What is "marked" in visual marking? Evidence for effects of configuration in preview search

Visual search for a conjunction target is facilitated when distractor sets are segmented over time: the preview benefit Watson and Humphreys (1997) suggested that this benefit involved inhibition of old items (visual marking, VM). We investigated whether the preview benefit is sensitive to the configuration of the old distractors. Old distractors changed their location prior to the occurrence of the new items, while also either changing or maintaining their configuration. Configuration changes disrupted search. The results are consistent with object-based VM, which is sensitive to the configuration of old stimuli.     

What you get out of memory depends on the question you ask

Following study, participants received 2 tests. The 1st was a recognition test; the 2nd was designed to tap recollection. The objective was to examine performance on Test 1 conditional on Test 2 performance. In Experiment 1, contrary to process dissociation assumptions, exclusion errors better predicted subsequent recollection than did inclusion errors. In Experiments 2 and 3, with alternate questions posed on Test 2, words having high estimates of recollection with one question had high estimates of familiarity with the other question. Results supported the following: (a) the 2-test procedure has considerable potential for elucidating the relationship between recollection and familiarity; (b) there is substantial evidence for dependency between such processes when estimates are obtained using the process dissociation and remember-know procedures; and (c) order of information access appears to depend on the question posed to the memory system.     

Disproportionate deficit in associative recognition relative to item recognition in global amnesia

In two experiments, we tested the hypothesis that medial temporal lobe (MTL) amnesic patients and, likewise, diencephalic (DNC) amnesic patients evidence a disproportionate deficit in memory for associations in comparison with memory for single items. In Experiment 1, we equated item recognition in amnesic and control participants and found that, under these conditions, associative recognition remained impaired both for MTL patients and for DNC patients. To rule out an alternative interpretation of the results of Experiment 1, in Experiment 2 we compared the performance of amnesic and control participants on a one-item recognition task and a two-item recognition task that required no memory for the association between members of word pairs. In the MTL group, when single-item recognition was equated to that of the controls, two-item nonassociative pair memory was equivalent as well. In the DNC group, nonassociative pair memory was impaired, but this impairment did not fully account for the impairment in associative memory. These findings indicate that memory for novel associations between items is disproportionately impaired in comparison with memory for single items in amnesia.     

Incidental learning of real-world regularities

The large literature on incidental learning relies almost exclusively on laboratory experiments. Whenever researchers have attempted to demonstrate incidental learning of real-world regularities, they have typically failed to show learning. For example, it is well established that people do not learn regularities in everyday objects, such as the left-right orientation of faces on coins, despite a very large exposure to them. In this report, we examine this apparent contradiction. We argue that most studies exploring real-life incidental learning use tests that are not as sensitive to low-confidence information as those traditionally used in laboratory tasks. Using more sensitive measures, we show that it is possible to learn regularities from British and Japanese cultural life as a direct result of exposure to these regularities. Further, confidence measures suggest that although the information may be acquired incidentally, it can be expressed with and without concomitant awareness of that knowledge.     

Asymmetric dependencies in perceiving identity and emotion: experiments with morphed faces.

We investigated whether an asymmetric relationship between the perception of identity and emotional expressions in faces (Schweinberger & Soukup, 1998) may be related to differences in the relative processing speed of identity and expression information. Stimulus faces were morphed across identity within a given emotional expression, or were morphed across emotion within a given identity. In Experiment 1, consistent classifications of these images were demonstrated across a wide range of morphing, with only a relatively narrow category boundary. At the same time, classification reaction times (RTs) reflected the increased perceptual difficulty of the morphed images. In Experiment 2, we investigated the effects of variations in the irrelevant dimension on judgments of faces with respect to a relevant dimension, using a Garner-type speeded classification task. RTs for expression classifications were strongly influenced by irrelevant identity information. In contrast, RTs for identity classifications were unaffected by irrelevant expression information, and this held even for stimuli in which identity was more difficult and slower to discriminate than expression. This suggests that differences in processing speed cannot account for the asymmetric relationship between identity and emotion perception. Theoretical accounts proposing independence of identity and emotion perception are discussed in the light of these findings.     

