The mirror effect and the spacing effect

In the mirror effect, there are fewer false negatives (misses) and false positives (false alarms) for rare (low-frequency) words than for common (high-frequency) words. In the spacing effect, recognition accuracy is positively related to the interval (spacing or lag) between two presentations of an item. These effects are related in that they are both manifestations of a leapfrog effect (a weaker item jumps over a stronger item). They seem to be puzzles for traditional strength theory and at least some current global-matching models. A computational strength-based model (EICL) is proposed that incorporates excitation, inhibition, and a closed-loop learning algorithm. The model consists of three nonlinear coupled stochastic difference equations, one each for excitation (x), inhibition (y), and context (z). Strength is the algebraic sum (i.e., s = x − y + z). These equations are used to form a toy lexicon that serves as a basis for the experimental manipulations. The model can simulate the mirror effect forcedchoice inequalities and the spacing effect for single-item recognition, all parameters are random variables, and the same parameter values are used for both the mirror and the spacing effects. No parameter values varied with the independent variables (word frequency for the mirror effect, lag for the spacing effect), so the model, not the parameters, is doing the work.     

Colavita dominance effect revisited: the effect of semantic congruity

To investigate the effect of semantic congruity on audiovisual target responses, participants detected a semantic concept that was embedded in a series of rapidly presented stimuli. The target concept appeared as a picture, an environmental sound, or both; and in bimodal trials, the audiovisual events were either consistent or inconsistent in their representation of a semantic concept. The results showed faster detection latencies to bimodal than to unimodal targets and a higher rate of missed targets when visual distractors were presented together with auditory targets, in comparison to auditory targets presented alone. The findings of Experiment 2 showed a cross-modal asymmetry, such that visual distractors were found to interfere with the accuracy of auditory target detection, but auditory distractors had no effect on either the speed or the accuracy of visual target detection. The biased-competition theory of attention (Desimone & Duncan Annual Review of Neuroscience 18: 1995; Duncan, Humphreys, & Ward Current Opinion in Neurobiology 7: 255–261 1997) was used to explain the findings because, when the saliency of the visual stimuli was reduced by the addition of a noise filter in Experiment 4, visual interference on auditory target detection was diminished. Additionally, the results showed faster and more accurate target detection when semantic concepts were represented in a visual rather than an auditory format.     

In the Netherlands the anti-Flynn effect is a Jensen effect

In this study, 63 observations of secular IQ changes (both Flynn and anti-Flynn effects) are collected from three demographically diverse studies of the Dutch population for the period 1975–2005 (representing the 1950–1990 birth cohorts), along with data on g loadings and subtest reliabilities. The method of correlated vectors is used to explore the association between Flynn and anti-Flynn effect magnitudes, both independently and together, and the g loadings of subtests. Despite a positive vector correlation the Flynn effects are not associated with the Jensen effect (r = .307, ns, N = 36), however the anti-Flynn effects are (r = .406, P = .05, N = 27). Combined, the vector correlation becomes negative but non-significant (r = −.111, ns, N = 63). Declines due to the anti-Flynn effect are estimated at −4.515 points per decade, whereas gains due to the Flynn effect are estimated at 2.175 points per decade. The N-weighted net of these is a loss of −1.350 points per decade, suggesting an overall tendency towards decreasing IQ in the Netherlands with respect to these cohorts. The Jensen effect on the anti-Flynn effect suggests that it may be related to bio-demographic changes within the Netherlands which have reduced ‘genetic-g’, despite the presence of large, parallel gains on subtests that may be relatively more sensitive to cultural-environmental improvements.     

Similarities between the irrelevant sound effect and the suffix effect

Although articulatory suppression abolishes the effect of irrelevant sound (ISE) on serial recall when sequences are presented visually, the effect persists with auditory presentation of list items. Two experiments were designed to test the claim that, when articulation is suppressed, the effect of irrelevant sound on the retention of auditory lists resembles a suffix effect. A suffix is a spoken word that immediately follows the final item in a list. Even though participants are told to ignore it, the suffix impairs serial recall of auditory lists. In Experiment 1, the irrelevant sound consisted of instrumental music. The music generated a significant ISE that was abolished by articulatory suppression. It therefore appears that, when articulation is suppressed, irrelevant sound must contain speech for it to have any effect on recall. This is consistent with what is known about the suffix effect. In Experiment 2, the effect of irrelevant sound under articulatory suppression was greater when the irrelevant sound was spoken by the same voice that presented the list items. This outcome is again consistent with the known characteristics of the suffix effect. It therefore appears that, when rehearsal is suppressed, irrelevant sound disrupts the acoustic-perceptual encoding of auditorily presented list items. There is no evidence that the persistence of the ISE under suppression is a result of interference to the representation of list items in a postcategorical phonological store.     

