An investigation of mental rotation in infancy using change detection

Two experiments were conducted to examine mental rotation in 6- to 12-month-old infants (N = 166) using a change detection task. These experiments were replications of Lauer and Lourenco (Lauer et al., 2015; Lauer & Lourenco, 2016), using identical stimuli and variations of their procedure, including an exact replication conducted in a laboratory setting (Experiment 1), and an online assessment using Lookit (Scott et al.,2017; Scott & Schulz, 2017) (Experiment 2). Both experiments failed to replicate the results of the original study; in neither experiment did infants’ behavior provide evidence that they mentally rotated the object. Results are discussed in terms of the robustness of mental rotation in infancy and about limits in our experimental procedures for uncovering perceptual and cognitive abilities in infants.     

The Not-Forgotten Child: Alienated Adult Children’s Experience of Parental Alienation

Abstract

This study explored the experience of adults who had experienced parental alienation during childhood. Ten alienated adult children participated in 60 to 90-minute semi-structured interviews about their experience of parental alienation. Using Braun and Clarke (2006 Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(2), 77–101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa[Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]) thematic analysis framework, seven themes were identified. Participants described experiencing abuse perpetrated by the alienating parent. They described experiencing anxiety, depression, low self-worth, guilt, attachment problems, difficulty in other relationships, and reduced or delayed educational and career attainment that they attributed to their experience of parental alienation. These results demonstrated that children’s exposure to parental alienation may have lifelong ramifications for their psychological well-being.     

The rebalancing act: Injured varsity women athletes’ experiences of global and sport psychological well-being

ObjectivesThe purpose of this study was to explore how seriously injured women athletes perceive and experience global and sport psychological well-being (PWB) during sport injury recovery.MethodAdopting an interpretivist constructionist approach, we conducted one semi-structured interview with twelve participants (12 interviews total), aged 18–23. All participants were currently seriously injured, with a range of six months out of sport. Through a reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2019) we analyzed patterns within the data related to how injured athletes perceived and experienced global and sport specific PWB during sport injury recovery.ResultsFour overarching themes were developed: (1) my life is chaos and out of control, (2) pressures shaping response to sport injury, (3) maybe I can: adaptation from the disruption of sport injury, and (4) sport injury growth (SIG). Participants experienced an initial disruption of sport PWB and global PWB, however once they were able to adapt, they could rebalance their PWBs. Once rebalanced, participants reappraised the injury experience to be an opportunity for psychological growth and development, leading to the possibility of SIG. Findings suggest that sport injury can initially hinder one’s PWB, however once one can rebalance their PWB sport injury is perceived as a positive event that can lead to SIG.ConclusionThese findings reveal that it is important to consider the role of PWB during sport injury, as it has been identified that there are disruptions to one’s PWB. These findings help further our understanding of injured athletes’ experiences of PWB during sport injury and how athletes could be better supported to protect their PWB and mental health during recovery.     

Unpacking educational athletics: An exploratory study of high school athletic directors' critical praxis

ObjectivesGiven the salience and popularity of interscholastic athletics, whether high school sport serves as a site for inclusive, empowering experiences for youth participants has significant implications. This study examined how U.S. high school athletic directors think about and navigate (i.e., praxis) broader social issues in their work with student-athletes and coaches to promote youth development.DesignA cultural praxis framework informed qualitative study design consisting of semi-structured interviews with 16 athletic directors from various high school community contexts within one Midwestern state.MethodReflexive thematic analysis of interviews with high school athletic directors employed a semantic (explicit, surface level) and latent (implicit, interpretative) focus (Braun & Clarke, 2019; Braun, Clarke, & Weate, 2016).ResultsSemantic analyses indicated that athletic directors used various strategies to navigate matters that arose in their work with student-athletes and coaches. Relevant issues were contextually situated and emerged as (in)congruent with their context. Latent analyses shed light on assumptions that ADs made about student-athlete development and demonstrated that sport leaders' critical praxis varied along a continuum.ConclusionFuture research is needed to more systematically examine how athletic directors engage in a (critical) praxis; student-athletes’ perspectives on the relevance of certain social issues and efficacy of administrators' praxis; and, developmental initiatives to empower youth and adult leaders in athletics.     

