Influence of Stimulus Salience and Attentional Demands on Visual Search Patterns in Hemispatial Neglect

Seventy-five left and right brain-damaged patients, with or without hemispatial neglect, and 40 age-matched control subjects were tested on cancellation tasks with two different visual textures modeled after Julesz (1981). In one condition (“preattentive”), target elements segregated easily from background elements and were perceived effortlessly. In the other (“attentive”), target elements did not segregate easily and could be detected only after prolonged focal scrutiny. Both controls and patients were more accurate and faster on the preattentive than attentive texture. However, only neglect patients were disproportionately impaired on the attentive texture, thus suggesting that unilateral neglect is exacerbated by the low visual salience of the stimuli and a higher engagement of focal attention. Thus, a simple bedside test may help to tell apart the level of visual information processing maximally impaired in neglect patients.     

Attitude toward Christianity,sexual orientation,and parental religiosity in a sample of Italian adolescents

Literature suggests that several demographic variables are linked with religiosity in adolescence, such as gender, age and parental religiosity. The sample consisted of 910 young people (53% female) between 14 and 19 years of age, attending secular secondary schools in Rome, Italy. They self-identified as heterosexual adolescents (91.6%), and lesbian/gay (LG) adolescents (8.4%). High scores of positive attitudes toward God, Jesus, the Bible, prayer and church were associated with female gender, higher father’s religiosity, and higher mother’s religiosity, but not with age of the participants. As expected, heterosexual orientation was associated with a more positive attitude toward Christianity, controlling for sex, age, and parental religiosity.     

Electrophysiological correlates of emotional crossmodal processing in binge drinking

Emotional crossmodal integration (i.e., multisensorial decoding of emotions) is a crucial process that ensures adaptive social behaviors and responses to the environment. Recent evidence suggests that in binge drinking—an excessive alcohol consumption pattern associated with psychological and cerebral deficits—crossmodal integration is preserved at the behavioral level. Although some studies have suggested brain modifications during affective processing in binge drinking, nothing is known about the cerebral correlates of crossmodal integration. In the current study, we asked 53 university students (17 binge drinkers, 17 moderate drinkers, 19 nondrinkers) to perform an emotional crossmodal task while their behavioral and neurophysiological responses were recorded. Participants had to identify happiness and anger in three conditions (unimodal, crossmodal congruent, crossmodal incongruent) and two modalities (face and/or voice). Binge drinkers did not significantly differ from moderate drinkers and nondrinkers at the behavioral level. However, widespread cerebral modifications were found at perceptual (N100) and mainly at decisional (P3b) stages in binge drinkers, indexed by slower brain processing and stronger activity. These cerebral modifications were mostly related to anger processing and crossmodal integration. This study highlights higher electrophysiological activity in the absence of behavioral deficits, which could index a potential compensation process in binge drinkers. In line with results found in severe alcohol-use disorders, these electrophysiological findings show modified anger processing, which might have a deleterious impact on social functioning. Moreover, this study suggests impaired crossmodal integration at early stages of alcohol-related disorders.     

Does a Judicial Warning Improve Defendant‐Culprit Matching?

During a trial, jurors may be asked to compare the defendant with video of the culprit. Yet matching unfamiliar people in this manner can be difficult and error‐prone. Judges may warn jurors about the dangers of identification from video images, but the effect of warnings is unknown. Here we report two studies that assessed the effect of warning instructions on defendant‐culprit matching. In Experiment 1, college students read either control, warning, or illustrated warning instructions before deciding if a defendant seen in one video matched the culprit in another video. Experiment 2 compared control and warning instructions in a sample of Amazon Mechanical Turk workers. Matching accuracy in both experiments was poor, and warnings did not consistently improve performance or make participants more cautious. These results do not support the supposition that warning instructions help jurors compare the defendant to images of the culprit.Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Binocular unmasking with unequal interocular contrast: The case for multiple Cyclopean eyes

Under certain conditions, the detection threshold for a sinusoidal grating embedded in a noisy background may be an order of magnitude lower when binocular cues are available than when monocular cues only are present. Such binocular unmasking occurs only when the degree of interocular disparity for the target differs from that of the background. Two classes of models have been advanced to account for such unmasking. The first assumes that orientation-specific, spatial frequency channels in each eye encode the amplitude and phase of the spatial frequency component of the pattern the channel is tuned to detect. Thus, a difference in interocular disparity between target and background could result in interocular amplitude and/or phase differences in left- and right-eye spatial frequency channels. When, however, there are no disparity differences between target and background, there will be no interocular differences in amplitude and phase in the left- and right-eye channels. In this model, then, binocular unmasking reflects the binocular system’s ability to respond to interocular amplitude and/or phase differences in the patterns presented to the two eyes. In the second class of models, it is assumed that the left and right-eye patterns are first summed to form a “Cyclopean” eye. In these models, detection depends on the effect this summation process has on the power spectrum of the summated patterns. To decide between these two classes of models, we observed the occurrence of binocular unmasking when (1) the contrast of masker and signal was varied identically in both eyes and (2) the contrast of masker and signal was varied in one eye only. Consistent with our previous research, we found that the results can be accounted for in terms of a linear summation model of binocular unmasking; the alternative interocular phase detection model was disproved. The implications of these findings for binocular contrast summation in the absence of visual noise are discussed.     

