Using direct and indirect measures to study perception without awareness

Many studies directed at demonstrating perception without awareness have relied on the dissociation paradigm. Although the logic underlying this paradigm is relatively straightforward, definitive results have been elusive in the absence of any general consensus as to what constitutes an adequate measure of awareness. We propose an alternative approach that involves comparisons of the relative sensitivity of comparable direct and indirect indexes of perception. The only assumption required by the proposed approach is that the sensitivity of direct discriminations to relevant conscious information is greater than or equal to the sensitivity of comparable indirect discriminations. The proposed approach is illustrated through an evaluation of Avant and Thieman’s (1985) recent claim that an indirect measure of perception based on judgments of apparent visual duration provides a more sensitive indicator of perception than does a direct measure based on forced-choice recognition. Contrary to this claim, when direct and indirect indexes are measured under comparable conditions, an indirect measure based on judgments of perceived duration provides a less sensitive index of perceptual processing than do comparable direct measures. The proposed approach provides a general conceptual/methodological framework for using the dissociation paradigm in studies directed at establishing unconscious processes.     

Could an autonomous syntax module have evolved?

Darwinian evolution necessitates a contribution to reproductive fitness. Recent studies of aphasia and Parkinson's disease show that functional syntactic ability involves neural structures that also are involved in speech motor control and nonlinguistic cognition. The evolution or presence of an autonomous syntax module is, therefore, implausible.     

Remembering pictures: pleasure and arousal in memory.

Incidental memory performance for pictures that varied along the affective dimensions of pleasantness and arousal was assessed. For both an immediate and delayed (1 year later) free-recall task, only the arousal dimension had a stable effect on memory performance: Pictures rated as highly arousing were remembered better than low-arousal stimuli. This effect was corroborated in a speeded recognition test, in which high-arousal materials encoded earlier in the experiment produced faster reaction times than their low-arousal counterparts. Pleasantness affected reaction time decisions only for pictures not encoded earlier. These results suggest that whereas both the dimensions of pleasantness and arousal are processed at initial encoding, long-term memory performance is mainly affected by arousal.     

Wisdom-related knowledge in a life review task: age differences and the role of professional specialization.

The study adopts life review as an avenue to access wisdom-related knowledge and examines the contribution of age and type of professional specialization to individual differences in wisdom-related knowledge. Women from 2 age groups/cohorts (young, M = 32 years; old, M = 71 years) and different professional specializations (human services vs. nonhuman services) were asked to think aloud about the life review of a fictitious woman who was either young or old. Verbal protocols were scored on 5 wisdom-related criteria: factual and procedural knowledge about life, life-span contextualism, relativism of values, recognition, and management of uncertainty. Three major findings emerged. First, human-services professionals outperformed the control group. Second, old adults performed as well as young adults. Third, for older adults wisdom-related performance was enhanced by the match between their own age and the age of the fictitious character.     

Environmental context-dependent eyewitness recognition

The present study helped resolve the apparent conflict between many laboratory list-learning studies, which have not found environmental context-dependent recognition memory, and staged field studies (e.g. Malpass and Devine, 1981), whose results with ‘guided memory’ techniques suggest that eyewitness face recognition should depend upon environmental context reinstatement. It was found in two different experiments that, relative to testing in a new place, returning participants to the environment where a live staged event had occurred improved performance on identification of a confederate's face (i.e., hit rate). Although physical reinstatement improved identification performance in Experiment 1, mental reinstatement instructions to subjects tested in a new environment did not improve identification performance over an uninstructed group. The environmental reinstatement effect did not interact with test delay or confederate. In Experiment 2 it was found that environmental reinstatement improved accuracy (hit rate and foil identification rate) when the correct target was present in the test line-up, and that false identifications were not significantly affected by contextual manipulations when the correct target was absent from the line-up. The results provide an empirical basis for the hypothesis that returning to the scene of an event improves eyewitness face recognition.     

Suggestiveness in photospread line-ups: Similarity induces distinctiveness

The present research examined whether line-ups based on target (‘suspect’) face similarity are biased or suggestive. Four experiments are described in which subjects constructed photographic line-ups by selecting foils similar in appearance to a target. Later, another group of subjects who had not seen the faces before (mock witnesses) were asked to pick out the targets from the line-ups. All four experiments showed that mock witnesses selected the target significantly more often than expected by chance, thereby demonstrating suggestiveness. Three alternative line-up construction methods were also evaluated. In these methods, foil selection was based not only on target similarity but also on similarity with one or more of the other line-up faces. Results showed that alternative line-up targets were not selected significantly more often than chance, suggesting that bias was reduced. An overall analysis showed that the alternative line-ups were significantly less suggestive than target-based line-ups. The results indicate that foil selection procedures that incorporate foil-to-foil similarity produce fairer line-ups than those exclusively based on target similarity.