Object onset and parvocellular guidance of attentional allocation

The parvocellular visual pathway in the primate brain is known to be involved with the processing of color. However, a subject of debate is whether an abrupt change in color, conveyed via this pathway, is capable of automatically attracting attention. It has been shown that the appearance of new objects defined solely by color is indeed capable of modulating attention. However, given evidence suggesting that the visual system is particularly sensitive to new onsets, it is unclear to what extent such results reflect effects of color change per se, rather than effects of object onset. We assessed attentional capture by color change that occurred as a result of either new objects appearing or already-present "old" objects changing color. Results showed that although new object onsets accrued attention, changing the color of old objects did not. We conclude that abrupt color change per se is not sufficient to capture attention.     

Planning and Problem solving Using the Five disc Tower of London Task

This paper investigates the planning and problem-solving abilities of normal adult subjects using a complex version of Shallice's (1982, 1988) Tower of London (TOL) task. Subjects were required to plan a fluent solution to a range of 5-disc TOL puzzles and then execute their formulated plans as fast as possible. The number of errors and the times taken to prepare the most efficient solutions increased monotonically with the number of chunks of subgoal moves. A subgoal move is a move that is essential for the solution of the puzzle, but which does not place a disc into its goal position. A subgoal chunk is a consecutive series of subgoal moves that all transfer discs to and from the same pegs. Furthermore, preparation time was found to be sensitive to a manipulation that increased the number of competing alternative choices, at critical steps in move selection. When subjects planned their action sequences 'on-line', analyses of individual moves and individual move latencies suggested that planning TOL solutions was limited by the difficulty in evaluating and selecting one action (or one subgoal chunk) from the set of competing potential actions at each step in the course of problem solving.     

Type A behavior, attentional style, and symptom reporting among adult men and women

Type A behavior and its components (measured on the JAS) were examined in relation to attentional style and symptom reporting in 294 healthy adult men and women. The results showed that for both men and women the JAS Type A, Job Involvement, and Hard Driving factors were all associated with self-reported attentional effectiveness as measured by the Nideffer Test of Attentional and Interpersonal Style. However, a fourth JAS factor, Speed and Impatience, was associated with Nideffer measures of cognitive overload. For both men and women, the Type A, Speed and Impatience, and Hard Driving factors were all positively associated with the number of medical and psychological symptoms reported on the Cornell Medical Index. In addition, acute psychological distress (Hopkins SCL-90R) was associated with Type A behavior for men and with Speed and Impatience for both sexes. Attention differences did not account for the observed positive relationships between Type A factors and symptom reporting with one exception; attentional overload (internal) appeared to partially explain the relationships between symptom reporting and Speed and Impatience in women. In summary, Type As described themselves as having a broader attentional focus and reported more naturally occurring physical and psychological symptoms than did Type Bs.     

The closing of the theory of mind: A critique of perspective-taking

Theory of mind (ToM) is defined as the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others and is often said to be one of the cornerstones of efficient social interaction. In recent years, a number of authors have suggested that one particular ToM process occurs spontaneously in that it is rapid and outside of conscious control. This work has argued that humans efficiently compute the visual perspective of other individuals. In this article, we present a critique of this notion both on empirical and theoretical grounds. We argue that the experiments and paradigms that purportedly demonstrate spontaneous perspective-taking have not as yet convincingly demonstrated the existence of such a phenomenon. We also suggest that it is not possible to represent the percept of another person, spontaneous or otherwise. Indeed, the perspective-taking field has suggested that humans can represent the visual experience of others. That is, going beyond assuming that we can represent another’s viewpoint in anything other than symbolic form. In this sense, the field suffers from the same problem that afflicted the “pictorial” theory in the mental imagery debate. In the last section we present a number of experiments designed to provide a more thorough assessment of whether humans can indeed represent the visual experience of others.

     

Reform of statistical inference in psychology: the case of memory & cognition.

Geoffrey Loftus, Editor of Memory & Cognition from 1994 to 1997, strongly encouraged presentation of figures with error bars and avoidance of null hypothesis significance testing (NHST). The authors examined 696 Memory & Cognition articles published before, during, and after the Loftus editorship. Use of figures with bars increased to 47% under Loftus's editorship and then declined. Bars were rarely used for interpretation, and NHST remained almost universal. Analysis of 309 articles in other psychology journals confirmed that Loftus's influence was most evident in the articles he accepted for publication, but was otherwise limited. An e-mail survey of authors of papers accepted by Loftus revealed some support for his policy, but allegiance to traditional practices as well. Reform of psychologists' statistical practices would require more than editorial encouragement.     

Time scale similarity and long-term memory for autobiographical events

We examine the extent to which retrieval from very long-term autobiographical memory is similar when participants are asked to retrieve from widely differing periods of time. Three groups of 20 participants were given 4 min to recall autobiographical events from the last 5 weeks, 5 months, or 5 years. Following recall, the participants dated their events. Similar retrieval rates, relative recency effects, and relative lag-recency effects were found, despite the fact that the considered time scales varied by a factor of 52. These data are broadly consistent with the principle of recency, the principle of contiguity (Howard & Kahana, 2002), and scale similarity in the rates of recall (Brown, Neath, & Chater, 2007; Maylor, Chater, & Brown, 2001). These findings are taken as support for models of memory that predict time scale similarity in retrieval, such as SIMPLE (Brown et al., 2007) and TCM (Howard & Kahana, 2002).