Privileged Access by Irrelevant Speech to Short-term Memory: The Role of Changing State

Memory for visually presented items is impaired by speech that is played as an irrelevant background. The paper presents the view that changing state of the auditory material is an important prerequisite for this disruption. Four experiments studied the effects of sounds varying in complexity in an attempt to establish which features of changing state in the auditory signal lead to diminished recall. Simple unvarying or repetitive speech sounds were not sufficient to induce the irrelevant speech effect (Experiment 1): in addition, simple analogues of speech, possessing regular or irregular envelopes and using a range of carriers, failed to imitate the action of speech (Experiment 2). Variability of between-utterance phonology in the irrelevant stream (Experiment 3) emerged as a crucial factor. Moreover, predictability of the syllable sequence did not reduce the degree of disruption (Experiment 4) suggesting that supra-syllabic characteristics of the speech are of little importance. The results broadly support the idea that disruption of short-term memory only occurs when the speech stream changes in state. It is argued that disruption occurs in memory when cues to serial order based on phonological representations of heard material interfere with the phonological codes of visual origin. It is suggested that cues to changing state of the speech input contaminate those associated with items of visual origin, which are already in a phonological store.     

Sender Demeanor: Individual Differences in Sender Believability Have a Powerful Impact on Deception Detection Judgments

Sender demeanor is an individual difference in the believability of message senders that is conceptually independent of actual honesty. Recent research suggests that sender demeanor may be the most influential source of variation in deception detection judgments. Sender demeanor was varied in five experiments (N = 30, 113, 182, 30, and 35) to create demeanor–veracity matched and demeanor–veracity mismatched conditions. The sender demeanor induction explained as much as 98% of the variance in detection accuracy. Three additional studies (N = 30, 113, and 104) investigated the behavioral profiles of more and less believable senders. The results document the strong impact of sender effects in deception detection and provide an explanation of the low‐accuracy ceiling in the previous findings.     

The First Sense: A Philosophical Study of the Sense of Touch

In this essay, I review Matthew Fulkerson's The First Sense: A Philosophical Study of the Sense of Touch. In this first philosophical book on the sense of touch, Fulkerson provides an account of the nature and content of tactual experience. Central to Fulkerson's view is the claim that exploratory action plays a fundamental role in touch. In this review, I put pressure on two of his arguments: (1) the argument that tactual experience is unisensory and (2) the argument that tactual experience does not depend on explicit bodily awareness.     

Implications of Teacher Life–Work Histories for Conceptualisations of ‘Care’: Narratives from Rural Zimbabwe

Schools are increasingly seen as key sites for support to HIV‐affected and other vulnerable children, and teachers are assigned the critical role of identifying and providing psychosocial support. Drawing on the life–work history narratives of 12 teachers in Zimbabwe, this paper explores the psychosocial processes underpinning teachers' conceptualisations of these caring roles. The influence of prolonged adversity, formative relationships, and broader patterns of social and institutional change in teacher identity formation processes speak to the complex and embodied nature of understandings of ‘care’. In such extreme settings teachers prioritise the material and disciplinary aspects of ‘care’ that they see as essential for supporting children to overcome hardship. This focus not only means that emotional support as envisaged in international policy is commonly overlooked, but also exposes a wider ideological clash about childrearing. This tension together with an overall ambivalence surrounding teacher identities puts further strain on teacher–student relationships. We propose the current trainings on providing emotional support are insufficient and that more active focus needs to be directed at support to teachers in relation with their students. © 2015 The Authors. Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.