The egocentric bias: Seeing oneself as cause and target of others' behavior

The egocentric bias—the tendency to see oneself as both cause and target of another person's behavior—was examined in the context of a small group interaction. Pairs of subjects plus a confederate conducted a short discussion, their goal being to achieve consensus on a specific topic. The discussion was interrupted by the experimenter when the confederate summarized his/her opinion. It was found that subjects were more likely to see themselves as a cause as well as a target of the confederate's last statement compared to the way they were seen by other group members. Subjects were also more likely to exaggerate the amount of attention they received from the confederate. The overall egocentric bias scores were correlated with subjects' level of self-esteem. Cognitive and motivational processes that may account for this bias were discussed.     

Overshoot of curvature in visual apparent motion

If a curved line and a straight line are presented briefly, one above the other, in sequence to the eye, then, under appropriate conditions, visual apparent motion is obtained. Subjects report that the illusory figure moving and changing from the curved line to the straight line appears to overshoot the latter, gaining a small curvature in the opposite sense. Three experiments are described. In the first, the magnitude of this apparent curvature was quantified as a function of the delay between the onsets of the curved line and straight line (the stimulus onset asynchrony, SOA). It is shown that overshoot in curvature cannot be attributed to inappropriate patterns of eye fixations. In the second experiment, the stimulus configuration was modified to reveal the contribution to apparent curvature of classical curvature-contrast effects. Curvature overshoot due to apparent motion alone was thus estimated as a function of SOA. In the third experiment, an analogous position overshoot was measured for apparent motion elicited by two brief sequentially presented parallel line segments. It is argued that a combination of such position overshoots cannot explain curvature overshoot. Two schemes of a more general kind that might be used to interpret curvature overshoot are then outlined. One scheme is based on a neural-net model of apparent motion, and the other on a functional model of apparent motion that operates by laws analogous to those governing real physical motion.     

Effort toward comprehension: Elaboration or “aha”?

Auble and Franks (1978) found that a process termed “effort toward comprehension” was important in facilitating recall of sentences. Four experiments were conducted to further elucidate the nature of this process. Two hypotheses were considered: (1)Effort toward comprehension involves greater elaboration or deeper processing of the sentence; (2)effort toward comprehension can be viewed as an “aha” experience (i.e., a state of noncomprehension followed by comprehension of the sentence). Results indicated that recall was significantly greater for subjects in conditions producing “aha” reactions. No support was found for the elaboration interpretation of effort toward comprehension.     

Binocular vision enhances phase discrimination by filtering the background

Previous studies have shown that the detectability of a noise-masked target can be enhanced under stereoscopic viewing when the target’s interocular disparity differs from that of the noise. This enhanced detectability can be accounted for by a model postulating that the binocular system linearly sums the left-eye and right-eye views of a visual scene. This model also predicts enhanced phase discrimination under specifiable interocular disparities of target and noise. Two experiments were conducted in which subjects were asked to discriminate between two luminance patterns (target and foil) that differed only in phase. The target patterns were constructed by summating two vertical sinusoidal gratings in which the phase difference between the higher and the lower spatial frequency gratings was 45°. The foils contained the same two component frequencies, with a phase difference of ?45°. Thus, targets and foils were mirror images of one another. The ability of subjects to Discriminate between these stereoscopically viewed mirror-image patterns was investigated under two sets of interocular disparities: those that, according to our model, would unmask one or both spatial frequency components, and those that would leave both components masked by the noise. Phase discrimination was enhanced only when both component frequencies of the target and foil were unmasked. The implications of these findings for template-matching and phase-discrimination models of pattern discrimination are considered.     

Psychological and overall well-being of Italian young adults in transition to adulthood: Evidence from a sequential explanatory mixed-methods study

Transitioning to adulthood is a fundamental yet challenging phase in human development. Despite its relevance, the literature has paid little attention to the impact that transitioning to adulthood has on multiple aspects of individual well-being. This is one of the few attempts that has employed a sequential explanatory mixed-methods study to explore how the path to adulthood impacted on the psychological and overall well-being of Italian young adults. In the quantitative phase, we employed two-step cluster analysis to assign 45 young adults, who had completed the Italian I COPPE scale of multidimensional well-being, to three clusters based on their level of change in psychological and overall well-being. Results from mixed design ANCOVA revealed that participants belonging to the high change cluster showed the highest significant positive change over time with respect to well-being. In the qualitative phase, 17 individuals took part in focalized narrative interviews, which aimed at exploring significant events, barriers, and facilitators, which had impacted on their well-being during the transition to adulthood. The textual material was analysed through the Grounded Theory Methodology. It emerged that the state of transition was associated with some triggering events and a temporary negative impact on the interviewees' well-being. However, findings also revealed that people assigned to different clusters had put in place or learned several resources, skills, and copying strategies, which led to different transitional and well-being outcomes.