An “outside-in” processing strategy in the perception of form

The discriminability of line segments in a number of different geometric forms was examined. The procedure used was to have one of the lines within a given form drawn thinner than the other lines. The location of the thin line varied randomly within the form, and subjects were required to detect its location. Three observations were made. First, outer line elements were discriminated more accurately than inner line elements. Second, the outer line advantage appeared to reflect an attentional strategy: By presenting inner and outer lines independently, and informing subjects in advance as to whether target lines would be in the inner or outer area of the form, the outer line advantage could be eliminated. Third, consonant with a global attentional strategy, and in opposition to any retinally tied, peripheral-to-central scanning process, an outer-line advantage was evident regardless of whether the fixation point was positioned within or outside the forms, or whether outer lines were more peripheral than inner lines.     

On the processing of regular and irregular forms of verbs and nouns: evidence from neuropsychology

Following acquired brain damage, a native English speaking patient (AW) encountered problems accessing phonology in speech production, while her ability to access word meaning appeared to be intact. In a series of tasks, AW was presented either with a verb, and was asked to produce its past tense or past participle (walk --> "walked"), or with a noun, and was asked to produce its plural (glove --> "gloves"). A stark dissociation was found: while AW responded accurately with regular forms of verbs (walked) and nouns (gloves), performance was significantly less accurate with irregular forms (found; children). The appearance of a selective deficit for irregular forms in conditions of impaired lexical access is in line with dual-mechanism accounts, which proposes that irregular forms are specified in the lexicon whereas regular forms are computed via rule-based mechanisms. In contrast, AW's data are problematic for connectionist accounts that do not posit separate mechanisms for processing regular and irregular forms, including the connectionist model recently proposed by Joanisse and Seidenberg (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 96 (1999) 7592) which successfully simulated a variety of earlier neuropsychological findings. Analyses of AW's responses shed light on further details of the representation and processing of regular and irregular inflected forms.     

Hemispheric visual processing in face recognition

Two experiments tested how facial details are used in recognizing face drawings presented to either the left or right visual field (VF). Subjects used inner and outer features about equally in both the left and right VFs. The major finding was a very strong tendency to recognize the upper facial features more accurately than the lower facial features. The top-to-bottom recognition difference occurred in both VFs, in contrast to an earlier study by J. Sergent (1982, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 8, 1-14). Methodological differences between the present experiments and Sergent's studies were discussed. It was concluded that both the left and right hemispheres recognize novel faces using top-to-bottom serial processing.     

Alcohol and remembering a hypothetical sexual assault: Can people who were under the influence of alcohol during the event provide accurate testimony?

We examined the influence of alcohol on remembering an interactive hypothetical sexual assault scenario in the laboratory using a balanced placebo design. Female participants completed a memory test 24 hours and 4 months later. Participants reported less information (i.e., responded “don't know” more often to questions) if they were under the influence of alcohol during scenario encoding. The accuracy of the information intoxicated participants reported did not differ compared to sober participants, however, suggesting intoxicated participants were effectively monitoring the accuracy of their memory at test. Additionally, peripheral details were remembered less accurately than central details, regardless of the intoxication level; and memory accuracy for peripheral details decreased by a larger amount compared to central details across the retention interval. Finally, participants were more accurate if they were told they were drinking alcohol rather than a placebo. We discuss theoretical implications for alcohol myopia and memory regulation, together with applied implications for interviewing intoxicated witnesses.     

Does order of letter analysis contribute to the parafoveal identification asymmetry?

A parafoveally presented target character usually is identified more accurately when flanked by a nontarget character to its foveal side than when flanked by one to its peripheral side. An outside-in process of analysis produced by uncertainty about the target's position could contribute to this asymmetry. Current results revealed a greater asymmetry with relative target position blocked than with it mixed over trials, suggesting that target position uncertainty leads to inside-out, rather than outside-in, analysis.     

Can intuition improve deception detection performance?

