Aging and visual marking: selective deficits for moving stimuli

The selective processing of new visual information can be facilitated by the top-down inhibition of old stimuli already in the visual field, a capacity-limited process termed visual marking (D. G. Watson & G. W. Humphreys, 1997). Three experiments assessed the effects of aging on visual marking using stationary (Experiment 1) and moving (Experiments 2 and 3) items. For young participants, visual marking was observed in all experiments. For older participants, visual marking was observed only with stationary items. The results are not consistent with any simple account of general age-related decrements and provide further support for the deployment of different methods of visual marking depending on the properties of the old items and the current task demands.     

Adaptation to disability: applying selective optimization with compensation to the behaviors of older adults with osteoarthritis

This research extends the use of P. B. Baltes and M. M. Baltes's (1990) theory of selective optimization with compensation (SOC) in an effort to conceptually integrate the adaptational behaviors of 248 older adults with disability arising from osteoarthritis. The authors also studied the relationship of SOC to age, illness variables, disability, illness perceptions, and support. The results highlight the variability and plasticity of older adults' efforts to manage disability, with most efforts aimed at compensation and optimization rather than selection. The benefit of using SOC to study adaptation to chronic illness and disability is discussed.     

Learning where to look for danger: integrating affective and spatial information

Although not previously addressed by researchers of spatial cognition or affect, the combination of spatial and affective information is essential for many approach and avoidance behaviors, and thus for survival. We provide the first evidence that through incidental experience, people form representations that capture correlations between affective and spatial information. Participants were able to do so even when the correlation was weak, they were not told to look for the correlation, and the stimuli varied on multiple other dimensions besides valence. In addition, people were more sensitive to the presented correlation when stimuli were negative than when they were positive. This asymmetry in representation may stem from underlying differences in the activation functions for positive and negative hedonic information processing.     

Inhibition and superconditioning

Superconditioning is said to occur when learning an association between a conditioned stimulus (CS) and unconditioned stimulus (US) is facilitated by pairing the CS with the US in the presence of a previously established conditioned inhibitor. Previous demonstrations of superconditioning have been criticized because their control conditions have allowed alternative interpretations. Using a within–subjects autoshaping procedure, the present study unambiguously demonstrated superconditioning. The results support the view that superconditioning is the symmetric opposite of blocking.     

Pharmacogenetics: ethical issues and policy options

Pharmacogenetics offers the prospect of an era of safer and more effective drugs, as well as more individualized use of drug therapies. Before the benefits of pharmacogenetics can be realized, the ethical issues that arise in research and clinical application of pharmacogenetic technologies must be addressed. The ethical issues raised by pharmacogenetics can be addressed under six headings: (1) regulatory oversight, (2) confidentiality and privacy, (3) informed consent, (4) availability of drugs, (5) access, and (6) clinicians' changing responsibilities in the era of pharmacogenetic medicine. We analyze each of these categories of ethical issues and provide policy approaches for addressing them.     

Contextual effects on word production: A lifespan study

The effect of sentence priming on picture naming was investigated across the lifespan, from age 3 to 87 years. Names that are normally acquired before 3 years of age were presented in auditory contexts that were semantically congruent, incongruent, or neutral in relation to each picture and its name. Sentential priming was present at all age levels. Facilitation (neutral vs. congruent) was significantly by 4 years of age and did not vary significantly with age. Interference (incongruent vs. neutral) was significant at all age levels, but changed nonmonotonically with age (largest in the youngest children, stable from young adulthood through age 70, with a small increase in the oldest participants). We conclude that picture naming is a useful tool for the investigation of sentential priming effects across the lifespan and that it can reveal potentially interesting developmental changes in the effects of sentential context on word retrieval.     

Immunity to functional fixedness in young children

In thecandle problem (Duncker, 1945), subjects must attach a candle to a vertical surface, using only a box of tacks and a book of matches. Subjects exhibitfunctional fixedness by failing, or being slow, to make use of one object (the tack box) as a support, rather than as a container, in their solutions. This failure to produce alternate functions is measured against improved performance when the tack box is presented empty rather than full of tacks (i.e., not preutilized as a container). Using an analogous task, we show that functional fixedness can be demonstrated in older children (6- and 7-year-olds); they are significantly slower to use a box as a support when its containment function has been demonstrated than when it has not. However, younger children (5-year-olds) are immune to this effect, showing no advantage when the standard function is not demonstrated. Moreover, their performance under conditions of preutilization is better than that of both older groups. These results are interpreted in terms of children’s developing intuitions about function and the effects of past experience on problem solving.     

Accounts of the confidence-accuracy relation in recognition memory

Confidence and accuracy, while often considered to tap the same memory representation, are often found to be only weakly correlated (e.g., Bothwell, Deffenbacher, & Brigham, 1987; Deffenbacher, 1980). There are at least two possible (nonexclusive) reasons for this weak relation. First, it may be simply due to noise of one sort or another; that is, it may come about because of both within- and between-subjects statistical variations that are partially uncorrelated for confidence measures on the one hand and accuracy measures on the other. Second, confidence and accuracy may be uncorrelated because they are based, at least in part, on different memory representations that are affected in different ways by different independent variables. We propose a general theory that is designed to encompass both of these possibilities and, within the context of this theory, we evaluate effects of four variables—degree of rehearsal, study duration, study luminance, and test luminance—in three face recognition experiments. In conjunction with our theory, the results allow us to begin to identify the circumstances under which confidence and accuracy are based on the same versus different sources of information in memory. The results demonstrate the conditions under which subjects are quite poor at monitoring their memory performance, and are used to extend cue utilization theories to the domain of face recognition.