Sensation seeking and estimation of numerosity

In a sample of 81 subjects, significant negative correlations were obtained between scores on Zuckerman's Sensation Seeking Scale and estimates of numerosity. A cognitive view of sensation seeking was suggested, according to which high scores are a function of an underestimation of the amount of stimulation experienced and low scores a function of overestimation. This approach was discussed in relation to motivational theories and those involving strength of the nervous system.     

How persuasive messages can influence behavior without awareness

A persuasive message that favors one option in a binary choice can enhance the apparent value of its target by biasing the interpretation of subsequent information. The message installs its target as the initial leader in preference and lets the predecisional distortion of information defend that leadership position. An experiment that contrasts showing TV commercials before and after objective product information demonstrates this process. Ratings of the importance of the commercials to the choice indicate that people are aware of advertising's direct effect on their choice but not of its indirect effect through the biased evaluation of the product information.     

Nonverbal estimation during numerosity judgements by adult humans

On an automated task, humans selected the larger of two sets of items, each created through the one-by-one addition of items. Participants repeated the alphabet out loud during trials so that they could not count the items. This manipulation disrupted counting without producing major effects on other cognitive capacities such as memory or attention, and performance of this experimental group was poorer than that of participants who counted the items. In Experiment 2, the size of individual items was varied, and performance remained stable when the larger numerical set contained a smaller total amount than the smaller numerical set (i.e., participants used numerical rather than nonnumerical quantity cues in making judgements). In Experiment 3, reports of the number of items in a single set showed scalar variability as accuracy decreased, and variability in responses increased with increases in true set size. These data indicate a mechanism for the approximate representation of numerosity in adult humans that might be shared with nonhuman animals.     

Nonverbal estimation during numerosity judgements by adult humans

On an automated task, humans selected the larger of two sets of items, each created through the one-by-one addition of items. Participants repeated the alphabet out loud during trials so that they could not count the items. This manipulation disrupted counting without producing major effects on other cognitive capacities such as memory or attention, and performance of this experimental group was poorer than that of participants who counted the items. In Experiment 2, the size of individual items was varied, and performance remained stable when the larger numerical set contained a smaller total amount than the smaller numerical set (i.e., participants used numerical rather than nonnumerical quantity cues in making judgements). In Experiment 3, reports of the number of items in a single set showed scalar variability as accuracy decreased, and variability in responses increased with increases in true set size. These data indicate a mechanism for the approximate representation of numerosity in adult humans that might be shared with nonhuman animals.     

Emotional awareness and psychological needs

This study examined whether individual differences in two dimensions of emotional awareness (i.e., clarity of emotions, attention to emotions) are associated with individual differences in idiographic personal needs and the processing of one's psychological needs. Two types of idiographic personal needs were examined (i.e., psychologically minded, self-focused). Need processing was measured in response to nine scenarios designed to activate six different psychological needs (i.e., achievement, friendship, independence, control, respect, physical safety). There was some evidence of emotional awareness being associated with the types of needs people generated. There was strong evidence of attention to, and clarity of, emotions being associated with need processing (i.e., need activation intensity, need activation consistency, need differentiation, need processing style).     

Deduction without awareness

We investigated whether two basic forms of deductive inference, Modus Ponens and Disjunctive Syllogism, occur automatically and without awareness. In Experiment 1, we used a priming paradigm with a set of conditional and disjunctive problems. For each trial, two premises were shown. The second premise was presented at a rate designed to be undetectable. After each problem, participants had to evaluate whether a newly-presented target number was odd or even. The target number matched or did not match a conclusion endorsed by the two previous premises. We found that when the target matched the conclusion of a Modus Ponens inference, the evaluation of the target number was reliably faster than baseline even when participants reported that they were not aware of the second premise. This priming effect did not occur for any other valid or invalid inference that we tested, including the Disjunctive Syllogism. In Experiment 2, we used a forced-choice paradigm in which we found that some participants were able to access some information on the second premise when their attention was explicitly directed to it. In Experiment 3, we showed that the priming effect for Modus Ponens was present also in subjects who could not access any information about P(2). In Experiment 4 we explored whether spatial relations (e.g., "a before b") or sentences with quantifiers (e.g., "all a with b") could generate a priming effect similar to the one observed for Modus Ponens. A priming effect could be found for Modus Ponens only, but not for the other relations tested. These findings show that the Modus Ponens inference, in contrast to other deductive inferences, can be carried out automatically and unconsciously. Furthermore, our findings suggest that critical deductive inference schemata can be included in the range of high-level cognitive activities that are carried out unconsciously.     

