Precise instructions determine participants’ memory search strategy in judgments of relative order in short lists

Memory often requires knowledge of the order of events. Previous findings about immediate judgments of relative order in short, subspan lists are variable regarding whether participants’ strategy is to search memory in the forward direction, starting from the first list item and progressing toward the end item, or in the backward direction, starting from the end item and progressing toward the start. We asked whether wording of the instructions influences participants’ search direction. Participants studied sequences of three to six consonants, and for an immediate, two-item probe of each list, judged which probe was presented earlier (“earlier” instruction) or later (“later” instruction) on the list. Forward and backward searches were supported for “earlier” and “later” instructions, respectively. Our findings suggest that participants have more than one effective strategy for order judgments in short lists, and that subtle instructional differences can bias memory search in either the forward or backward direction.     

Gendered Ways to Motivation Gains in Groups

Recent studies have demonstrated motivation gains of low performing group members even beyond the level of an individual work baseline (e.g., Weber and Hertel, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93:973–993, 2007). We expected that the underlying mechanisms of these motivation gains, i.e., social indispensability and social competition, are moderated by individuals’ gender. Moreover, these gender effects were assumed to be moderated by partner anonymity. Predictions were tested with mostly undergraduate German students (N?=?213) working in same-gender groups in a computer-supported environment. Results revealed that motivation gains due to social indispensability were more likely for women, whereas motivation gains due to social competition were more likely for men. Furthermore, women compared to men showed higher motivation gains in anonymous conditions compared to conditions with an acquainted partner.     

Lifespan development of stimulus-response conflict cost: similarities and differences between maturation and senescence

Age gradient of the mechanism of stimulus-response conflict cost was investigated in a population-based representative sample of 291 individuals, covering the age range from 6 to 89 years. Stimulus-response conflict cost, indicated by the amount of additional processing time required when there is a conflict between stimulus and response options, follows a U-shaped function across the lifespan. Lifespan age gradient of conflict cost parallels closely those of processing fluctuation and fluid intelligence. Individuals at both ends of the lifespan displayed a greater amount of processing fluctuation and at the same time a larger amount of conflict cost and a lower level of fluid intelligence. After controlling for chronological age and baseline processing speed, conflict cost continues to correlate significantly with fluid intelligence in adulthood and old age and with processing fluctuation in old age. The relation between processing fluctuation and conflict cost in old age lends further support for the neuromodulation of neuronal noise theory of cognitive aging as well as for theories of dopaminergic modulation of conflict monitoring.     

Symbolic control of attention: Tracking its temporal dynamics

Three experiments examined the temporal dynamics of the impact of symbols with task-irrelevant spatial meanings on attentional control. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants were color-cued to report the first letter they saw in the left or right of two parallel letter streams. The cue appeared in the shape of an arrow pointing to the target stream (compatible) or to the other stream (incompatible). Incompatible arrows delayed letter selection; that is, participants reported later-appearing letters and made more errors. In Experiment 3, the target stream was cued in advance, and yet, incompatible symbols delayed target selection. These findings suggest that the irrelevant meaning of symbolic stimuli can still penetrate and bias attentional top-down control, an observation that challenges available control theories.     

Die Bindungstheorie und ihre Relevanz für die Psychotherapie

Zusammenfassung W?hrend im ersten Teil der übersicht über die Relevanz der Bindungstheorie Grundlagen und Methoden der Bindungsforschung skizziert wurden, werden nun die m?glichen Implikationen der Theorie für die Psychotherapie und Psychosomatik er?rtert. überlegungen zur allgemeinen klinischen Relevanz und zum Verh?ltnis der Bindungstheorie zur Psychoanalyse bilden die Basis für die Darstellung konkreter Anwendungen von Ergebnissen der Bindungsforschung in der therapeutischen Praxis. Es folgen zusammenfassende Darstellungen von Untersuchungen, die sich mit der Bedeutung von Bindungscharakteristika für die Entwicklung psychosomatischer St?rungen und die Krankheits- bzw. Stre?verarbeitung befassen sowie von Studien, in denen Bindungscharakteristika psychischen St?rungen zugeordnet wurden. Schlie?lich wird die Bedeutung der Theorie für die Psychotherapie und die Psychotherapieforschung dargestellt.      

Detecting and identifying response-compatible stimuli

Previous work indicates that action-control processes influence perceptual processes: The identification probability of a left- or right-pointing arrow is reduced when it appears during the execution of a compatible left-right-key press (Müsseler & Hommel, in press). The present study addresses the question of whether this effect would also be observed in a detection task—that is, with judgments that do not require discriminating between left- and right-pointing arrows. Indeed, we found comparable effects in both the identification task and the detection task. This outcome is interpreted within a commoncoding framework, which holds that stimulus processing and action control operate on the same codes.     

Visual-manual commonality in size judgments

Visual-manual commonality was studied in terms of commonality of process and commonality of achievement. Fifty-four Ss madelarge-small categorical judgments about a set of stimuli presented in counterbalanced order through both the visual modality and the haptic, touch, or kinesthetic modality. Using a linear discriminant function model, analyses of the several visual-manual pairings were made on the basis of intra-S absolute differences in the weighting of the physical dimensions (process) and the degree of category separation (achievement). A correlational analysis revealed the independence of these measures, and analyses of variance revealed greater visual-haptic commonality for weighting systems and similar visual-haptic and visual-touch commonality for category separation. The results were interpreted in terms of similarities and differences in information gathering and processing characteristics.     

What do we learn from binding features? Evidence for multilevel feature integration

Four experiments were conducted to investigate the relationship between the binding of visual features (as measured by their aftereffects on subsequent binding) and the learning of feature-conjunction probabilities. Both binding and learning effects were obtained, but they did not interact. Interestingly, (shape-color) binding effects disappeared with increasing practice, presumably because of the fact that only 1 of the features involved was relevant to the task. However, this instability was only observed for arbitrary, not highly overlearned combinations of simple geometric features and not for real objects (colored pictures of a banana and strawberry), where binding effects were strong and resistant to practice. These findings suggest that learning has no direct impact on the strength or resistance of bindings or on speed with which features are bound; however, learning does affect the amount of attention particular feature dimensions attract, which again can influence which features are considered in binding.     

Short-term memory and the attentional blink: Capacity versus content

When people monitor the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) of stimuli for two targets (T1 and T2), they often miss T2 if it falls into a time window of about half a second after T1 onset, a phenomenon known as the attentional blink (AB). We found that overall performance in an RSVP task was impaired by a concurrent short-term memory (STM) task and, furthermore, that this effect increased when STM load was higher and when its content was more task relevant. Loading visually defined stimuli and adding articulatory suppression further impaired performance on the RSVP task, but the size of the AB over time (i.e., T1-T2 lag) remained unaffected by load or content. This suggested that at least part of the performance in an RSVP task reflects interference between competing codes within STM, as interference models have held, whereas the AB proper reflects capacity limitations in the transfer to STM, as consolidation models have claimed.