When attention is intact in adults with ADHD

Is covert visuospatial attention—selective processing of information in the absence of eye movements—preserved in adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)? Previous findings are inconclusive due to inconsistent terminology and suboptimal methodology. To settle this question, we used well-established spatial cueing protocols to investigate the perceptual effects of voluntary and involuntary attention on an orientation discrimination task for a group of adults with ADHD and their neurotypical age-matched and gender-matched controls. In both groups, voluntary attention significantly improved accuracy and decreased reaction times at the relevant location, but impaired accuracy and slowed reaction times at irrelevant locations, relative to a distributed attention condition. Likewise, involuntary attention improved accuracy and speeded responses. Critically, the magnitudes of all these orienting and reorienting attention effects were indistinguishable between groups. Thus, these counterintuitive findings indicate that spatial covert attention remains functionally intact in adults with ADHD.     

The Role of Optimism,Social Constraints,Coping, and Cognitive Processing in Psychosocial Adjustment Among Breast Cancer Survivors

The social-cognitive processing model suggests that a socially constrained environment may impede adjustment to a chronic illness. The present study primarily investigated the mediating psychological pathways through which social constraints on cancer-related disclosure, low optimism, disengagement-oriented coping, and brooding could be associated with low levels of psychosocial adjustment. One hundred twenty-five female breast cancer survivors participated in a cross-sectional study. Path analysis was used to examine the proposed model. Low optimism, increased social constraints, and higher levels of brooding appeared to be risk factors for poor psychosocial adjustment to breast cancer. Disengagement-oriented coping and brooding partially mediated the relationship between social constraints and adjustment. Brooding totally mediated the relationship between disengagement-oriented coping and adjustment. The current findings provide support for the value of the social-cognitive processing model among breast cancer survivors. The mapping of psychological pathways of adjustment to breast cancer may have useful clinical implications for better adjustment outcomes.     

Systems Factorial Technology provides new insights on the other-race effect

The other-race effect refers to the difficulty of discriminating between faces from ethnic and racial groups other than one’s own. This effect may be caused by a slow, feature-by-feature, analytic process, whereas the discrimination of own-race faces occurs faster and more holistically. However, this distinction has received inconsistent support. To provide a critical test, we employed Systems Factorial Technology (Townsend & Nozawa in Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 39, 321–359, 1995), which is a powerful tool for analyzing the organization of mental networks underlying perceptual processes. We compared Taiwanese participants’ face discriminations of both own-race (Taiwanese woman) and other-race (Caucasian woman) faces according to the faces’ nose-to-mouth separation and eye-to-eye separation. We found evidence for weak holistic processing (parallel processing) coupled with the strong analytic property of a self-terminating stopping rule for own-race faces, in contrast to strong analytic processing (serial self-terminating processing) for other-race faces, supporting the holistic/analytic hypothesis.     

ELF: A new measure of response capture

Response capture is a widespread and extensively studied phenomenon, in particular in decision tasks involving response conflict. Its intensity is routinely quantified by conditional accuracy function (CAF). We argue that this method might be misleading, and propose an alternative approach, the error location function (ELF). While CAF provides the error rate by bins of reaction time (RT), ELF represents the share of total errors below each quantile of RT. We derive from ELF an index of response capture, the error location index (ELI), which represents the area below the ELF. Using simulations of computational models, we show that ELF and ELI specifically quantify variations in response capture. Finally, we illustrate the usefulness of ELF and ELI through experimental data and show that ELF and CAF can yield to contradictory conclusions.     

Recognition-induced forgetting does not occur for temporally grouped objects unless they are semantically related

Recent evidence has shown that practice recognizing certain objects hurts memories of objects from the same category, a phenomenon called recognition-induced forgetting. In all previous studies of this effect, the objects have been related by semantic category (e.g., instances of vases). However, the relationship between objects in many real-world visual situations stresses temporal grouping rather than semantic relations (e.g., a weapon and getaway car at a crime scene), and temporal grouping is thought to cluster items in models of long-term memory. The goal of the present study was to determine whether temporally grouped objects suffer recognition-induced forgetting. To this end, we implemented a modified recognition-induced forgetting paradigm in which the objects were temporally clustered at study. Across four experiments, we found that recognition-induced forgetting occurred only when the temporally clustered objects were also semantically related. We conclude by discussing how these findings relate to real-world vision and inform models of memory.     

