Is perceptual salience needed in explanations of the isolation effect?

The isolation effect is a well-known phenomenon that has a well-accepted explanation: An item that is isolated on a list becomes perceptually salient, which leads to extra rehearsal that enhances memory for the isolate. To evaluate this hypothesis, the authors isolated an item near the beginning of a list. Immediately after each item was presented for study, participants judged the likelihood of recalling the item. Although the isolation effect occurred, participants did not judge the isolate as being more memorable than the preceding item, suggesting that the isolate was not salient. In a second experiment, participants rehearsed items aloud. Isolation at the beginning of the list did not produce extra rehearsal. By contrast, isolation in the middle of the list produced extra rehearsal; however, even when the isolate did not receive extra rehearsal, an isolation effect was evident. Thus, salience and extra rehearsal are not necessary for producing an isolation effect.     

Is desynchrony tolerance adaptable in the perceptual organization of speech?

Speech signal components that are desynchronized from the veridical temporal pattern lose intelligibility. In contrast, audiovisual presentations with large desynchrony in visible and audible speech streams are perceived without loss of integration. Under such conditions, the limit of desynchrony that permits audiovisual integration is also adaptable. A new project directly investigated the potential for adaptation to consistent desynchrony with unimodal auditory sine-wave speech. Listeners transcribed sentences that are highly intelligible, with veridical temporal properties. Desynchronized variants were created by leading or lagging the tone analog of the second formant relative to the rest of the tones composing the sentences, in 50-msec steps, ranging from 250-msec lead to 250-msec lag. In blocked trials, listeners only tolerated desynchronies <50 msec, and exhibited no gain in intelligibility to consistent desynchrony. Unimodal auditory and bimodal audiovisual forms of perceptual integration evidently exhibit different temporal characteristics, an indication of distinct perceptual functions.     

Do film cuts facilitate the perceptual and cognitive organization of activitiy sequences?

Film depictions of activities possess two kinds of structures--namely, the structural features of the depicted activities themselves and a formal structure defined by film cuts. The former structure is used by everyday observers for perceptually and cognitively unitizing the continuous flow of events into comprehensible entities. It seems conceivable that cuts can serve a similar unitizing purpose for film viewers. For each of two different activity sequences, two film versions were produced. Throughout each film version, cuts were placed either at breakpoints or at nonbreakpoints. In a 2 x 2 (activity sequence x film version) factorial design, 40 subjects segmented the film during viewing and recalled the film content after viewing in a detailed protocol. Segmentation behavior depended primarily on the occurrence of breakpoints and was largely unaffected by the occurrence of cuts. Cuts accompanying a breakpoint lead to more detailed recall protocols for these sections of the film.     

Is this a good time? Political activism and other in the temenos

This paper discusses raciality and Africanist culture as elements of the analytical clinical experience. The history of American Jungian psychology, and its relationship with the African diaspora, is reviewed with a perspective that seeks to deepen understanding of racism as an aspect of psychoanalytical institutional life. An attempt to separate political activism from the clinical setting is explored with consideration of the necessary intertwining relationship between socialization, racial identity and racism. Diversity and inclusion are becoming cultural signature markers of clinical work with individuals who have oftentimes, within the psychoanalytical clinical setting, been described due to ethnicity, as other. Political activism such as the Black Lives Matter movement stretches consciousness towards an insistence that blackness matters, skin colour matters and the lives of Africanist individuals matter. This paper reflects on cultural racial identity, the influence of politics on the individual, and the effects of these on the analytical relationship.     

Is strong reciprocity really strong in the lab, let alone in the real world?

We argue that standard experiments supporting the existence of "strong reciprocity" do not represent many cooperative situations outside the laboratory. More representative experiments that incorporate "earned" rather than "windfall" wealth also do not provide evidence for the impact of strong reciprocity on cooperation in contemporary real-life situations or in evolutionary history, supporting the main conclusions of the target article.     

Functioning of cognitive codes in autobiographical memory and the self—Is the self visual?

The main goal was to test the relationship between types of cognitive codes (perceptual–imaginative and verbal–propositional) and autobiographical memory. The purpose of this research was to evaluate whether there are independent processes serving the self, depending on separate cognitive codes. Sixty adult participants completed the NEO-FFI inventory using two kinds of procedure: perceptual–imaginative code or verbal–propositional code. Both quantitative and qualitative methods were used for analysis. The study has shown the dynamic of the self, depending on two cognitive perspectives. The results indicate that the reflection of the self in autobiographical memory brings different knowledge about the self and its motives.     

