On the relationship between flanker interference and localized attentional interference

The flanker interference (FI) effect suggests that visual attention operates like a mental spotlight, enhancing all stimuli within a selected region. In contrast, other data suggest difficulty dividing attention between objects near one another in the visual field, an effect termed localized attentional interference (LAI). The present experiment examined the relationship between these phenomena. Observers made speeded identity judgments of a colored target letter embedded among gray fillers. A response-compatible or -incompatible flanker of a non-target color appeared at varying distances from the target. Data gave evidence of LAI and spatially-graded FI, with mean RTs and flanker effects both decreasing with target–flanker separation. Both effects were reduced when target location was pre-cued and when the target was of higher salience than the flanker. Results suggest that the distribution of spatial attention modulates the strength of objects competing for selection, with this competition underlying both the FI and LAI effects.     

Resources, confusions, and compatibility in dual-axis tracking: displays, controls, and dynamics

Why do people often find that performing two tasks at once is harder than performing one task at a time? Three mechanisms of task interference that might answer that question were investigated: resource competition, confusions, and incompatible task proximity between processing stages. The subjects performed dual-axis compensatory tracking with error displays that were either integrated or separated, with axis controls that either were integrated into one stick or remained separate, and with control dynamics on the two axes that were either the same or different. Tracking error increased and control activity decreased as a function of the combined difficulty of the two control dynamics. Integrated displays and integrated controls both led to increased confusions between tracking axes although error was not reliably affected. Significantly, performance was also affected by whether the integrality of displays matched that of controls. These results suggest that resource competition, confusions, and compatibility of proximity play distinct roles in dual-axis tracking performance.     

Preserving informational separability and violating decisional separability in facial perception and recognition

The holistic encoding hypothesis (M. J. Farah, K. D. Wilson, M. Drain, & J. N. Tanaka, 1998) proposes that faces are encoded and used in perception and cognition as relatively undifferentiated wholes. A previous study (M. J. Wenger & E. M. Ingvalson, 2002) found very little support for the strong version of this hypothesis and instead found evidence that shifts in decisional criteria may be important. This study provides a replication and stronger test of those findings, demonstrating consistent violations of decisional separability and preservation of informational separability in both immediate perception and delayed recognition.     

Boundaries of separability between melody and rhythm in music discrimination: A neuropsychological perspective

The detailed study of a patient who suffered from a severe amelodia without arhythmia as a consequence of bilateral temporal lobe damage revealed that the processing of melodic information is at least partially separable from the processing of rhythmic information. This dissociation was replicated across different sets of material, was supported by the presence of a reversed association, and was maintained in conditions that promote integration in the normal brain. These results argue against the view that melody and rhythm are treated as a unified dimension throughout processing. At the same time, they support the view that integration takes place after early separation of the two dimensions.     

Flexibility of attention between stimulus dimensions

Three experiments examined the flexibility of attention to the color and location dimensions of visual stimuli. Displays typically consisted of two curved lines, one a target and the other a distractor. Subjects were precued to the location of the target, and they made a speeded response to that item’s direction of curvature. In Experiment 1, a color difference between the stimuli facilitated selective attention to targets. Experiment 2 demonstrated that this effect was not automatic. Although component color differences were necessary for selective attention, they were not sufficient unless they reliably specified the target. Furthermore, when color was informative but the target was in an unexpected color, performance was markedly impaired. A third experiment, using a response-deadline technique, showed that stimulus color was resolved before stimulus location and that attention can be exclusive to the color dimension. The results were interpreted in terms of a model assuming that stimulus color and location are processed independently. Subjects attend to the dimension resolved most quickly which can reliably specify the target.     

Relations between empathy and anxiety dimensions in inpatient adolescents

Background and objectives: A better understanding of the relationships between empathy and internalizing disorders is needed to plan therapeutic interventions for children and adolescents. Several studies have revealed positive relations of internalizing symptoms to personal distress and affective empathy. However, there is a lack of studies that take into account the multidimensional nature of anxiety in its relation to empathy.

Design: Structural equation modeling was used to test the moderated mediation model of the relations between empathy, depression and anxiety dimensions and the moderating role of gender on these associations in inpatient adolescents.

Method: A total of 403 inpatient adolescents aged 12–17 years completed the Basic Empathy Scale, the Multidimensional Anxiety Scale for Children, and the Beck Depression Inventory-II.

