2D location biases depth-from-disparity judgments but not vice versa

Visual cognition in our 3D world requires understanding how we accurately localize objects in 2D and depth, and what influence both types of location information have on visual processing. Spatial location is known to play a special role in visual processing, but most of these findings have focused on the special role of 2D location. One such phenomena is the spatial congruency bias, where 2D location biases judgments of object features but features do not bias location judgments. This paradigm has recently been used to compare different types of location information in terms of how much they bias different types of features. Here we used this paradigm to ask a related question: whether 2D and depth-from-disparity location bias localization judgments for each other. We found that presenting two objects in the same 2D location biased position-in-depth judgments, but presenting two objects at the same depth (disparity) did not bias 2D location judgments. We conclude that an object’s 2D location may be automatically incorporated into perception of its depth location, but not vice versa, which is consistent with a fundamentally special role for 2D location in visual processing.     

Lateral asymmetry of personal optimism

By combining models of cerebral emotional asymmetry and unilateral hemispheric activation, it was hypothesized that orienting to the right would produce greater personal optimism about future events than would orienting toward the left. This was supported significantly in two experiments which differed from each other in their manipulations, hypothetical future events, means of responding, and settings. The results supported previous research on unrealistic optimism and extended the concept to show the effect of induced lateral orientation. It was proposed that this effect is mediated by mood, and possibly by perceived control, and that this methodology can be extended to other behaviors which have proven amenable to mood manipulation.     

Lateral asymmetry in subgroups of dyslexic children

It has been proposed that in examining hemispheric dominance in dyslexics, investigators must make a distinction between subtypes of the disorder. Using the Denver Reading and Spelling Test, 72 dyslexics were divided into three groups: dysphonetics, dyseidetics, and nonspecifics. Three measures of hemispheric dominance were administered: a dichotic listening test, a hemiretinal test with linguistic stimuli, and a hemiretinal test with spatial stimuli. Results indicated that the three subgroups of dyslexics did not differ from one another on measures of hemispheric dominance. Dyslexics, taken as a group, tended to show an exaggerated right ear advantage on the dichotic listening test, in comparison with that of controls. It was proposed that the dichotic listening test may be confounded by attentional deficits in the dyslexics.     

Lateral asymmetry in visual detection under hypnosis

It has been suggested that the hypnotic state results in a greater relative activation or priming of the right cerebral hemisphere than of the left hemisphere. The experiment reported here employed hypnosis to produce such a priming effect in a visual-detection task. Subjects were required to detect the presence or absence of a gap in outline squares presented either to the left visual field or right visual field, with response time as the primary dependent measure. Those subjects who were hypnotized produced a 50-msec. response time difference favoring squares presented to the left visual field whereas control subjects and simulator-control subjects showed no lateral asymmetries. The result is classified as a material-nonspecific priming effect and discussed with regard to the nature of processing resources.     

Effects of instruction presentation mode in comparative judgments

In each of two experiments, the comparative instructions in a symbolic comparison task were either varied randomly from trial to trial (mixed blocks) or left constant (pure blocks) within blocks of trials. In the first experiment, every stimulus was compared with every other stimulus. The symbolic distance effect (DE) was enhanced, and the semantic congruity effect (SCE) was significantly larger, when the instructions were randomized than when they were blocked. In a second experiment, each stimulus was paired with only one other stimulus. The SCE was again larger when instructions were randomized than when they were blocked. The enhanced SCE and DE with randomized instructions follow naturally from evidence accrual views of comparative judgments.     

Mnemic neglect is not an artifact of expectancy: The moderating role of defensive pessimism

Research supporting the mnemic neglect model finds that people more easily recall positive than negative personality feedback, even when only asked to imagine that the feedback is real. The same bias is not found when people are asked to recall information about other people. Despite evidence that these findings reflect self‐enhancement motives, more research is needed to rule out the possibility that they instead simply reflect expectancies. Results supported the mnemic neglect model, and revealed that expectancies predicted recall only for a subgroup of participants who did not demonstrate the self–other recall bias characteristic of mnemic neglect: defensive pessimists, who are more likely than other people to process social information by comparing it to their expectancies. These findings suggest that mnemic neglect is not an artifact of expectancies, and is not driven by other self‐evaluation motives (such as self‐verification or self‐assessment). Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Lateral asymmetry in phonological processing: relating behavioral measures to neuroimaged structures