Cross-modal attention modulates tactile subitizing but not tactile numerosity estimation

Debate remains about whether the same attentional mechanism subserves subitizing (with number of items less than or equal to 4) and numerosity estimation (with number of items equal to or larger than 5), and evidence is scarce from the tactile modality. Here, we examined tactile numerosity perception. Using tactile Braille displays, participants completed the following three main tasks: (1) Unisensory task with focused attention: Participants reported the number (1~12) of the tactile pins. (2) Unisensory task with divided attention: Participants compared the numbers of pins across the upper and lower area of their left index fingers, in addition to reporting the number of tactile pins on their right index fingers. (3) Cross-modal task with divided attention: Participants reported the number of tactile pins and compared the numbers of visual dots across the upper and lower part of a (illusory) rectangle that overlaid the tactile stimuli. We found that performance of subitizing rather than estimation was interfered with in dual tasks, regardless of whether distractor events were from the same modality (tactile modality) or from a different modality (visual modality). Moreover, a further test of visual/tactile working memory capacity revealed that the precision of tactile subitizing, in the presence of a visual distractor, was correlated with the capacity of visual working memory, not of tactile working memory. Overall, our study revealed that tactile numerosity perception is accounted for by amodal attentional modulation yet by differential attentional mechanisms in terms of subitizing and estimation.     

Attention without awareness: Attentional modulation of perceptual grouping without awareness

Perceptual grouping is the process through which the perceptual system combines local stimuli into a more global perceptual unit. Previous studies have shown attention to be a modulatory factor for perceptual grouping. However, these studies mainly used explicit measurements, and, thus, whether attention can modulate perceptual grouping without awareness is still relatively unexplored. To clarify the relationship between attention and perceptual grouping, the present study aims to explore how attention interacts with perceptual grouping without awareness. The task was to judge the relative lengths of two centrally presented horizontal bars while a railway-shaped pattern defined by color similarity was presented in the background. Although the observers were unaware of the railway-shaped pattern, their line-length judgment was biased by that pattern, which induced a Ponzo illusion, indicating grouping without awareness. More importantly, an attentional modulatory effect without awareness was manifested as evident by the observer’s performance being more often biased when the railway-shaped pattern was formed by an attended color than when it was formed by an unattended one. Also, the attentional modulation effect was shown to be dynamic, being more pronounced with a short presentation time than a longer one. The results of the present study not only clarify the relationship between attention and perceptual grouping but also further contribute to our understanding of attention and awareness by corroborating the dissociation between attention and awareness.

     

Visual awareness and the detection of fearful faces

A commonly held view is that emotional stimuli are processed independently of awareness. Here, the authors parametrically varied the duration of a fearful face target stimulus that was backward masked by a neutral face. The authors evaluated awareness by characterizing behavioral performance using receiver operating characteristic curves from signal detection theory. Their main finding was that no universal objective awareness threshold exists for fear perception. Although several subjects displayed a behavioral pattern consistent with previous reports (i.e., targets masked at 33 ms), a considerable percentage of their subjects (64%) were capable of reliably detecting 33-ms targets. Their findings suggest that considerable information is available even in briefly presented stimuli (possibly as short as 17 ms) to support masked fear detection.     

Bidirectional examination of the interaction between time and numerosity corroborates that numerosity influences time estimation but not vice versa

There has been great interest in the idea that time, number, and space share a common magnitude system. However, only a handful of studies examined bidirectional interaction between time and number and the results varied depending on the specifics of the methods and stimulus properties of each study. The present study investigated bidirectional interaction between time and number using estimation tasks. We used duration (Experiment 1) and numerosity (Experiment 2) estimation tasks to investigate the effect of numerosity‐on‐duration and duration‐on‐numerosity estimation. The results from the two experiments demonstrated that numerosity influences duration processing but not vice versa; that is, there was unidirectional interaction between numerosity and time. The duration of stimulus presentation was overestimated for stimuli larger in (task‐irrelevant) numerosity. Possible mechanisms underlying the unidirectional interaction between time and number are discussed.     

Influencing choice without awareness

Forcing occurs when a magician influences the audience’s decisions without their awareness. To investigate the mechanisms behind this effect, we examined several stimulus and personality predictors. In Study 1, a magician flipped through a deck of playing cards while participants were asked to choose one. Although the magician could influence the choice almost every time (98%), relatively few (9%) noticed this influence. In Study 2, participants observed rapid series of cards on a computer, with one target card shown longer than the rest. We expected people would tend to choose this card without noticing that it was shown longest. Both stimulus and personality factors predicted the choice of card, depending on whether the influence was noticed. These results show that combining real-world and laboratory research can be a powerful way to study magic and can provide new methods to study the feeling of free will.     

