Cross-modal illusory conjunctions between vision and touch

Cross-modal illusory conjunctions (ICs) happen when, under conditions of divided attention, felt textures are reported as being seen or vice versa. Experiments provided evidence for these errors, demonstrated that ICs are more frequent if tactile and visual stimuli are in the same hemispace, and showed that ICs still occur under forced-choice conditions but do not occur when attention to the felt texture is increased. Cross-modal ICs were also found in a patient with parietal damage even with relatively long presentations of visual stimuli. The data are consistent with there being cross-modal integration of sensory information, with the modality of origin sometimes being misattributed when attention is constrained. The empirical conclusions from the experiments are supported by formal models.     

Temperament and Social-Emotional Difficulties: The Dark Side of Learning Disabilities

The authors compared the relations between general psychological difficulties and dimensions of temperament in children with and without learning disability (LD). The main aim was to analyze whether and to what extent children's temperament dimensions contribute to their general psychological difficulties when LD diagnosis, age, and gender are taken into account. Participants were 52 elementary school children 7–11 years old (M age = 8.61 years, SD = 1.21 years). Twenty-six of them had been diagnosed with LD. Six teachers rated their pupils with and without LD in relation to their general psychological difficulties (Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire) and temperament dimensions (Italian Questionnaires of Temperament). In children with LD, the main dimensions of temperament with the power to predict general psychological difficulties (i.e., emotionality and social orientation) concern these students' relationships with others (teachers and peers). The findings of the current study draw educators' and practitioners' attention to the fact that children's temperamental characteristics may affect how they experience their LD, with significant implications for their later social adjustment.     

Target animacy influences gorilla handedness

We investigated the unimanual actions of a biological family group of twelve western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) using a methodological approach designed to assess behavior within social context from a bottom-up perspective. Measures of both the lateralization of unimanual actions (left, right) and the target of the action (animate, inanimate) were assessed during dual, synchronized video observations of naturalistic behavior. This paper demonstrates a corelationship between handedness and the animate quality of the target object. Analyses demonstrated a significant interaction between lateralized unimanual actions and target animacy and a right-hand bias for actions directed toward inanimate targets. We suggest that lateralized motor preference reflects the different processing capabilities of the left and right hemispheres, as influenced by the emotive (animate) and/or functional (inanimate) characteristics of the target, respectively.     

Associative and repetition priming with the repeated masked prime technique: No priming found

Wentura and Frings (2005) reported evidence of subliminal categorical priming on a lexical decision task, using a new method of visual masking in which the prime string consisted of the prime word flanked by random consonants and random letter masks alternated with the prime string on successive refresh cycles. We investigated associative and repetition priming on lexical decision, using the same method of visual masking. Three experiments failed to show any evidence of associative priming, (1) when the prime string was fixed at 10 characters (three to six flanking letters) and (2) when the number of flanking letters were reduced or absent. In all cases, prime detection was at chance level. Strong associative priming was observed with visible unmasked primes, but the addition of flanking letters restricted priming even though prime detection was still high. With repetition priming, no priming effects were found with the repeated masked technique, and prime detection was poor but just above chance levels. We conclude that with repeated masked primes, there is effective visual masking but that associative priming and repetition priming do not occur with experiment-unique prime-target pairs. Explanations for this apparent discrepancy across priming paradigms are discussed. The priming stimuli and prime-target pairs used in this study may be downloaded as supplemental materials from mc.psychonomicjournals. org/content/supplemental.     

Evidence for working memory storage operations in perceptual cortex

Isolating the short-term storage component of working memory (WM) from the myriad of associated executive processes has been an enduring challenge. Recent efforts have identified patterns of activity in visual regions that contain information about items being held in WM. However, it remains unclear (1) whether these representations withstand intervening sensory input and (2) how communication between multimodal association cortex and the unimodal perceptual regions supporting WM representations is involved in WM storage. We present evidence that the features of a face held in WM are stored within face-processing regions, that these representations persist across subsequent sensory input, and that information about the match between sensory input and a memory representation is relayed forward from perceptual to prefrontal regions. Participants were presented with a series of probe faces and indicated whether each probe matched a target face held in WM. We parametrically varied the feature similarity between the probe and target faces. Activity within face-processing regions scaled linearly with the degree of feature similarity between the probe face and the features of the target face, suggesting that the features of the target face were stored in these regions. Furthermore, directed connectivity measures revealed that the direction of information flow that was optimal for performance was from sensory regions that stored the features of the target face to dorsal prefrontal regions, supporting the notion that sensory input is compared to representations stored within perceptual regions and is subsequently relayed forward. Together, these findings indicate that WM storage operations are carried out within perceptual cortex.     

