Contextual modulation of reading rate for direct versus indirect speech quotations

In human communication, direct speech (e.g., Mary said: “I’m hungry”) is perceived to be more vivid than indirect speech (e.g., Mary said [that] she was hungry). However, the processing consequences of this distinction are largely unclear. In two experiments, participants were asked to either orally (Experiment 1) or silently (Experiment 2, eye-tracking) read written stories that contained either a direct speech or an indirect speech quotation. The context preceding those quotations described a situation that implied either a fast-speaking or a slow-speaking quoted protagonist. It was found that this context manipulation affected reading rates (in both oral and silent reading) for direct speech quotations, but not for indirect speech quotations. This suggests that readers are more likely to engage in perceptual simulations of the reported speech act when reading direct speech as opposed to meaning-equivalent indirect speech quotations, as part of a more vivid representation of the former.     

Accounting for successful control of implicit racial bias: the roles of association activation, response monitoring, and overcoming bias

Individuals who are primarily internally motivated to respond without prejudice show less bias on implicit measures than individuals who are externally motivated or unmotivated to respond without prejudice. However, it is not clear why these individuals exhibit less implicit bias than others. We used the Quad model to examine motivation-based individual differences in three processes that have been proposed to account for this effect: activation of associations, overcoming associations, and response monitoring. Participants completed an implicit measure of stereotyping (Study 1) or racial attitudes (Study 2). Modeling of the data revealed that individuals who were internally (but not externally) motivated to respond without prejudice showed enhanced detection and reduced activation of biased associations, suggesting that these processes may be key to achieving unbiased responding.     

Early electro-cortical correlates of inspection time task performance

The concept of general intelligence (g) summarizes the well established finding that scores on separate cognitive tasks are positively correlated, indicating a trait common to many aspects of information processing. Inspection time is a well-established correlate of IQ, where those of a higher IQ can correctly identify a briefly presented stimulus with a greater level of accuracy than those of a lower IQ. This study used two age-matched samples, selected on the basis of their scores on Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices from the undergraduate population of Bangor University. In order to address the confound of inspection time and IQ of previous ITT-ERP research, each participant of the presented study performed an IT task with the same five levels of stimulus duration while undergoing 64-channel EEG recording. The high IQ group made significantly fewer errors at each level of stimulus duration and exhibited a significantly larger N1 response. N1 latency and other ERP components did not distinguish the two IQ groups. Given the specificity of ERP group differences to the N1, the results of the present study suggest that the link between IT performance and g is attributable to individual differences in directing attention to a spatial region.     

Truth Approximation, Social Epistemology, and Opinion Dynamics

This paper highlights some connections between work on truth approximation and work in social epistemology, in particular work on peer disagreement. In some of the literature on truth approximation, questions have been addressed concerning the efficiency of research strategies for approximating the truth. So far, social aspects of research strategies have not received any attention in this context. Recent findings in the field of opinion dynamics suggest that this is a mistake. How scientists exchange and take into account information about each others’ beliefs may greatly influence the accuracy and speed with which the scientific community as a whole approximates the truth. On the other hand, social epistemologists concerned with peer disagreement have so far neglected the question of how practices of responding to disagreements with peers fare with respect to the goal of approximating the truth. Again, work on opinion dynamics shows that this may be a mistake, and that how we ought to respond to disagreements with our peers may depend on the specific purposes of our investigations.     

On the stability of instability: Optimising the reliability of intra-subject variability of reaction times

While reaction times have been traditionally aggregated using measures of central tendency, interest in higher moments of the reaction time distribution, particularly intra-subject variability (ISV), has grown in recent years. However it is unclear to what extent individual differences in these higher moments are stable across time, reflecting trait-like features. The present study compares the reliability of a number of metrics for higher moments of the reaction time distribution on a battery of speeded tasks, and supplements these analyses with a Monte Carlo analysis of the go no-go task. The reliability of ISV is shown to be dependent on both the metric used and the number of trials used to calculate them. However, when using sufficient trials and appropriate metrics, ISV shows good test-retest and odd-even reliability. This study has important practical implications for the design and analysis of studies into ISV, as well as theoretical importance for the trait concept of ISV.     

