Counter‐Interrogation Strategies when Anticipating Questions on Intentions

The present experimental study adds to the emerging line of psycholegal research focusing on true and false intentions. It is the first to examine mock suspects' (N = 120) counter‐interrogation strategies in investigative interviews in which they anticipate questions on their intentions. As planning is an inherent part of many intentions, mock suspects were, in addition to questions on their intentions, asked a set of questions that pertained to the planning phase in which they formed their intentions. Besides ratings of the anticipation and difficulty of the questions, participants were asked to provide their principal strategy for being perceived as truthful. Both truth tellers and liars perceived the questions on the planning phase as significantly more unanticipated than the questions on their intentions. Furthermore, liars perceived the questions on the planning phase as more difficult to answer than did truth tellers. Liars and truth tellers differed with respect to their principal strategy employed for being perceived as truthful. Liars' most commonly used strategy was to stick to the cover story, whereas truth tellers' most common strategy was to be honest. The results are discussed in relation to the unanticipated questions approach and psychological concepts such as the illusion of transparency. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Reliable Digit Span: a systematic review and cross-validation study

Reliable Digit Span (RDS) is a heavily researched symptom validity test with a recent literature review yielding more than 20 studies ranging in dates from 1994 to 2011. Unfortunately, limitations within some of the research minimize clinical generalizability. This systematic review and cross-validation study was conducted to address these limitations, thus increasing the measure's clinical utility. Sensitivity and specificity rates were calculated for the ≤6 and ≤7 cutoffs when data were globally combined and divided by clinical groups. The cross-validation of specific diagnostic groups was consistent with the data reported in the literature. Overall, caution should be used when utilizing the ≤7 cutoff in all clinical groups and when utilizing the ≤6 cutoff in the following groups: cerebrovascular accident, severe memory disorders, mental retardation, borderline intellectual functioning, and English as a second language. Additional limitations and cautions are provided.     

Africa Humiliated? Misrecognition in Development Aid

Critiques of development aid from its recipient’s sometimes draw our attention to the perception of paternalism on the part of ‘development industry’ actors. Even within participatory project designs, critical voices recount experiences of clear power divides and informal hierarchies determining the content and form of ‘cooperation’. While neoliberal as well as neo-Marxist scholars base their critiques on a distributive scheme of global justice, post-development theory emphasizes respect and recognition as the central aspect of justice Indeed, post-development theorists continue to complain of neo-colonial power structures between nations as well as on a micro-level between the ‘experts’ and local people. The latter feel misrecognized in being judged according to the parameters of Western actors within the international community. This article explores how charges of misrecognition within development cooperation challenge the assumption by many liberal political theorists that more global justice could be achieved through more aid.     

Attention modulates 'speech-tracking' at a cocktail party

Recent findings by Mesgarani and Chang demonstrate that signals in auditory cortex can reconstruct the spectrotemporal patterns of attended speech tokens better than those of ignored ones. These results help extend the study of attention into the domain of natural speech, posing numerous questions and challenges for future research.     

Sometimes,often, and always: Exploring the vague meanings of frequency expressions

The article describes a general two-step procedure for the numerical translation of vague linguistic terms (LTs). The suggested procedure consists of empirical and model components, including (1) participants’ estimates of numerical values corresponding to verbal terms and (2) modeling of the empirical data using fuzzy membership functions (MFs), respectively. The procedure is outlined in two studies for data from N = 89 and N = 109 participants, who were asked to estimate numbers corresponding to 11 verbal frequency expressions (e.g., sometimes). Positions and shapes of the resulting MFs varied considerably in symmetry, vagueness, and overlap and are indicative of the different meanings of the vague frequency expressions. Words were not distributed equidistantly across the numerical scale. This has important implications for the many questionnaires that use verbal rating scales, which consist of frequency expressions and operate on the premise of equidistance. These results are discussed for an exemplar questionnaire (COPSOQ). Furthermore, the variation of the number of prompted LTs (5 vs. 11) showed no influence on the words’ interpretations.     

Top-down search for color prevents voluntary directing of attention to informative singleton cues

Visuo-spatial attention can be directed in a top-down controlled way to search for color targets and it can be captured by color contrasts, regardless of color identity. Here we tested whether participants can both search for a particular color target (e.g., red) and make use of a color-contrast cue that predicted the target's most likely position to direct their attention voluntarily. Our results show that this was impossible for the participants. Results support that top-down search for particular colors is incommensurate with directing attention to just any color contrast. The results are discussed in light of the current debates concerning the roles of color and color contrast for visuo-spatial attention.     

The influence of story context on a working memory span task

The purpose of the present study was to examine factors that could influence whether recall performance in the reading span task (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980 ) would benefit from the contextual information from the sentences in the processing component of the task. More specifically, we investigated whether people would benefit from sentence sets that formed short stories or when the entire span task was one continuous story. Overall, there was a clear benefit for contextually related sentence sets (i.e., the story span tasks) compared to the traditional reading span task. However, the benefit was eliminated when the entire set formed one continuous story. These results support the recall reconstruction hypothesis for working memory (Towse, Cowan, Hitch, & Horton, 2008 ), which suggests that people may strategically use the content of the sentences from the processing component of the reading span task as memorial cues to reconstruct the target words of the storage component. However, this benefit is constrained to scenarios when the contextual cues are unique to a specific set.