Timing variations in music performance: musical communication, perceptual compensation, and/or motor control?

A perceptual performance paradigm was designed to disentangle the timing variations in music performance that are due to perceptual compensation, motor control, and musical communication. First, pianists perceptually adjusted the interonset intervals of three excerpts so that they sounded regular. These adjustments deviated systematically from regularity, highlighting two sources of perceptual biases in time perception: rhythmic grouping and a psychoacoustic intensity effect. Then the participants performed the excerpts on the piano in the same regular way. The intensity effect disappeared, and some variations due to motor constraints were observed in relation to rhythmic groups. Finally, the participants performed the excerpts musically. Variations due to musical communication involved additional group-final lengthening that reflected the hierarchical grouping structure of the excerpts. These results underline the nuclear role of grouping in musical time perception and production.     

What cognitive abilities are involved in trail-making performance?

The cognitive abilities involved in the Connections (Salthouse, et al., 2000) version of the trail making test were investigated by administering the test, along with a battery of cognitive tests and tests of complex span and updating conceptualizations of working memory, to a sample of over 3600 adults. The results indicate that this variant of the trail making test largely reflects individual differences in speed and fluid cognitive abilities, with the relative contributions of the two abilities varying according to particular measure of performance considered (e.g., difference, ratio, or residual). Relations of age on trail making performance were also examined. Although strong age differences were evident in the Connections and working memory measures, with both sets of variables there was nearly complete overlap of the age differences with individual differences in speed and fluid cognitive abilities.     

Procedural interference in perceptual classification: Implicit learning or cognitive complexity?

Researchers have argued that an implicit procedural-learning system underlies performance for information integration category structures, whereas a separate explicit system underlies performance for rule-based categories. One source of evidence is a dissociation in which procedural interference harms performance in information integration structures, but not in rule-based ones. The present research provides evidence that some form of overall difficulty or category complexity lies at the root of the dissociation. The authors report studies in which procedural interference is observed for even simple rule-based structures under more sensitive testing conditions. Furthermore, the magnitude of the interference is large when the nature of the rule is made more complex. By contrast, the magnitude of interference is greatly reduced for an information integration structure that is cognitively simple. These results challenge the view that a procedural-learning system mediates performance on information integration categories, but not on rule-based ones.     

The influence of cognitive load on self-presentation: can cognitive busyness help as well as harm social performance?

Extra cognitive loads can hinder challenging self-presentations by usurping needed cognitive resources but also may sometimes improve them by shifting attention away from negative self-preoccupation. In Study 1, extraverts and introverts participated in an interview in which they presented themselves as either extraverted or introverted. Congruent self-presentations, which should be cognitively nondemanding, were unaffected by a cognitive busyness manipulation (rehearsing an 8-digit number). However, incongruent self-presentations were affected by busyness. Busyness decreased the effectiveness of extraverts who tried to appear introverted but increased the effectiveness of introverts who tried to appear extraverted. Study 2 found that introverts, who also tend to be socially anxious, reported less public self-consciousness and fewer negative self-focused thoughts when they were busy than when they were not busy.     

Ability EI as an intelligence? Associations of the MSCEIT with performance on emotion processing and social tasks and with cognitive ability

Associations among the MSCEIT, a broad-bandwidth measure of ability emotional intelligence (EI), self-report EI, social perception ability, psychometric intelligence and performance on inspection time (IT) tasks, which assessed the speed of processing of emotional and non-emotional information were investigated in two student samples (N=99, 199). The main findings were that MSCEIT scores were unrelated to fluid ability or speed of non-emotional information processing as assessed by IT, but evidence for associations of MSCEIT scores with crystallised ability was found. Positive associations were found between MSCEIT scores, self-report EI and some emotion/social task scores. The results suggest that EI as assessed by the MSCEIT has some properties of an intelligence and is more closely related to crystallised than to fluid ability. The relatively small MSCEIT/g _c correlations suggest that the MSCEIT is not a pure ability measure, although restriction of range in the samples used may also be relevant. More work, and the development of new measures, is required to determine whether performance EI has a fluid component.     

Examining cognitive performance: Do perfectionism and rumination matter?

