Decoupling stimulus duration from brightness in metacontrast masking: data and models

A brief target that is visible when displayed alone can be rendered invisible by a trailing stimulus (metacontrast masking). It has been difficult to determine the temporal dynamics of masking to date because increments in stimulus duration have been invariably confounded with apparent brightness (Bloch's law). In the research reported here, stimulus luminance was adjusted to maintain constant brightness across all durations. Increasing target duration yielded classical U-shaped masking functions, whereas increasing mask duration yielded monotonic decreasing functions. These results are compared with predictions from 6 theoretical models, with the lateral inhibition model providing the best overall fit. It is tentatively suggested that different underlying mechanisms may mediate the U-shaped and monotonic functions obtained with increasing durations of target and mask, respectively.     

Selecting the Right Tool For the Job

There are competing ethical concerns when it comes to designing any clinical research study. Clinical trials of possible treatments for Ebola virus are no exception. If anything, the competing ethical concerns are exacerbated in trying to find answers to a deadly, rapidly spreading, infectious disease. The primary goal of current research is to identify experimental therapies that can cure Ebola or cure it with reasonable probability in infected individuals. Pursuit of that goal must be methodologically sound, practical and consistent with prevailing norms governing human subjects research. Some maintain that only randomized controlled trials (RCTs) with a placebo or standard-of-care arm can meet these conditions. We maintain that there are alternative trial designs that can do so as well and that sometimes these are preferable to RCTs.     

Perceptual distinctiveness produces long-lasting priming of pop-out

Maljkovic and Nakayama (1994) demonstrated memory influences in singleton search from one trial to the next, an effect they termed priming of pop-out (PoP). This effect was described as resulting from the persistence of an implicit memory trace, the influence of which could be observed for around five to eight subsequent trials. The seemingly short-lived nature of this priming effect has been attributed to decay of the underlying memory representation that occurs when attention is directed to intervening search items, even when such items are perceptually dissimilar from the search trials upon which PoP is measured (Maljkovic & Nakayama, 2000). The present study reexamines the role of perceptual similarity as a mechanism of interference by examining the influence on PoP of rare search trials that were perceptually distinct with respect to the other, common trials. Long-lasting (n − 16) PoP was observed for rare trials that were composed of distinct target/distractor colors, suggesting that PoP can be observed across at least twice as many trials as has previously been reported. Thus, the time span across which PoP can be measured depends heavily on the nature of the intervening search displays, a result that must be accommodated by current theoretical accounts of PoP.     

Stereotyped connotations of masculine and feminine names

This study was designed to provide a basis to understand better antifeminine stereotyped attitudes that occur in association with a stimulus no more informative about a person than her first name. College students, mostly freshmen and sophomores, ascribed connotative meanings to common and uncommon masculine and feminine first names while imagining either real or ideal persons. The results from 48 subjects disclosed that the semantic dimension of potency (e.g., strength and bravery) is likely to be a fundamentally important connotation associated more with masculine names than with feminine names. Two findings very much supported this conclusion. Thus, the potency dimension was the only one of five dimensions of semantic meaning that: (a) yielded any masculine-feminine difference in the ideal condition, and (b) showed a disfavorable connotation for feminine names in comparison to masculine names in either the real or ideal condition.     

Subjective past, present, and future fit: effects on anxiety depression, and other indicators of well-being

Hypotheses were tested regarding the effects of subjective current, retrospected, and anticipated person-environment fit on affective and somatic strain and well-being. Two-hundred seven university students preparing for annual academic examinations at an Indian university completed self-administered questionnaires measuring parameters of the hypotheses. A distinction was made between cognitive (e.g., meeting demands for intelligence, good memory) and motivational (e.g., being able to muster the effort) fit. Cognitive poor fit had a greater effect on predicting high levels of strain across all time frames but did best in the past and current frames. Motivational poor fit had its greatest effect on strain when poor fit dealt with anticipated or current fit. These findings are discussed in terms of hypotheses, which suggest that the more subjectively uncontrollable a dimension of fit, the more salient it is in the past time frame, whereas the more subjectively controllable the dimension, the more salient it is in the future time frame.     

Effects of age, speed of processing, and working memory on comprehension of sentences with relative clauses

Two hundred participants, 50 in each of four age ranges (19-29, 30-49, 50-69, 70-90) were tested for working memory, speed of processing, and the processing of sentences with relative clauses. In Experiment 1, participants read four sentence types (cleft subject, cleft object, subject-subject, subject-object) in a word-by-word, non-cumulative, self-paced reading task and made speeded plausibility judgments about them. In Experiment 2, participants read two types of sentences, one of which contained a doubly center embedded relative clause. Older participants' comprehension was less accurate and there was age-related slowing of online processing times in all but the simplest sentences, which increased in syntactically complex sentences in Experiment 1. This pattern suggests an age-related decrease in the efficiency of parsing and interpretation. Slower speed of processing and lower working memory were associated with longer online processing times only in Experiment 2, suggesting that task-related operations are related to general speed of processing and working memory. Lower working memory was not associated with longer reading times in more complex sentences, consistent with the view that general working memory is not critically involved in online syntactic processing. Longer online processing at the most demanding point in the most demanding sentence was associated with better comprehension, indicating that it reflects effective processing under some certain circumstances. However, the poorer comprehension performance of older individuals indicates that their slower online processing reflects inefficient processing even at these points.