The effects of local and global processing orientation on eyewitness identification performance

Recent work has demonstrated that performance on a simultaneous target-present photographic line-up can be enhanced by prior global processing orientation, and hindered by prior local processing orientation induced by processing Navon letter stimuli. A series of studies explore the generality of this processing bias effect using either videotaped scenarios or live interactions. Five experiments demonstrate that these effects are seen across a range of test stimuli, test formats, and test instructions.These data inform the processes engaged in by witnesses when making line-up identifications and indicate that it may be possible to improve the accuracy of witnesses making such judgements.     

The time course of attentional and oculomotor capture reveals a common cause

Eye movements are often misdirected toward a distractor when it appears abruptly, an effect known as oculomotor capture. Fundamental differences between eye movements and attention have led to questions about the relationship of oculomotor capture to the more general effect of sudden onsets on performance, known as attentional capture. This study explores that issue by examining the time course of eye movements and manual localization responses to targets in the presence of sudden-onset distractors. The results demonstrate that for both response types, the proportion of trials on which responses are erroneously directed to sudden onsets reflects the quality of information about the visual display at a given point in time. Oculomotor capture appears to be a specific instance of a more general attentional capture effect. Differences and similarities between the two types of capture can be explained by the critical idea that the quality of information about a visual display changes over time and that different response systems tend to access this information at different moments in time.     

Role of responsibility in conditional reasoning

A series of recent studies showed that facilitation on the Wason Selection Task could be produced by perceived utilities. The present work was aimed at testing whether a similar factor could also be involved in human reasoning performance in the context of responsibility. We supposed that the motivation of the subject assuming responsibility is affected by normative goals. These goals prescribe the actions and the results to be achieved, also considering the different social roles. In this experiment the responses of different groups of subjects (N = 270) to a selection task were compared in two different conditions involving different responsibility contexts. The results show that the subjects' strategies in searching for possible violators depended on the condition (responsibility vs no responsibility). In particular, only in the context of responsibility were the performances elicited by conditional rules characterised by a falsification strategy.     

Eliminating the cost of task set reconfiguration

With insufficient time to fully prepare for a switch in task, a deterioration in performance on the first trial of a new task would be expected. The interest of researchers has been captured by the residual switch costs that, surprisingly, remain despite sufficient time to prepare. We used avery simple task to investigate the costs to reaction time and accuracy associated with changing between two different instructional sets every eight trials. Subjects responded to left and right visual targets by making either spatially compatible or incompatible eye movements (Experiment 1) or buttonpress responses (Experiment 2). The subjects were cued as to whether to make the compatible or the incompatible response by the color of a border appearing on the perimeter of the display. In cases in which the subject alternated between making pro- and antisaccades, the large costs to reaction time and accuracy at the short cue-target stimulus onset asynchrony were completely eliminated when sufficient time was provided to prepare for the switch. This complete elimination of residual switch costs was not obtained when the same alternation was applied to manual responses. This pattern of results links residual costs to response selection processes and suggests that they are not a necessary component of the switch process. We propose that the elimination of "stubborn" residual switch costs is rooted in our use of a hypercompatible task (making saccades toward targets) that places minimal demands on response selection.     

Counter-narratives in context: The role of the organisation and broader culture in psychic splitting among South African survivors of intimate partner violence

Chronic trauma, shame and psychopathology, as well as the association between them, are acutely understudied, both in South African and internationally. The focus of this article is on chronic trauma of a particular kind, intimate partner violence (IPV) and the development of a specific form or shame-related psychopathology, the splitting of self and how this splitting may be further facilitated or exacerbated by the contexts in which people live. The (counter) narratives of three women are presented. These (counter) narratives demonstrate the presence of both a concealed and shameful authentic self, and the socially conforming projected false self, two polarised parts of the psyche. It is argued that the organisational context, a shelter for survivors of IPV, which has a strong ethos centred around advocacy and human rights and which promotes a strong message of personal empowerment and agency, may unintentionally exacerbate the psychic split in women who have been subjugated at a broader (predominantly patriarchal) cultural level their whole lives. Participants’ resistance narratives were often characterised by inconsistencies and contradictions which oscillated between supporting mainstream cultural narratives and organisationally driven, active resistance against the cultural context from which they came. However, resistance narratives often felt thinly veiled and inauthentic, which is one of the problems with interventions in resource constrained settings which are necessarily time-limited. To fully and completely counter the cultural message that has been the focus of participants’ lifelong gendered socialisation, long-term and in depth interventions at organisational level are needed. These ideas are not only relevant to the South African setting, but have wider application internationally.     

Sex Referent Cues,Success Estimations,and Performance of Children on a Lateral Jumping Task

This study examined the effects of sex referent cues for the estimation of success, as well as actual performance on a simple motor endurance task. Boys and girls in grades 3 and 5 (N = 160) were randomly assigned to one of three referent groups or a control group. Subjects in the referent groups were given an identical referent score, (48), presented in three different forms: the average score for boys, the average score for girls, and the average score for children. The control group was given no referent score. Subjects were required to estimate their own success and then perform a timed side-to-side jump over a rope. Results suggest that as girls increase in age there is a decrease in their confidence in performing motor skills. Further, boys and girls at the two grade levels responded differently to the sex referent cues.     

An unusual presentation of probable dementia: Rhyming,associations, and verbal disinhibition

We report a case of probable Alzheimer's disease who presented with the unusual feature of disinhibited rhyming. Core language skills were largely intact but generative language was characterized by semantic‐based associations, evident in tangential and associative content, and phonology‐based associations, evident in rhyming, in the context of prominent executive dysfunction. We suggest this pattern is underpinned by a failure to terminate or inhibit verbal associations resulting in a ‘loosening’ of associations at the level of conceptual preparation for spoken language.     

Physical self-similarity enhances the gaze-cueing effect

Important social information can be gathered from the direction of another person's gaze, such as their intentions and aspects of the environment that are relevant to those intentions. Previous work has examined the effect of gaze on attention through the gaze-cueing effect: an enhancement of performance in detecting targets that appear where another person is looking. The present study investigated whether the physical self-similarity of a face could increase its impact on attention. Self-similarity was manipulated by morphing participants' faces with those of strangers. The effect of gaze direction on target detection was strongest for faces morphed with the participant's face. The results support previous work suggesting that self-similar faces are processed differently from dissimilar faces. The data also demonstrate that a face's similarity to one's own face influences the degree to which that face guides our attention in the environment.     

The course of adult experiences of abuse in patients with borderline personality disorder and Axis II comparison subjects: a 10-year follow-up study

The first objective of this study was to assess the rates of adult experiences of verbal, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse reported by borderline patients and Axis II comparison subjects over 10 years of prospective follow-up. The second objective was to determine time-to-cessation, recurrence, and new onset of each type of abuse. The Abuse History Interview (AHI) was administered to 290 borderline patients and 72 Axis II comparison subjects at baseline. The AHI Follow-up Version (AHI-FUV) was administered at five contiguous follow-up waves. Over 10 years of follow-up, the rates of all four types of abuse declined significantly for borderline patients. For borderline patients, rates of cessation were high for all types of abuse (>90%). However, recurrences and new onsets of verbal and emotional abuse were relatively common (>60%). Contrastingly, they were relatively uncommon for physical and sexual abuse (<30%), suggesting that verbal and emotional abuse represent more stable forms of abuse.