Prosaccade and Antisaccade Paradigms in Persons with Alzheimer’s Disease: A Meta-Analytic Review

Persons with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) are at high Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) risk but the development of sensitive measures to assess subtle cognitive decline in this population poses a major challenge for clinicians and researchers. Eye movement monitoring is a non-invasive, sensitive way to assess subtle cognitive processes in clinical populations. We conducted a critical review and a meta-analysis of the literature on pro and antisaccade paradigm in AD/MCI. The meta-analysis included 20 studies, all of which used the prosaccade paradigm and 13 of which studied the antisaccade paradigm as well. Our meta-analysis showed that AD but not MCI patients showed longer prosaccade latencies when compared to controls. While antisaccade latencies did not differentiate between patients from controls, antisaccade error rate were significantly increased among patients in comparison to controls in over 87% of the studies. These findings highlight antisaccade error rate as a reliable tool to distinguish inhibition abilities between AD/MCI and healthy older persons.     

Heuristics and biases in mental arithmetic: revisiting and reversing operational momentum

ABSTRACT

Mental arithmetic is characterised by a tendency to overestimate addition and to underestimate subtraction results: the operational momentum (OM) effect. Here, motivated by contentious explanations of this effect, we developed and tested an arithmetic heuristics and biases model that predicts reverse OM due to cognitive anchoring effects. Participants produced bi-directional lines with lengths corresponding to the results of arithmetic problems. In two experiments, we found regular OM with zero problems (e.g., 3+0, 3?0) but reverse OM with non-zero problems (e.g., 2+1, 4?1). In a third experiment, we tested the prediction of our model. Our results suggest the presence of at least three competing biases in mental arithmetic: a more-or-less heuristic, a sign-space association and an anchoring bias. We conclude that mental arithmetic exhibits shortcuts for decision-making similar to traditional domains of reasoning and problem-solving.     

Non-cognitive antecedents of pay and pay expectations: gender-based differences in a masculine work setting

Research on gender differences in the effects of non-cognitive traits and behaviours on pay is rather scant and focuses largely on the big five personality traits. To address this gap, we consider the equivocal findings regarding the direct associations of intrinsic motivation, self-efficacy, and networking with pay, arguing for gender differences in the degree to which actual pay and pay expectations are influenced by these non-cognitive factors. Hypotheses are tested using a sample of 250 individuals working in traditionally masculine jobs at a single high-technology firm. Participants completed two surveys, and income data were retrieved from the firm’s archives. Intrinsic motivation was positively related to actual pay and pay expectations among men and was negatively related to both pay measures among women. Self-efficacy was positively related to actual pay among women and was unrelated to actual pay among men. Networking was positively related to actual pay among men and was negatively related to actual pay among women. Finally, self-efficacy and networking were unrelated to pay expectations among both men and women. We draw from notions of gender stereotypes, backlash, and tokenism to discuss gender-based differences in how organizations appraise and reward non-cognitive traits and behaviours.     

The cognitive reflection test is robust to multiple exposures

The cognitive reflection test (CRT) is a widely used measure of the propensity to engage in analytic or deliberative reasoning in lieu of gut feelings or intuitions. CRT problems are unique because they reliably cue intuitive but incorrect responses and, therefore, appear simple among those who do poorly. By virtue of being composed of so-called “trick problems” that, in theory, could be discovered as such, it is commonly held that the predictive validity of the CRT is undermined by prior experience with the task. Indeed, recent studies have shown that people who have had previous experience with the CRT score higher on the test. Naturally, however, it is not obvious that this actually undermines the predictive validity of the test. Across six studies with ~ 2,500 participants and 17 variables of interest (e.g., religious belief, bullshit receptivity, smartphone usage, susceptibility to heuristics and biases, and numeracy), we did not find a single case in which the predictive power of the CRT was significantly undermined by repeated exposure. This occurred despite the fact that we replicated the previously reported increase in accuracy among individuals who reported previous experience with the CRT. We speculate that the CRT remains robust after multiple exposures because less reflective (more intuitive) individuals fail to realize that being presented with apparently easy problems more than once confers information about the task’s actual difficulty.     