Do locally defined feature discontinuities capture attention?

Results from previous visual search studies have suggested that abrupt onsets produce involuntary shifts of attention (i.e., attentional capture), but discontinuities in simple features such as color and brightness do not (Jonides & Yantis, 1988). In the present study we tested whether feature discontinuities (i.e., “singletons”) can produce attentional capture in a visual search task if defined “locally” or over a small spatial range. On each trial, a variable number of letters appeared, one of which differed from the others in color or intensity. The location of this singleton was uncorrelated with target location. Local discontinuities were created by embedding the letters in a dot texture. In Experiment 1, display size effects for singleton targets were not reduced with the addition of a background dot texture. Similar results were obtained in Experiment 2, regardless of variations in texture density. Experiment 3 confirmed that when targets are defined by a color or intensity singleton, they are detected preattentively, and that increasing texture density yields faster detection. We conclude that the spatial range over which feature discontinuities are defined may influence the guidance of spatial attention, but it has no influence on their ability to capture attention.     

Athletes’ ease of imaging predicts their imagery and observational learning use

Objectives

Following the development of the Sport Imagery Ability Questionnaire (SIAQ; Williams & Cumming, 2011), the aim of the present two studies was to more comprehensively examine the relationship between sport-related imagery ability and the functions of imagery and observational learning (OL) athletes report. A second aim was to establish the SIAQ’s predictive validity.

Design

Two samples of cross-sectional questionnaire data are presented in two studies.

Method

For both studies, athletes were recruited from a variety of team and individual sports, ranging in competitive level and years of experience. In Study 1, 117 participants (41 male and 76 female) with a mean age of 24.38 (SD = 9.46) completed the SIAQ and the Sport Imagery Questionnaire (SIQ; Hall, Mack, Paivio, & Hausenblas, 1998). In Study 2, 221 participants (83 male and 138 female) with a mean age of 22.34 (SD = 7.66) completed the SIAQ and the Functions of Observational Learning Questionnaire (FOLQ; Cumming, Clark, Ste-Marie, McCullagh, & Hall, 2005).

Results

Athletes’ imagery ability significantly predicted their imagery and OL use. Moreover, with the exception of performance OL, predictions were stronger when the type of imagery ability closely matched the function of imagery or OL being predicted.

Conclusions

As well as demonstrating the predictive validity of the SIAQ, results from both studies support the need to use imagery ability measures that most closely match the type of imagery or OL being used.     

The role of social meaning in inattentional blindness: When the gorillas in our midst do not go unseen

Without visual attention, even the obvious–like a gorilla walking through a scene of people–goes undetected (Mack & Rock, 1998; Simons & Chabris, 1999). This “inattentional blindness” is a persistent, well-documented limitation of the human visual system. The current research examines whether social meaning reduces this visual bias by imbuing unexpected objects with signal value, thus increasing their relevance and facilitating perception. Using one of the most established illustrations of inattentional blindness, we show for the first time that activating a social association, even an erroneous one (i.e., the African American–ape association), drastically attenuates inattentional blindness. This is not accounted for by visual feature matching. Rather, these results suggest that social meaning, even when flawed, may direct our visual system towards associated visual information that would otherwise be overlooked. As such, these results provide a powerful replication of the African American–ape association and illustrate that this broadly held association has the power to spontaneously change the content of one's visual world.     

The Effect of Mood on Helping Behavior

Abstract

In the present experiment, “lost” letters were placed on the cars of team supporters at a major football grand final. Significantly more letters were returned by supporters of the losing team than by supporters of the winning team. These results were interpreted as presenting a problem for the theory that negative mood only increases helping behavior when internal attribution of responsibility occurs (Rogers, Miller, Mayer, & Duval, 1982).     

