The psychological bases of ideology and prejudice: testing a dual process model

The issue of personality and prejudice has been largely investigated in terms of authoritarianism and social dominance orientation. However, these seem more appropriately conceptualized as ideological attitudes than as personality dimensions. The authors describe a causal model linking dual dimensions of personality, social world view, ideological attitudes, and intergroup attitudes. Structural equation modeling with data from American and White Afrikaner students supported the model, suggesting that social conformity and belief in a dangerous world influence authoritarian attitudes, whereas toughmindedness and belief in a competitive jungle world influence social dominance attitudes, and these two ideological attitude dimensions influence intergroup attitudes. The model implies that dual motivational and cognitive processes, which may be activated by different kinds of situational and intergroup dynamics, may underlie 2 distinct dimensions of prejudice.     

Naming and categorization in young children: vocal tact training

In three experiments, 2- to 4-year-old children, following pretraining with everyday objects, were presented with arbitrary stimuli of differing shapes. In Experiment 1A, 9 subjects were trained one common tact response, "zag," to three of these and a second tact, "vek," to another three. In category match-to-sample Test 1, 4 subjects sorted accurately when required only to look at the sample before selecting from five comparisons. The remaining 5 subjects succeeded in Test 2, in which they were required to tact the sample before selecting comparisons. Experiment 1B showed, for 2 of these subjects, that tact training with 12 arbitrary stimuli established two six-member classes that were still intact 6 weeks later. In Experiment 2, 3 new subjects participated in a common tact training procedure that ensured that none of the exemplars from the same class were presented together prior to the test for three-member classes. Two subjects passed category Test 1 and the third passed Test 2. Tests showed subjects' listener behavior in response to hearing /zog/ and /vek/ to be in place. These experiments indicate that common naming is effective in establishing arbitrary stimulus classes and that category match-to-sample testing provides a robust measure of categorization.     

Illusory 3-D rotation induced by dynamic image shading

Observers' perceptions of the three-dimensional structure of smoothly curved surfaces defined by patterns of image shading were investigated under varying conditions of illumination. In five experiments, observers judged the global orientation and the motion of the simulated surfaces from both static and dynamic patterns of image shading. We found that perceptual performance was more accurate with static than with dynamic displays. Dynamic displays evoked systematic biases in perceptual performance when the surface and the illumination source were simulated as rotating in opposite directions. In these conditions, the surface was incorrectly perceived as rotating in the same direction as the illumination source. Conversely, the orientation of the simulated surfaces was perceived correctly when the frames making up the apparent-motion sequences of the dynamic displays were presented as static images. In Experiment 6, moreover, the results obtained with the computer-generated displays were replicated with solid objects.     

Tactile "capture" of audition

Previous research has demonstrated that the localization of auditory or tactile stimuli can be biased by the simultaneous presentation of a visual stimulus from a different spatial position. We investigated whether auditory localization judgments could also be affected by the presentation of spatially displaced tactile stimuli, using a procedure designed to reveal perceptual interactions across modalities. Participants made left-right discrimination responses regarding the perceived location of sounds, which were presented either in isolation or together with tactile stimulation to the fingertips. The results demonstrate that the apparent location of a sound can be biased toward tactile stimulation when it is synchronous, but not when it is asynchronous, with the auditory event. Directing attention to the tactile modality did not increase the bias of sound localization toward synchronous tactile stimulation. These results provide the first demonstration of the tactile capture of audition.     

A reversal in the direction of detection asymmetry: effects of spatial density,spatial regularity,and retinal eccentricity

We analyzed detection asymmetry, using openand closed squares as target and contextelements. It was found that varying density, regularity, and target eccentricity not only can modulate the amount of asymmetry, but also can produce a reversal in the direction of the asymmetry. The results suggest that the different stimuli are processed with different grains of analysis,consisting of in some cases, single elements and their properties and, in other cases, larger units of the stimulus array and more globalproperties. A detection task that can utilize the properties that are available with a given grain of analysis would show an advantage over a task for which the given grain of analysis is not as favorable, resulting indetection asymmetry in one direction or another.     