Emotional awareness,gender, and suspiciousness

We investigated the causal relation between emotional awareness (EA) and suspiciousness, and whether this relation is moderated by gender. After inducing an unpleasant mood, we manipulated EA by having participants read one of two versions of a story (the high EA condition provided cues to what the participant was feeling and why, whereas the low EA condition did not). Following the manipulation, one sample of participants completed a measure of suspiciousness, and a second, independent sample of participants described their emotional state. Emotional Awareness Condition×Gender effects were obtained for suspiciousness and EA. Men in the low EA condition reported significantly higher levels of suspiciousness and lower levels of EA than men in the high EA condition. Women in both conditions reported equally high levels of EA, which were greater than those of men in both conditions, and the manipulation did not affect their levels of suspiciousness.     

Conscious control and memory awareness when recognising famous faces

We describe an experiment that investigated levels-of-processing effects in recognition memory for famous faces. The degree of conscious control over the recognition decisions was manipulated by using a response deadline procedure, and memory awareness associated with those decisions was assessed using a standard remember-know paradigm. Levels-of-processing effects were found at both short and long response deadlines, and at both deadlines those effects occurred only in remembering. Moreover, knowing, as well as remembering, increased with the greater opportunity for conscious control over recognition decisions at the long deadline. These results have implications for dual-process theories that distinguish between a slower, more controlled recollection process, reflected in remembering, and a faster, more automatic familiarity process, reflected in knowing.     

Conscious control and memory awareness when recognising famous faces

We describe an experiment that investigated levels-of-processing effects in recognition memory for famous faces. The degree of conscious control over the recognition decisions was manipulated by using a response deadline procedure, and memory awareness associated with those decisions was assessed using a standard remember-know paradigm. Levels-of-processing effects were found at both short and long response deadlines, and at both deadlines those effects occurred only in remembering. Moreover, knowing, as well as remembering, increased with the greater opportunity for conscious control over recognition decisions at the long deadline. These results have implications for dual-process theories that distinguish between a slower, more controlled recollection process, reflected in remembering, and a faster, more automatic familiarity process, reflected in knowing.     

Eye contact facilitates awareness of faces during interocular suppression

Eye contact captures attention and receives prioritized visual processing. Here we asked whether eye contact might be processed outside conscious awareness. Faces with direct and averted gaze were rendered invisible using interocular suppression. In two experiments we found that faces with direct gaze overcame such suppression more rapidly than faces with averted gaze. Control experiments ruled out the influence of low-level stimulus differences and differential response criteria. These results indicate an enhanced unconscious representation of direct gaze, enabling the automatic and rapid detection of other individuals making eye contact with the observer.     

Emotional faces capture spatial attention in 5-year-old children

Emotional facial expressions are important social cues that convey salient affective information. Infants, younger children, and adults all appear to orient spatial attention to emotional faces with a particularly strong bias to fearful faces. Yet in young children it is unclear whether or not both happy and fearful faces extract attention. Given that the processing of emotional faces is believed by some to serve an evolutionarily adaptive purpose, attentional biases to both fearful and happy expressions would be expected in younger children. However, the extent to which this ability is present in young children and whether or not this ability is genetically mediated is untested. Therefore, the aims of the current study were to assess the spatial-attentional properties of emotional faces in young children, with a preliminary test of whether this effect was influenced by genetics. Five-year-old twin pairs performed a dot-probe task. The results suggest that children preferentially direct spatial attention to emotional faces, particularly right visual field faces. The results provide support for the notion that the direction of spatial attention to emotional faces serves an evolutionarily adaptive function and may be mediated by genetic mechanisms.     

无觉知条件下的客体注意效应

采用双矩形范式变式考察在对客体无觉知的条件下的客体注意效应,共包括两个实验：实验一考察对完整矩形客体无觉知的条件下能否出现客体注意效应,发现在完整矩形客体不可见的情况下依然出现了客体注意效应。实验二考察对虚拟矩形客体无觉知的情况下是否能够出现客体注意效应,发现在虚拟矩形客体不可见的情况下也能够出现客体注意效应。研究结果表明客体注意效应在无觉知条件下依然存在,为注意与觉知在功能上相互分离的观点提供了新的证据。