Socioemotional selectivity in cancer patients

This study analyzed the contact preferences of newly diagnosed cancer patients and healthy control group participants. In line with the theory of socioemotional selectivity, patients were more likely than control participants to prefer contact with familiar social partners, but this difference was stronger in younger and middle-aged patients than in older patients. Across a 6-month interval, patients' contact preferences changed according to the perceived success of therapy. For example, if therapy was perceived to be successful, patients showed an increasing interest in contacts with unfamiliar social partners. Results indicate that contact preferences are adapted to the perception of limited versus extended future lifetime.     

Spatial selectivity in visual search

To what extent does successful search for a target letter in a visual display depend on the allocation of attention to the target’s spatial position? To investigate this question, we required subjects to discriminate the orientation of a briefly flashed U-shaped form while searching for a target letter. Performance operating characteristics (POCs) were derived by varying the relative amounts of attention subjects were to devote to each task. Extensive tradeoffs in performance were observed when the orientation form and target letter occurred in nonadjacent display positions. In contrast, the tradeoff was much more restricted when the two targets occurred in adjacent positions. These results suggest that the interference between simultaneous visual discriminations depends critically on their separation in visual space. Both visual search and form discrimination require a common limited-capacity visual resource.     

Lexical and grammatical processing of unshadowed messages: A re-examination of the Mackay effect

Mackay (1973) claimed to have provided evidence that subjects could process the grammatical structure and lexical content of nonshadowed messages. In the present study, it was found impossible to repeat Mackay's findings when controls for several factors that had been ignored in Mackay's study were employed. Subsequent experiments indicated that two major factors contributing to Mackay's results were that he had a gap between sentences in his experiment and that the nonshadowed material came out of a background of silence. Both of these probably enabled subjects to switch attention to the nonshadowed material without disruption of shadowing performance.     

Self-deception and selectivity

Philosophical Studies - This article explores the alleged “selectivity problem” for Alfred Mele’s deflationary position on self-deception, a problem that can allegedly be solved...     

Cross-dimensional perceptual selectivity

Three visual search experiments tested whether top-down selectivity toward particular stimulus dimensions is possible during preattentive parallel search. Subjects viewed multielement displays in which two salient items, each unique in a different dimension--that is, color and intensity (Experiment 1) or color and form (Experiments 2 and 3)--were simultaneously present. One of the dimensions defined the target; the other dimension served as distractor. The results indicate that when search is performed in parallel, top-down selectivity is not possible. These findings suggest that preattentive parallel search is strongly automatic, because it satisfies both the load-insensitivity and the unintentionality criteria of automaticity.     

Brightness selectivity in the motion aftereffect

Eighteen Ss were required to track the apparent motion of a stationary grating viewed after prolonged inspection of a moving grating. Measures were obtained with the inspection and test gratings identical in contrast but different in space-average luminance, or with luminance held constant and contrast varied. The aftereffect was reduced as the gratings differed in space-average luminance, but contrast exerted less uniform influence as a variable. Brightness-selectivity in the motion aftereffect is interpreted within the selective adaptation model of aftereffects as evidence that some detectors in human vision are conjointly tuned to space-average luminance and image motion.     

Attributed intentions and informational selectivity

Three experiments tested the hypothesis that ascribing a specific intention to an actor prior to witnessing his behavior leads an observer to preferentially recall action bearing on the intention. In each case, subjects were exposed to an action sequence which mixed elements appropriate to more than one intention. Recall of action was compared among different observers who were led to attribute different intentions to the same actors. Selective remembering favoring intent-relevant action is demonstrated in all three studies. The second experiment offers evidence that selectivity operates during observation of an actor rather than retrospectively. The third experiment suggests that attributions about intentions are more potent determiners of such selectivity than are characteristics of an actor related to his behavior but not bearing on his intention and indicates that observer characteristics interact with attributed intentions to determine recall. Interpretation of the findings suggests that accurate attribution of intentions can facilitate social exchange by attuning partners to the planned aspects of each other's behavior, while misapprehension of intentions can preclude coordinated interaction by misdirecting attention to irrelevant action or to responses coerced by the observer.     

On-the-fly adaptation of selectivity in the flanker task

The processing selectivity in the flanker task has been shown to depend on the ratio of congruent trials to incongruent trials in a task (Gratton, Coles, & Donchin, 1992). If congruent trials are more frequent than incongruent ones, the flankers are more attended and, consequently, the flanker congruency effect is increased. Recent results suggest that participants can even allocate attention on the fly to the flankers-that is, in a highly flexible way after stimulus onset-depending on the frequency of incongruent trials on a certain stimulus location. Because location plays a unique role in stimulus selection, we investigated in two experiments whether selectivity can also be adjusted on the fly depending on stimulus color. The results demonstrate that color can be used for such an adjustment, but only if the association between color and frequency has be enpreviously learned under blocked conditions.     

Adult age differences in attentional selectivity and capacity

Abstract

This paper reviews empirical research on adult age differences in the use of attention during visual search and classification tasks. This research suggests that the selective aspect of attention, in the sense of the ability to discriminate relevant and irrelevant information, is relatively resistant to age-related change. The capacity aspect of attention, in the sense of the limited processing resources that underlie task performance, appears to undergo age-related decline. Questions remain, however, regarding whether capacity-reduction explanations of age differences in cognitive performance have any advantages over explanations based on task complexity. Recent analyses of ageing and attention emphasise the potential contribution of formal models of cognitive performance.     

Flexible adjustments of visual selectivity in a Flanker task

Congruency effects observed in stimulus-response compatibility paradigms are affected by proportion congruency (PC), that is, the ratio of congruent trials in a block-wise context. The PC effect may reflect the operation of visual selectivity. We used a flanker task to investigate the nature of the relationship between the congruency effect and PC in a given block, as well as the preservation of visual selectivity. In Experiment 1, we observed a linear relationship between the congruency effect and PC across five PC groups in a training session; in post training (with PC constant), the congruency effect was equivalent across the five groups. In Experiment 2, congruency effects varied with PC in phases within a block. These suggest that visual selectivity, acquired in a training session, is not sustained in post training where it rapidly adjusts to a new PC context. Characteristics of visual selectivity derived from these findings are discussed.     

A test for contrast-polarity selectivity in the tilt aftereffect

The tilt aftereffect (TAE) was studied with adapting and test stimuli consisting of black or white bars (experiment 1), and of luminance edges (experiment 2). Both experiments failed to demonstrate selectivity of the TAE to the polarity of luminance contrast.