Two studies examined the role of processing style (intuitive vs. deliberative processing) in a deception detection task. In the first experiment, a thin slicing manipulation was used to demonstrate that intuitive processing can lead to more accurate judgments of deception when compared with traditional deliberative forms of processing. In the second experiment, participants who engaged in a secondary (concurrent) task performed more accurately in a deception detection task than participants who were asked to provide a verbal rationale for each decision and those in a control condition. Overall, the results converge to suggest that intuitive processing can significantly improve deception detection performance.     

A developmental approach to the study of shape processing

Young children show deficits in shape recognition under piecemeal presentation (i.e., sequential, aperture-viewing) conditions for forms that they can recognize accurately under free-viewing conditions. Two factors that differentiate between these two situations are: (1) S can look at each view more than once in the free-viewing but not in the previously used aperture-viewing situations, and (2) the amount of the shape visible per view may not have been the Ss' preferred unit for processing. The experiment reported here uses Ss, aged 4.7–10.7 years, to explore the relative contributions of these factors. Both increasing the number of “looks” per view and the amount of shape available per view increased the number of correct recognitions at all ages. It seems likely that both of these factors are often involved in accurate shape processing.     

Negative Emotion Enhances Memory Accuracy: Behavioral and Neuroimaging Evidence

ABSTRACT— There have been extensive discussions about whether emotional memories contain more accurate detail than nonemotional memories do, or whether individuals simply believe that they have remembered emotional experiences more accurately. I review evidence that negative emotion enhances not only the subjective vividness of a memory but also the likelihood of remembering some (but not all) event details. I then describe neuroimaging evidence suggesting that engagement of emotion-processing regions (particularly the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex) relates to the encoding and retrieval of details intrinsically linked to negative items.     

Morphological knowledge as revealed in children's spelling accuracy and reports of spelling strategies

The goal of the current research was to assess whether children can make strategic use of morphological relations among words to spell. French-speaking children in Grade 4 spelled three word types: (a) phonological words that had regular phoneme-grapheme correspondences, (b) morphological words that had silent consonant endings for which a derivative revealed the silent ending, and (c) lexical words that had silent consonant endings for which no familiar derivative revealed the ending. Children were also asked to provide immediate retrospective reports of the strategies used to spell each word. Two experiments (Ns = 46 and 39) were conducted. As expected, children in Grade 4 spelled phonological words more accurately than they did words with silent consonant endings. In addition, children spelled morphological words more accurately than they did lexical words. Reports of using retrieval were associated with accurate performance across word types. Importantly, reports of using morphological strategies to spell morphological words were associated with a similar level of accuracy, as were reports of using retrieval. Even though children reported using a phonological strategy frequently across all word types, this strategy was associated with accurate performance only for spelling phonological words. Experiment 2 replicated the results of Experiment 1 with another set of stimuli and also showed that children's morphological awareness predicted their spelling accuracy for morphological words as well as the reported frequency of morphological strategy use. In sum, the findings revealed that most children showed evidence of adaptive strategy use.     

The role of structural redundancy in the perception of visual targets

Most visual images contain “gross shapes” which are highly correlated with less perceptable “details,” e.g., the gross outline of a head and details such as eyes, ears, etc. The role of such structural redundancy in perception is considered both from a “syntactical” and “spatial-frequency” view of structure. An experiment is reported and evaluated in terms of a simple mathematical model which allows one to isolate the influence of several factors in the perceptual process, particularly the observer’s actual sensitivity to specific details and the influence of the redundant (correlated) information in “higher order forms,” The basic idea is that one decides whether a particular (target) detail is present in a briefly presented image by integrating impressions from various parts of the image in a weighted manner, with the weights determined by redundant information in “higher order forms.” Furthermore, the results are generally consistent with the notion that an increase in the number of attended letters does not reduce the information extracted from each letter.     

