Interaction of attention and temporal object priming

Within a 3 × 3 matrix of 90° corner junctions, detection of a Kanizsa-type square is facilitated when the target display is preceded by a 40-Hz flickering premask of 3 × 3 crosses, with four crosses synchronously oscillating at the subsequent target location. To examine whether this ‘synchrony-priming’ effect is influenced by, or dependent on, visuo-spatial attention, a spatial-cueing manipulation was introduced. Observers were presented with a visual or acoustic cue which indicated the likely target quadrant. The main finding was that synchrony priming was larger for invalidly, compared with validly, cued locations, and that the priming effect was figural, rather than spatial, in nature (i.e., confined to points associated with the completed boundary, rather than extending to the inner region, defined by the synchronous premask elements). This pattern of effects argues that target processing is expedited not by attracting spatial attention to the primed location, but by the prime expediting (figure-specific) target encoding, as a result of which the target position gains a processing and selection advantage relative to non-primed locations.     

Distinct,but top-down modulable color and positional priming mechanisms in visual pop-out search

Three experiments examined reaction time (RT) performance in visual pop-out search. Search displays comprised of one color target and two distractors which were presented at 24 possible locations on a circular ellipse. Experiment 1 showed that re-presentation of the target at a previous target location led to expedited RTs, whereas presentation of the target at a distractor location led to slowed RTs (relative to target presentation at a previous empty location). RTs were also faster when the color of the target was the same across consecutive trials, relative to a change of the target’s color. This color priming was independent of the positional priming. Experiment 2 revealed larger positional facilitation, relative to Experiment 1, when position repetitions occurred more likely than chance level; analogously, Experiment 3 revealed stronger color priming effects when target color repetitions were more likely. These position and color manipulations did not change the pattern of color (Experiment 2) and positional priming effects (Experiment 3). While these results support the independency of color and positional priming effects (e.g., Maljkovic and Nakayama in Percept Psychophys 58:977–991, 1996), they also show that these (largely ‘automatic’) effects are top-down modulable when target position and color are predictable (e.g., Müller et al. in Vis Cogn 11:577–602, 2004).     

The “beam of darkness”: Spreading of the attentional blink within and between objects

When two targets (T1 and T2) are inserted into a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream of nontargets, observers are impaired at identifying T2 when it is presented within half a second after T1. This transient drop in performance, or attentional blink (AB), has been attributed to a temporary unavailability of task-critical processing resources. In the present study, we investigated how object-based attention modulates the AB, by presenting four synchronized RSVP streams in the corners of two rectangular bars (e.g., one above and one below fixation). The results from four experiments revealed that the AB increased within short temporal lags (of up to ～400 msec) when T2 was presented on the same, rather than a different, bar as T1 (with T1–T2 spatial distance controlled for). Thus, the AB is seen to spread across entire object groupings, suggesting that the spatiotemporal resolution of attention is modulated by global-object information.     

Being in Berlin: A large group experience in the Berlin Congress

In July 2007, the International Psychoanalytic Congress convened for the first time since the war in the former Nazi capital, Berlin. An open large group forum was held at this meeting, where attendees (Jewish, German and others) had the opportunity to explore the emotional aspects stirred up by being in Berlin. Hundreds of people participated in the event and described it as the 'heart of the Congress'. We examine several aspects of the event, including the passions stirred, the containment of the setting, and the voices present and absent.     

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Über ein Verfahren zur Untersuchung der psychischen Leistungsfähigkeit

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Motivationsanalyse der Anspruchsniveau-Setzung

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