The role of letter identity and letter position in orthographic priming

Four experiments are reported investigating orthographic priming effects in French by varying the number and the position of letters shared by prime and target stimuli. Using both standard masked priming and the novel incremental priming technique (Jacobs, Grainger, & Ferrand, 1995), it is shown that net priming effects are affected not only by the number of letters shared by prime and target stimuli but also by the number of letters in the prime not present in the target. Several null results are thus explained as a tradeoff between the facilitation generated by common letters and the inhibition generated by different letters. Inhibition was significantly reduced when different letters were replaced by nonalphabetic symbols. Facilitation effects disappeared when the common letters did not have the same relative position in the prime and target strings, thus supporting a relative-position coding scheme for letters in words.     

The Right Stuff: Preschoolers Generalize Reliability Across Communicative Domains When Informants Show Semantic (Not Episodic) Knowledge

ABSTRACT

Although preschoolers have strong expectations about the pedagogical nature of pointing gestures (Csibra & Gergely, 2006), more recent work has shown that preschoolers prefer to use informants’ spoken language, not their pointing gestures, to make judgments about their reliability (Palmquist & Jaswal, 2015). Here, we explored children’s inferences about pointers using a standard selective trust paradigm. Specifically, we asked whether 4- and 5-year-olds generalize reliability across communicative domains (from pointing ability to speaking ability). We found that children preferred to make generalizations about pointers’ reliability when they had conveyed semantic, but not episodic, knowledge. Individual differences in theory of mind also predicted children’s willingness to make generalizations about pointers’ reliability. Both sets of results suggest that multiple factors (i.e., the type of knowledge an informant shares and individual differences in children’s cognitive development) affect whether preschoolers generalize others’ reliability across domains.     

When appearance concerns make women look bad: Solo status and body image concerns diminish women’s academic performance

Women entering male-dominated fields often find themselves the only women present, i.e., they experience solo status. Solo status diminishes women’s performance when women are negatively stereotyped in the testing domain (Inzlicht & Ben-Zeev, 2000) or when the performance is public (Sekaquaptewa & Thompson, 2002). Because women experience greater body image concerns than men and underperform when these concerns are high (Fredrickson, Roberts, Noll, Quinn, & Twenge, 1998), body image concerns may also cause diminished performance in solo women. Women were given a stigmatized (i.e., heavy) or neutral appearance (via a manipulated photograph), then tested as either solos or non-solos. Results showed that women performed more poorly when given a stigmatized appearance and placed under solo status compared to when only one of these factors were present. Social identity threat concerns (Steele, Spencer, & Aronson, 2002) mediated the solo status effect on performance for women given a stigmatized appearance.     

Examining the role of emotional valence of mind wandering: All mind wandering is not equal

To evaluate the role of emotional valence on the impact of mind wandering on working memory (WM) and sustained attention, we reanalyzed data from three independently conducted studies that examined the impact of stress on WM (Banks & Boals, 2016; Banks, Welhaf, & Srour, 2015) and sustained attention (Banks, Tartar, & Welhaf, 2014). Across all studies, participants reported the content of their thoughts at random intervals during the WM or sustained attention task. Thought probes in all studies included a core set of response options for task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs) that were negatively, positively, or neutrally emotionally valenced. In line with theories of emotional valenced stimuli on capture of attention, results suggest negatively valenced TUTs, but not positively valenced TUTs, were related to poorer WM and sustained attention in two studies. Neutral TUTs were related to poorer WM but not sustained attention performance. Implications for models of mind wandering are discussed.     

