Last but not least

When two three-letter words are flashed up in sequence, observers cannot tell whether the top halves of the words are the same or different. It follows that words, like faces, are processed holistically, not as a set of separate features.     

Last but not least

When a simple rectangular grid is drawn toward one's face there is the striking illusion that a spherical bulge is protruding from the grid. This illusion may be helpful in studying the interaction of spatial and motion processing.     

Last but not least.

New variations of the spiral illusion are demonstrated. They include spiral illusions of the Café Wall illusion and the Z?llner illusion, as well as other new orientation illusions. Thus the spiral illusion is not limited to the Fraser illusion. We discuss the role that detectors of spirals in a higher visual area might play in the spiral illusion.     

Last but not least. Flashing lines

In a periodic pattern of horizontally and vertically aligned quadrangles, two sets of illusory lines are seen to pulsate at orthogonal orientations, corresponding to the directions of knight's moves on a chessboard. The illusion seems to be governed by subtle rules of long-range interactions between parallel and non-parallel orientation filters.     

Emotions in context: Anger causes ethnic bias but not gender bias in men but not women

Emotions influence information processing because they are assumed to carry valuable information. We predict that induced anger will increase ethnic but not gender intergroup bias because anger is related to conflicts for resources, and ethnic groups typically compete for resources, whereas gender groups typically engage in relations of positive interdependence. Furthermore, we also predict that this increased ethnic intergroup bias should only be observed among men because men show more group‐based reactions to intergroup conflict than women do. Two studies, with 65 and 120 participants, respectively, indeed show that anger induction increases ethnic but not gender intergroup bias and only for men. Intergroup bias was measured with an implicit measure. In Study 2, we additionally predict (and find) that fear induction does not change ethnic or gender intergroup bias because intergroup bias is a psychological preparation for collective action and fear is not associated with taking action against out‐groups. We conclude that the effect of anger depends on its specific informational potential in a particular intergroup context. These results highlight that gender groups differ on a crucial point from ethnic groups and call for more attention to the effect of people's gender in intergroup relations research. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

道德直觉合乎道义却不客观

面对道德困境, 道德直觉倾向于促使人们做出道义论的判断。但是, 道德直觉易受情绪因素影响, 具有较强的主观性。道德直觉警惕有意图地使用个人力量造成的伤害, 却会接受由非个人力量或连带作用引发的伤害。“模块近视假说”认为, 大脑中存在一个预警系统, 能快速地对主动伤害的想法发出情绪警报。但该系统的审查机制是一种简单的“单通道”加工, 这种加工局限使连带作用造成的伤害避开了审查机制的监控。道德直觉的不客观提示, 面对现实生活中的道德争议, 不应该仅听凭直觉作为行动的依据。     

Mental Causation: Unnaturalized but not Unnatural

The central problem for a realist about mental causation is to show that mental causation is compatible with the causal completeness of physical systems. This problem has seemed intractable in large part because of a widely held view that any sort of systematic overdetermination of events by their causes is unacceptable. I account for the popularity of this view, but argue that we ought to reject it. In doing so. I show how we thereby undermine the idea that mental causes must be naturalizable in order to be legitimate. Thus I argue that a non-naturalist conception of mental causation is compatible with a plausible kind of physicalism.     

Spontaneous recovery of excitation but not inhibition

Five magazine approach experiments with rats and 1 sign-tracking experiment with pigeons explored the possibility of an analogue to spontaneous recovery of excitatory conditioning from extinction: spontaneous recovery of inhibitory conditioning from training. Stimuli were 1st treated as conditioned inhibitors and then as conditioned exciters or as irrelevant to reinforcement. At issue was whether the passage of time after the 2nd treatment would allow partial restoration of the initial conditioned inhibition. The experiments differed in the design used to study recovery, the manner of reinforcing the inhibitor, the means of testing for recovery, the time interval allowed for recovery, and the species used. None of the experiments found evidence for recovery of the inhibitory learning with time, despite the concurrently measured presence of spontaneous recovery of excitatory conditioning after extinction. These experiments suggest that changes with time may be preferential to the learning that occurs during extinction.     

Belief inhibition during thinking: Not always winning but at least taking part

Human thinking is often biased by intuitive beliefs. Inhibition of these tempting beliefs is considered a key component of human thinking, but the process is poorly understood. In the present study we clarify the nature of an inhibition failure and the resulting belief bias by probing the accessibility of cued beliefs after people reasoned. Results indicated that even the poorest reasoners showed an impaired memory access to words that were associated with cued beliefs after solving reasoning problems in which the beliefs conflicted with normative considerations (Experiment 1 and 2). The study further established that the impairment was only temporary in nature (Experiment 3) and did not occur when people were explicitly instructed to give mere intuitive judgments (Experiment 4). Findings present solid evidence for the postulation of an inhibition process and imply that belief bias does not result from a failure to recognize the need to inhibit inappropriate beliefs, but from a failure to complete the inhibition process. This indicates that people are far more logical than hitherto believed.     

Visual illusions affect planning but not control

Much debate has arisen over how to account for the pattern of effects of visual illusions on action - that is, the findings that illusions affect actions in some circumstances but not others. I propose that this pattern can best be explained by postulating that visual illusions affect the planning of actions but do not affect the on-line control of actions. Strong evidence for this viewpoint comes from recent studies that show 'dynamic illusion effects': a large illusion effect early in a movement, but a decreasing effect as the hand approaches the target. These findings pose difficulties for other models of illusion effects on action.