The chronic psychosocial stress paradigm in male tree shrews: evaluation of a novel animal model for depressive disorders

To improve our knowledge of the causal mechanisms of stress-related disorders such as depression, we need animal models that mirror the situation in patients. One promising model is the chronic psychosocial stress paradigm in male tree shrews, which is based on the territorial behaviour of these animals that can be used to establish naturally occurring challenging situations under experimental control in the laboratory. Co-existence of two males in visual and olfactory contact leads to a stable dominant-subordinate relationship, with subordinates showing distinct stress-induced behavioural and neuroendocrine alterations that are comparable to the symptoms observed during episodes of depression in patients such as constantly elevated circulating glucocorticoid hormones due to a chronic hyperactivity of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. To elucidate whether the chronic psychosocial stress model in tree shrews besides its "face validity" for depression also has "predictive validity", we treated subordinate tree shrews with the tricyclic antidepressant clomipramine and found a time-dependent restoration of both endocrine and behavioural parameters. In contrast, the anxiolytic diazepam was ineffective. Although the chronic psychosocial stress model in tree shrews requires further validation, it has sufficient face, predictive, and construct validity to become an interesting non-rodent model for research on the etiology and pathophysiology of depression.     

Parametric coupling and generalized decoupling revealed by concurrent and successive isometric contractions of distal muscles

In two experiments we examined the hypothesis of transient parametric coupling during the specification of peak forces of isometric contractions produced by the left and right hand. In the first experiment participants had to produce bimanual contractions with same and different target forces as rapidly as possible in response to an auditory signal; target forces were cued visually with variable cueing intervals. At short cueing intervals reaction times were longer when different peak forces had to be specified than when same peak forces were cued, and this reaction-time difference declined as the cueing interval was increased. Independent of the cueing interval intermanual correlations of peak forces, rise times, and reaction times were smaller in conditions with different peak forces than in those with same peak forces. In the second experiment imperative signals for left-hand and right-hand contractions were separated in time. Target forces for the first response were cued with variable cueing intervals, while for the second response the cues were presented simultaneously with the second imperative signal. Reaction time of the second response was longer when target forces for the two successive responses were different rather than same, and this reaction-time difference declined when the delay of the second signal was increased as well as when the cueing interval for the first response became longer. These results are consistent with the hypothesis of a transient cross-talk between concurrent processes of peak-force specifications; in addition they indicate generalization of the decoupling required to specify different peak forces concurrently to the specification of temporal response characteristics and to processes of response initiation.     

Syntactic priming in English sentence production: categorical and latency evidence from an Internet-based study

To date, syntactic priming in sentence production has been investigated categorically, in terms of the probabilities of reusing particular syntactic structures. In this paper, we report a web-based replication of Pickering and Branigan (1998), Experiment 1, using a typed sentence completion paradigm that made it possible to record not only the responses made but also the response onset latency for each sentence completion. In conditions where priming occurred (as determined categorically), responses took less time when target completions were of the same type as preceding prime completions than when they differed. As well as validating Internet-based research by direct comparison with laboratory-based work, our findings strengthen the support for an architectural account of syntactic priming as envisaged by Pickering and Branigan.     

Temporal, but not spatial, context modulates a masked prime's effect on temporal order judgment, but not on response latency

Three experiments investigated a dissociation originally described by Neumann, Esselmann, and Klotz. Stimuli were geometric shapes, preceded by similar shapes that were masked by metacontrast. Each experiment consisted of three parts. In the reaction time (RT) part, participants saw an array of geometric shapes, one of which was marked by bars, and had to respond to the marked shape's position by pressing an appropriate button. A prime (a similar, but smaller stimulus) preceded either the marked or an unmarked stimulus. In the temporal order judgment (TOJ) part, the task was to judge the temporal order of the marked and the unmarked stimulus. In the detection part, detectability of the prime was tested. Although its detectability was zero or close to zero, the prime affected both RT and the apparent onset as measured by TOJ. The effect on RT was significantly larger than the effect on TOJ (Exp. 1). Increasing the spatial context (number of non-target stimuli in the display) did not affect this pattern (Exp. 2). By contrast, reducing the temporal context (range of stimulus onset asynchronies) abolished the prime's effect in the TOJ task, although the prime affected RT under identical conditions. It is concluded that partially different mechanisms mediate the prime's effect in the two tasks and that the effect of stimulus context on TOJ found in the Neumann et al. study was due to temporal, not spatial context. Received: 17 December 1997 / Accepted: 15 December 1998