Priming in the attentional blink: Perception without awareness?

The attentional blink refers to a reduction in accuracy that occurs when observers are required to identify the second of two rapidly sequential targets. Even when the second target cannot be reported, however, it is still capable of priming the response to a subsequent related item. At issue in the present work was whether this priming is attributable mainly to conscious or unconscious processes. To answer this question, we used an exclusion procedure that permitted an assessment of the relative dominance of conscious and unconscious processes. The results showed that second targets that are identified incorrectly are nonetheless processed extensively outside of awareness. Moreover, this processing is sufficient to prime a subsequent response for at least 1 s after the onset of the prime.     

Demands,resources, and work ability: A cross-national examination of health care workers

Understanding work ability, with the goal of promoting it, is important for individuals as well as organizations. It is especially important to study work ability in health care workers, who face many work-related challenges that may threaten work ability. We studied various job demands, job resources, and interactions of demands and resources relating to work ability using the Job Demands–Resources model as a framework. Acute care health care workers from six nations (US, Australia, UK, Brazil, Croatia, and Poland) completed a survey. Role demands related to work ability in the Australia sample only, and supervisor support related to work ability in the Australia sample only. Yet, high levels of supervisor support significantly moderated (buffered) negative relationships between physical demands and work ability in the US sample, along with negative relationships between role demands and work ability in both the Croatia and UK samples. Skill discretion related to work ability in every nation sample, and therefore appears to be particularly important to work ability perceptions. In addition, skill discretion moderated (buffered) a negative relationship between role demands and work ability in the Australia sample. We therefore recommend that interventions to help preserve or improve work ability target this important job resource.     

Frankfurt versus Frankfurt: a new anti-causalist dawn

There is an important anomaly to the causalist/compatibilist paradigm in the philosophy of action and free will. This anomaly, which to my knowledge has gone unnoticed so far, can be found in the philosophy of Harry Frankfurt. Two of his most important contributions to the field – his influential counterexample to the Principle of Alternate Possibilities and his ‘guidance’ view of action – are incompatible. Frankfurt's counterexample to the Principle works only if we do not understand action as Frankfurt does in his guidance account. If, on the other hand, we understand agency in terms of the agent's guidance, then his counterexample to the Principle fails because, then, counterfactual scenarios of Frankfurt-type counterexamples are such that what happens does not count as the relevant agent's action. So Frankfurt-type counterexamples do not show that the agent could not have avoided acting as she did: so they fail to offer a scenario in which the agent is intuitively responsible even though she could not have avoided acting as she did. Therefore, Frankfurt-type counterexamples do not challenge the Principle, according to which ‘a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise’. The importance of this inconsistency goes far beyond the issue of coherence within Frankfurt's philosophy. I shall argue that this inconsistency represents an important anomaly within the causalist/compatibilist framework; so that we should start to seriously consider having to move on from the established paradigm.     

What clocks tell us about the neural correlates of spatial imagery

We review a series of experimental studies aimed at answering some critical questions about the neural basis of spatial imagery. Our group used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to explore the neural correlates of an online behaviourally controlled spatial imagery task without need for visual presentation—the mental clock task. Subjects are asked to imagine pairs of times that are presented acoustically and to judge at which of the two times the clock hands form the greater angle. The cortical activation elicited by this task was contrasted with that obtained during other visual, perceptual, verbal, and spatial imagery tasks in several block design studies. Moreover, our group performed an event‐related fMRI study on the clock task to investigate the representation of component cognitive processes in spatial imagery. The bulk of our findings demonstrates that cortical areas in the posterior parietal cortex (PPC), along the intraparietal sulcus, are robustly involved in spatial mental imagery and in other tasks requiring spatial transformations. PPC is bilaterally involved in different kinds of spatial judgement. Yet the degree to which right and left PPC are activated in different tasks is a function of task requirements. From event‐related fMRI data we obtained evidence that left and right PPC are activated asynchronously during the clock task and this could reflect their different functional role in subserving cognitive components of visuospatial imagery.     

A short‐term perceptual priming account of spacing effects in explicit cued‐memory tasks for unfamiliar stimuli

Memory for repeated items improves when presentations are spaced during study. This effect is found in explicit memory tasks using different types of material, different experimental paradigms, and in different subject populations. Two experiments are described where the spacing effect was assessed on a yes/no recognition memory task using words and nonwords as targets. The main results showed that changing the font between repeated occurrences of targets at study did not affect the spacing effect for words, even under shallow encoding conditions, but effectively removed the spacing effect with nonwords. In both experiments, the font manipulation was made between subjects, ruling out explanations in terms of differential attention to particular font conditions. These results provide further support for short‐term perceptual priming accounts of the spacing effect: Semantically‐based repetition priming affects memory for words; perceptual priming mechanisms affect memory for nonwords.     

Forgetting curves in long-term memory: evidence for a multistage model of retention.

An experimental study with 20 normal healthy young adult subjects was performed to evaluate the interaction of type of memory tasks, type of learning modalities, and length of acquisition/recall interval. Four different tasks were employed (serial learning, paired learning, rote learning, and visuolinguistic transfer), some requiring a single trial learning modality others a multitrial learning modality. Acquisition/recall intervals were immediate, intermediate (3 min), and delayed. The experimental design allowed for the comparison of effects from five different delayed recall intervals (2, 8, 12, 24, and 48 hr). Results demonstrated a specific interaction on learning rates due to different ceiling effects for the different types of memory tasks. Forgetting rates, on the other hand, demonstrated a specific effect due to type of memory tasks and learning modalities only for differences between immediate and intermediate recall. These differences remained stable during the longer intervals and were not affected by length of interval. A multistage composition of long-term retention was suggested to explain these results, and a practical indication to build experimental procedures to study memory in the clinical field was evidenced.