Figural effects in afterimage fragmentation

Afterimages consisting of between two and five lines were observed in five experiments. Measures were taken of both the duration and frequency of visibility of the lines comprising the configurations, and also of all line combinations. In Experiments I-III, lines forming angles, triangles, and a square were varied in orientation. Neither the absolute nor the relative orientation of the lines had any systematic effects on the measures. These results are compared with those that have been derived from steady fixation and optical stabilization, in which vertical-horizontal line pairs yield greater stability than other orientations. In Experiment IV, afterimages of the letters N and Z were found to be more stable than those of their mirror-image reversals, both in terms of the duration of visibility of the entire configurations and the obliques. This pattern was not produced using a complex configuration that could fragment into either a letter or a reversed letter (Experiment V). Similar effects have been found during steady fixation.     

Figural goodness effects in perception and memory

There is an apparent contradiction concerning configurational effects in visual information processing. Some studies have shown that when an array is organized into a “good” or unitary Gestalt, analysis of a single part of it is facilitated, while others have shown “good” arrays to impede search for a part. The three experiments reported here support the proposition that goodness of form can facilitate performance when memory is used, but that goodness impairs strictly perceptual search for a part of an array. These experiments compare detection of a single feature in faces (unitary figures) and nonfaces. They show that when the face or nonface is presented before the target feature (and must be held in memory), performance is better for faces than for nonfaces. When the target is presented before the face or nonface and perceptual search is required, faces give worse performance than nonfaces. Implications for perceptual phenomena, including the object-superiority and word-superiority effects, are discussed.     

The source of belief bias effects in syllogistic reasoning.

In studies of the belief bias effect in syllogistic reasoning, an interaction between logical validity and the believability of the conclusion has been found; in essence, logic has a larger effect on unbelievable than on believable conclusions. Two main explanations have been proposed for this finding. The selective scrutiny account claims that people focus on the conclusion and only engage in logical processing if this is found to be unbelievable; while the misinterpreted necessity account claims that subjects misunderstand what is meant by logical necessity and respond on the basis of believability when indeterminate syllogisms are presented. Experiments 1 and 2 compared the predictions of these two theories by examining whether the interaction would disappear if only determinate syllogisms were used. It did, thus providing strong support for the misinterpreted necessity explanation. However, the results are also consistent with a version of the mental models theory, and so Experiment 3 was carried out to compare these two explanations. The mental models theory received strong support, as it did also in the follow-up Experiments 4 and 5. It is concluded that people try to construct a mental model of the premises but, if there is a believable conclusion consistent with the first model they produce, then they fail to construct alternative models.     

Phonological and visual distinctiveness effects in syllogistic reasoning: Implications for mental models theory

Two experiments are reported in which the representational distinctiveness of terms within categorical syllogisms was manipulated in order to examine the assumption of mental models theory that abstract, spatially based representations underpin deduction. In Experiment 1, participants evaluated conclusion validity for syllogisms containing either phonologically distinctive terms (e.g., harks, paps, and fids) or phonologically nondistinctive terms (e.g., fuds, fods, and feds). Logical performance was enhanced with the distinctive contents, suggesting that the phonological properties of syllogism terms can play an important role in deduction. In Experiment 2, participants received either the phonological materials from Experiment 1 or syllogisms involving distinctive or nondistinctive visual contents. Logical inference was again enhanced for the distinctive contents, whether phonological or visual in nature. Our findings suggest a broad involvement of multimodal information in syllogistic reasoning and question the assumed primacy of abstract, spatially organized representations in deduction, as is claimed by mental models theorists.     

Choice in a "self-control" paradigm: effects of a fading procedure

Pigeons chose between an immediate 2-second reinforcer (access to grain) and a 6-second reinforcer delayed 6 seconds. The four pigeons in the control group were exposed to this condition initially. The four experimental subjects first received a condition where both reinforcers were delayed 6 seconds. The small reinforcer delay was then gradually reduced to zero over more than 11,000 trials. Control subjects almost never chose the large delayed reinforcer. Experimental subjects chose the large delayed reinforcer significantly more often. Two experimental subjects showed preference for the large reinforcer even when the consequences for pecking the two keys were switched. The results indicate that fading procedures can lead to increased “self-control” in pigeons in a choice between a large delayed reinforcer and a small immediate reinforcer.     