Effects of verbal ability and fluid intelligence on children's emotion understanding

This study investigated the role of verbal ability and fluid intelligence on children's emotion understanding, testing the hypothesis that fluid intelligence predicts the development of emotion comprehension over and above age and verbal ability. One hundred and two children (48 girls) aged 3.6–6 years completed the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC) that comprised external and mental components, the Coloured Progressive Matrices and the Test for Reception of Grammar. Regression analysis showed that fluid intelligence was not equally related to the external and mental components of the TEC (Pons & Harris, 2000). Specifically, the results indicated that the external component was related to age and verbal ability only, whereas recognition of mental emotional patterns required abstract reasoning skills more than age and verbal ability. It is concluded that the development of fluid intelligence has a significant role in the development of mental component of emotion comprehension.     

Binding and content updating in working memory tasks

Working memory updating can involve processing of either a specific memory content or a binding. So far, research has focused mainly on single contents as objects of updating, via recall accuracy measures. Here, we have addressed more direct measurement of the updating process (i.e., response times), assessing individually the role of single contents, as well as bindings. To this end, we compared two updating tasks from separate research traditions: a RT‐based computer task and a classical accuracy‐based task. The former consisted of trials where measures of content and binding updating were obtained, allowing a dissociation between these two components. The latter measured recall accuracy and intrusion rate for lists of words under different conditions of maintenance/inhibition. These results enable a better understanding of the updating process for the dual components of binding and content updating, and their potential role in an accuracy‐based task. An overlap between the underlying components of updating tasks was demonstrated, specifically between binding updating RT and intrusion rate. Notably, binding updating appears to be a more sensitive measure in explaining results in the classical updating task.     

Target animacy influences chimpanzee handedness

We employed a bottom-up, quantitative method to investigate great ape handedness. Our previous investigation of gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) demonstrated that contextual information influenced an individual’s handedness toward target objects. Specifically, we found a significant right-hand bias for unimanual actions directed toward inanimate target objects but not for actions directed to animate target objects (Forrester et al. in Anim Cogn 14(6):903–907, 2011). Using the identical methodological technique, we investigated the spontaneous hand actions of nine captive chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) during naturalistic, spontaneous behavior. We assessed both the frequencies and proportions of lateralized hand actions directed toward animate and inanimate targets employing focal follow video sampling. Like the gorillas, the chimpanzees demonstrated a right-handed bias for actions directed toward inanimate targets, but not toward animate targets. This pattern was evident at the group level and for the majority of subjects at the individual level. We postulate that a right-hand bias for only inanimate targets reflects the left hemisphere’s dominant neural processing capabilities for objects that have functional properties (inanimate objects). We further speculate that a population-level right-hand bias is not a human-unique characteristic, but one that was inherited from a common human-ape ancestor.     

Seeing women as objects: The sexual body part recognition bias

Objectification theory suggests that the bodies of women are sometimes reduced to their sexual body parts. As well, an extensive literature in cognitive psychology suggests that global processing underlies person recognition, whereas local processing underlies object recognition. Integrating these literatures, we introduced and tested the sexual body part recognition bias hypothesis that women's (versus men's) bodies would be reduced to their sexual body parts in the minds of perceivers. Specifically, we adopted the parts versus whole body recognition paradigm, which is a robust indicator of local versus global processing. The findings across two experiments showed that women's bodies were reduced to their sexual body parts in perceivers' minds. We also found that local processing contributed to the sexual body part recognition bias, whereas global processing tempered it. Implications for sexual objectification and its underlying processes and motives are discussed. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.