Recognition memory for source and occurrence: The importance of recollection

Previous recognition memory studies indicate that when both recollection and familiarity are expected to contribute to recognition performance (e.g., discriminating studied items from nonstudied items) the dual-process and the unequal-variance signal detection models provide comparable accounts of performance. When familiarity is not expected to be useful (e.g., when items from two equally familiar sources are discriminated between), the dual-process model provides a significantly better account of performance. In the present study, source recognition was tested under conditions in which familiarity could have been used to perform a list-discrimination task; participants were required to discriminate between strong studied items, weak studied items, and new items. The dual-process model provided a better account of performance than did the unequal-variance model. Moreover, the results indicated that the unequal-variance assumption in a single-process signal detection model was not a valid substitution for recollection and that recollection was used to make recognition judgments even when assessments of familiarity were useful.     

Cross-modal re-mapping influences the Simon effect

Tagliabue, Zorzi, Umiltà, and Bassignani (2000) showed that one's practicing of a spatially incompatible task influences performance in a Simon task even when the interval between the two tasks is as long as 1 week. In the present study, three experiments were conducted to investigate whether such an effect could be found in a cross-modal paradigm, whereby stimuli in the two tasks were presented in different modalities. Subjects performed either compatible or incompatible mappings in an acoustic spatial compatibility task and, after an interval of 5 min, 24 h, or 7 days, performed a visual Simon task. Results show that the spatially incompatible mapping task affected performance in the Simon task: The Simon effect was absent for all three intervals. This pattern is similar to the results of the Tagliabue et al. study, in which both tasks were performed in the same (visual) modality. Our findings disprove possible explanations based on episodic/contextual effects and support the hypothesis of a long-lasting spatial remapping that is not modality specific.     

Personally familiar proper names are relatively successfully processed in the human right hemisphere; or, the missing link

Responding to our abstract in Brain and Language (Ohnesorge & Van Lancker, 1999), which proposed that famous proper nouns are successfully processed in both cerebral hemispheres, Schweinberger, Landgrebe, Mohr, and Kaufmann (2001) claimed that the "link" between personal names and the right hemisphere is "illusory." Ohnesorge and Van Lancker (2001) further described six experimental studies in which LVF/RH recognition of famous proper nouns was influenced by task conditions and stimulus familiarity. Here presenting two more experiments performed to explore the refutation presented by Schweinberger et al., this article confirms an ability of the right hemisphere to recognize famous proper nouns and explains why appropriate stimulus development and task conditions are essential in furthering our understanding of the role of the right hemisphere in processing personal relevance.     

Sentence processing strategies in healthy seniors with poor comprehension: an fMRI study

We used fMRI to examine patterns of brain recruitment in 22 healthy seniors, half of whom had selective comprehension difficulty for grammatically complex sentences. We found significantly reduced recruitment of left posterolateral temporal [Brodmann area (BA) 22/21] and left inferior frontal (BA 44/6) cortex in poor comprehenders compared to the healthy seniors with good sentence comprehension, cortical regions previously associated with language comprehension and verbal working memory, respectively. The poor comprehenders demonstrated increased activation of left prefrontal (BA 9/46), right dorsal inferior frontal (BA 44/6), and left posterior cingulate (BA 31/23) cortices for the grammatically simpler sentences that they understood. We hypothesize that these brain regions support an alternate, nongrammatical strategy for processing complex configurations of symbolic information. Moreover, these observations emphasize the crucial role of the left perisylvian network for grammatically guided sentence processing in subjects with good comprehension.     

Derivation by prefixation in Slovenian: two aphasia case studies

The present study is concerned with two Slovenian-speaking patients who were asked to produce, in various tasks, verbs, nouns, and adjectives derived by prefixation with prepositions. Despite differences due to their specific linguistic difficulties, both patients' performance was characterized by the differential processing of prefixes and remaining components of complex words. Prepositions in prefixation were mostly preserved, and less frequently substituted, regardless of the numerous errors produced in the remaining portion of the words. These errors seem clearly determined by the morphological structure of the words and therefore appear to be authentic morphological errors. These findings contribute to the theoretical debate on mental lexical representation, speaking in favor of a morphological decomposition in processing of prefixed complex words at different processing levels.