Examining the effects of memory specificity and perceptual load on susceptibility to misleading information

Our study aimed to examine the role of perceptual load in eyewitness memory and susceptibility to misinformation and establish whether trait-based memory specificity protects against misinformation. Participants (n = 264) viewed a video depicting a crime and completed a memory questionnaire immediately afterwards and 1 week later. Memory specificity was measured using the Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT). Higher AMT scores were associated with better memory accuracy. Performance was worse in the high load compared to the low load condition at immediate recall. However, this effect was not seen for every question and load did not influence eyewitness identifications. To test the possibility that load effects were not fully captured by the questionnaire in experiment 1, we conducted a second experiment (n = 120) where we systematically manipulated misinformation about central and peripheral details. We found no effects. Our findings suggest that high perceptual load enhances eyewitness suggestibility, while specific autobiographical memory protects against misinformation.     

Temporal representation impairment in developmental dyslexia for unisensory and multisensory stimuli

Dyslexia has been associated with a problem in visual–audio integration mechanisms. Here, we investigate for the first time the contribution of unisensory cues on multisensory audio and visual integration in 32 dyslexic children by modelling results using the Bayesian approach. Non‐linguistic stimuli were used. Children performed a temporal task: they had to report whether the middle of three stimuli was closer in time to the first one or to the last one presented. Children with dyslexia, compared with typical children, exhibited poorer unimodal thresholds, requiring greater temporal distance between items for correct judgements, while multisensory thresholds were well predicted by the Bayesian model. This result suggests that the multisensory deficit in dyslexia is due to impaired audio and visual inputs rather than impaired multisensory processing per se. We also observed that poorer temporal skills correlated with lower reading skills in dyslexic children, suggesting that this temporal capability can be linked to reading abilities.     

Infanticide by genetically deaf mice: Possible evidence for an inhibiting function of pups' ultrasonic calls

The influence of pup ultrasonic calls on male infanticidal behavior was evaluated by using mice of the GFF strain which includes two different lines: a normally hearing line and a genetically deaf line. Deaf male mice exhibited more infanticidal behavior than mice with normal hearing. In addition, deaf pups, which emitted fewer ultrasonic calls than normal pups, suffered a higher, even though not significant, rate of infanticidal behavior by normally hearing males. On the whole, these results question Labov's hypothesis that pups emit few ultrasounds in the presence of strange males in order to avoid being located and killed by them.     

Intentional control over prejudice: when the choice of the measure matters

We tested the idea that the correlation between implicit and explicit measures of prejudice depends on whether or not groups are normatively protected against discrimination. A pilot study (N=31) showed that 13 categories varied widely in the degree to which it is acceptable to express negative opinions about them. The main study involving 89 Catholic subjects found that explicit (reward allocation, liking ratings) and implicit measures (linguistic intergroup bias) of prejudice were correlated for the outgroup that is not normatively protected against discrimination (Islamic Fundamentalists) but uncorrelated for the outgroup that is protected (Jews). Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Preferential orienting to faces in 4‐month‐olds: analysis of temporal–nasal visual field differences

A two‐process theory of the development of face processing predicted that newborns’ preferential orienting to face‐like patterns would be stronger in the temporal visual field than in the nasal. This prediction was confirmed in a previous study. While it is known that the newborn tendency to orient to face‐like patterns declines around 6 weeks of age, it is not known whether this is due to inhibition by cortical pathways or to the conflicting biases of cortical and subcortical pathways. In the present experiment we repeated the newborn study but with 4‐month‐olds and obtained results which were partially consistent with both the inhibition and the conflicting pathways accounts. We conclude that disappearance of the newborn tendency to orient to face‐like patterns is probably due to multiple factors.