Primacy of emotional vs. semantic scene recognition in peripheral vision

Emotional scenes were presented peripherally (5.2° away from fixation) or foveally (at fixation) for 150 ms. In affective evaluation tasks viewers judged whether a scene was unpleasant or not, or whether it was pleasant or not. In semantic categorisation tasks viewers judged whether a scene involved animals or humans (superordinate-level task), or whether it portrayed females or males (subordinate-level task). The same stimuli were used for the affective and the semantic task. Results indicated that in peripheral vision affective evaluation was less accurate and slower than animal/human discrimination, and did not show any advantage over gender discrimination. In addition, performance impairment in the peripheral relative to the foveal condition was greater or equivalent for affective than for semantic categorisation. These findings cast doubts on the specialness and the primacy of affective over semantic recognition. The findings are also relevant when considering the role of the subcortical “low route” in emotional processing.     

Measuring Coping in Low-Income European American,African American,and Mexican American Adolescents: An Examination of Measurement Equivalence

We examined the cross-ethnic and cross-language equivalence of the Children's Coping Strategies Checklist (Ayers, T.S., Sandler, I.N., West, S.G. and Roosa, M.W. (1996). A dispositional and situational assessment of children's coping: Testing alternative models of coping. Journal of Personality , 64 (4), 923-958) by assessing item, functional, and scalar equivalence in a sample of 319 European American, African American, and Mexican American adolescents from low-income inner-city families. Depression, as measured by Children's Depression Inventory, was the criterion in the analyses of scalar equivalence. The results suggest considerable cross-ethnic and cross-language measurement equivalence of the Children's Coping Strategies Checklist. The findings also suggest some caution in using the Children's Depression Inventory in comparative studies of African American and Mexican American adolescents or in studies that treat these groups as homogeneous samples.     

A letter visual-similarity matrix for Latin-based alphabets

Indicators of letter visual similarity have been used for controlling the design of empirical and neuropsychological studies and for rigorously determining the factors that underlie reading ability and literacy acquisition. Additionally, these letter similarity/confusability matrices have been useful for studies examining more general aspects of human cognition, such as perception. Despite many letter visual-similarity matrices being available, they all have two serious limitations if they are to be used by researchers in the reading domain: (1) They have been constructed using atypical reading data obtained from speeded reading-aloud tasks and/or under degraded presentation conditions; (2) they only include letters from the English alphabet. Although some letter visual-similarity matrices have been constructed using data gathered from normal reading conditions, these either are based on old fonts, which may not resemble the letters found in modern print, or were never published. For the first time, this article presents a comprehensive letter visual-similarity/confusability matrix that has been constructed based on untimed responses to clearly presented upper- and lowercase letters that are present in many languages that use Latin-based alphabets, including Catalan, Dutch, English, French, Galician, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. Such a matrix will be useful for researchers interested in the processes underpinning reading and literacy acquisition.     

Psychological distance and reaction time in a Stroop task

Several sources of interference may simultaneously affect the onset of the well-known “Stroop effect.” Among them is the semantic component, which is reflected in the gradient or semantic effect. This effect consists of an increase in the amount of interference as the semantic distance between the word and the color concept decreases. Shepard (Science 237:1317–1323, 1987) relates psychological space, measured through multidimensional scaling, to mean response times. The present investigation aims to study the function relating the semantic gradient with the psychological distance between the word and the color in a Stroop task. After measuring the gradient, we obtained the subjective rating of the degree of dissimilarity of the gradient words with the concept of “color.” In our work, we show that the amount of interference in a Stroop task increases when the semantic distance from the word to the color concept decreases, and it does so exponentially. We replicated the study with different stimuli to test the robustness of the results.     