The effect of the feeling of resolution and recognition performance on the revelation effect

The fact that engaging in a cognitive task before a recognition task increases the probability of “old” responses is known as the revelation effect. We used several cognitive tasks to examine whether the feeling of resolution, a key construct of the occurrence mechanism of the revelation effect, is related to the occurrence of the revelation effect. The results show that the revelation effect was not caused by a visual search task, which elicited the feeling of resolution, but caused by an unsolvable anagram task and an articulatory suppression task, which did not elicit the feeling of resolution. These results suggest that the revelation effect is not related to the feeling of resolution. Moreover, the revelation effect was likely to occur in participants who performed poorly on the recognition task. The result suggests that the revelation effect is inclined to occur when people depend more on familiarity than on recollection process.     

Overview of the Flynn effect

Following WW2, various researchers found and reported secular gains in IQ, but it was not until additional reports appeared in the 1980s that researchers began to look for the cause or causes. It was quickly apparent that the gains were not limited to any group or nation, but the manifestation of the gains was different depending on time and place. For every discovery, there was a different or opposite result in a different data set. Gains have been large, small, variable, and even negative. Some researchers have found that the gains were on g, while more have found no g loading. Abstract test formats, such as the Raven have often shown the greatest gains, but gains have also appeared in tests of crystallized intelligence. Some data has shown greater gains for the lower half of the intelligence distribution, while others have shown greater gains in the top half, and others have shown equal gains at all levels. Hypotheses for the causes have included environmental factors, genetic effects, reduced fertility, and methodological dependence. Two models are discussed.     

Determinants of the Bourdon effect

The Bourdon illusion is the apparent inward bending of straight, collinear edges in a solid figure consisting of two elongated triangles meeting at their apexes. This effect was investigated in five experiments. In the first and third experiments, it was shown that the apparent bending is greatest when the apical angles are about 12 deg and the axis of the figure is oriented at about 22 deg from the vertical. The second experiment was a control involving visual acuity for angular departures of two lines from collinearity and served as a basis of selection for subjects in Experiments 3, 4, and 5. Experiments 4 and 5 showed that the illusion occurs strongly in a solid (“filled in”) figure but is notably smaller in outline figures of the same size and shape. It tends to be negative in outline figures with boundaries formed by continuous and broken lines. The relationship between the Bourdon illusion and the “negative” Zöllner illusion is considered.     

On the law of effect

Experiments on single, multiple, and concurrent schedules of reinforcement find various correlations between the rate of responding and the rate or magnitude of reinforcement. For concurrent schedules (i.e., simultaneous choice procedures), there is matching between the relative frequencies of responding and reinforcement; for multiple schedules (i.e., successive discrimination procedures), there are contrast effects between responding in each component and reinforcement in the others; and for single schedules, there are a host of increasing monotonic relations between the rate of responding and the rate of reinforcement. All these results, plus several others, can be accounted for by a coherent system of equations, the most general of which states that the absolute rate of any response is proportional to its associated relative reinforcement.     

Mystery of the anti-McCollough effect

The McCollough Effect (ME) is a complex perceptual aftereffect that remains of interest half a century after its discovery. It is argued that a recently reported variant, dubbed the anti-McCollough effect, is not the reverse of the ME, with aftereffect colors in the same direction as the inducing stimuli. A red-horizontal stimulus leads to a reddish aftereffect not because of red-horizontal parings, but despite them. The anti-ME is a weak standard-direction ME produced by complementary afterimage colors (afterimage green with horizontal), rather than by environmental colors, first shown decades ago. It is not a new type of contingent aftereffect. The red-horizontal pair does not interfere with the afterimage green-horizontal pair it produces because a single color-orientation pairing provides more ambiguous input than does the standard two orientation-color pairings (red-horizontal, green-vertical) of the ME. It is also argued that not even one orientation-contingent color aftereffect is convincingly shown in the "anti"-ME, let alone, as has previously been suggested, two simultaneous orientation-contingent color aftereffects in opposite directions at different levels of the visual system, in which the higher-level effect suppresses the downstream effect from reaching consciousness. The "anti"-ME can be explained by existing theories of contingent aftereffects, including perceptual-learning theory.     