Individual differences in working memory strategies for reading expository text

This study investigated whether individual differences in working memory (WM) span are associated with different WM management strategies during the reading of expository text. In Experiment 1, probe questions were presented on line during reading to determine whether thematic information was maintained in WM throughout comprehension. The data indicated that readers across the range of WM span maintained thematic information in WM throughout the reading of a given passage. In Experiment 2, sentence reading times and accuracy for both topic and detail questions were measured in two conditions: when topic sentences were present and when topic sentences were absent. Subjects performed similarly across the range of WM span in the topic-present condition, but lower span subjects performed more poorly on detail questions in the topic-absent condition. In Experiment 3, the topic-present condition of the second experiment was replicated, except that subjects expected to receive questions about details only. Thematic processing and retention of topic and detail information all increased with span. Taken together, these results suggest that, for more difficult text processing tasks, high- and low-span subjects adopt different WM management strategies and these strategies influence what is learned from reading the text.     

Hemispheric differences in stimulus identification

Subjects were presented with either verbal (letters) or nonverbal (outline forms) stimuli to their left or right cerebral hemispheres. Verbal items presented with a lateral masking stimulus were identified more quickly and accurately when presented to the right hemisphere rather than to the left. When the letters were presented without a masking stimulus, weak hemispheric effects were obtained. Nonverbal forms demonstrated faster reaction time and fewer errors for right-hemisphere presentations under both masked and unmasked conditions. Retinal locus of the display item was also varied and produced faster responding with fewer errors when the stimulus was presented foveally rather than peripherally under all display conditions. These effects were attributed to the use of a manual response procedure that effectively reduced the ability of subjects to employ names for the stimulus objects.     

Memory and interpretation of visual representations of threat in socially anxious and nonanxious individuals

The present study was designed to replicate and extend results reported by Brendle and Wenzel (Behav. Res. Ther. 42 (2004) 155), who found that socially anxious individuals accurately recalled threat-relevant information but subsequently imposed a biased interpretation upon that same material, using more ecologically valid stimuli. Socially anxious (n=37) and nonanxious (n=47) individuals viewed two positive, two negative, and two neutral video vignettes and completed two cognitive tasks assessing memory and interpretation of factual details immediately and after 48 h. Similar to the results reported by Brendle and Wenzel (2004), socially anxious and nonanxious individuals did not differ in their memory for details that had been presented in the vignettes. However, socially anxious individuals made more negative interpretations of details included in the vignettes than nonanxious individuals, although unlike Brendle and Wenzel (2004), they did not demonstrate the tendency to make less positive interpretations. It is concluded that socially anxious individuals are characterized by interpretation biases when presented with threat-relevant information, and there is no evidence to suggest that they are characterized by memory biases for threat-relevant information.     

Can self-reported encoding strategy and recognition skill be diagnostic of performance in eyewitness identifications?

The relationship between 3 witness factors and identification accuracy, as well as calibration and diagnosticity of confidence, was investigated. A total of 384 participants in an eyewitness experiment rated their facial recognition skill, general memory skill, and self-reported encoding strategy on a questionnaire presented after the photo-confrontation. Participants who rated themselves to be good face recognizers showed a slightly higher overall accuracy with a more diagnostic confidence-accuracy relation. Participants who reported that they relied on a holistic encoding strategy were associated with more accurate identifications and a stronger confidence-accuracy relation than those who reported an analytic encoding strategy. Degree of self-reported general memory skill was not diagnostic of identification performance.     

The valence-specific laterality effect in free viewing conditions: The influence of sex, handedness, and response bias

The right hemisphere has often been viewed as having a dominant role in the processing of emotional information. Other evidence indicates that both hemispheres process emotional information but their involvement is valence specific, with the right hemisphere dealing with negative emotions and the left hemisphere preferentially processing positive emotions. This has been found under both restricted (Reuter-Lorenz & Davidson, 1981) and free viewing conditions (Jansari, Tranel, & Adophs, 2000). It remains unclear whether the valence-specific laterality effect is also sex specific or is influenced by the handedness of participants. To explore this issue we repeated Jansari et al.'s free-viewing laterality task with 78 participants. We found a valence-specific laterality effect in women but not men, with women discriminating negative emotional expressions more accurately when the face was presented on the left-hand side and discriminating positive emotions more accurately when those faces were presented on the right-hand side. These results indicate that under free viewing conditions women are more lateralised for the processing of facial emotion than are men. Handedness did not affect the lateralised processing of facial emotion. Finally, participants demonstrated a response bias on control trials, where facial emotion did not differ between the faces. Participants selected the left-hand side more frequently when they believed the expression was negative and the right-hand side more frequently when they believed the expression was positive. This response bias can cause a spurious valence-specific laterality effect which might have contributed to the conflicting findings within the literature.     