Purposes of reasoning and (a new vindication of) Moore’s proof of an external world

A common view about Moore’s Proof of an External World is that the argument fails because anyone who had doubts about its conclusion could not use the argument to rationally overcome those doubts. I agree that Moore’s Proof is—in that sense—dialectically ineffective at convincing an opponent or a doubter, but I defend that the argument (even when individuated taking into consideration the purpose of Moore’s arguing and, consequently, the preferred addressee of the Proof) does not fail. The key to my defence is to conceive the Proof as addressed to subjects with a different epistemic condition. To sustain this view I formulate some hypothesis about the common general purpose of arguing and I defend that it can be fulfilled even when the addressee of an argument is not someone who disbelieves or doubts its conclusion.     

On the value of genealogy,materiality, and networks: a response

In response to the challenges posed by Steven Engler, Martha Finch, Mark Gardiner, Laura Harrington, Paul Johnson, and Michael Stausberg, this essay fleshes out key terms in More than Belief (2011), including genealogy, materialism, non-reductionism, and networks, showing their value in researching and theorizing about religion.     

The Role of Time in the Quest for Understanding Psychological Mechanisms

The lead-lag structure of multivariate time-ordered observations and the possibility to disentangle between-person (BP) from within-person (WP) sources of variance are major assets of longitudinal (panel) data. Hence, psychologists are making increasing use of such data, often with the intent to delineate the dynamic properties of psychological mechanisms, understood as a sequence of causal effects that govern psychological functioning. However, even with longitudinal data, psychological mechanisms are not easily identified. In this article, we show how an adequate representation of time may enhance the tenability of causal interpretations in the context of multivariate longitudinal data analysis. We anchor our considerations with an example that illustrates some of the main problems and questions faced by applied researchers and practitioners. We distinguish between static versus dynamic and discrete versus continuous time modeling approaches and discuss their advantages and disadvantages. We place particular emphasis on different ways of addressing BP differences and stress their dual role as potential confounds versus valuable sources of information for improving estimation and aiding causal inference. We conclude by outlining an approach that offers the potential of better integration of information on BP differences and WP changes in the search for causal mechanisms along with a discussion of current problems and limitations.     

Detection of emotional faces: low perceptual threshold and wide attentional span

In two experiments, prime face stimuli with an emotional or a neutral expression were presented individually for 25 to 125 ms, either in foveal or parafoveal vision; following a mask, a probe face or a word label appeared for recognition. Accurate detection and sensitivity (A') were higher for angry, happy, and sad faces than for nonemotional (neutral) or novel (scheming) faces at short exposure times (25-75 ms), in both the foveal and the parafoveal field, and with both the probe face and the probe word. These results indicate that there is a low perceptual threshold for unambiguous emotional faces, which are especially likely to be detected both within and outside the focus of attention; and that this facilitated detection involves processing of the affective meaning of faces, not only discrimination of formal visual features.     

Processing of emotional visual scenes outside the focus of spatial attention: The role of eccentricity

Pairs of emotional-neutral pictures were presented parafoveally or peripherally (i.e., 2.2° or 5.2° away from fixation) as primes for 150 ms, followed by a recognition probe. The probe was either identical or related in semantic content to one of the primes. Physical features (colour, size, and spatial orientation) were always different for the primes and the probe. Results indicated that, for parafoveal displays, hit rate and sensitivity (A′) were higher for the identical emotional probes than for the identical neutral probes; in contrast, for peripheral displays there were more false alarms for the related emotional probes than for the related neutral probes. It is concluded that processing of specific semantic content is more likely to be obtained from emotional than from neutral scenes in parafoveal vision, whereas an overall, vague impression is extracted in peripheral vision.     

Eye movements when reading words with $YMβOL$ and NUM83R5: There is a cost

Recent evidence from masked priming experiments has revealed that readers regularize letter-like symbols and letter-like numbers into their corresponding base letters with minimal processing cost. However, one open question is whether the same pattern occurs when these items are presented during normal silent reading. In the present study, we respond to this question in an eye-movement experiment that included sentences with words that had symbols and numbers as letters, as in “YESTERDAY I SAW THE SECRE74RY WORKING VERY HARD”. Results revealed that there is a greater reading cost associated with letter-by-number replacements than with letter-by-symbol replacements, especially when the replaced letters occur at the beginning of the word. We examine the implications of these findings for models of visual word recognition and reading.