Interpretive biases in chronic insomnia: an investigation using a priming paradigm

Disorder-congruent interpretations of ambiguous stimuli characterize several psychological disorders and have been implicated in their maintenance. Models of insomnia have highlighted the importance of cognitive processes, but the possibility that biased interpretations are important has been minimally investigated. Hence, a priming methodology was employed to investigate the presence of an interpretive bias in insomnia. A sample of 78 participants, differing in the presence of a diagnosis of insomnia, severity of sleep disturbance, and sleepiness, was required to read ambiguous sentences and make a lexical decision about target words that followed. Sleepiness at the time of the experiment was associated with the likelihood with which participants made insomnia and threat consistent interpretations of ambiguous sentences. The results suggest that there is a general bias towards threatening interpretations when individuals are sleepy and suggests that cognitive accounts of insomnia require revision to include a role for interpretative bias when people are sleepy. Future research is required to investigate whether this interpretive bias plays a causal role in the maintenance of insomnia.     

Mistaking the instance for the rule: A critical analysis of the truth-table evaluation paradigm

Many studies probe for interpretations of < if A then C> by having people evaluate truth-table cases (<A and C>, < A and not-C>, < not-A and C>, < not-A and not-C>) as making the rule true or false, or being irrelevant. We argue that a single case can never prove a general rule to be true, as philosophy of science has taught any researcher. Giving participants the impossible “true” option would therefore bias results away from this response. In Experiment 1 people judged instead whether cases make a rule false, do not make the rule false, or are irrelevant to the rule. The experimental group (N = 44) showed a significant increase in not-false responses compared with true responses of the control group (N = 39). In Experiments 2 and 3 the experimental groups judged whether cases make a rule true, corroborate it (i.e., make the rule more plausible, but neither true nor false), make it false, or are irrelevant. There was a significant reduction of irrelevant responses as compared to the default true/false/irrelevant task for the control groups. Even < A and C> cases were often no longer considered to make an < if A then C> rule true and were correctly judged to corroborate (vs. verify) rules. Results corroborate our conceptual analyses of the unsuitable “true” response option and put into question arguments that hinge on the presumed likelihood by which people consider truth contingencies to make a rule “true”.     

Long lasting effects of unmasking in a feature fusion paradigm

In spite of more than 100 years of research, the mechanisms underlying visual masking are still unknown. In recent publications, we introduced an unmasking paradigm involving the fusion of features that revealed interesting spatial characteristics. Here, we investigate the temporal aspects of this paradigm showing very long lasting effects that impose serious restrictions on models of masking. We used a simple feed-forward neural network model to explain these results.     

Motivational effects in the mere-exposure paradigm

Three experiments investigated the effects of time-pressure and evaluation apprehension on the mere-exposure phenomenon (Zajonc, 1968). Subjects viewed slides of abstract paintings at different frequencies of exposure and subsequently indicated their liking for the stimuli. Evaluation apprehension during the assessment phase consistently undermined mere-exposure effects. Furthermore, when evaluation apprehension was high, time-pressure magnified those effects. These findings were discussed in terms of the notions that (1) prior exposure may increase the sense of processing fluency associated with a stimulus (Jacoby & Kelley, 1990), (2) fluency may be interpreted as plausibility of a judgmental cue evoked by the stimulus, (3) motivational factors like time-pressure and evaluation apprehension may moderate the impact of plausibility information on judgment, hence, may moderate ‘mere-exposure’ effects.     

A repetition-suppression account of between-trial effects in a modified Stroop paradigm

Theories that postulate cognitive inhibition are very common in psychology and cognitive neuroscience [e.g., Hasher, L., Lustig, C., & Zacks, R. T. (2007). Inhibitory mechanisms and the control of attention. In A. Conway, C. Jarrold, M. Kane, A. Miyake, A. Towse, & J. Towse (Eds.), Variation in working memory (pp. 227-249). New York, NY: Oxford, University Press], although they have recently been severely criticized [e.g., MacLeod, C. M., Dodd, M. D., Sheard, E. D., Wilson, D. E., & Bibi, U. (2003). In opposition to inhibition. In H. Ross (Ed.), The psychology of learning and motivation (Vol. 43, pp. 163-214). Elsevier Science]. This paper poses and attempts to answer the question whether a research program with cognitive inhibition as its main theoretical assumption is still worth pursuing. We present a set of empirical data from a modified Stroop paradigm that replicates previously reported findings. These findings refer to between-trial effects previously described in the literature on Stroop, negative priming, and inhibition-of-return. Existing theoretical accounts fail to explain all these effects in an integrated way. A repetition-suppression mechanism is proposed in order to account for these data. This mechanism is instantiated as a computational cognitive model. The theoretical implications of this model are discussed.     