The Interactive Role of Negative Affectivity and Job Characteristics: Are High-NA Employees Destined to Be Unhappy at Work?1

The present study examined whether employees high in negative affectivity (NA) are destined to be unhappy at work. Managerial employees provided information regarding perceptions of job characteristics, negative affectivity (NA), job satisfaction, and intentions to turnover. Using hierarchical regression, our findings suggest that employees who reported being high NA were more reactive to the environmental cues of perceived job scope. Specifically, NA interacted with job scope such that individuals high in NA who perceived their jobs as being higher (lower) in scope reported more (less) job satisfaction than did individuals low in NA. Implications for organizations and future research directions are discussed.     

When days are numbered: calendar structure and the development of calendar processing in English and Chinese.

Unlike English, Chinese uses a numerical system for naming months and days. This study explored whether this difference in naming affects the development of simple calendar calculation. Eight- and 10-year-old children as well as undergraduates in China and the United States were asked to name the day or month that comes a specified time before or after a given day or month. In each age group Chinese speakers primarily used calculation based on calendar names to solve these tasks, while English speakers primarily resorted to reciting the names. The magnitude of these differences was substantial; on difficult tasks Chinese fourth graders performed at speeds comparable to those of English-speaking adults. Implications for models of how linguistic structure affects cognition are discussed.     

Mitigating Burnout Among High-NA Employees in Health Care: What Can Organizations Do?

The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which factors in the nursing environment have differential effects on burnout levels among nurses high and low in negative affectivity (NA). Specifically, this field study examined the moderating relationships among role ambiguity, role conflict, and collective efficacy on the NA–burnout relationship among nurses in a hospital setting. Findings suggest that perceived role conflict exacerbates while perceptions of collective efficacy reduce specific dimensions of burnout for nurses high in NA. These results offer some evidence regarding which environmental characteristics may mitigate burnout for high-NA nurses.     

Iterated Belief Revision, Reliability, and Inductive Amnesia

Belief revision theory concerns methods for reformulating an agent's epistemic state when the agent's beliefs are refuted by new information. The usual guiding principle in the design of such methods is to preserve as much of the agent's epistemic state as possible when the state is revised. Learning theoretic research focuses, instead, on a learning method's reliability or ability to converge to true, informative beliefs over a wide range of possible environments. This paper bridges the two perspectives by assessing the reliability of several proposed belief revision operators. Stringent conceptions of minimal change are shown to occasion a limitation called inductive amnesia: they can predict the future only if they cannot remember the past. Avoidance of inductive amnesia can therefore function as a plausible and hitherto unrecognized constraint on the design of belief revision operators.     

Parent–Child Attunement Moderates the Prospective Link between Parental Overcontrol and Adolescent Adjustment

Parental overcontrol (OC), behavior that intrusively or dominantly restricts child autonomy, has been identified as a transdiagnostic risk factor for youth. However, it is as yet unknown whether the association between parental OC and child maladjustment remains even when OC is exerted infrequently or by attuned parents. Rather, the selective use of OC might steer children away from danger. Taking a developmental psychopathology approach, this study focuses on the larger parent–child relationship context, testing whether either the dose at which parents demonstrate OC or the degree to which children perceive their parents as attuned determines whether OC is risky or protective for adolescents’ adjustment. Among a community sample of 114 families of children followed from the ages of 12–18, we examine whether OC, behaviorally coded from triadic mother–father–child discussions in middle childhood, is associated with later risky behavior and anxiety symptoms in adolescence. Overcontrol exerted by either mothers or fathers had a curvilinear effect on adolescent risky behaviors, and this effect was moderated by children's perceived attunement. Although OC generally was associated with increased risky behaviors, low doses of OC or OC exerted by highly attuned parents protected against engagement in risky behaviors. No main effect of OC was observed on adolescent anxiety; however, mothers’ OC interacted with perceived parental attunement, such that OC exerted by less attuned parents predicted greater anxiety. Results underscore that the effect of parenting behaviors depends on the larger parent–child relationship context.