Cognitive consequences of novelty and familiarity: How mere exposure influences level of construal

Two experiments examine whether frequency of exposure influences level of construal. Using subliminal presentation, participants were exposed to neutral, unknown letters 0, 5, 15, or 40 times, and a typical mere exposure effect was found on evaluation. However, we hypothesized and showed in Experiment 1 that novelty enhances Gestalt-like, global perception, whereas familiarity bolsters detail-oriented, local perception. Furthermore, in Experiment 2, we demonstrated that participants generated more abstract solutions for items presented less frequently. These results support a Construal level theory [Liberman, N., Trope, Y., & Stephan, E. (2007). Psychological distance. In E. T. Higgins & A. W. Kruglanski, Social psychology, handbook of basic principles. New York: Guilford Press.] contention that distance from direct experience is associated with high construal level and global processing. It seems that in order to prepare for novel events, people automatically engage in higher levels of construal. New information needs to be integrated into existing knowledge structures in order to be understood, and abstract categories and global processing may support the process of understanding.     

Cognitive and social consequences of exposure to emotional narratives: Two studies on secondary social sharing of emotions

People who listen to a narrative concerning another's experience feel the urge to share in turn their experience of listening. This phenomenon is called secondary social sharing of emotion and has been widely investigated in the last ten years (Christophe & Di Giacomo, 1995; Christophe & Rimé, 1997). The present two studies aimed to provide new evidence concerning secondary social sharing of emotion. In the first study, participants were asked to recall an emotional narrative they had been told no more than three months before and to specify their social sharing about the narrative. In the second study, a diary strategy was used in order to encourage participants to recall an emotional narrative they had listened to during the day that had just elapsed. A follow‐up, three weeks after the completion of the diaries, was used to assess secondary social sharing over time. Results from both studies confirmed that secondary social sharing is a widespread phenomenon, involving many partners, mainly belonging to the circle of intimates, and affected by the intensity of listeners' emotional reactions. Adults exhibited significantly higher ratings of secondary social sharing than young people. In the first study, the valence (positive vs. negative) of the emotional experience affected secondary social sharing. However, no differences were found for sharing positive and negative experiences in the diary study.     

Selective influence of second target exposure duration and Task1 load effects in the attentional blink phenomenon

The purpose of the experiments was to constrain the locus of interference in the attentional blink (AB) paradigm. Two visual stimuli, T₁ and T₂, were shown 300 msec apart, and each was followed by a mask. T₁ was an “H,” an “S,” an “ &, ” or a blank field; T₂ consisted of five letters. In Task₁, blank fields and & characters could be ignored, whereas Hs and Ss had to be identified and reported. Task₂ was always to report as many letters as possible from T₂. Task₂ performance was lower when T₁ had to be reported, as expected from the attentional blink phenomenon (AB). The exposure duration of T₂ was also manipulated. More letters could be reported as exposure duration was increased. However, this effect was additive with manipulations of Task₁ processing load that produced the AB effect. Log-linear analyses assuming that effects of T₂ exposure duration and Task₁ load effects occur at functionally distinct stages of processing provided satisfactory fits to the results, suggesting that none of the AB effect occurs as early as those of T₂ exposure duration. The results suggest that the locus of the AB effect is later than the stage(s) of processing affected by exposure duration.     

Calibration of peripheral perception of shape with and without saccadic eye movements

The cortical representations of a visual object differ radically across saccades. Several studies claim that the visual system adapts the peripheral percept to better match the subsequent foveal view. Recently, Herwig, Weiß, and Schneider (2015, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1339(1), 97–105) found that the perception of shape demonstrates a saccade-dependent learning effect. Here, we ask whether this learning actually requires saccades. We replicated Herwig et al.’s (2015) study and introduced a fixation condition. In a learning phase, participants were exposed to objects whose shape systematically changed during a saccade, or during a displacement from peripheral to foveal vision (without a saccade). In a subsequent test, objects were perceived as less (more) curved if they previously changed from more circular (triangular) in the periphery to more triangular (circular) in the fovea. Importantly, this pattern was seen both with and without saccades. We then tested whether a variable delay between the presentations of the peripheral and foveal objects would affect their association—hypothetically weakening it at longer delays. Again, we found that shape judgments depended on the changes experienced during the learning phase and that they were similar in both the saccade and fixation conditions. Surprisingly, they were not affected by the delay between the peripheral and foveal presentations over the range we tested. These results suggest that a general associative process, independent of saccade execution, contributes to the perception of shape across viewpoints.