Results: Affective empathy was positively related to all the anxiety dimensions – most strongly to separation/panic and humiliation/rejection anxiety, whereas cognitive empathy was negatively related to social and separation/panic anxiety. Relations between affective and cognitive empathy and anxiety were partly mediated by depressive symptoms. No evidence of a moderating role of gender has been found.

Conclusions: Our results suggest that processes associated with empathy may play a role in the development or maintenance of anxiety symptoms.     

Interactions between spatial and kinetic dimensions in movement aftereffect

In some conditions, the surface of the test figure on which one sees an aftereffect of movement does not fit with that part of the visual field previously adapted to a movement. Such an effect, called kinetic-figural effect, may be conceived of as resulting from an interaction between two perceptual systems, each one giving specific information: one for the kinetic aspects which are spatially defined, the other for the spatial relationship inside the visual field. Experiments are presented which indicated the validity of a “law of location” for a movement aftereffect, together with some effects of the spatial relationships between adapting and test fields upon the movement aftereffect.     

The development of separability in visual perception

Under conditions that do not allow focused attention, reports of illusory conjunctions (i.e. errors that wrongly recombine the features of different objects) constitute evidence of the separate registering of features at an early processing level. The occurrence of illusory conjunctions was used to determine whether there is preattentive analysis of component dimensions (colour and form) and of parts of shapes (triangles and arrows) in young children aged 5 to 8 years. Evidence of preattentive analysis was found, even for the youngest children, for colour and form but not for parts of shapes. Although developmental effects hardly reached significance, inspection of abilities assumed to affect the illusory conjunctions phenomenon suggests that at the preattentive stage children can integrate spatially separate segments but lack the capacity to fully analyse connected segments.     

Gender and coping: The dual-axis model of coping

Examined a dual-axis model of coping that included both action (active vs. passive) and social dimensions (prosocial vs. antisocial) of coping strategies among a combined sample of students and community residents. We developed an assessment device to represent the model and allow investigation. Mixed support for the model and instrument were noted. Women were more prosocial than men in their coping, but no less active. Men were more likely to use antisocial and aggressive, but less assertive coping strategies than women. More prosocial, action coping strategies were also more likely to be related to greater sense of mastery and more liberal gender-role orientation. Antisocial and passive strategies tended to be related to lower mastery and more traditional gender-role orientation. Active coping was related to lower emotional distress for men and women, but both prosocial and antisocial coping were related to greater emotional distress for men, suggesting that men may have a narrower band of beneficial coping strategies than do women. This research was made possible, in part, by a grant from the National Institute of Health (R01-HD24901-01) and by support of the Kent State Applied Psychology Center, which was established through the support of the Ohio Board of Regents.     

Development and the continuum of dimensional separability

Recent studies of adult perception may be interpreted in terms of a continuum from the integral to the separable perception of multidimensional variation. Three experiments examined the existence of such a continuum across developmental levels. These experiments are important because several developmental studies suggest that the separability of dimensions increases with age. Despite this assumed developmental trend, it was hypothesized that therelative separability of dimensions does not change with age. The results of the three experiments did not support the hypothesis. The ordering of dimensions by their relative separability changes with development. These results suggest that the relative separability and potential separability of dimensions are not fixed. In light of the results, it is hypothesized that the integrality or separability of dimensions in adult perception is primarily determined by perceptual learning and not by the inherent characteristics of combinations of stimulus dimensions.     

An investigation of the perceptual basis of redundancy gain and orthogonal interference for integral dimensions

Redundancy gain and orthogonal interference for height and width were demonstrated in two experiments using a relative coding task with number of intertrial repetitions controlled. Orthogonal interference was shown to be perceptually based rather than simply an intertrial repetitions effect as suggested by Felfoldy (1974). These results from a relative coding task were discussed in terms of the previous multidimensional processing literature. It was concluded that Lockhead’s (1972t model has been applied too generally. An alternative model (a parallel, dimensional analysis stage followed by a stage in which dimensional information is integrated) was suggested.     

On interference effects in concurrent perception and action

Recent studies have reported repulsion effects between the perception of visual motion and the concurrent production of hand movements. Two models, based on the notions of common coding and internal forward modeling, have been proposed to account for these phenomena. They predict that the size of the effects in perception and action should be monotonically related and vary with the amount of similarity between what is produced and perceived. These predictions were tested in four experiments in which participants were asked to make hand movements in certain directions while simultaneously encoding the direction of an independent stimulus motion. As expected, perceived directions were repelled by produced directions, and produced directions were repelled by perceived directions. However, contrary to the models, the size of the effects in perception and action did not covary, nor did they depend (as predicted) on the amount of perception–action similarity. We propose that such interactions are mediated by the activation of categorical representations.     

