The Prevalence and Prevention of Crosstalk: A Multi-Institutional Study

It is a common problem in psychology subject pools for past study participants to inform future participants of key experimental details (also known as crosstalk). Previous research (Edlund, Sagarin, Skowronski, Johnson, & Kutter, 2009) demonstrated that a combined classroom and laboratory treatment could significantly reduce crosstalk. The present investigation tested a laboratory-only treatment for the prevention of crosstalk at five universities, along with institutional-level moderators of crosstalk. Results indicated the presence of crosstalk at all universities and that the laboratory-based treatment was effective in reducing crosstalk. Importantly, crosstalk rates were higher (but successfully neutralized) in research pools with higher research credit requirements. Therefore, this research provides valuable guidance regarding crosstalk prevalence and its minimization by researchers.     

Knowing against the odds

We present and discuss a counterexample to the following plausible principle: if you know that a coin is fair, and for all you know it is going to be flipped, then for all you know it will land tails.     

Sleeping beauty should be imprecise

The traditional solutions to the Sleeping Beauty problem say that Beauty should have either a sharp 1/3 or sharp 1/2 credence that the coin flip was heads when she wakes. But Beauty’s evidence is incomplete so that it doesn’t warrant a precise credence, I claim. Instead, Beauty ought to have a properly imprecise credence when she wakes. In particular, her representor ought to assign \(R(H\!eads)=[0,1/2]\) . I show, perhaps surprisingly, that this solution can account for the many of the intuitions that motivate the traditional solutions. I also offer a new objection to Elga’s restricted version of the principle of indifference, which an opponent may try to use to collapse the imprecision.     

Sexually Explicit Media and Sexual Risk Behavior in a Sample of Men Who Have Sex with Men in Norway

The aim of this study was to explore the association between the consumption of sexually explicit media (SEM) depicting condom and non-condom use and HIV/STI-related sexual risk behavior among men who have sex with men (MSM) in Norway. We also explored whether the association between SEM consumption and STI-related sexual risk behavior is mediated by men’s sexual self-esteem and/or condom use self-efficacy. A cross-sectional online survey study was carried out in Norway in 2012. The final sample comprised 529 MSM in Norway. There was a bivariate association between the use of SEM picturing condom use and less STI-related sexual risk behavior. Further, the association between SEM consumption and sexual risk behavior was mediated by condom use self-efficacy. However, SEM did not influence sexual risk behavior via sexual self-esteem. The results offer important cross-cultural validation of recent comparative data from the US and may be used to promote HIV/STI prevention, in the sense that the actors in SEM may serve as role models in managing condom use in sexual contexts.     

Effects of targets embedded within words in a visual search task

Visual search performance can be negatively affected when both targets and distracters share a dimension relevant to the task. This study examined if visual search performance would be influenced by distracters that affect a dimension irrelevant from the task. In Experiment 1 within the letter string of a letter search task, target letters were embedded within a word. Experiment 2 compared targets embedded in words to targets embedded in nonwords. Experiment 3 compared targets embedded in words to a condition in which a word was present in a letter string, but the target letter, although in the letter string, was not embedded within the word. The results showed that visual search performance was negatively affected when a target appeared within a high frequency word. These results suggest that the interaction and effectiveness of distracters is not merely dependent upon common features of the target and distracters, but can be affected by word frequency (a dimension not related to the task demands).     

Guided search for triple conjunctions

A key tenet of feature integration theory and of related theories such as guided search (GS) is that the binding of basic features requires attention. This would seem to predict that conjunctions of features of objects that have not been attended should not influence search. However, Found (1998) reported that an irrelevant feature (size) improved the efficiency of search for a Color × Orientation conjunction if it was correlated with the other two features across the display, as compared to the case in which size was not correlated with color and orientation features. We examined this issue with somewhat different stimuli. We used triple conjunctions of color, orientation, and shape (e.g., search for a red, vertical, oval-shaped item). This allowed us to manipulate the number of features that each distractor shared with the target (sharing) and it allowed us to vary the total number of distractor types (and, thus, the number of groups of identical items: grouping). We found that these triple conjunction searches were generally very efficient—producing very shallow Reaction Time × Set Size slopes, consistent with strong guidance by basic features. Nevertheless, both of the variables, sharing and grouping, modulated performance. These influences were not predicted by previous accounts of GS; however, both can be accommodated in a GS framework. Alternatively, it is possible, though not necessary, to see these effects as evidence for “preattentive binding” of conjunctions.     

Introduction to the special issue on visual working memory

Visual working memory is a volatile, limited-capacity memory that appears to play an important role in our impression of a visual world that is continuous in time. It also mediates between the contents of the mind and the contents of that visual world. Research on visual working memory has become increasingly prominent in recent years. The articles in this special issue of Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics describe new empirical findings and theoretical understandings of the topic.     

Gender Differences among Self-Reported Genital Piercing Stories

Through the investigation of a rich, qualitative dataset of 484 self-reported genital piercing stories, we significantly expand an understanding of the characteristics, motivations, experiences, and outcomes of persons with genital piercings. While many of our findings confirm and elaborate prior research, some of our findings also challenge this research. In particular, we find that contrary to the expectations of prior research, there is: (1) little evidence to support the frequently made claim that genital piercings are pathological and (2) little evidence to support the alternatively framed claim that genital piercings somehow offer resistance to traditional gender and sexual norms. Instead, we argue that, by and large, genital piercings are just another mainstream and fairly conventional type of body decoration and adornment.