The effect of change in US quality on the blocking effect

If one CS is paired with a US and then that CS together with a “redundant” stimulus is paired with the US, conditioning of that “redundant” stimulus is attenuated or blocked. The present experiment explores the effect upon this blocking of changing the quality of the US coincident with the introduction of the redundant stimulus. Changing US quality disrupted blocking only when the US potency was also increased. Quality changes in which the redundant stimulus was correlated with a lower potency US only increased blocking. These results are taken as supporting the conditioning model of Rescorla and Wagner but inconsistent with a casual informational model of conditioning.     

Dissociation of the distance effect and size effect in one-digit numbers

Magnitude comparison of single digits is robustly characterized by a distance effect (close numbers are more difficult to compare than numbers further apart) and a size effect (for a given distance, comparison difficulty increases with increasing size). The distance effect indicates access to the mental number line (Dehaene, 1997), and the size effect is usually interpreted as indicating that the mental number line represents larger numbers more vaguely than smaller ones. In contrast, we have argued earlier (Verguts, Fias, & Stevens, 2005) that for symbolic numbers (Arabic or verbal notation), the size effect does not originate from the mental number line but, instead, originates from mappings to relevant output components that are specific for magnitude comparison. If the latter is true, it should be possible to dissociate the distance effect from the size effect in tasks other than magnitude comparison. In two experiments, we observed a robust distance effect insame/different judgments, which implies access to the mental number line. Yet the size effect was absent. Consistent with our prediction, this finding establishes a dissociation between the size effect and the distance effect.     

Flash-lag effect: complicating motion extrapolation of the moving reference-stimulus paradoxically augments the effect

One fundamental property of the perceptual and cognitive systems is their capacity for prediction in the dynamic environment; the flash-lag effect has been considered as a particularly suggestive example of this capacity (Nijhawan in nature 370:256-257, 1994, Behav brain sci 31:179-239, 2008). Thus, because of involvement of the mechanisms of extrapolation and visual prediction, the moving object is perceived ahead of the simultaneously flashed static object objectively aligned with the moving one. In the present study we introduce a new method and report experimental results inconsistent with at least some versions of the prediction/extrapolation theory. We show that a stimulus moving in the opposite direction to the reference stimulus by approaching it before the flash does not diminish the flash-lag effect, but rather augments it. In addition, alternative theories (in)capable of explaining this paradoxical result are discussed.     

Widening the boundaries of the production effect

Words that are read aloud are more memorable than words that are read silently. The boundaries of this production effect (MacLeod, Gopie, Hourihan, Neary, & Ozubko, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 36, 671-685, 2010) have been found to extend beyond speech. MacLeod and colleagues demonstrated that mouthing also facilitates memory, leading them to speculate that any distinct, item-specific response should result in a production effect. In Experiment 1, we found support for this conjecture: Relative to silent reading, three unique productions-spelling, writing, and typing-all boosted explicit memory. In Experiment 2, we tested the sensitivity of the production effect. Although mouthing, writing, and whispering all improved explicit memory when compared to silent reading, these other production modalities were not as beneficial as speech. We argue that the enhanced distinctiveness of speech relative to other productions-and of other productions relative to silent reading-underlies this pattern of results.     

道德的轻与重：道德的重量具身效应及隐喻的调节作用

本研究采用行为反应时和事件相关电位(ERP)探讨道德的重量具身效应及“重量-道德”隐喻联结对该效应的调节作用。参考内隐联想测验的逻辑，采用联合分类反应任务，在默认的“重量-道德”隐喻表征情境（实验1）和道德垂直空间隐喻的启动情境（实验2）中，要求被试分别使用轻鼠标和重鼠标对道德/不道德词进行分类判断，考察鼠标重量对道德概念的加工所产生的影响。结果显示，在默认情境中，“重-道德，轻-不道德”的联合分类条件比“轻-道德，重-不道德”条件的分类反应时更短，并伴随有更大的脑电晚期正成分（LPC），而在启动道德垂直空间隐喻后，两种联合分类条件下的反应时和LPC结果出现反转。本研究结果表明道德概念的加工会受到重量经验的影响，“重量-道德”具身效应具有心理现实性，且重量概念与道德概念的隐喻联结引导并调节了这种具身效应。     

