Visual skills in airport-security screening

Abstract— An experiment examined visual performance in a simulated luggage-screening task. Observers participated in five sessions of a task requiring them to search for knives hidden in x-ray images of cluttered bags. Sensitivity and response times improved reliably as a result of practice. Eye movement data revealed that sensitivity increases were produced entirely by changes in observers' ability to recognize target objects, and not by changes in the effectiveness of visual scanning. Moreover, recognition skills were in part stimulus-specific, such that performance was degraded by the introduction of unfamiliar target objects. Implications for screener training are discussed.     

Age-related differences in localized attentional interference

Attentional selection of an object in the visual field degrades processing of neighboring stimuli in young adults. A pair of experiments examined the effects of aging on such localized attentional interference. In Experiment 1, younger and older observers made speeded same-different judgments of target shapes that varied in spatial separation. Performance declined for both age groups as the distance between targets decreased, but an Age x Distance interaction indicated that the magnitude of this effect was larger for older adults. Experiment 2 ruled out sensory masking as an explanation for these findings. Results indicate that older observers experience losses in the ability to attend to multiple spatially proximal stimuli within the visual field.     

On being lonely: fear of one's own aggression as an impediment to intimacy

This paper considers loneliness from the point of view of compromise formation and the development of fantasy as a means of defending against painful affect. Our idea is that at least one strand of loneliness derives from longing for an ideal object with whom one would never have to feel aggression and from whom no aggressive actions would have to be tolerated. The development of such a fantasy in a middle-aged man is traced to early loss of a parent with missed mourning, and is shown to be ameliorated by psychoanalytic treatment that allowed the mourning to take place.     

Changes in executive control across the life span: examination of task-switching performance

A study was conducted to examine changes in executive control processes over the life span. More specifically, changes in processes responsible for preparation and interference control that underlie the ability to flexibly alternate between two different tasks were examined. Individuals (N = 152) ranging in age from 7 to 82 years participated in the study. A U-shaped function was obtained for switch costs (i.e., the time required to switch between tasks compared with a repeated-task baseline), with larger costs found for young children and older adults. Switch costs were reduced with practice, particularly for children. All age groups benefited from increased preparation time, with larger benefits observed for children and older adults. Adults benefited to a greater extent than children when the interval between the response to one task and the cue indicating which task to perform next was lengthened, which suggested faster decay of interference from the old task set for adults than for children. A series of hierarchical analyses indicated that the age-related variance in task-switching performance is independent, at least in part, from the age-related variance in other cognitive processes such as perceptual speed and working memory. The results are discussed in terms of the development and decline of executive control processes across the life span.     

Family myths in romantic fiction

Three types of myths frequently appearing in contemporary romantic fiction deal with traditional family values, spousal relationships, and love. Several myths belonging to each type are illustrated and analyzed. It is argued that by naturalizing some behaviors and idealizing others, romantic novels not only may indoctrinate their readers with a patriarchal ideology but also may inculcate upon them pathogenic family processes.     

Parental beliefs about managing sibling conflict

This study examined the correspondence between parents' beliefs about the most effective ways to manage sibling conflict and their responses to their children's spontaneous sibling conflicts. Eighty-eight 2-child, 2-parent families participated in 3 home sessions. Second-born children were 3-5 years old, and firstborn children were 2-4 years older. Parents' use of a particular conflict management strategy was based, in part, on their perception of how effective the strategy was and how well they could carry out the strategy. For example, mothers' use of child-centered strategies was predicted by their belief that parental control strategies were ineffective. Fathers' use of control strategies was predicted by their low confidence in enacting child-centered techniques. Although both mothers and fathers perceived child-centered and control strategies as more effective than passive nonintervention, parents engaged in passive nonintervention most often.     

Attentional capture and aging: implications for visual search performance and oculomotor control

Two studies examined potential age-related differences in attentional capture. Subjects were instructed to move their eyes as quickly as possible to a color singleton target and to identify a small letter located inside it. On half the trials, a new stimulus (i.e., a sudden onset) appeared simultaneously with the presentation of the color singleton target. The onset was always a task-irrelevant distractor. Response times were lengthened, for both young and old adults, whenever an onset distractor appeared, despite the fact that subjects reported being unaware of the appearance of the abrupt onset. Eye scan strategies were also disrupted by the appearance of the onset distractors. On about 40% of the trials on which an onset appeared, subjects made an eye movement to the task-irrelevant onset before moving their eyes to the target. Fixations close to the onset were brief, suggesting parallel programming of a reflexive eye movement to the onset and goal-directed eye movement to the target. Results are discussed in terms of age-related sparing of the attentional and oculomotor processes that underlie attentional capture.     

Object-based attentional selection and aging

The authors conducted 2 studies to examine potential age-related differences in object-based attentional selection. Participants were briefly presented with pairs of wrenches and were asked to make 1 response if both target properties (i.e., an open end and a hexagonal end) were present and another response if only a single target property was present in the display. The critical manipulation was whether the target properties were present on 1 wrench or distributed between 2 wrenches. Space-based models of selective attention predict no difference in performance between these conditions. However, object-based attentional selection models predict better performance when both target properties appear on a single object. The results from both of the studies were consistent with object-based models of attentional selection. Furthermore, both young and old adults showed similar performance effects, suggesting the object-based attentional selection is insensitive to normal aging.     

Cues to personality and health in the facial appearance of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)

Humans (Homo sapiens) and chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) can extract socially-relevant information from the static, non-expressive faces of conspecifics. In humans, the face is a valid signal of both personality and health. Recent evidence shows that, like humans, chimpanzee faces also contain personality information, and that humans can accurately judge aspects of chimpanzee personality relating to extraversion from the face alone (Kramer, King, and Ward, 2011). These findings suggest the hypothesis that humans and chimpanzees share a system of personality and facial morphology for signaling socially-relevant traits from the face. We sought to test this hypothesis using a new group of chimpanzees. In two studies, we found that chimpanzee faces contained health information, as well as information of characteristics relating to extraversion, emotional stability, and agreeableness, using average judgments from pairs of individual photographs. In a third study, information relating to extraversion and health was also present in composite images of individual chimpanzees. We therefore replicate and extend previous findings using a new group of chimpanzees and demonstrate two methods for minimizing the variability associated with individual photographs. Our findings support the hypothesis that chimpanzees and humans share a personality signaling system.     

What Is Legal Philosophy?

This article delineates some of the main issues that are debated by philosophers of law. It explores the connections between legal philosophy and other areas of philosophy, while also seeking to specify the distinctiveness of many of the concerns that have preoccupied philosophers of law. It illustrates its abstract points with examples focused on the separability of law and morality, the nature of the rule of law, the nature of rights, justifications for the imposition of punishment, and the identification of basic legal entitlements.