Exploring Temporal Progression of Events Using Eye Tracking

This study investigates the representation of the temporal progression of events by means of the causal change in a patient. Subjects were asked to verify the relationship between adjectives denoting a source and resulting feature of a patient. The features were presented either chronologically or inversely to a primed event context given by a verb (to cut: long–short vs. short–long). Effects on response time and on eye movement data show that the relationship between features presented chronologically is verified more easily than that between features presented inversely. Post hoc, however, we found that the effects of temporal order occurred only when subjects read the features more than once. Then, the relationship between the features is matched with the causal change implied by the event context (contextual strategy). When subjects read the features only once, subjects respond to the relationship between the features without taking into account the event context.     

Visualizing individual differences in Web navigation: STRATDYN, a tool for analyzing navigation patterns

Navigational behavior on the Web can be analyzed with different methods. Log file data are an important source of behavioral traces of navigation. In this paper, we first discuss existing approaches to the classification and visualization of movement sequences that are important for understanding Web navigation. We then present STRATDYN, a tool that provides meaningful quantitative and qualitative measures from server-generatedlog files, as well as easy-to-follow visualizations of navigational paths of individual users. We demonstrate the usefulness of this new approach by reporting the results of two studies (with 44 students in education and vocational training), which show that navigational effectiveness is positively related to the ability to concentrate and selectivelyfocus attention, as measuredby the D2 Test of Attention and the FWIT, a German version of the Stroop test. Finally, we discuss implications for further research in this area and for the continuing development of the approach presented.     

Suppression of intrusive thoughts and working memory capacity in repressive coping

Previous research using a thought suppression paradigm found that repressors are more skilled in suppressing anxious autobiographical thoughts than low anxious, high anxious, and defensive high anxious people. Another line of research showed that individual differences in working memory capacity are related to the ability to intentionally suppress intrusive thoughts. This study aimed at combining these findings and sought to investigate whether repressors' superior ability to suppress intrusive thoughts is related to a larger working memory capacity. Results indicate that in a thought suppression paradigm, repressors report fewer intrusive thoughts for their most anxious experiences than participants in the 3 other subgroups. Furthermore, the superior ability of repressors to avoid intrusive thoughts can be explained largely by their higher working memory capacity.     

Activation and binding in verbal working memory: a dual-process model for the recognition of nonwords

The article presents a mathematical model of short-term recognition based on dual-process models and the three-component theory of working memory [Oberauer, K. (2002). Access to information in working memory: Exploring the focus of attention. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 28, 411-421]. Familiarity arises from activated representations in long-term memory, ignoring their relations; recollection retrieves bindings in the capacity-limited component of working memory. In three experiments participants encoded two short lists of nonwords for immediate recognition, one of which was then cued as irrelevant. Probes from the irrelevant list were rejected more slowly than new probes; this was also found with probes recombining letters of irrelevant nonwords, suggesting that familiarity arises from individual letters independent of their relations. When asked to accept probes whose letters were all in the relevant list, regardless of their conjunction, participants accepted probes preserving the original conjunctions faster than recombinations, showing that recollection accessed feature bindings automatically. The model fit the data best when familiarity depended only on matching letters, whereas recollection used binding information.     

Emotional Stroop task: effect of word arousal and subject anxiety on emotional interference

Inconsistent findings regarding the emotional Stroop effect in healthy subjects may be explained by confounding effects of stimulus valence and arousal, as well as individual differences in anxiety. We examined reaction time data in a healthy sample using the emotional Stroop task while carefully matching arousal level of positive and negative words. Independent of valence, emotional relative to neutral words elicited emotional interference, indicating that arousal determines emotional interference. Independent of valence, emotional words were better re-called and recognized than neutral words. Individual differences in state anxiety were associated with emotional interference, that is, emotional interference was enhanced in subjects with high state anxiety. There was no influence of trait anxiety. These findings indicate that word arousal produces emotional interference independent of valence. State anxiety exacerbates interference of emotional words by further biasing attention towards emotionally salient stimuli. Thomas Dresler and Katja Mériau have contributed equally.     

From individual preference construction to group decisions: Framing effects and group processes

Two choice tasks known to produce framing effects in individual decisions were used to test group sensitivity to framing, relative to that of individuals, and to examine the effect of prior, individual consideration of a decision on group choice. Written post-decision reasons and pre-decision group discussions were analyzed to investigate process explanations of choices made by preexisting, naturalistic groups. For a risky choice problem, a similar framing effect was observed for groups and individuals. For an intertemporal choice task where consumption was either delayed or accelerated, naïve groups (whose members had not preconsidered the decision) showed a framing effect, less discounting in the delay frame, opposite to that observed in individuals. Predecided groups showed a non-significant effect in the other, expected direction. In all cases, process measures better explained variability in choices across conditions than frame alone. Implications for group decision research and design considerations for committee decisions are addressed.     

Logic and belief across the lifespan: the rise and fall of belief inhibition during syllogistic reasoning

Popular reasoning theories postulate that the ability to inhibit inappropriate beliefs lies at the heart of the human reasoning engine. Given that people's inhibitory capacities are known to rise and fall across the lifespan, we predicted that people's deductive reasoning performance would show similar curvilinear age trends. A group of children (12‐year‐olds), young adults (20‐year‐olds), and older adults (65+‐year‐olds) were presented with a classic syllogistic reasoning task and a decision‐making questionnaire. Results indicated that on syllogisms where beliefs and logic conflicted, reasoning performance showed the expected curvilinear age trend: Reasoning performance initially increased from childhood to early adulthood but declined again in later life. On syllogisms where beliefs and logic were consistent and sound reasoning did not require belief inhibition, however, age did not affect performance. Furthermore, across the lifespan we observed that the better people were at resisting intuitive temptations in the decision‐making task, the less they were biased by their beliefs on the conflict syllogisms. As with the effect of age, one's ability to override intuitions in the decision‐making task did not mediate reasoning performance on the no‐conflict syllogisms. Results lend credence to the postulated central role of inhibitory processing in those situations where beliefs and logic conflict.