The anchoring bias reflects rational use of cognitive resources

Cognitive biases, such as the anchoring bias, pose a serious challenge to rational accounts of human cognition. We investigate whether rational theories can meet this challenge by taking into account the mind’s bounded cognitive resources. We asked what reasoning under uncertainty would look like if people made rational use of their finite time and limited cognitive resources. To answer this question, we applied a mathematical theory of bounded rationality to the problem of numerical estimation. Our analysis led to a rational process model that can be interpreted in terms of anchoring-and-adjustment. This model provided a unifying explanation for ten anchoring phenomena including the differential effect of accuracy motivation on the bias towards provided versus self-generated anchors. Our results illustrate the potential of resource-rational analysis to provide formal theories that can unify a wide range of empirical results and reconcile the impressive capacities of the human mind with its apparently irrational cognitive biases.     

Determining informative priors for cognitive models

The development of cognitive models involves the creative scientific formalization of assumptions, based on theory, observation, and other relevant information. In the Bayesian approach to implementing, testing, and using cognitive models, assumptions can influence both the likelihood function of the model, usually corresponding to assumptions about psychological processes, and the prior distribution over model parameters, usually corresponding to assumptions about the psychological variables that influence those processes. The specification of the prior is unique to the Bayesian context, but often raises concerns that lead to the use of vague or non-informative priors in cognitive modeling. Sometimes the concerns stem from philosophical objections, but more often practical difficulties with how priors should be determined are the stumbling block. We survey several sources of information that can help to specify priors for cognitive models, discuss some of the methods by which this information can be formalized in a prior distribution, and identify a number of benefits of including informative priors in cognitive modeling. Our discussion is based on three illustrative cognitive models, involving memory retention, categorization, and decision making.     

Time-varying decision boundaries: insights from optimality analysis

The most widely used account of decision-making proposes that people choose between alternatives by accumulating evidence in favor of each alternative until this evidence reaches a decision boundary. It is frequently assumed that this decision boundary stays constant during a decision, depending on the evidence collected but not on time. Recent experimental and theoretical work has challenged this assumption, showing that constant decision boundaries are, in some circumstances, sub-optimal. We introduce a theoretical model that facilitates identification of the optimal decision boundaries under a wide range of conditions. Time-varying optimal decision boundaries for our model are a result only of uncertainty over the difficulty of each trial and do not require decision deadlines or costs associated with collecting evidence, as assumed by previous authors. Furthermore, the shape of optimal decision boundaries depends on the difficulties of different decisions. When some trials are very difficult, optimal boundaries decrease with time, but for tasks that only include a mixture of easy and medium difficulty trials, the optimal boundaries increase or stay constant. We also show how this simple model can be extended to more complex decision-making tasks such as when people have unequal priors or when they can choose to opt out of decisions. The theoretical model presented here provides an important framework to understand how, why, and whether decision boundaries should change over time in experiments on decision-making.     

Holistic face representation is highly orientation-specific

It has long been argued that face processing requires disproportionate reliance on holistic processing (HP), relative to that required for nonface object recognition. Nevertheless, whether the holistic nature of face perception is achieved via a unique internal representation or by the employment of an automated attention mechanism is still debated. Previous studies had used the face inversion effect (FIE), a unique face-processing marker, or the face composite task, a gold standard paradigm measuring holistic processing, to examine the validity of these two different hypotheses, with some studies combining the two paradigms. However, the results of such studies remain inconclusive, particularly pertaining to the issue of the two proposed HP mechanisms—an internal representation as opposed to an automated attention mechanism. Here, using the complete composite paradigm design, we aimed to examine whether face rotation yields a nonlinear or a linear drop in HP, thus supporting an account that face processing is based either on an orientation-dependent internal representation or on automated attention. Our results reveal that even a relatively small perturbation in face orientation (30 deg away from upright) already causes a sharp decline in HP. These findings support the face internal representation hypothesis and the notion that the holistic processing of faces is highly orientation-specific.     

Surprising depth cue captures attention in visual search

A substantial amount of evidence indicates that surprising events capture attention. The present study was primarily intended to investigate whether expectancy discrepant depth information also is able to capture attention immediately and—more specifically—whether cues that are relatively closer or farther differentially modulate behavior. For this purpose, participants had to identify one of two target letters in a search display. Stimulus positions were initially cued by uninformative placeholders. After half of the trials, the cue at the target position was suddenly and unexpectedly (critical trial) displayed closer to or farther from the observer. In line with previous research, both depth cues captured attention on their very first appearance. Performance in the critical trial was superior to the error rates in the trials without depth cue and was even above the performance in subsequent trials that included depth cue. This effect was only observed when the cue preceded the target by 400 ms. Using a shorter cue-stimulus interval of 100 ms, only a delayed improvement was observed, which denotes a typical feature of surprise capture. Moreover, response times were faster in trials comprising a depth cue, and this was already true for the critical trial. Apart from that, no other marked differences between near and far depth cues were observed. Therefore, the present results emphasize that surprising depth information indeed captures attention. However, in contrast to other perceptual tasks, search performance was not considerably influenced by relative position in depth.