Emotional stress and eyewitness memory: a critical review.

The eyewitness literature often claims that emotional stress leads to an impairment in memory and, hence, that details of unpleasant emotional events are remembered less accurately than details of neutral or everyday events. A common assumption behind this view is that a decrease in available processing capacity occurs at states of high emotional arousal, which, therefore, leads to less efficient memory processing. The research reviewed here shows that this belief is overly simplistic. Current studies demonstrate striking interactions between type of event, type of detail information, time of test, and type of retrieval information. This article also reviews the literature on memory for stressful events with respect to two major theories: the Yerkes-Dodson law and Easter-brook's cue-utilization hypothesis. To account for the findings from real-life studies and laboratory studies, this article discusses the possibility that emotional events receive some preferential processing mediated by factors related to early perceptual processing and late conceptual processing.     

Hierarchical forms processing in adults and children

Two experiments examined child and adult processing of hierarchical stimuli composed of geometric forms. Adults (ages 18-23 years) and children (ages 7-10 years) performed a forced-choice task gauging similarity between visual stimuli consisting of large geometric objects (global level) composed of small geometric objects (local level). The stimuli spatial arrangement was manipulated to assess child and adult reaction times and predisposition toward local or global form categorization under two distinct trial conditions, with varied density of the local forms comprising the global forms. In Experiment 1, children and adults were presented with common, simple geometric shape hierarchical forms composed of ovals and rectangles. In Experiment 2, adults were presented with hierarchical forms composed of the simple geometric shapes, ovals and rectangles, and additional novel complex geometric shapes, “posts” and “arches.” Results show a clear increase of global processing bias across the age ranges of the individuals in the study, with children at 10 years performing similarly to adults on the simple stimuli. In addition, adults presented with the novel complex geometric shapes showed a significant reduction in global processing bias, indicating that form novelty and complexity lead to additional attention to local features in categorization tasks.     

Impulsivity and speed-accuracy tradeoffs in information processing

Despite its theoretical importance for such areas of research as reflection-impulsivity (Kagan, 1966), there is little evidence to support the assumption that individual differences in the personality trait of impulsivity are associated with differences in the willingness to sacrifice accuracy for speed of information processing. The present studies explored this association further. In Experiment 1, high, medium, and low impulsives (identified by self-report) performed a visual-comparison task under conditions differing in the monetary payoff for speed relative to accuracy. High impulsives were consistently faster and less accurate than other subjects. However, an analysis based on Sternberg's (1969) additive-factor method indicated that high impulsives performed at least one stage of information processing as slowly and accurately as other subjects. In Experiment 2, it was found that high impulsives were actually more accurate than low impulsives when all subjects were required to process information extremely rapidly. Experiment 3 identified the response execution stage as one that high impulsives carry out just as slowly and accurately as other individuals. The data from these experiments pose problems for a simple speed-accuracy tradeoff model of impulsive cognitive functioning.     

Not too ‘shy’ to help catch a thief: Recall memory of shy versus non-shy witnesses

Witness shyness was examined to determine its impact on recall accuracy in two experiments. It was hypothesized that shyness would facilitate witness accuracy, under some conditions. In Experiment 1, witnesses were asked to respond to directed recall questions probing crime event and culprit details. Non-shy and shy witnesses produced comparable accuracy rates when describing the culprit. In contrast, non-shy witnesses were more accurate when describing crime environment details than shy witnesses. In Experiment 2, arousal was manipulated and a free recall approach was used to assess recall accuracy. Under low arousal, shy witnesses were more accurate at describing the culprit than non-shy witnesses, whereas, non-shy witnesses were more accurate at describing crime details than shy witnesses. Under high arousal, differences in accuracy were not observed across shy and non-shy witnesses.