Olfactory–Visual Congruence Effects Stable Across Ages: Yellow Is Warmer When It Is Pleasantly Lemony

This study aimed to examine the age-related differences in the olfactory–visual cross-correspondences and the extent to which they are moderated by the odors pleasantness. Sixty participants aged from 20- to 75- years (young, middle-aged and older adults) performed a priming task to explore the influence of six olfactory primes (lemon, orange, rose, thyme, mint and fish) on the categorization (cool vs. warm) of six subsequent color targets (yellow, orange, pink, malachite green, grass-green, and blue-gray). We tested mixed effects models. Response times were regressed on covariates models using both fixed effects (Groups of age, olfactory Pleasantness and multimodal Condition) and cross-random effects (Subject, Color and Odor). The random effects coding for Odor (p < .001) and Color (p = .001) were significant. There was a significant interaction effect ( p= .004) between Condition × Pleasantness, but not with Groups of age. The compatibility effect (i.e., when odors and colors were congruent, the targets processing were facilitated) was as much enhanced as the olfactory primes were pleasant. Cross-correspondences between olfaction and vision may be robust in aging. They should be considered alongside spatiotemporal but also emotional congruency.     

Heidegger and the Supposition of a Single,Objective World

Christina Lafont has argued that the early Heidegger's reflections on truth and understanding are incompatible with ‘the supposition of a single objective world’. This paper presents her argument, reviews some responses that the existing Heidegger literature suggests (focusing, in particular, on work by John Haugeland), and offers what I argue is a superior response. Building on a deeper exploration of just what the above ‘supposition’ demands (an exploration informed by the work of Bernard Williams and Adrian Moore), I argue that a crucial assumption that Lafont and Haugeland both accept must be rejected, namely, that different ‘understandings of Being’ can be viewed as offering ‘rival perspectives’ on a common subject‐matter. I develop this case by drawing on an alternative account of what a Heideggerian ‘understanding of Being’ might be like.     

Acting knowingly: effects of the agent's awareness of an opportunity on causal attributions

According to difference-based (e.g. counterfactual/covariational) models of causal judgement, the epistemic state of the agent should not affect judgements of cause. Four experiments examined opportunity chains in which a physical event (distal cause) enabled a subsequent proximal cause to produce an outcome. All four experiments showed that when the proximal cause was a human action, it was judged as more causal if the agent was aware of his opportunity than if he was not or if the proximal cause was a physical event. The first two experiments showed that these preferences could not be explained in terms of differences in perceived conditional probability (whether from the observer's or the agent's point of view), social controllability or perceptions of the causal sequence as forming a single unit. The third experiment showed that awareness affected the perceived deliberateness with which the action brought the outcome about but not its perceived voluntariness. The fourth experiment showed that when the outcome was intended, the perceived deliberateness of the agent's action was a plausible mediator of the effect of awareness of opportunity on causal preference. We conclude that awareness of the opportunity allows inferences about the deliberate production of the outcome when the action is voluntary, which in turn influence causal judgements.     

Mechanisms of developmental change in infant categorization

Computational models are tools for testing mechanistic theories of learning and development. Formal models allow us to instantiate theories of cognitive development in computer simulations. Model behavior can then be compared to real performance. Connectionist models, loosely based on neural information processing, have been successful in capturing a range of developmental phenomena, in particular on-line within-task category learning by young infants. Here we describe two new models. One demonstrates how age dependent changes in neural receptive field sizes can explain observed changes in on-line category learning between 3 and 10 months of age. The other aims to reconcile two conflicting views of infant categorization by focusing on the different task requirements of preferential looking and manual exploration studies. A dual-memory hypothesis posits that within-task category learning that drives looking time behaviors is based on a fast-learning memory system, whereas categorization based on background experience and assessed by paradigms requiring complex motor behavior relies on a second, slow-learning system. The models demonstrate how emphasizing the mechanistic causes of behaviors leads to discovery of deeper, more explanatory accounts of learning and development.     

Short-term forgetting without interference

In the 1st reported experiment, we demonstrate that auditory memory is robust over extended retention intervals (RIs) when listeners compare the timbre of complex tones, even when active or verbal rehearsal is difficult or impossible. Thus, our tones have an abstract timbre that resists verbal labeling, they differ across trials so that no "standard" comparison stimulus is built up, and the spectral change to be discriminated is very slight and therefore does not shift stimuli across verbal categories. Nonetheless, performance in this nonverbal immediate memory task was better at short (1-, 2-, or 4-s) than long (8-, 16-, or 32-s) RIs, an outcome predicted by temporal distinctiveness theory whereby at long RIs, tones are closer in time to tones on previous trials. We reject this account in the 2nd experiment, where we demonstrate that the ratio of RI to intertrial interval makes absolutely no difference to performance. We suggest that steady forgetting is consistent with a psychoacoustically derived conception of an auditory memory (the timbre memory model) that embodies time-based forgetting in the absence of feature-specific interference.     