Overtraining and transfer within and between dimensions in the rat

Although reversal learning in the rat is normally assisted by overtraining, it seems that transfer to a new discrimination in a different stimulus dimension is not. This effect is confirmed in the present experiment, even though the stimuli of the second problem had been present (and necessarily attended to) in the first problem. This result is taken to show that the effects of overtraining cannot be accounted for by supposing that it strengthens an overt orienting response of the animal. A second group of rats was run to show that transfer to a second discrimination problem within the same dimension as the first is facilitated by overtraining. The important variable, therefore, that determines the direction of the effect of overtraining on transfer between problems, is the relationship between the stimulus dimensions concerned.     

Order of a 'uniform random' presentation on contextual interference in a serial tracking task

The purpose of the present study was to examine the effect of order of a 'uniform random' presentation on contextual interference in a serial tracking task. Subjects (N=48) were randomly assigned to either a random condition or a blocked condition in the acquisition phase, in which they learned three patterns of serial tracking tasks. Subjects performed retention and transfer trials either in a blocked or a 'uniform random' order. Analysis indicated, in comparisons of performance among conditions, 'uniform random' presentation in the acquisition phase did not improve learning in retention and transfer phases. The results are discussed with regard to both theoretical significance to contextual interference and the nature of 'uniform random' presentation.     

Bidirectional semantic interference between action and speech

Research on embodied cognition assumes that language processing involves modal simulations that recruit the same neural systems that are usually used for action execution. If this is true, one should find evidence for bidirectional crosstalk between action and language. Using a direct matching paradigm, this study tested if action-languages interactions are bidirectional (Experiments 1 and 2), and whether the effect of crosstalk between action perception and language production is due to facilitation or interference (Experiment 3). Replicating previous findings, we found evidence for crosstalk when manual actions had to be performed simultaneously to action-word perception (Experiment 1) and also when language had to be produced during simultaneous perception of hand actions (Experiment 2). These findings suggest a clear bidirectional relationship between action and language. The latter crosstalk effect was due to interference between action and language (Experiment 3). By extending previous research of embodied cognition, the present findings provide novel evidence suggesting that bidirectional functional relations between action and language are based on similar conceptual-semantic representations.     

Asymmetric interference between sex and emotion in face perception

Previous research with speeded-response interference tasks modeled on the Garner paradigm has demonstrated that task-irrelevant variations in either emotional expression or facial speech do not interfere with identity judgments, but irrelevant variations in identity do interfere with expression and facial speech judgments. Sex, like identity, is a relatively invariant aspect of faces. Drawing on a recent model of face processing according to which invariant and changeable aspects of faces are represented in separate neurological systems, we predicted asymmetric interference between sex and emotion classification. The results of Experiment 1, in which the Garner paradigm was employed, confirmed this prediction: Emotion classifications were influenced by the sex of the faces, but sex classifications remained relatively unaffected by facial expression. A second experiment, in which the difficulty of the tasks was equated, corroborated these findings, indicating that differences in processing speed cannot account for the asymmetric relationship between facial emotion and sex processing. A third experiment revealed the same pattern of asymmetric interference through the use of a variant of the Simon paradigm. To the extent that Garner interference and Simon interference indicate interactions at perceptual and response-selection stages of processing, respectively, a challenge for face processing models is to show how the same asymmetric pattern of interference could occur at these different stages. The implications of these findings for the functional independence of the different components of face processing are discussed.     

Parallel encoding within and between elementary stimulus dimensions

Human ability to encode simultaneously different dimensions of a visual display was tested, using an “erasure” technique to control the time for which the visual information remained available for processing. Three separate vocabularies of test item were employed, one varying in terms of color and two in terms of form attributes. Simultaneous presentation of color and form stimuli gave evidence of nearly perfect parallel encoding of both types of attribute. Form-form combinations, on the other hand, indicated only partially simultaneous encoding of the primary form dimensions involved. It was suggested that, while primary encoding of different stimulus dimensions is simultaneous, within the same dimension encoding of discrete stimulus elements may occur seriatim.