Focusing on the bodily self: The influence of endogenous attention on visual body processing

The present study explores whether endogenous attention can modulate body perception. A modified version of the Posner paradigm was used to direct participants' attention toward the appearance of distinct body images, which differed only in detailed idiosyncratic features: one's own and another person's hands. Hand stimuli were preceded by symbolic cues that predicted their identity with high probability, which made it possible to compare the processing of expected (valid) and unexpected (invalid) targets. Results revealed that endogenous attention influenced the processing of participants' own hands by speeding participants' responses to valid in contrast to invalid trials. Crucially, no validity effect was found for the hands of another person. These findings cannot be explained in terms of perceptual familiarity, since an optimization of the processing for both familiar and unfamiliar faces by symbolic cues was observed. In light of these results, it is suggested that participants are able to anticipate particular stimuli within the same perceptual category as long as these stimuli appear to be remarkably distinct to them, which is probably the case for particular faces and their own bodies, in contrast to other people's bodies.     

Identity salience and the influence of differential activation of the social self-schema on advertising response

The authors examined how identity primes and social distinctiveness influence identity salience (i.e., the activation of a social identity within an individual's social self-schema) and subsequent responses to targeted advertising. Across 2 studies, individuals who were exposed to an identity prime (an ad element that directs attention to the individual's social identity) and who were socially distinctive (minorities in the immediate social context) expressed systematically different evaluations of spokespersons and the advertisements that featured them. Specifically, Asian (Caucasian) participants responded most positively (negatively) to Asian spokespeople and Asian-targeted advertising when the participants were both primed and socially distinctive. No main effects of identity primes or social distinctiveness were found. The implications of these findings for identity theory, advertising practice, and intervention communications are discussed.     

Grape expectations: The role of cognitive influences in color–flavor interactions

Color conveys critical information about the flavor of food and drink by providing clues as to edibility, flavor identity, and flavor intensity. Despite the fact that more than 100 published papers have investigated the influence of color on flavor perception in humans, surprisingly little research has considered how cognitive and contextual constraints may mediate color–flavor interactions. In this review, we argue that the discrepancies demonstrated in previously-published color–flavor studies may, at least in part, reflect differences in the sensory expectations that different people generate as a result of their prior associative experiences. We propose that color–flavor interactions in flavor perception cannot be understood solely in terms of the principles of multisensory integration (the currently dominant theoretical framework) but that the role of higher-level cognitive factors, such as expectations, must also be considered.     

视觉搜索中风味引发对关联颜色的注意偏向

人们常将特定的颜色与风味联系起来形成色味联结, 而且颜色线索会影响风味感知, 这体现了视觉信息对味觉信息加工的跨通道影响。本研究通过两个行为实验, 考察了味觉信息是否也会影响视觉搜索。实验任务要求被试品尝饮品后对形状靶子进行视觉搜索, 并且操纵了味觉刺激的提示性以及靶子颜色与风味之间的关联性。实验1的结果表明, 当风味线索提示的靶子颜色是与风味关联的颜色时可以加快视觉搜索。但如果与该风味关联的颜色出现在干扰项上, 风味线索则无法促进视觉搜索。其后, 我们在实验2中排除了语义启动的混淆, 也发现了与实验1一致的结果。本研究的结果表明, 风味线索会引发对关联颜色的注意偏向, 证实了味觉刺激对视觉注意的跨通道影响, 为色味交互提供了新的实验证据, 揭示了跨通道影响可能的发生机制。     

The effects of conformity on recognition judgements

Schneider and Watkins (1996) demonstrated that participants' recognition performance can be affected by responses generated by a confederate. However, it remains uncertain whether the confederate's responses actually change the participants' memories or whether participants simply attempt to conform to the confederate. The present experiments examined this issue by having participants complete a final individual recognition test following a recognition test in which the participants worked with a virtual confederate. The results suggest that responses from virtual confederates affect participants' performance in ways similar to actual confederates and that conforming to a virtual confederate's responses does appear to result in actual deficits in memory. More specifically, it impairs participants' ability to correctly recognise material presented earlier.     

Attention and perceptual priming in the perceptual identification task

Prior research indicates that manipulations of attention during encoding sometimes affect perceptual implicit memory. Two hypotheses were investigated. One proposes that manipulations of attention affect perceptual priming only to the extent that they disrupt stimulus identification. The other attributes reduced priming to the disruptive effects of distractor selection. The role of attention was investigated with a variant of the Stroop task in which participants either read words, identified their color, or did both. Identifying the color reduced priming even when the word was also overtly identified. This result held regardless of whether color and word were presented as a single object (Experiments 1 and 2) or as separate objects (Experiment 4). When participants read and identified a color, the overt order of the responses did not matter; both conditions reduced priming relative to reading alone (Experiment 3). The results provide evidence against the stimulus-identification account but are consistent with the distractor-selection hypothesis.     