Recent neuroimaging studies have revealed neuroanatomical centers of activation that appear to be linked specifically to phonological processes. Furthermore, there is evidence that these centers of activation are more likely to be bilaterally represented in women than in men. However, behavioral evidence of such hemispheric asymmetries or of related sex differences is somewhat inconsistent. Two experiments were carried out to determine whether behavioral correlates of the neuroimaging findings could be demonstrated. The first experiment employed a rhyme-matching task used in a recent neuroimaging study, in which two nonsense words were projected successively to the left or right sides of the visual field. The results indicated that the left hemisphere was superior for this task. An analysis of gender effects, however, revealed that the asymmetry was restricted to men. The second experiment employed a lateralized pseudohomophone detection task that was designed to determine whether the results of the first experiment could be confirmed in the context of a phonological task with a simpler structure. This experiment broadly supported the findings of the first experiment. The results support the specialization of the left hemisphere for phonological processing, and the existence of gender differences with respect to these processes.     

Mood and the perception of unusual people: Affective asymmetry in memory and social judgments

Does good and bad mood have a different influence on our perceptions of typical and atypical people? In this experiment, people in happy, sad or neutral moods recalled, and formed impressions of high- or low-prototypical characters. We expected an asymmetric mood effect on memory, with better recall of typical targets that require simplified, schematic processing in positive mood, but greater negative mood effects on atypical targets that require more detailed and inferential processing. Subjects (N = 66) an audio-visual mood induction in an allegedly separate experiment, before recalling, and forming impressions about people who were consistent or inconsistent with familiar prototypes within their social milieu. We found the predicted mood-congruent bias in judgments, that was significantly greater for non-typical than for typical people. We also found evidence for positive-negative mood asymmetry in memory, with better recall of typical people in positive mood, and atypical people in negative mood. The findings are discussed in terms of contemporary multi-process models of affect and cognition (Forgas, 1992), and the implications for everyday affective influences on social judgments and stereotyping are considered.     

Response bias and judgments of the location of clicks in sentences

This study examines the view that response bias is the basis of the “click effect,” i.e., the influence of grammatical structure on subjects’ location of clicks sounded during the presentation of a sentence. It is argued that, since response bias is more likely to operate when one is unsure of one’s perception, if response bias generates the “click effect,” the effect should be weaker for certain than for uncertain responses. Subjects were asked to identify the location of the click and allowed to make more than one response if they were uncertain of their first choice. Using the number of locations selected as an index of uncertainty, it was found that when a subject was less certain, the click was less likely to be judged as having occurred in the major grammatical break. Further, performance was superior when the click had been in the break, and this effect, which was more pronounced for “certain” responses, was not eliminated by correcting for possible response bias. It is concluded that the "click effect" is not attributable solely to response bias.     

Induced movement-in-depth: relative location of static stimulus and direction asymmetry

A rotating spiral stimulus induced prolonged movement-in-depth in a static circle concentric with its origin. Both were coated in luminous paint and viewed monocularly in the dark. Analysis showed that (a) longer induced movement was observed in the circle when it was central than when it was peripheral to the inducing stimulus, and (b) induced movement was perceived longer when towards the subject than when away from the subject.     

Object-based selection in the two-rectangles method is not an artifact of the three-sided directional cue

A common means of investigating object-specific selection is the two-rectangles method, in which a target appears at one end of two rectangles (Egly, Driver, & Rafal, 1994). Prior to target presentation, one end of two parallel rectangles is cued by brightening the three line segments along one of its ends. When the target appears in the opposite end of the cued rectangle, responses tend to be faster and more accurate than when it appears in the end of the other rectangle, which is equally distant from the cue. This effect has been taken as evidence of object-specific selection of information. The present study rules out the concern that the object-specific effect that is found with this method is caused by the directional nature of the cue. That is, the three-sided cue, which essentially points to the "same-object" location, does not itself give rise to the object-specific advantage. These results are discussed in terms of the combined roles of explicit object structure in the scene, past experience, and task set as contributing to the way in which information is organized and selected from a scene.     

Imagination inflation is a fact, not an artifact: A reply to Pezdek and Eddy

Pezdek and Eddy (2001) claim to prove that imagination inflation is a spurious effect caused by regression to the mean (RTM). They make four predictions about what patterns of data would demonstrate a genuine effect for imagination versus those that would be explainable by RTM. We review each of those predictions, and demonstrate significant problems with them. We conclude that imagination inflation is a genuine effect, and that Pezdek and Eddy’s work has contributed to the growing research showing that when people imagine fictitious events from long ago, they become more confident that those false events were genuine experiences.     

