The effect of cleft sentence structures on attention

Summary The frequency of correct recognition of agent and patient concepts as a function of agent and patient cleft sentence structures was studied. It was expected that the presentation of agent sentences would lead to a better recognition of the concept of agent than of the concept of patient. Such a different recognition performance should, however, not be found under the influence of patient sentences. These expectations were studied in an experiment in which the Ss first saw a sentence which was followed after 5 seconds by a pictorial representation of the agent and patient concepts. After the subjects had seen 12 such sentence-picture-pairs they were shown each concept individually, together with three distractors in a recognition test. The expectations were confirmed by the results.Our thanks are due to T.E. Scott M.A. for help in preparing the English text.     

Stimulus dimensions or stimulus aspects

Summary The questionableness of geometric models of stimulus similarity has led to the development of an alternative approach by Tversky which makes no dimensional or metric assumptions. Rather, stimuli are described as sets of qualitative stimulus aspects and stimulus similarity as a function of common and non-common aspects. According to Restle's model of stimulus similarity, however, the perception of stimuli of a categorial nature can be organized along dimensions because stimulus aspects form dimensions under certain conditions. The present study supports the empirical validity of this assumption. Further it is suggested that contrary to the present opinion quantitative stimulus characteristics are probably not perceived as dimensions in the sense of the geometric models but only dimensions as described in the Restle model.     

Embodied Cognition,affects and language comprehension

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - Our main considerations take as a starting point the educational policy demand for a model of competence of text comprehension, which should make it...     

Author Correction: Supervaluation-Style Truth Without Supervaluations

Journal of Philosophical Logic - The original version of the article unfortunately contained a mistake. In the Acknowledgments section of the original version of the article, the grant number of...     

Feeling time in nature: The influence of directed and undirected attention on time awareness

In the present study, we examined the impact of the interaction of environmental and task-induced attentional focus on time perception, specifically awareness of the time flow. We tested 48 participants in either a natural or urban setting over three 25- to 35-min sessions. We manipulated the within-subjects factor task by means of two tasks—one requiring directed attention on the task itself, the other undirected attention on the environment—alongside a control condition with no specific task. We measured time awareness, passage of time judgments, felt time judgments, and estimated time as dependent variables. For time awareness, we found an interaction between environment and task: in the natural environment, only a task requiring directed attention reduced time awareness; whereas, in the urban environment, both tasks reduced time awareness compared to the control condition. The results suggest that natural environments increase time awareness unless we focus our attention on a task.     

Indicators of Affect Dynamics: Structure,Reliability, and Personality Correlates

Researchers are increasingly interested in the affect dynamics of individuals for describing and explaining personality and psychopathology. Recently, the incremental validity of more complex indicators of affect dynamics (IADs; e.g. autoregression) has been called into question (Dejonckheere et al., 2019), with evidence accumulating that these might convey little unique information beyond mean level and general variability of emotions. Our study extends the evidence for the construct validity of IADs by investigating their redundancy and uniqueness, split-half reliability based on indices from odd-numbered and even-numbered days, and association with big five personality traits. We used three diverse samples that assessed daily and momentary emotions, including community participants, individuals with personality pathology, and their significant others (total N = 1192, total number of occasions = 51 278). Mean and variability of affects had high reliability and distinct nomological patterns to big five personality traits. In contrast, more complex IADs exhibited substantial redundancies with mean level and general variability of emotions. When partialing out these redundancies by using residual variables, some of the more complex IADs had acceptable reliability, but only a few of these showed incremental associations with big five personality traits, indicating that IADs have limited validity using the current assessment practices. © 2020 The Authors. European Journal of Personality published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of European Association of Personality Psychology     

Face viewing behavior predicts multisensory gain during speech perception

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - Visual information from the face of an interlocutor complements auditory information from their voice, enhancing intelligibility. However, there are large...