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.     

Coping with threat and memory for ambiguous information: testing the repressive discontinuity hypothesis

Two studies examined the influence of coping dispositions (repression, sensitization, and nondefensiveness) and anxiety on the encoding and memory representation of ambiguous threat-related stimuli. In Study 1, memory was tested shortly after encoding. Study 2 contrasted immediate and delayed testing. Repressers showed evidence of "mixed" affective reactions to ambiguous stimuli at encoding, accompanied by weak memory representation of potentially threatening implications of these stimuli. In contrast, sensitizers and anxious individuals manifested a processing bias in favor of threatening implications of ambiguous stimuli. Influences of coping on memory were most pronounced for delayed testing. Anxiety influences on memory were weak. An expectancy-based account of individual differences in processing ambiguous stimuli is discussed.     

Comparing learning environments in U.S. military officer education: a brief replication

A 2003 comparative study on learning environments at two military officer training sites was replicated using different methodology. Satisfaction with learning environment and with administrative inprocessing was higher at Fort Leavenworth than at Fort Dix. Most students expressed a preference for Fort Leavenworth. Satisfaction with institutional support and educational facilities appears to influence perceived satisfaction with a learning environment and with preference for training sites among senior military officers.     

Placing the perceptual-cognitive approach in perspective

Although some features of the "psychological approach" are compelling, its immediate impact as a theoretical framework appears to be limited by somewhat ambiguous key constructs and the lack of appropriate placement vis-a-vis extant conceptual views.     

Morphological family size in a morphologically rich language: the case of Finnish compared with Dutch and Hebrew

Finnish has a very productive morphology in which a stem can give rise to several thousand words. This study presents a visual lexical decision experiment addressing the processing consequences of the huge productivity of Finnish morphology. The authors observed that in Finnish words with larger morphological families elicited shorter response latencies. However, in contrast to Dutch and Hebrew, it is not the complete morphological family of a complex Finnish word that codetermines response latencies but only the subset of words directly derived from the complex word itself. Comparisons with parallel experiments using translation equivalents in Dutch and Hebrew showed substantial cross-language predictivity of family size between Finnish and Dutch but not between Finnish and Hebrew, reflecting the different ways in which the Hebrew and Finnish morphological systems contribute to the semantic organization of concepts in the mental lexicon.     

Visual masking during the attentional blink: tests of the object substitution hypothesis

When 2 masked targets are presented in a rapid sequence, correct identification of the 1st hinders identification of the 2nd. Visual masking of the 2nd target plays a critical role during this 2nd-target deficit, or "attentional blink" (AB). The object substitution hypothesis (B. Giesbrecht & V. Di Lollo, 1998) predicts that late-stage visual processes involved in object substitution mediate masking of the 2nd target during AB, whereby stronger masking should produce a more severe deficit. Six experiments are presented, together testing this hypothesis. Although masking by object substitution was observed, it did not interact with the AB. An alternative hypothesis is proposed stating that mostly early-stage visual processes mediate the masking effects that are critical to the AB.     

Interpreting past religious discrimination today

Much of modern western law now presupposes opposition to discrimination based on race, religion, sex, national origin, and other factors. However, ancient religious Scriptures may have sanctioned certain types of discrimination. Whether those who are inclined to accept literal interpretations of their Scriptures will condone certain forms of discrimination could be evaluated to contrast the effects of modernization versus religious indoctrination on various kinds of prejudice.