Genre of Music and Lyrical Content: Expectation Effects

This study was designed to examine whether people's expectations differ regarding how music lyrics affect individual behavior as a function of music genre. Because legislative attention and media publicity have been biased against certain types of popular music (i.e., heavy metal and rap), the authors expected that those genres of music would be viewed more negatively than other genres of popular music, for which there has been little or no negative publicity (i.e., pop and country). Participants (N = 160 college students) rated their perceptions of how the lyrical content of a song would affect listeners' behavior. The authors presented prosocial or antisocial lyrical passages to students (N = 160) under the guise of four musical genres (heavy metal, rap, pop, and country). Participants rated the potential impact of the lyrics on listeners' behavior. Findings indicated that lyrics labeled as heavy metal or rap were perceived as less likely to inspire prosocial behavior but not more likely to inspire antisocial behavior than the same lyrics labeled as country or pop.     

Role of Interactivity in Learning from Engineering Animations

This study examines the pedagogic value of incorporating sophisticated interactivity features into lessons on hand‐held devices. Engineering students (Experiment 1) and non‐engineering college students (Experiment 2) spent 5 min studying an animation showing a six‐step maintenance procedure for a mechanical device called a Power Take‐Off presented on an iPad. In both experiments, students who received high interactivity (i.e., rotation through dragging movements and zoom through pinching movements) reported higher interest but did not show better learning as compared to the low interactivity group (i.e., pause and continue buttons on the touch screen) or no interactivity group. Across two experiments, the interactivity hypothesis was supported in terms of increased interest but not supported in terms of improved learning. Thus, there was not support for the idea that increasing situational interest through high levels of interactivity primes deeper learning processes that produce better learning outcomes. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Multimedia Learning in a Second Language: A Cognitive Load Perspective

What can be done to help college students who are not native speakers of English learn from computer‐based lessons that are presented in English? To help students access the meaning of spoken words in a slow‐paced 16‐minute narration about wildlife in Antarctica, a representational video was added that showed the scenes and animals being described in the narration (Experiment 1). Adding video resulted in improved performance of non‐native English speakers on a comprehension test (d = 0.63), perhaps because the video improved access to word meaning without creating extraneous cognitive load. To help students perceive the spoken words in a fast‐paced 9‐minute narrated video about chemical reactions, concurrent on‐screen captions were added (Experiment 2). Adding on‐screen captions did not improve performance by non‐native English speakers on comprehension tests, perhaps because learners did not have available capacity to take advantage of the captions. Implications for cognitive load theory are discussed. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Working memory encoding and false memory in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder in a spatial delayed response task

Working memory (WM) impairment is a core feature of schizophrenia, but the contributions of different WM components are not yet specified. Here, we investigated the potential role of inefficient encoding in reduced WM performance in patients with schizophrenia (PSZ). Twenty-eight PSZ, 16 patients with bipolar disorder (PBP), 16 unaffected and unmedicated relatives of PSZ (REL), and 29 demographically matched healthy controls (HC) performed a spatial delayed response task with either low or high WM demands. The demands on attentional selection were also manipulated by presenting distractor stimuli during encoding in some of the trials. After each trial, participants rated their level of response confidence. This allowed us to analyze different types of WM responses. WM was severely impaired in PSZ compared to HC; this reduction was mainly due to an increase in the amount of false memory responses (incorrect responses that were given with high confidence) rather than an increase in the amount of incorrect and not-confident responses. Although PBP showed WM impairments, they did not have increased false memory errors. In contrast, reduced WM in REL was also accompanied by an increase in false memory errors. The presentation of distractors led to a decline in WM performance, which was comparable across groups indicating that attentional selection was intact in PSZ. These findings suggest that inefficient WM encoding is responsible for impaired WM in schizophrenia and point to differential mechanisms underlying WM impairments in PSZ and PBP. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Does personal intelligence exist? Evidence from a new ability-based measure

Personal intelligence has been defined as the ability to reason about personality and personality-relevant information and to use that information to guide one's actions and more generally, one's life. We constructed an initial version of an ability-based measure to test whether personal intelligence can be measured and whether it exists as a unitary intelligence. In 3 studies (N = 241, 308, and 385), we administered this Test of Personal Intelligence (TOPI), composed of 4 sections, to undergraduates along with criterion measures. Results suggested that a personal intelligence can be measured, that it might exist as a unified area of mental abilities, and that it represents psychological qualities that have intriguing predictive aspects.     

Deduction without awareness

We investigated whether two basic forms of deductive inference, Modus Ponens and Disjunctive Syllogism, occur automatically and without awareness. In Experiment 1, we used a priming paradigm with a set of conditional and disjunctive problems. For each trial, two premises were shown. The second premise was presented at a rate designed to be undetectable. After each problem, participants had to evaluate whether a newly-presented target number was odd or even. The target number matched or did not match a conclusion endorsed by the two previous premises. We found that when the target matched the conclusion of a Modus Ponens inference, the evaluation of the target number was reliably faster than baseline even when participants reported that they were not aware of the second premise. This priming effect did not occur for any other valid or invalid inference that we tested, including the Disjunctive Syllogism. In Experiment 2, we used a forced-choice paradigm in which we found that some participants were able to access some information on the second premise when their attention was explicitly directed to it. In Experiment 3, we showed that the priming effect for Modus Ponens was present also in subjects who could not access any information about P(2). In Experiment 4 we explored whether spatial relations (e.g., "a before b") or sentences with quantifiers (e.g., "all a with b") could generate a priming effect similar to the one observed for Modus Ponens. A priming effect could be found for Modus Ponens only, but not for the other relations tested. These findings show that the Modus Ponens inference, in contrast to other deductive inferences, can be carried out automatically and unconsciously. Furthermore, our findings suggest that critical deductive inference schemata can be included in the range of high-level cognitive activities that are carried out unconsciously.     

Stimulus/response learning in masked congruency priming of faces: evidence for covert mental classifications?

Reaction times for categorization of a probe face according to its sex or fame were contrasted as a function of whether the category of a preceding, sandwich-masked prime face was congruent or incongruent. Prime awareness was measured by the ability to later categorize the primes, and this was close to chance and typically uncorrelated with priming. When prime faces were never presented as visible probes within a test, priming was not reliable; when prime faces were also seen as probes, priming was only reliable if visible and masked presentation of faces were interleaved (not simply if primes had been visible in a previous session). In the latter case, priming was independent of experimentally induced face-response or face-category contingencies, ruling out any simple form of stimulus-response learning. We conclude that the reliable masked congruency priming reflects bindings between stimuli and multiple, abstract classifications that can be generated both overtly and covertly.