     

THE ECOLOGY OF SPELLING: A LENS MODEL ANALYSIS OF SPELLING ERRORS AND STUDENT JUDGMENTS OF SPELLING DIFFICULTY

Abstract

Students who were identified by their teachers as poor spellers were asked to judge the difficulty they would have in spelling each of 100 words that were representative of the sorts of words they tended to misspell in their various subject areas (the spelling ecology). After making difficulty judgments, the students were then asked to spell each word on the list. Spelling errors were scored as either phonetic or nonphonetic. The researchers rated each of the 100 words on ten characteristics: number of letters, syllables, letters per syllable, double and silent letters; schwa, ambiguous, and unusual sounds; and two measures of familiarity to the student. This task was replicated after a four‐week period to check for spelling and judgment consistency. Spelling errors and judgments of spelling difficulty were analyzed using the double system Lens Model using the ten word characteristics as “cues” in the analysis. Results showed only moderate agreement between difficulty judgments and spelling errors, and fairly consistent differences between those word characteristics that were predictive of perceived spelling difficulty and those predictive of phonetic and nonphonetic errors. Several different patterns of cue weights were noted for spelling errors whereas spelling difficulty judgments were primarily based upon word familiarity. Implications are drawn for the further investigation of spelling errors and of how students decide what constitutes a “hard” word to spell and for the potential improvement of the spelling judgment process using cognitive feedback from the Lens Model.

The characterization of spelling as a cognitive activity has received increasing attention in the educational research literature. For example, two recent issues of Reading Psychology (Numbers 2 and 3, 1989) were entirely devoted to research on spelling. Much of this work has focused on spelling strategies (e.g., Anderson, 1985, Kreiner & Gough, 1990, and Olson, Logan, & Lindsey, 1989), spelling problems and types of errors (e.g., see Frith, 1980, and Weber & Henderson, 1989), and the relationship between spelling and reading (e.g., Templeton, 1989, and Zutell & Rasinski, 1989). However, there has been very little research on the issues of the criteria individuals use in deciding that a particular word is difficult or easy to spell, and the accuracy and effects of such a decision. We refer here to the more metacognitive aspects of the task ecology of spelling, and the effects of which may be shown in decisions to avoid or at least minimize the cognitive efforts expended in spelling a perceived “hard” word.

The issue of judging spelling difficulty forms the focus of the present study. Here we attempt to document those features of a word that make students think it would be hard or easy to spell. We then relate this judgment process to errors made when students attempt to spell words. Finally, we compare the relative importance of various features of words as predictors of both difficulty judgments and actual spelling errors.     

Whammies and double whammies: The effect of length on nonword reading

In the work presented here, the length effect in nonword reading aloud was investigated in order to assess whether that effect is driven by the number of letters in a string or by the number of graphemes in a string. Simulation work with the Dual-Route Cascaded (DRC) model (e.g., Coltheart, Curtis, Atkins, & Haller, 1993; Coltheart & Rastle, 1994) uncovered a surprising finding regarding the length effect; the same result was obtained in an experiment with human subjects. The results are discussed in terms of the DRC model, with particular reference to serial processing and interphoneme inhibition, two properties critical to understanding the effect reported here.     

Mental rotation and perceptual uprightness

Performance in Cooper and Shepard’s (1973) mental rotation task was examined in the context of a model that defined the extent to which alphabet letters could be tilted from their normal orientation and still be perceptually upright. For letters with a broad range of orientations for which they remain perceptually upright, a nonlinear effect of orientation on reaction time was obtained (as in Cooper and Shepard). However, for letters with a narrow range of orientations for which they remain perceptually upright, reaction time was linearly related to orientation. The results supported the hypothesis that subjects in the Cooper and Shepard task would mentally rotate alphabet letters only when they were presented in orientations for which they were not perceptually upright.