Symbolic control of attention: Tracking its temporal dynamics

Three experiments examined the temporal dynamics of the impact of symbols with task-irrelevant spatial meanings on attentional control. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants were color-cued to report the first letter they saw in the left or right of two parallel letter streams. The cue appeared in the shape of an arrow pointing to the target stream (compatible) or to the other stream (incompatible). Incompatible arrows delayed letter selection; that is, participants reported later-appearing letters and made more errors. In Experiment 3, the target stream was cued in advance, and yet, incompatible symbols delayed target selection. These findings suggest that the irrelevant meaning of symbolic stimuli can still penetrate and bias attentional top-down control, an observation that challenges available control theories.     

Detecting and identifying response-compatible stimuli

Previous work indicates that action-control processes influence perceptual processes: The identification probability of a left- or right-pointing arrow is reduced when it appears during the execution of a compatible left-right-key press (Müsseler & Hommel, in press). The present study addresses the question of whether this effect would also be observed in a detection task—that is, with judgments that do not require discriminating between left- and right-pointing arrows. Indeed, we found comparable effects in both the identification task and the detection task. This outcome is interpreted within a commoncoding framework, which holds that stimulus processing and action control operate on the same codes.     

Visual-manual commonality in size judgments

Visual-manual commonality was studied in terms of commonality of process and commonality of achievement. Fifty-four Ss madelarge-small categorical judgments about a set of stimuli presented in counterbalanced order through both the visual modality and the haptic, touch, or kinesthetic modality. Using a linear discriminant function model, analyses of the several visual-manual pairings were made on the basis of intra-S absolute differences in the weighting of the physical dimensions (process) and the degree of category separation (achievement). A correlational analysis revealed the independence of these measures, and analyses of variance revealed greater visual-haptic commonality for weighting systems and similar visual-haptic and visual-touch commonality for category separation. The results were interpreted in terms of similarities and differences in information gathering and processing characteristics.     

Die Bindungstheorie und ihre Relevanz für die Psychotherapie

Zusammenfassung W?hrend im ersten Teil der übersicht über die Relevanz der Bindungstheorie Grundlagen und Methoden der Bindungsforschung skizziert wurden, werden nun die m?glichen Implikationen der Theorie für die Psychotherapie und Psychosomatik er?rtert. überlegungen zur allgemeinen klinischen Relevanz und zum Verh?ltnis der Bindungstheorie zur Psychoanalyse bilden die Basis für die Darstellung konkreter Anwendungen von Ergebnissen der Bindungsforschung in der therapeutischen Praxis. Es folgen zusammenfassende Darstellungen von Untersuchungen, die sich mit der Bedeutung von Bindungscharakteristika für die Entwicklung psychosomatischer St?rungen und die Krankheits- bzw. Stre?verarbeitung befassen sowie von Studien, in denen Bindungscharakteristika psychischen St?rungen zugeordnet wurden. Schlie?lich wird die Bedeutung der Theorie für die Psychotherapie und die Psychotherapieforschung dargestellt.      

National glorification and attachment differentially predict support for intergroup conflict resolution: Scrutinizing cross-country generalizability

Research on national identity distinguishes between national glorification and attachment. We tested whether glorification and attachment differentially predicted support for military and diplomatic conflict resolution strategies (CRS) in response to international conflicts. Using data collected in seven countries (Australia, United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Israel, China; total N = 1784), we investigated whether glorification and attachment can be equivalently measured (using tests of measurement invariance) and whether their relationships with CRS were generalizable across countries. The results revealed metric, but not scalar, measurement invariance of the two-factor structure of national identification across six countries, excluding China. Among these six countries, glorification predicted more support for military CRS, whereas attachment predicted more support for diplomatic CRS. Our study is novel in scrutinizing the cross-cultural generalizability of the bi-dimensional model of national identification. Implications for studying national identification and intergroup conflict cross-culturally are discussed.     

Selection and consolidation of objects and actions

Response selection bottleneck models attribute performance costs under dual-task conditions to the human inability to select more than one response at a time. Consistent with this claim Pashler (1991) found that carrying out a speeded manual choice reaction time (RT) task does not impair the unspeeded report of a cued visual target from a masked display. In contrast, Jolicoeur and DellAcqua (1999, Experiment 2) observed pronounced interference between a speeded manual choice RT task and the unspeeded report of a small number of visually presented letters, a finding they attributed to resource sharing between response selection and stimulus consolidation. We demonstrate that comparable costs are obtained with the same task combination used by Pashler (1991) if only task order is reversed—a manipulation that is likely to increase the necessity of consolidating the target stimulus into working memory. We also found that these costs are not diminished if the location of the target to be reported is cued in advance (reducing demands on spatial focusing) and that they do not vary with the number of target features to be reported. These findings support a consolidation account of costs in dual-task performance.     

Psychosomatische und psychotherapeutische Probleme in der Frauenheilkunde und Geburtshilfe

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

What do we learn from binding features? Evidence for multilevel feature integration

Four experiments were conducted to investigate the relationship between the binding of visual features (as measured by their aftereffects on subsequent binding) and the learning of feature-conjunction probabilities. Both binding and learning effects were obtained, but they did not interact. Interestingly, (shape-color) binding effects disappeared with increasing practice, presumably because of the fact that only 1 of the features involved was relevant to the task. However, this instability was only observed for arbitrary, not highly overlearned combinations of simple geometric features and not for real objects (colored pictures of a banana and strawberry), where binding effects were strong and resistant to practice. These findings suggest that learning has no direct impact on the strength or resistance of bindings or on speed with which features are bound; however, learning does affect the amount of attention particular feature dimensions attract, which again can influence which features are considered in binding.     

Psy-BaDo

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

The cognitive representation of action: Automatic integration of perceived action effects

Actions have been assumed to be cognitively represented by codes of relevant action features. Six experiments investigated whether irrelevant action features — conditioned response-contingent auditory events — are also coded and integrated into action codes. Subjects responded to visual stimuli by pressing a left- versus right-hand button or by touching a single key once versus twice. Responses produced certain action effects: tones on the left versus the right or tones of low versus high pitch. After subjects had some practice, an inducing stimulus was presented together with the reaction stimulus; this inducing stimulus shared features with the action effect of the correct or incorrect response. If action effects were integrated into action codes, inducing stimuli should activate or prime the associated response. Indeed, substantial effects of correspondence or compatibility between inducing stimuli and irrelevant action effects were found in a variety of tasks. Results are interpreted as evidence for an automatic integration of information about action effects and taken as support of an action-concept model of action-effect integration and stimulus-response compatibility.