Affectivity in Its Relation to Memory

It seems obvious that various feelings (various kinds of affectivity) are memorized, forgotten, and recollected to various degrees. Some of them are forgotten. Some of those forgotten can be recollected, while others are lost forever. For example, short and long-lasting feelings and shallow and deep feelings are memorized and remembered in different ways. In this paper I analyse from a conceptual point of view several categories of memory-of-feelings and offer a comprehensive map of them. In the end, the richness of categories in the realm of memory is interpreted as a proof of the intricacy of affectivity.     

Influence of practice on response-selection and response-implementation processes involved in the response-interference effect

In a choice reaction-time task, the response-interference effect is an increase in reaction times when the two possible responses are from the same hand compared to when the two possible responses are from different hands [Psychonomic Science 2 (1965) 55-56; Human Motor Control, Academic Press, San Diego, CA, 1991]. Although the influence of practice on other reaction-time effects (i.e., the complexity effect and precuing) has been examined, research evaluating the influence of practice on the response-interference effect is limited. Therefore, two experiments were conducted to determine the influence of practice on the response-interference effect. In Experiment 1, a bilateral transfer task was used to assess the influence of practice on the response-selection processes associated with the response-interference effect. The practice results indicated decreased reaction times, but did not influence the response-interference effect. In Experiment 2, a priming task was used to assess the influence of practice on response-implementation processes associated with the response-interference effect. The reaction time results indicated a change in the response-interference effect. The results of these two experiments suggest that with only two fingers on response keys, practice alters the mechanical constraints affecting the response-implementation processes and thereby decreases the response-interference effect.     

Effects of acoustic degradation on syntactic processing: implications for the nature of the resource system used in language processing

This study investigated the effect of noise masking on on-line syntactic processing. Ninety college students were tested on measures of working memory and on-line sentence comprehension. Subjects were divided equally into three listening conditions: no noise masking, -3 dB signal-to-noise ratio (S:N), -4.5 dB S:N. The auditory moving windows (AMW) paradigm was used to measure on-line sentence processing. In the AMW paradigm, subjects pressed a button for the successive presentation of each phrase in two types of sentences (syntactically simple and complex), and listening times were recorded for each phrase. Previous studies have shown that the verb in the more complex sentence type is the most capacity demanding portion of the sentence. Listening times were longer overall with increased noise masking, and listening times were longer overall at the verb of the harder sentence type. However, the increase at the verb was not larger with increased noise masking. All three groups showed similar effects of syntactic structure in the on-line data. The on-line syntactic effects were not due to problems in word recognition. Correlational analyses did not indicate a relationship between the increase in processing time at the capacity demanding region of the harder sentence types and any of the measures of working memory capacity in any of the three listening conditions. Results indicate that on-line sentence processing is not affected by noise masking if lexical access (e.g., word recognition) remains intact.     

Action-based and vision-based selection of input: Two sources of control

In the first part of this paper we review evidence suggesting that there exists a mechanism that selects input on the basis of its similarity to the required action. This response-based input selection differs from the more established space- and object-based input selection in that it is not constrained by the structure of the input. Our evidence suggests that the two-choice Stroop effect is caused by this response-based selection mechanism. By contrast, it is known that the flanker effect is determined by the space- and object- based selection mechanisms. We explore whether the conflict resolution of the Stroop and flanker tasks is different as well by embedding these two tasks in a PRP (Psychological Refractory Period) paradigm. We show that the Stroop and the PRP effects are additive whereas the flanker and the PRP effects are underadditive, suggesting that the processes in charge of the conflict resolution in the Stroop and the flanker tasks are indeed different. We discuss possible reasons for this difference, and discuss possible ways in which the response-based mechanism can be implemented in information processing models.