Spatial location judgments: a cross-national comparison of estimation bias in subjective North American geography

We examined alternate explanations for distortions in the subjective representation of North American geography. One explanation, based on physical proximity, predicts that bias in location estimates should increase with the distance from a participant's home city or region. An alternative is that biases arise from combining accurate and inaccurate beliefs about the cities and the superordinate regions to which they belong, including beliefs that may have social or cultural origins. To distinguish these, Canadians from Alberta and Americans from Texas judged the latitudes of cities in Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. The Texans' estimates of Mexican locations were 16" (approximately 1,120 miles) more biased than their estimates of Canadian locations that were actually about 840 miles farther away. This finding eliminates proximity as a primary source of geographic biases and underscores the role of categorical beliefs as an important source of biased judgments.     

Spatial location judgments as a function of intention to learn, and mood state: an evaluation of an alleged automatic encoding operation

An assessment of the Hasher and Zacks (1979) conceptualization of the automatic nature of the acquisition of spatial location information was made in the context of manipulations of subjects' intention to learn and mood state. The Velten (1968) mood induction procedure was used to establish depressed and nondepressed subjects. Half of each group was then presented with a matrix of geometric forms under instructions to learn the location of the forms (intentional) or to evaluate the pleasantness of the array (incidental). Subsequent tests of spatial location performance found no differences as a function of subjects' mood state, but did find a strong effect for instructional condition. The superior performance of the intentional subjects raises questions about the automatic nature of the encoding of spatial location.     

Lateral asymmetry in the perceived sequence of speech and nonspeech stimuli

The task was to estimate the position where a click had been superimposed in a spoken sentence. Experiment 1 confirmed Fodor and Bever’s observation of an ear-asymmetry effect: the click is located earlier when it is presented to the left ear and the sentence to the right ear than with the opposite arrangement. In Experiment 2, combinations of monaural and binaural presentations were considered. They made it possible to eliminate interpretations which link the laterality effect to the fact of reaching or not reaching a particular ear and showed that the relevant factor is the relative position of the stimuli in acoustic space. Experiments 3 and 4 explored the relation between spatial separation and perceived sequence in greater detail. The relation involves a plateau: when the click comes to the left of the speech, it is preposed to a degree which depends on the amount of spatial separation; but, when it comes to the right of the speech, separation is irrelevant and the mean error is of the same order of magnitude as in a control condition without separation.     

Visual judgments of kinship: an alternative perspective

Following other researchers, we investigated the premise that visual judgment of kinship might be modelled as a signal-detection task, strictly related to similar facial features. We measured subjects' response times to face-pair stimuli while they performed visual judgments of kinship, similarity, or dissimilarity, and examined some priming effects involved. Our results show that kinship judgment takes longer on average than either similarity or dissimilarity judgment-which is compatible with existing models, yet might also suggest that kinship judgments are of a more complex character. In our priming study we observed selective suppression/enhancement of the efficacy of dissimilarity judgments whenever they followed similarity and kinship judgments. This finding confounds the notion, inherent in previous models, of resemblance cues signalling for kinship, since similarity and dissimilarity cannot be considered just as opposite concepts, and observed priming effects need to be explicitly modelled, including dissimilarity cues. To model kinship judgments across faces that are perceived as dissimilar, a new framework may be required, perhaps accepting the perspective of a task-driven use of the visual cues, modulated by experience and cultural conditioning.     

Global-scale location and distance estimates: common representations and strategies in absolute and relative judgments

The authors examined whether absolute and relative judgments about global-scale locations and distances were generated from common representations. At the end of a 10-week class on the regional geography of the United States, participants estimated the latitudes of 16 North American cities and all possible pairwise distances between them. Although participants were relative experts, their latitude estimates revealed the presence of psychologically based regions with large gaps between them and a tendency to stretch North America southward toward the equator. The distance estimates revealed the same properties in the representation recovered via multidimensional scaling. Though the aggregated within- and between-regions distance estimates were fitted by Stevens's law (S. S. Stevens, 1957), this was an averaging artifact: The appropriateness of a power function to describe distance estimates depended on the regional membership of the cities. The authors conclude that plausible reasoning strategies, combined with regionalized representations and beliefs about the location of these relative to global landmarks, underlie global-scale latitude and distance judgments.