Socio-cognitive conflict, emotions and complexity of thought in real-life morality

A new taxonomy of real-life dilemmas was tested in two studies. In Study 1, 35 respondents assessed six types of real-life dilemmas in terms of socio-cognitive conflict. Support was found for a classification of dilemmas into three levels of socio-cognitive conflict. In Study 2, 191 young women responded to measures of social perspective-taking and emotional empathy and reported a real-life moral dilemma as well as their feelings while making decisions about it. The dilemmas were classified into personal and impersonal and into three levels of socio-cognitive conflict. Dependent variables were the integrative complexity of the arguments and the reported feelings (sympathy, upset, and remorse). Dispositional empathy and perspective taking predicted level of socio-cognitive conflict and feelings of sympathy but not integrative complexity. Personal dilemmas aroused more feelings of upset than did impersonal ones. Low socio-cognitive conflict dilemmas evoked less complex thinking and less intensive feelings of upset and sympathy than did moderate and high socio-cognitive conflict dilemmas.     

The effects of processing time and processing rate on forgetting in working memory: Testing four models of the complex span paradigm

Four models of working memory processes in the complex span paradigm were tested: The task-switching model of Towse, Hitch, and Hutton (1998), the interference account of Saito and Miyake (2004), and two versions of the time-based resource-sharing model of Barrouillet, Bernardin, and Camos (2004). On the basis of a reading span paradigm that used segmented sentences, the effect of processing time on the recall of words was investigated while the amount of processing was held constant. Two conditions of reading (continuous vs. normal) were compared in order to study the influence of brief pauses during reading that could be used for articulatory rehearsal. The results favor a version of the time-based resource-sharing model: A faster reading rate had a negative effect on recall. The effect of reading rate was obtained with continuous as well as normal reading, revealing that even continuous articulation does not prevent simultaneous refreshing of memory traces. A second experiment showed that continuous reading made concurrent articulatory rehearsal virtually impossible. These findings imply that a second rehearsal mechanism for verbal working memory, other than articulatory rehearsal, exists.     

Interviewing Witnesses: Forced Confabulation and Confirmatory Feedback Increase False Memories

In two experiments, adults who witnessed a videotaped event subsequently engaged in face-to-face interviews during which they were forced to confabulate information about the events they had seen. The interviewer selectively reinforced some of the participants' confabulated responses by providing confirmatory feedback (e.g., "Yes, _is the correct answer") and provided neutral (uninformative) feedback for the remaining confabulated responses (e.g., "O.K. _"). One week later, participants developed false memories for the events they had earlier confabulated knowingly. However, confirmatory feedback increased false memory for forcibly confabulated events, increased confidence in those false memories, and increased the likelihood that participants would freely report the confabulated events 1 to 2 months later. The results illustrate the powerful role of social-motivational factors in promoting the development of false memories.     

Pupillary responses to syntactic ambiguity of sentences

Pupillary responses have proven to be reliable physiological correlates of cognitive effort in a variety of tasks, including language processing. To investigate the relation between psychological and syntactic complexity 20 syntactically ambiguous sentences, balanced for bias, were presented to 16 subjects, while their pupil size was continuously measured. These sentences could be read as verb oriented (syntactically more complex) or object oriented (syntactically less complex). Principal components analysis of pupillary movements revealed that verb-oriented readings, resulted in greater pupillary dilations than object-oriented readings, indicating that syntactically more complex sentences, as determined via a formal grammar, require greater cognitive effort in processing. This is viewed as further evidence for the notion that syntactic and psychological complexity are related. High- and low-bias sentences did not induce comparable differences in pupillary movements, indicating that the "multiple meaning theory" may have to be modified.     

The effect of causal chain length on counterfactual conditional reasoning

We investigated German and Nichols' finding that 3‐year‐olds could answer counterfactual conditional questions about short causal chains of events, but not long. In four experiments (N =192), we compared 3‐ and 4‐year‐olds' performance on short and long causal chain questions, manipulating whether the child could draw on general knowledge to answer. We failed to replicate German and Nichols' result, finding instead that in two experiments (Experiments 1 and 3) there was no difference in performance on short and long causal chain questions and in two experiments (Experiments 2 and 4) children showed the opposite pattern: short causal chain questions were more difficult than long. These two unexpected patterns of results were replicated in a fifth study (N =97). Children with lower language ability found short causal chains more difficult than long. Performance by children with higher language ability was unaffected by the length of the causal chain they had to consider. We found no evidence that children showed precocious counterfactual thinking when asked about recent events in a causal chain and conclude that counterfactual thinking develops after 4 years of age.