Effect of color on expected and experienced refreshment, intensity, and liking of beverages

The effect of color on the expected and experienced refreshment, intensity, and liking of lemon, mint, and vanilla beverages was studied. Subjects rated the expected and actual taste of brown lemon and mint solutions as less refreshing than the tastes of differently colored solutions of the same flavor. However, the refreshment ratings (expected and actual) of the brown vanilla beverage were not different from those of the vanilla beverages of other colors. Liking ratings also depended on color in a manner similar to that of the refreshment ratings. Intensity ratings also varied with color. However, unlike when subjects smell solutions rather than taste them, colored solutions were not judged as more intense than colorless ones. In fact, the clear solutions were judged as strongest.     

Predicting the paths of peripherals: the interaction of identification and future possibilities

Two studies investigated how both degree of identification and the individual's position within the group influence aspects of group loyalty. The authors considered ingroup position in terms of both the individual's current position within a group and expectations concerning the likelihood that one's position might change in the future. Peripheral group members learned that their acceptance by other group members would improve in the future or that they could expect rejection by other group members. Various indices of group loyalty (ingroup homogeneity, motivation to work for the group, and evaluation of a motivated group member) showed that when group members anticipated future rejection, the lower the identification the less loyal they were. In contrast, those who expected future acceptance were more loyal (more motivated to work for the group) the lower their identification. Current group behavior depends on both intragroup future expectations and level of identification.     

To look or not to look: an eye movement study of hypervigilance during change detection in high and low spider fearful students

Previous eye movement studies of attentional bias in spider fear reported inconsistent results with respect to early attentional capture, suggesting that overt attentional capture only reliably occurs under specific circumstances. In addition, none of these studies explored covert attention. The present study examined attentional bias in spider phobia using a change detection paradigm that was expected to provide good conditions for documenting attentional capture. In contrast to our expectations, eye movement data showed that all participants' first fixations were fastest on general negative targets, whereas participants' first fixations on spider targets were slower in the spider fearful than in the nonfearful group. In addition, spider fearful participants made more nontarget fixations before fixating on a spider target than did nonfearful participants. Thus, we found that participants' overt attention was more quickly focused on general negative targets, whereas covert attentional processes enabled initial avoidance of fear-relevant (i.e. spider) stimuli. The present findings have important implications for research on attention and fear as they indicate that fearful individuals are not characterized by static attentional orienting toward threat but, under certain conditions, may avert attention from threat automatically.     

Self-representation in mediated environments: the experience of emotions modulated by auditory-vibrotactile heartbeat.

In 1890, William James hypothesized that emotions are our perception of physiological changes. Many different theories of emotion have emerged since then, but it has been demonstrated that a specifically induced physiological state can influence an individual's emotional responses to stimuli. In the present study, auditory and/or vibrotactile heartbeat stimuli were presented to participants (N = 24), and the stimuli's effect on participants' physiological state and subsequent emotional attitude to affective pictures was measured. In particular, we aimed to investigate the effect of the perceived distance to stimuli on emotional experience. Distant versus close sound reproduction conditions (loudspeakers vs. headphones) were used to identify whether an "embodied" experience can occur in which participants would associate the external heartbeat sound with their own. Vibrotactile stimulation of an experimental chair and footrest was added to magnify the experience. Participants' peripheral heartbeat signals, self-reported valence (pleasantness) and arousal (activation) ratings for the pictures, and memory performance scores were collected. Heartbeat sounds significantly affected participants' heartbeat, the emotional judgments of pictures, and their recall. The effect of distance to stimuli was observed in the significant interaction between the spatial location of the heartbeat sound and the vibrotactile stimulation, which was mainly caused by the auditory-vibrotactile interaction in the loudspeakers condition. This interaction might suggest that vibrations transform the far sound condition (sound via loudspeakers) in a close-stimulation condition and support the hypothesis that close sounds are more affective than distant ones. These findings have implications for the design and evaluation of mediated environments.     