Research has looked to possible personality constructs that can affect cognitive performance. Studies have demonstrated that working memory and attentional effectiveness can be directly related to the cognitive resources upon which one is readily able to call. Whereas limited research has examined the role of perfectionism in relation to problem solving abilities, to date, no studies have specifically examined how it may affect working memory or attention. The study’s purpose was to assess the impact of task difficulty (high, medium, or low) and personality constructs on working memory and attention. Following completion of the personality measures, participants completed the d2 test of attention and an N-back task. Results indicated that perfectionism and rumination significantly affected accuracy but not reaction time on the N-back task and that rumination significantly affected the total number of items processed on the d2 test of attention. Given the lack of elevated scores on the personality indicators within this sample, future research might examine this process in those more strongly endorsing these traits, allowing us to better ascertain the degree to which cognitive deficits may be evident.     

Individual differences in infant fearfulness and cognitive performance: a testing,performance, or competence effect?

The author conducted 2 studies to examine the relations between infant fear and cognitive testing performance in 12-month-old infants. In Study 1, fear was assessed by using 2 standard temperament questionnaires and a laboratory-based, standardized stranger approach. Individual differences in cognitive development were assessed using the Object Permanence Scale of the Infant Psychological Development Scales (I. C. Uzgiris & J. M. Hunt, 1975). All 3 assessments of fear significantly predicted object permanence performance, with correlations ranging from -.32 to -.35. In Study 2, fear was assessed via a maternal report questionnaire, and habituation performance was assessed via a basic-level categorization task. Familiarity with the examiner and with the testing environment was manipulated to test for a familiarity influence on performance. Testing revealed individual differences in both fear and habituation. Results suggest that highly fearful infants required more trials to habituate and were less likely to meet the habituation criterion than infants who were less fearful. Methodological and conceptual implications of these results are discussed.     

Is reading-aloud performance in megastudies systematically influenced by the list context?

To examine megastudy context effects, 585 critical words, each with a different orthographic rime, were placed at the beginning or end of a 2614-word megastudy of reading aloud. Sixty participants (30 participants in each condition) responded to these words. Specific predictors examined for change between beginning and end conditions were frequency, length, feedforward rime consistency, feedforward onset consistency, orthographic neighbourhood size, age of acquisition (AoA), and imageability. While it took longer to respond to items at the end of the experiment than items at the beginning of the experiment, there was very little change in the effects of the specific variables assessed. Thus, there is little evidence of list context effects influencing the estimates of the predictor variables in large-scale megastudies.     

Is happiness the supreme good? Some philosophical objections

Modern philosophy is characterised by various objections to the Aristotelian conception of happiness as the supreme good of human life. In this paper, I focus on the objections raised by two key thinkers of the modern period, namely Blaise Pascal and Friedrich Nietzsche. Both philosophers formulate important counter- arguments to the teleological claim that happiness is the highest good towards which all human beings naturally direct their efforts. Their target is not any specific definition of happiness as a particular kind of activity, or a particular kind of good. Instead, they express a more fundamental scepticism about the very possibility of happiness being the ultimate end of human life. As I show, Pascal's and Nietzsche's radical point is that, since reason alone can never answer for certain the question of whether or not happiness is the ultimate aim of human existence, philosophy should not concern itself with the question of happiness. The paper has three parts. I first sketch an outline of Pascal's sceptical argument with regard to happiness, and then present his positive definition of happiness, after which I do the same for Nietzsche. The third part is devoted to a critical assessment of their positions in light of an alternative argument developed by John Cottingham.     

Is static spatial performance distinguishable from dynamic spatial performance? A latent-variable analysis

There is disagreement among researchers about the distinction between dynamic and static spatial performance. Given that dynamic spatial performance is supposed to be important for some occupations, such as air traffic control (ATC), it is germane to have evidence about the likelihood of that distinction. In the present study, a battery of printed static spatial and reasoning tests were applied to 480 applicants for an ATC training course. Two dynamic spatial tests were also applied. Confirmatory factor analyses were performed for testing three models. In Model A, static and dynamic spatial tests were grouped, whereas in Model B, spatial tests were separated according to their static or dynamic character, and in Model C, spatial tests were segregated according to the construct they tapped (visualization or spatial relations). The authors found that Model B, which distinguished static and dynamic spatial tests, showed the best fit. They also discuss some implications of the findings.