Basic processes in reading: Is visual word recognition obligatory?

Visual word recognition is commonly argued to be automatic in the sense that it is obligatory and ballistic. The present experiments combined Stroop and visual search paradigms to provide a novel test of this claim. An array of three, five, or seven words including one colored target (a word in Experiments 1 and 2, a bar in Experiment 3) was presented to participants. An irrelevant color word also appeared in the display and was either integrated with or separated from the colored target. The participants classified the color of the single colored item in Experiments 1 and 3 and determined whether a target color was present or absent in Experiment 2. A Stroop effect was observed in Experiment 1 when the color word and the color target were integral, but not when the color word and the color target were separated. No Stroop effect was observed in Experiment 2. Visual word recognition is contingent on both the distribution of spatial attention and task demands.     

Stimulus-response compatible orienting and the effect of an action not taken: Perception delayed is automaticity denied

Orienting to a signal source is widely viewed asautomatic in the sense that it is triggered by the stimulus. However, this behavior is typically assessed in a context in which the subject knows beforehand what he or she has to do. In the present experiments, the role of task set was investigated by having the response vary randomly from trial to trial. On some trials, a cue signaled the subject to respond, and on the remaining trials, another cue signaled the subject to withhold a response. Stimulus contrast and temporal overlap between task cue and target were manipulated. The effect of a reduction in stimulus contrast was sometimes absorbed into the time taken to decode the cue, but critically, other times not. These results highlight the theoretical importance of considering task set as an essential element in processing, and they undermine the theoretical claim that putatively automatic processes are not subject to interference from other mental activities.     

Modeling the effects of prior knowledge on learning incongruent features of category members

The authors conducted 3 experiments addressing the issue of how observations and multiple sources of prior knowledge are put together in category learning. In Experiments 1 and 2, learning was faster for critical features, which were predictable on the basis of prior knowledge, than for filler features, and this advantage increased as more observations were made. In addition, learning was fastest for incongruent features that could only be predicted using knowledge from other domains. In Experiment 3, presenting contradictory features that violated prior knowledge led to rote learning rather than use of prior knowledge. The results were simulated with the Baywatch model, which addresses how observations of category members lead to recruitment and selection of sources of prior knowledge.     

Life and mind: From autopoiesis to neurophenomenology. A tribute to Francisco Varela

This talk, delivered at De l'autopoièse à la neurophénoménologie: un hommage à Francisco Varela; from autopoiesis to neurophenomenology: a tribute to Francisco Varela, June 18–20, at the Sorbonne in Paris, explicates several links between Varela's neurophenomenology and his biological concept of autopoiesis.     

Effects of self-other decision making on regulatory focus and choice overload

A growing stream of research is investigating how choices people make for themselves are different from choices people make for others. In this paper, I propose that these choices vary according to regulatory focus, such that people who make choices for themselves are prevention focused, whereas people who make choices for others are promotion focused. Drawing on regulatory focus theory, in particular work on errors of omission and commission, I hypothesize that people who make choices for others experience a reversal of the choice overload effect. In 6 studies, including a field study, I found that people who make choices for themselves are less satisfied after selecting among many options compared to few options, yet, people who make choices for others are more satisfied after selecting among many options compared to few options. Implications and suggestions for other differences in self-other decision making are discussed.     

Working Memory Effects of Gap-Predictions in Normal Adults: An Event-Related Potentials Study

The current study examined the relationship between verbal memory span and the latency with which a filler-gap dependency is constructed. A previous behavioral study found that low span listeners did not exhibit antecedent reactivation at gap sites in relative clauses, in comparison to high verbal memory span subjects (Roberts et?al. in J Psycholinguist Res 36(2):175-188, 2007), which suggests that low span subjects are delayed at gap filling. This possibility was examined in the current study. Using an event-related potentials paradigm, it was found that low span subjects have an onset latency delay of about 200?ms in brain responses to violations of syntactic expectancies after the gap site, thus providing a time course measure of the delay hypothesized by previous literature.     

A new look at social attention: Orienting to the eyes is not (entirely) under volitional control

People tend to look at other people's eyes, but whether this bias is automatic or volitional is unclear. To discriminate between these two possibilities, we used a "don't look" (DL) paradigm. Participants looked at a series of upright or inverted faces, and were asked either to freely view the faces or to avoid looking at the eyes, or as a control, the mouth. As previously demonstrated, participants showed a bias to attend to both eyes and mouths during free viewing. In the DL condition, participants told to avoid the eyes of upright faces were unable to fully suppress the tendency to fixate on the faces' eyes, whereas participants told to avoid the mouth of upright faces successfully eliminated their bias to overtly attend to that feature. When faces were inverted, participants were equally able to suppress looks to the eyes and mouth. Together, these results suggest that the tendency to look at the eyes reflects orienting that is both volitional and automatic, and that the engagement of holistic or configural face processing mechanisms during upright face viewing has an influence in guiding gaze automatically to the eyes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Implicit statistical learning is directly associated with the acquisition of syntax

This article reports on an individual differences study that investigated the role of implicit statistical learning in the acquisition of syntax in children. One hundred children ages 4 years 5 months through 6 years 11 months completed a test of implicit statistical learning, a test of explicit declarative learning, and standardized tests of verbal and nonverbal ability. They also completed a syntactic priming task, which provided a dynamic index of children's facility to detect and respond to changes in the input frequency of linguistic structure. The results showed that implicit statistical learning ability was directly associated with the long-term maintenance of the primed structure. The results constitute the first empirical demonstration of a direct association between implicit statistical learning and syntactic acquisition in children.     

Phenomenal consciousness with infallible self-representation

In this paper, I argue against the claim recently defended by Josh Weisberg that a certain version of the self-representational approach to phenomenal consciousness cannot avoid a set of problems that have plagued higher-order approaches. These problems arise specifically for theories that allow for higher-order misrepresentation or—in the domain of self-representational theories—self-misrepresentation. In response to Weisberg, I articulate a self-representational theory of phenomenal consciousness according to which it is contingently impossible for self-representations tokened in the context of a conscious mental state to misrepresent their objects. This contingent infallibility allows the theory to both acknowledge the (logical) possibility of self-misrepresentation and avoid the problems of self-misrepresentation. Expanding further on Weisberg’s work, I consider and reveal the shortcomings of three other self-representational models—put forward by Kreigel, Van Gulick, and Gennaro—in order to show that each indicates the need for this sort of infallibility. I then argue that contingent infallibility is in principle acceptable on naturalistic grounds only if we attribute (1) a neo-Fregean kind of directly referring, indexical content to self-representational mental states and (2) a certain ontological structure to the complex conscious mental states of which these indexical self-representations are a part. In these sections I draw on ideas from the work of Perry and Kaplan to articulate the context-dependent semantic structure of inner-representational states.