Readers' reliance on source credibility in the service of comprehension

The current project examined the impact of knowledge about the credibility of sources on readers' processing of texts. Participants read texts in which information about characters was provided by either a credible or a noncredible source; this information suggested that the character potentially possessed a particular trait. A subsequent text episode offered the opportunity for participants to apply any inferred trait to their understanding of unfolding story events. In Experiment 1, participants' moment-by-moment reading times indicated strong expectations for characters to behave in trait-consistent ways, with little effect of credibility on those expectations. Experiments 2 and 3 provided participants with additional encouragement to attend to credibility during reading, but these experiments also revealed little influence of credibility. In Experiment 4, in addition to being given added encouragement, participants were explicitly asked to evaluate the likelihood of future text events; under these conditions, expectations for story outcomes were influenced by the credibility of information sources. This influence was mediated by the degree to which participants self-reported relying on credibility during the task. These findings have implications for contemporary accounts of text comprehension, persuasion, and individual differences in credibility assessment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).     

Suppressing unwanted memories: where there is a will,there is a way?

Research suggests that suppressing unwanted thoughts, generally, is an ineffective thought control strategy, because suppression attempts oftentimes fail, and, furthermore, result in a paradoxical increase of unwanted thoughts, later on. The present study sought to investigate whether manipulated expectations about suppression efficacy determine actual effects of suppression attempts. To test this hypothesis, participants listened to an audiotaped story, and were subsequently appointed to one of four conditions: a no-instruction-control (n = 20), suppression (n = 20), suppression-works (n = 20; participants were told that suppression generally is a fruitful strategy), or suppression-does-not-work (n = 25; participants were told that suppression primarily has paradoxical effects) condition. Two hours later, participants' memories of the story were tested, and several metamemory questions were answered. Induced expectations actually determined the perceived efficacy of suppression attempts, as well as thought frequency, although perceived or actual accuracy of recollections was not affected by the instructions.     

Self-presentation: managing the impression of consistency when reality interferes with self-enhancement.

The manner in which an individual's self-perceptions affect related self-presentations was investigated. One hundred and twenty subjects believed that they would participate in a group task where their individual performance would either be known to the group or be completely anonymous. On the basis of bogus feedback from prior tests, subjects expected to perform either extremely well or very poorly on the group task; control groups received no such feedback. Before the task began, group members exchanged personal information that allowed them to vary their self-presentations. Factor analysis revealed two self-presentational factors: competence and interpersonal relations. A Performance Expectations X Anonymity interaction was obtained on self-presentational claims to personal competence. Under public performance conditions (where future public events could invalidate an unrealistically positive self-presentation), self-presentations were consistent with subjects' expectations of actual performance. However, under anonymous conditions, self-presentations were quite favorable and unaffected by expectations of actual performance. The results support an incentive model and fail to support a consistency model. Subjects seemed to desire as self-enhancing and approval gaining a public image as possible but conceded to the demands of public reality when necessary.     

Vicarious moral licensing: the influence of others' past moral actions on moral behavior

This article investigates the effect of others' prior nonprejudiced behavior on an individual's subsequent behavior. Five studies supported the hypothesis that people are more willing to express prejudiced attitudes when their group members' past behavior has established nonprejudiced credentials. Study 1a showed that participants who were told that their group was more moral than similar other groups were more willing to describe a job as better suited for Whites than for African Americans. In Study 1b, when given information on group members' prior nondiscriminatory behavior (selecting a Hispanic applicant in a prior task), participants subsequently gave more discriminatory ratings to the Hispanic applicant for a position stereotypically suited for majority members (Whites). In Study 2, moral self-concept mediated the effect of others' prior nonprejudiced actions on a participant's subsequent prejudiced behavior such that others' past nonprejudiced actions enhanced the participant's moral self-concept, and this inflated moral self-concept subsequently drove the participant's prejudiced ratings of a Hispanic applicant. In Study 3, the moderating role of identification with the credentialing group was tested. Results showed that participants expressed more prejudiced attitudes toward a Hispanic applicant when they highly identified with the group members behaving in nonprejudiced manner. In Study 4, the credentialing task was dissociated from the participants' own judgmental task, and, in addition, identification with the credentialing group was manipulated rather than measured. Consistent with prior studies, the results showed that participants who first had the opportunity to view an in-group member's nonprejudiced hiring decision were more likely to reject an African American man for a job stereotypically suited for majority members. These studies suggest a vicarious moral licensing effect.     

Memory for scenes: Refixations reflect retrieval

Most conceptions of episodic memory hold that reinstatement of encoding operations is essential for retrieval success, but the specific mechanisms of retrieval reinstatement are not well understood. In three experiments, we used saccadic eye movements as a window for examining reinstatement in scene recognition. In Experiment 1, participants viewed complex scenes, while number of study fixations was controlled by using a gaze-contingent paradigm. In Experiment 2, effects of stimulus saliency were minimized by directing participants' eye movements during study. At test, participants made remember/know judgments for each recognized stimulus scene. Both experiments showed that remember responses were associated with more consistent study-test fixations than false rejections (Experiments 1 and 2) and know responses (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, we examined the causal role of gaze consistency on retrieval by manipulating participants' expectations during recognition. After studying name and scene pairs, each test scene was preceded by the same or different name as during study. Participants made more consistent eye movements following a matching, rather than mismatching, scene name. Taken together, these findings suggest that explicit recollection is a function of perceptual reconstruction and that event memory influences gaze control in this active reconstruction process.     