Predicting Well-Being From Personality in Adolescents and Older Adults

The relationship between personality and well-being is dynamic and therefore should be examined within aging perspective. In study presented here we compared the prediction of well-being from personality in two samples?C223 adolescents attending high-school (16?C19?years; M?=?16.94, SD?=?0.51) and 134 older adults (54?C90?years; M?=?77.20, SD?=?7.39) living in retirement home or at home. Different aspects of well-being were included in the study. Subjective well-being was measured with Index of Well-Being, but also self-esteem and loneliness were included as measures of psychological well-being. Personality (measured with FFPI; Hendriks et al. in Pers Individ Dif 27:307?C325, 1999) significantly predicted indicators of well-being (Self-Esteem, Loneliness and Index of Well-Being) in both samples, with emotional stability and extraversion as most pronounced predictors. Personality explained more variance of well-being in adolescents than in older adults, and more variance in eudaimonic than hedonic aspects of well-being.     

Biases in evaluation of neutral words due to motor compatibility effect

This study aims to demonstrate the effect of action fluency on emotional evaluation, specifically to show that neutral words can be evaluated positively or negatively depending on motor activity and evaluative setting. Right-handers naturally tend to associate positive (negative) valence to the right (left) part of space (Casasanto, 2009). We extend these associations to lateralized behaviors by studying the combined effect of motor fluency of lateral arm movements and the evaluative scale on the subjective evaluation of neutral words. Three experiments evidenced that, for right-handers, the realization of fluent rightward arm movements and the use of an evaluative scale congruent with their valence/laterality associations (left negative, right positive) led to a positive evaluation of neutral words, while non-fluent leftward movements and an incongruent scale led to a negative evaluation. This study demonstrates that emotion–action associations are experience-based, and influenced by functional and situational constraints.     

Dissociating mental transformations and visuo‐spatial storage in working memory: Evidence from representational neglect

A study is reported of visuo‐spatial working memory in two individuals suffering from a cognitive deficit known as unilateral spatial neglect, and seven healthy control participants. Both patients have difficulties reporting details on the left side of imaged representations, and one has an additional difficulty with perceptual input to the left of his body midline. All participants were asked to report the location and identity of objects presented in novel 2 × 2 arrays that were either present throughout or were described orally by the experimenter, with no visual input. On half of the trials, the report was to be made from the opposite perspective, requiring 180 degree mental rotation of the mentally represented array. The patients show an impaired ability to report details from the presented or the imagined left, but had no difficulty with mental rotation. Results point to a clear separation between the processes of perception and those of visuo‐spatial working memory. Results also suggest that the patients might be suffering from damage to the system used for holding visuo‐spatial representations rather than a difficulty with attending to elements of that representation.     

New insights on eye blindness and hand sight: Temporal constraints of visuo-motor networks

Pioneer experiments on saccadic suppression have shown that this effect is not followed by motor disorientation: Conscious perception of a target displacement can be dissociated from correct manual target reaching. It has subsequently been demonstrated that movement corrections with the same latency and spatial characteristics can be produced in conditions allowing perceptual awareness of perturbation of a target as in condition inducing saccadic suppression. In addition to the qualitative dissociation between motor performance and conscious awareness, quantitative temporal dissociations in action can be observed by manipulating different features of the visual target. When the target of an ongoing simple action is perturbed, a temporal advantage is found for responses to perturbations of location relative to colour and shape. Furthermore, there seems to be a temporal advantage for automatic motor corrections made in response to a target displacement as compared to other responses (other ongoing movement adjustments, movement interruption, conditional motor response such as pressing a key, verbal response, delayed matching-to-sample tasks). Thus, this paper reviews evidence for the fact that the temporal characteristics of any given response to a stimulus are dependent both on the sensory processes and on the type of response generated. Accordingly, identification responses (such as verbal report) to a visual stimulus are much slower than motor corrections of an ongoing movement in response to a target location change because of different processing times of the stimulus features (“What” compared to “Where”) and of the response itself (“What” compared to “How”). The existence of two continua (What/Where and What/How) is proposed between these two extreme stimulus- response combinations. This model may be a useful framework to better understand visuo-motor transformations and the network of connections between visual and motor areas.