The size of an attentional window modulates attentional capture by color singletons

Researchers have proposed that during visual search, a color singleton cannot capture attention in a bottom-up fashion (Jonides & Yantis, 1988). In the present study, we manipulated the size of the attentional window by asking participants to detect either a global (diffuse attention) or a local (focused attention) shape before starting the search for a nonsingleton target. We demonstrate that increasing the size of attentional window causes the observers to frequently orient to an irrelevant color singleton. We conclude that although the size of attentional window might be under a top-down control, within the attentional window, an irrelevant salient singleton can capture attention in a bottom-up fashion.     

The Use of Homework in Cognitive Behavior Therapy: Working with Complex Anxiety and Insomnia

Homework, or self-help, is an essential and required part of cognitive behavioral treatment. It offers several opportunities for the therapist to extend and increase therapy contact by having the patient “live” the therapy outside of the consulting room. It can also serve as a measure of the patient’s motivation for therapy or for change. Homework offers the patient an opportunity to practice what has been developed and discussed in the therapy session. By trying out new behaviors, new ideas, or new emotional responses, the patient can make “real” what has been an abstraction in the therapeutic dialogue. The homework becomes an opportunity for gathering data. Inasmuch as the homework grows “organically” from the session content, it is relevant and timely. Homework provides continuity between sessions. Rather than sessions being discrete moments in time, they are chained together by the homework from the previous session being included in the agenda for the subsequent session. The homework can be structured to involve significant others. This is essential in many therapeutic situations, and having the significant others involved can substantially aid in relapse prevention. Finally, effective homework helps to build therapeutic collaboration and afford the patient the opportunity for building self-efficacy. Using several case examples, this paper describes the functions and impediments to using homework in CBT.     

Sublexical frequency measures for orthographic and phonological units in German

Many recent studies have demonstrated the influence of sublexical frequency measures on language processing, or called for controlling sublexical measures when selecting stimulus material for psycholinguistic studies (Aichert & Ziegler, 2005). The present study discusses which measures should be controlled for in what kind of study, and presents orthographic and phonological syllable, dual unit (bigram and biphoneme) and single unit (letter and phoneme) type and token frequency measures derived from the lemma and word form corpora of the CELEX lexical database (Baayen, Piepenbrock, & Gulikers, 1995). Additionally, we present the SUBLEX software as an adaptive tool for calculating sublexical frequency measures and discuss possible future applications. The measures and the software can be downloaded at www.psychonomic.org.     

Aboutness and ontology: a modest approach to truthmakers

Philosophical Studies - Truthmaker theory has been used to argue for substantial conclusions about the categorial structure of the world, in particular that states of affairs are needed to play the...