Walking through doorways causes forgetting: environmental effects

Previous work has shown a decline in memory for objects carried through a doorway versus across a room. The aim of the current study is to extend this work to understand how variations in perceptual experience during these event shifts influence this finding. First a change in procedure to reduce memory load to a single item was assessed. Next we explored whether performance is influenced by spatial distance versus spatial categories, the ability to perceptually preview the next location, and changes in the colour and texture of the walls. The location updating effect was consistently observed for all manipulations, suggesting that such event transformations have a robust influence on human memory. This suggests that event cognition is driven more by the use of perceptual information to infer or impose a categorical shift from one event to another rather than by the nature of perceptual information available at the time.     

What is it like to think about oneself? De Se thought and phenomenal intentionality

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - The topic of the paper is at the intersection of recent debates on de se thought and phenomenal intentionality. An interesting problem for phenomenal...     

Educating Adolescents with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder: Caregiver Support Needs

The purpose of this study was to identify caregivers’ needs in helping youth with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) succeed in school. Sixteen caregivers raising a youth with FASD participated in telephone interviews that included the question: “What do caregivers need to help youth be successful in school?”. Participants then sorted responses to these questions into piles they believed to be a conceptual fit with one another, and the data was analyzed using multi-dimensional scaling and cluster analysis. Five concepts emerged: (1) Working to meet the needs of the individual, (2) educational accommodations, (3) FASD-literate schools, (4) resources, and (5) therapeutic supports. These concepts were compared and contrasted with the existing literature.     

Formal Lessons Improve Informal Educational Experiences: The Influence of Prior Knowledge on Student Engagement

Educational experiences can be influenced by novel experiences, yet educators often overlook the influence novelty exerts on students. This quasi-experimental study manipulated prior knowledge before a zoo field trip for 210 urban 7^th-grade students from 2 schools, 1 comprised mostly of low-socioeconomic status (SES) families and 1 comprised mostly of middle-SES families. Students participated in 1 of 2 preparatory lessons, only 1 of which previewed field trip-related content, thereby increasing prior knowledge for half the students from each school. Prior knowledge significantly increased learner engagement, measured through attentiveness, from both schools, but in different types of behaviors. Students from the low-SES school demonstrated more attentiveness if their preparatory lesson previewed field trip material than if it was unrelated to the field trip. Students from the middle SES school displayed the same level of attentiveness in both conditions (and overall higher than the low-SES students). This study highlights complexities associated with prior knowledge and reveals strategies to help improve engagement levels for students visiting informal learning environments.     

Two kinds of bias in visual comparison illustrate the role of location and holistic/analytic processing differences

A number of studies have shown that two stimuli appearing successively at the same spatial location are more likely to be perceived as the same, even though location is irrelevant to the task. This bias to respond “same” when stimuli are at the same location is termed spatial congruency bias. The experiments reported here demonstrate that the spatial congruency bias extends to letter strings: Participants tend to respond “same” when comparing two strings appearing successively at the same location. This bias may arise because successive stimuli at the same location are more likely to be perceived as a single object. Bias is also affected by the nature of the comparison task. We show that if letters must be compared individually (analytical comparison), there is a bias to respond “different,” but if letter strings are compared as unified wholes (holistic comparison), there is no bias or a bias to respond “same.” This analytical bias is apparently separate from the spatial congruency bias. It appears whether the task requires localization of differences between strings, or counting the number of differences, or ignoring differences in some parts of the stimuli while attending to others. All of these analytical comparison tasks require that letters be selected individually, and the analytical bias may reflect difficulty in preventing interference from neighboring letters in this selection process. Each type of bias reflects a different aspect of visual processing, and both can be measured to probe how processing changes across different tasks.     

“Pushing the Button While Pushing the Argument”: Motor Priming of Abstract Action Language

In a behavioral study we analyzed the influence of visual action primes on abstract action sentence processing. We thereby aimed at investigating mental motor involvement during processes of meaning constitution of action verbs in abstract contexts. In the first experiment, participants executed either congruous or incongruous movements parallel to a video prime. In the second experiment, we added a no‐movement condition. After the execution of the movement, participants rendered a sensibility judgment on action sentence targets. It was expected that congruous movements would facilitate both concrete and abstract action sentence comprehension in comparison to the incongruous and the no‐movement condition. Results in Experiment 1 showed a concreteness effect but no effect of motor priming. Experiment 2 revealed a concreteness effect as well as an interaction effect of the sentence and the movement condition. The findings indicate an involvement of motor processes in abstract action language processing on a behavioral level.     

Facilitating Creative Idea Selection: The Combined Effects of Self-Affirmation,Promotion Focus and Positive Affect

Generating creative ideas in a brainstorm session `is a crucial part of innovation. However, for actual implementation, the most creative ideas must be selected from a pool of ideas. To date, idea selection has remained relatively unexplored and validated instruments to measure idea selection performance are not systematically employed. This study aimed to improve creative idea selection performance in a field study. In this study, an idea pool of 18 ideas was used, and participants had to select the 5 most creative ideas from the idea pool. Right before participants performed the idea selection task, in the experimental condition, a promotion focus and positive affect was induced in combination with a self-affirmation task. Participants in the control condition performed corresponding filler tasks. The selection of the 5 most creative ideas from the idea pool of 18 ideas was performed individually. Participants in the experimental condition selected ideas that were more creative than did participants in the control condition. These findings provide first evidence that the selection of creative ideas can be enhanced through a combined induction of promotion-focus, positive mood and self-affirmation.     

Normative Sample of the PEAK Relational Training System: Generalization Module with Comparison to Individuals with Autism

With the rising number of individuals diagnosed with autism and other developmental disabilities comes an increased need for effective assessment and treatment options. Previous research has indicated that applied behavior analytic techniques are among the most empirically supported and utilized treatments for this population; however, curriculum and assessment tools rooted in utilizing these techniques have very little empirical support for their reliability and validity. The current studies sought to assess the performance of both a normative sample and a sample with autism on one such assessment tool: The PEAK Generalization Module. Altogether, 183 typically developing children participated in study 1 and 84 children with a diagnosis of autism participated in study 2. The results indicated that the normative sample demonstrated a strong positive correlation between the PEAK Generalization Assessment and age, whereas the sample with autism demonstrated no significant relationship between the two. Further analysis indicates that the PEAK Generalization Assessment may be an appropriate tool for assessing individuals with autism across a wide range of ages, and provides a preliminary benchmark against which to measure both current functioning and progress in individuals with developmental disabilities.     

Normal Personality Correlates of Chronic Pain Subgroups

A heterogeneous sample of chronic pain patients was first classified into one of three previously identified subgroups (i.e., dysfunctional, interpersonally distressed, adaptive) using the Multidimensional Pain Inventory (R. D. Kerns, D. C. Turk, & T. E. Rudy, 1985). Multiple differences at the domain and facet levels of the Revised NEO PI-R Personality Inventory (P. T. Costa, Jr. & R. R. McCrae, 1992) were found among the three subgroups of patients. In particular, the interpersonally distressed patients showed a greater degree of Neuroticism and were more introverted. Further analyses revealed that this group had tendencies toward feeling more vulnerable, being less trustful, and experiencing less positive emotions than the other groups. The dysfunctional group of patients was notable in terms of their low activity level and lower Openness (to new experience). Adaptive copers reported being emotionally stable, having a moderate degree of Extraversion, and being open to a wider variety of experiences. These differences may act as mediating influences in differing patient responsiveness to pain management programs.