Effect of photographic negation on matching the expressions and identities of faces

In four experiments, participants made speeded same-different responses to pairs of face photographs showing the same woman or different women with the same expression or different expressions. Compared with responses to positive pairs, negative pairs were matched more slowly on identity than on expression. A secondary finding showed that face expressions (same, different) influenced identity responses, and identities influenced expression responses, equally for positive and negative pairs. The independence of this irrelevant-dimension effect from the contrast effect supports the conclusion required by the main finding that negation slows perceptual encoding of surface-based information used for identification more than it does encoding of edge-based information used for expression recognition.     

Assessment of perceptual discrepancy: utility of the Primary Communication Inventory

The Primary Communication Inventory was factor-analyzed in order to validate the subscales of this instrument. These subscales were derived by Navran (20) on the basis of face validity and were labeled verbal and nonverbal communication subscales. The analysis yielded two factors. However, they could not be labeled verbal and nonverbal. Instead, the factors were interpreted as: (a) the individual's perceptions of own communication ability, and (b) the spouse's perceptions of the individual's communication ability. The scoring of the Primary Communication Inventory was revised and used as a measure of perceptual discrepancy between husbands and wives. Interestingly, discrepancy within the marital dyad was greater for the nondistressed participants than for the distressed participants. The results illustrate the potentially adaptive nature of positive perceptual distortion within the marital dyad and the potential utility for future research of calculating perceptual discrepancy scores for each spouse using the Primary Communication Inventory.     

Working memory representations persist in the face of unexpected task alterations

It is well known that information can be held in memory while performing other tasks concurrently, such as remembering a color or number during a separate visual search task. However, it is not clear what happens to stored information in the face of unexpected tasks, such as the surprise questions that are often used in experiments related to inattentional and change blindness. Does the unpredicted shift in task context cause memory representations to be cleared in anticipation of new information? To answer this question, we ran two experiments where the task unexpectedly switched partway through the experiment with a surprise question. Half of the participants were asked to report the same attribute (Exp. 1?=?Identity, Exp. 2?=?Color) of a target stimulus in both presurprise and postsurprise trials, while for the other half, the reported attribute switched from identity to color (Exp. 1) or vice versa (Exp. 2). Importantly, all participants had to read an unexpected set of instructions and respond differently on the surprise trial. Accuracy on the surprise trial was higher for the same-attribute groups than the different-attribute groups. Furthermore, there was no difference in reaction time on the surprise trial between the two groups. These results suggest that information participants expected to report can survive an encounter with an unexpected task. The implication is that failures to report information on a surprise trial in many experiments reflect genuine differences in memory encoding, rather than forgetting or overwriting induced by the surprise question.     

The accumulating effects of shared expectations

This research examined whether self‐fulfilling prophecies and perceptual confirmation effects accumulated across people. Trios of same‐sex participants, each consisting of two interviewers and one target, were randomly assigned to one of three conditions that served to manipulate interviewers' expectations (i.e., non‐hostile vs. hostile) and the similarity of their expectations (i.e., similar vs. dissimilar) for targets. Each trio participated in an interaction in which interviewers asked targets questions. Targets' hostility during the interaction and interviewers' impressions of targets' hostility following the interaction served as the primary dependent variables. Results indicated that perceptual confirmation effects accumulated across interviewers. Even though targets' behavior during the interaction did not differ across conditions, interviewers nonetheless judged targets as more hostile when both interviewers expected targets to be hostile than when only one did. The authors discuss these findings in terms of the potential implications for those who have multiple inaccurate and unfavorable expectations held about them. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The nonconscious influence of religious symbols in motivated performance situations

Anthropological, sociological, and psychological theories suggest that religious symbols should influence motivational processes during performance of goal-relevant tasks. In two experiments, positive and negative religious (Christian) symbols were presented outside of participants' conscious awareness. These symbols influenced cardiovascular responses consistent with challenge and threat states during a subsequent speech task, particularly when the speech topic concerned participants' mortality, and only for Christian participants; similar images lacking Christian meaning were not influential. Results suggested that these effects were due to the learned meaning of the symbols and point to the importance of religion as a coping resource.