Where perception meets memory: A review of repetition priming in visual search tasks

What we have recently seen and attended to strongly influences how we subsequently allocate visual attention. A clear example is how repeated presentation of an object’s features or location in visual search tasks facilitates subsequent detection or identification of that item, a phenomenon known as priming. Here, we review a large body of results from priming studies that suggest that a short-term implicit memory system guides our attention to recently viewed items. The nature of this memory system and the processing level at which visual priming occurs are still debated. Priming might be due to activity modulations of low-level areas coding simple stimulus characteristics or to higher level episodic memory representations of whole objects or visual scenes. Indeed, recent evidence indicates that only minor changes to the stimuli used in priming studies may alter the processing level at which priming occurs. We also review recent behavioral, neuropsychological, and neurophysiological evidence that indicates that the priming patterns are reflected in activity modulations at multiple sites along the visual pathways. We furthermore suggest that studies of priming in visual search may potentially shed important light on the nature of cortical visual representations. Our conclusion is that priming occurs at many different levels of the perceptual hierarchy, reflecting activity modulations ranging from lower to higher levels, depending on the stimulus, task, and context—in fact, the neural loci that are involved in the analysis of the stimuli for which priming effects are seen.     

Perceived collective efficacy to stop aggression at school: A validation of an Italian and a Swedish version of a scale for adolescents

Collective efficacy to stop peer aggression in the school context refers to adolescents’ beliefs about the capability of students and teachers in their school to work together to counteract aggressive behaviours among peers. This study presents the Italian and Swedish versions of a recently developed scale to measure the construct. Factorial structure and measurement invariance of the scale were assessed in two samples of adolescents aged 10–15 years. The findings support both a two-dimensional and a three-dimensional scale across gender and countries, demonstrating the importance of making distinctions between different forms of aggression when measuring collective efficacy to stop aggression. A one-dimensional scale was only supported in the Swedish sample. The results support the use of the Collective Efficacy to Stop Aggression scale with both Italian and Swedish adolescents.     

Behavior during cyberbullying episodes: Initial validation of a new self-report scale

Research on cyberbullying has been growing worldwide, with much of the focus on the characteristics of perpetrators and targets of cyberbullying. In recent years, increasing attention has been paid on bystanders of cyber-attacks. This study presents the Italian validation of a newly developed self-report scale that measures different forms of participation in cyberbullying, namely cyberbullying, cybervictimization, cyber-defending and cyber-passive bystanding. We used responses from 561 young adolescents (289 girls; mean age = 12 years, 1 month; SD = 9 months) attending middle schools in Italy. A 16-item scale was developed paralleling the content of an already existing scale that measures young adolescents’ behavior in traditional bullying. Confirmatory factor analysis supported the four-dimensional structure of the scale and the four subscale's scores showed acceptable levels of internal consistency. Multigroup analyses demonstrated full scalar invariance of the scale across gender groups. Finally, each behavior in the electronic context was positively correlated with its counterpart in the school context, suggesting certain stability across contexts. It is concluded that the scale may be a first, promising attempt to measure different youths’ behavior during cyberbullying episodes.