藏语阅读中中央凹词频效应及对副中央凹预视效应的影响

在不同语言文字系统中,对于眼动控制的本质及其发生机制,尤其是阅读过程中注意资源的分配是序列分布还是平行分布的问题,目前仍然存在着争论和分歧。藏语是拼音文字,但它同时又具有汉语的特点,独具语言特色。因此,通过对藏语阅读过程中中央凹词频对副中央凹预视效应影响这一问题的探讨,可以在一种已有研究未曾涉及的文字系统中进一步推动上述争议的解决。本研究采用眼动记录法,设计了两个实验。实验1操纵了中央凹词频(高频、低频),考察藏语阅读中中央凹词的词频效应及词频延迟效应,结果发现,藏语阅读中存在词频效应及词频延迟效应。实验2同时操纵中央凹词频和副中央凹预视词类型,借助边界范式,考察藏语阅读中副中央凹预视效应及中央凹词频对副中央凹预视效应的影响,结果发现,藏语阅读中存在副中央凹预视效应,且与低频中央凹词相比,高频中央凹词对副中央凹预视效应的促进作用更大。两个实验结果表明:(1)藏语阅读中存在显著的词频效应,且表现在词汇加工的整个过程;(2)藏语阅读中存在显著的词频延迟效应,并贯穿于词汇加工的整个过程;(3)藏语阅读中存在显著的副中央凹预视效应,读者能通过副中央凹预视提取到语音和字形信息。藏语阅读中中央凹词...     

The Stroop effect in English-Japanese bilinguals: the effect of phonological similarity

English-Japanese bilinguals performed a Stroop color-word interference task with both English and Japanese stimuli and responded in both English and Japanese. The Japanese stimuli were either the traditional color terms (TCTs) written in Hiragana or loanwords (LWs) from English written in Katakana. Both within-language and between-language interference were found for all combinations of stimuli and responses. The between-language interference was larger for Katakana LWs (phonologically similar to English) than for Hiragana TCTs, especially with Japanese responses. The magnitude of this phonological effect increased with self-rated reading fluency in Japanese. Overall responding was slower and the Stroop effect larger with English than with Japanese stimuli. These results suggest that unintentional lexical access elicits automatic phonological processing even with intermediate-level reading proficiency.     

Redefining the regularity effect

This study reports two experiments that further explore the regularity effect in single-word pronunciation. Experiment 1 shows that regularity effects are found only with irregular words that are “true” exceptions (e.g., PINT, MONK, BROAD). Words that are irregular in terms of grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence rules, but either are regular in terms of a higher order correspondence rule (e.g., PALM, HEALTH) or possess a divergent, although reasonably common, correspondence (e.g., GLOVE, HEAD), produce response times similar to those produced by regular words. These results indicate that the regularity effect is restricted to a smaller set of words than previously has been thought. Experiment 2 examines the regularity effect when subjects are required to delay their responses by 1,500 msec; no difference between exception and regular words is found. This finding indicates that previous demonstrations of the regularity effect cannot be attributed to articulatory differences between exception and regular word samples. Theoretical accounts of the regularity effect are considered briefly.     

On the word-superiority effect

Summary Four experiments tested Johnston's (1981) hierarchical-activation account and McClelland and Rumelhart's (1981) interactive-activation account of the word-superiority effect. The hierarchical-activation account claims that the effect depends on masking. Using both a luminance manipulation and direct feature removal, however, we showed that the word-superiority effect can be obtained without a mask. Moreover, when words were made hard to read by displaying them in a column, the context advantage with both the luminance and the feature-removal techniques was reduced to zero. With masking, in contrast, a context effect remained because of lower accuracy in the no-context (control) condition. Thus, masking confounds enhancement on context trials with inhibition on no-context trials and is neither a necessary nor a desirable procedure with which to demonstrate a context advantage.The advantage of word context is reduced when words are printed with extra space between the letters. The amount of space needed depends on the size of the letters — the reduction requires a manipulation about the size of a blank character. Although both define visual features spatially, neither model includes an internal representation of space. Thus, neither model can represent the configural manipulations, and neither can explain why column orientation and blank characters reduce the word-superiority effect.The research is based on a Ph.D thesis (Marchetti, 1983) supervised by the second author. The work was supported by post-graduate awards from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and from the Ontario Graduate Scholarship Fund to the first author. Laboratory facilities were made possible by grants from NSERC to the second author.Preliminary reports of the data were presented at the meeting of the Psychonomic Society in San Diego, November 1983 and at a conference, Common processes in speaking, listening, reading, and writing, held at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research. University of Bielefeld, July, 1985     

Abolishing the word-length effect

The authors report 2 experiments that compare the recall of long and short words in pure and mixed lists. In pure lists, long words were much more poorly remembered than short words. In mixed lists, this word-length effect was abolished and both the long and short words were recalled as well as short words in pure lists. These findings contradict current models that seek to explain the word-length effect in terms of item-based effects such as difficulty in assembling items, or in terms of list-based accounts of rehearsal speed. An alternative explanation, drawing on ideas of item complexity and item distinctiveness, is proposed.