed foreperiod. The task employed differed from simple RT tasks especially with regard to processing and attention demands. Subjects were required to determine as quickly and accurately as possible whether a probe, presented for 80 ms, was identical or not to one of two distinct memory items, presented at the onset of each trial. Reaction times as well as accuracy of responses were determined. The results of the present study were indicative of a reliable anticipatory HR deceleration which was related to latency of responses to the probe stimulus. Subjects with stronger decelerations reacted faster than subjects with diminished or missing decelerations. Furthermore a relation was found between this association and the heart rate changes to repeated presentations of a non-signal auditory stimulus under habituation conditions. Results were discussed in terms of differences in the regulation or control of attentional processes.     

Social psychology at the crossroads: Its encounter with cognitive and ecological psychology and the interactive perspective

This article discusses the implications for social psychology of recent developments in the neighbouring fields of cognitive and ecological psychology. The authors stress the importance of studying the cognitive processes directly instead of inferring them as hypothetical constructs from aggregate responses. This paradigmatic shift implies a change in the conduct of research from the traditional nomothetic perspective to a neo-idiographic one. A method of representational contextualization is offred to generate the affective and cognitive deep structure from surface, first order data. This structure identified as the internal environment, reflects simultaneously the construction of reality by a situated individual and the recoding rules operating in such a construction.     

NEURONAL CODING OF SERIAL ORDER:

Abstract— How does the brain create rule-governed sequences of behavior? An answer to this question may come from a surprising source: the neostriatum (caudate nucleus and putamen), Traditionally, the neostriatum has been considered pun of the brain's motor system, but its contribution to the preparation or execution of movement is recognized generally to concern high-level motor functions. Recent work implicates the neostriatum in disorders of sequential action and thought, as in the repetition of thoughts or habits in human obsessive-compulsive disorder and movements or speech in Tourette's syndrome. Yet there is no direct evidence to support the idea that the neostriatum controls sequences of behavior. Using ethological and neurophysiological techniques to study neural activity in the rat neoslriatum during syntactic grooming sequences, we found that neuronal activity in the anterolateral neostriatum depended on the execution of syntactic sequences of grooming actions. The individual grooming movements themselves did not activate the neoslriatum; activation was determined by the syntactic sequence in which grooming movements were performed. These data provide the first direct evidence that the neoslriatum coordinates the control of rule-governed behavioral sequences.