Traditional response interference effects from anticipated action outcomes: a response-effect compatibility paradigm

An act as simple as pressing a button involves various stages of processing. Each stage of action production is susceptible to interference from competing representations/processes. For example, in the Simon Effect, interference arises from an incongruence between incidental spatial information and the spatial properties of intended action; in the flanker task, interference arises when visual targets and distracters are associated with different responses (response interference [RI]). Less interference arises in the flanker task when targets and distracters are different in appearance but associated with the same response (perceptual interference [PI]). Interference also stems from the automatic activation of representations associated with the anticipated effects of an action, response-effect (R–E) compatibility (e.g., the presence of a left-pointing arrow after one presses a button on the right will increase interference in future trials). This has been explained by ideomotor theory—that the mental representation of anticipated action-effects are activated automatically by voluntary action and that such representations can cause facilitation or interference by automatically priming their associated action plans. To illuminate the nature of action production and provide additional support for ideomotor theory, we examined for the first time the effects of PI and RI in a new R–E compatibility paradigm.     

Trial-by-trial effects in the affective priming paradigm

In this paper, we yield evidence for the dependence of affective priming on the congruency of the previous trial. Affective priming refers to the finding that valence categorizations of targets are facilitated when the preceding prime is of the same valence. In two experiments, affective priming was diminished after incongruent trials (i.e., prime and target were of different valence), whereas, significant affective priming was observed after congruent trials (i.e., prime and target were of same valence). We compare this pattern to the known sequential dependencies in Stroop- and Eriksen-type tasks. Furthermore, our results can help to improve the statistical power of studies in which the affective priming task is used as a measure for automatic evaluations of attitude-objects.     

Congruity effects in the survival processing paradigm

Five experiments were conducted to investigate a proposal by Butler, Kang, and Roediger (2009) that congruity (or fit) between target items and processing tasks might contribute, at least partly, to the mnemonic advantages typically produced by survival processing. In their research, no significant survival advantages were found when words were preselected to be highly congruent or incongruent with a survival and control (robbery) scenario. Experiments 1a and 1b of the present report show that survival advantages, in fact, generalize across a wide set of selected target words; each participant received a unique set of words, sampled without replacement from a large pool, yet significant survival advantages remained. In Experiment 2, we found a significant survival advantage using words that had been preselected by Butler et al. to be highly unrelated (or irrelevant) to both the survival and control scenarios. Experiment 3 showed a significant survival advantage using word sets that had been preselected to be highly congruent with both scenarios. Finally, Experiment 4 mixed congruent and incongruent words in the same list, more closely replicating the design used by Butler et al., and a highly reliable main effect of survival processing was still obtained (although the survival advantage for the congruent words did not reach conventional levels of statistical significance). Our results suggest that the null effects of survival processing obtained by Butler et al. may not generalize beyond their particular experimental design.     

Early and late processes in syllogistic reasoning: evidence from eye-movements

An eye-movement monitoring experiment was carried out to examine the effects of the difficulty of the problem (simple versus complex problems) and the type of figure (figure 1 or figure 4) on the time course of processing categorical syllogisms. The results showed that the course of influence for these two factors is different. We found early processing effects for the figure but not for the difficulty of the syllogism and later processing effects for both the figure and the difficulty. These results lend support to the Model Theory (Johnson-Laird, P. N., Byrne, R. M. J. (1991). Deduction. Hillsdale, New Jersey: LEA.) as opposed to other theories of reasoning (Chater, N., Oaksford, M. (1999). The probability heuristics model of syllogistic reasoning. Cognitive Psychology, 38, 191-258; Rips, L. J. (1994). The psychology of proof. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Rips, L. J. (1994). The psychology of proof. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).