Orthographic neighborhood effects in the right but not in the left cerebral hemisphere

Two lexical decision experiments investigated orthographic neighborhood effects in the hemispheres. In the first experiment, lexical decision was affected by orthographic neighborhood size when stimuli were presented to the right hemisphere (RH) but not to the left hemisphere (LH). In a four-field masked-prime lexical decision task (Experiment 2), a larger shared orthographic neighborhood between prime and target facilitated lexical decision in the RH but not in the LH. The patterns of activation invoked in the two cerebral hemispheres by a written word and its orthographic neighbors may be qualitatively different.     

The humanity of what we eat: Conceptions of human uniqueness among vegetarians and omnivores

Studies on dehumanization demonstrated that denying certain human characteristics might serve as a strategy for moral disengagement. Meat consumption—especially in the times of cruel animal farming—is related to the exclusion of animals from the human scope of justice. In the present research, it was hypothesized that the conception of human uniqueness (denying animals certain psychological characteristics) might be a strategy of meat‐eaters' moral disengagement. Three studies compared the extent to which vegetarians and omnivores attribute psychological characteristics to humans versus animals. In Study 1, vegetarian participants ascribed more secondary (uniquely human) emotions to animals than did the omnivores; however, there were no differences in primary (animalistic) emotions. Study 2 showed that omnivores distinguish human characteristics from animalistic ones more sharply than vegetarians do, while both groups do not differ in distinguishing human characteristics from mechanistic ones. Study 3 confirmed the results by showing that omnivores ascribed less secondary emotions to traditionally edible animals than to the non‐edible species, while vegetarians did not differentiate these animals. These results support the claim that the lay conceptions of ‘human uniqueness’ are strategies of moral disengagement. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Perceived size and perceived direction: the interplay of the two descriptors of visual space

The stimulus in the outdoor psychophysical experiment was formed by two rods placed on the ground plane over a range of possible distances and orientations. Observers estimated its size and direction by positioning the third rod in the neighbouring space to form an evenly spaced collinear triple of rods. The data revealed interesting similarities between the profiles of the deviations in both judgments: for size judgments, the variability of the responses was least when the targets were at a frontal orientation and gradually increased as the orientation approached the medial plane. For direction judgments, on the other hand, the variability of the responses was least when the stimuli were aligned with the observer's line of sight and gradually increased as the orientation approached the frontoparallel plane. The finding of inverse relationship between the precision of size and direction judgments is interpreted as a consequence of the unequal precision in localisation between the frontal and in-depth dimensions of visual space. The question of the best parameterisation of the observers' responses is discussed.     

The positive effect of negative emotions in protracted conflict: The case of anger

Extant research has demonstrated the destructive role that anger plays in the context of intergroup conflict. Among other findings, it has been established that anger elevates public support for aggressive and violent actions towards the outgroup. This finding has been explained by the unique cognitive appraisals, emotional goal, and response tendencies associated with anger, typified by appraised relative strength and high control, motivation to correct perceived wrongdoings, and willingness to engage in risky behavior. In the current work we examine an innovative assumption, according to which the apparent destructive implications of anger are a result of situational range restriction—namely, that anger as a group emotion has been examined almost solely at the escalation stage of conflict. Instead, we propose that the same unique characteristics of anger can bring about constructive political attitudes and support for non-violent policies in the context of systematic efforts to de-escalate a protracted conflict.To test this hypothesis we conducted two studies in which we examined the relationship between anger and the willingness to engage in positive risk-taking and support non-violent policies in the context of political negotiations between adversaries. Results indicate a significant positive relationship, supporting the hypothesis that anger is not an exclusively militant emotion, and its effects are situationally dependent.     

Expanding on the mental number line: Zero is perceived as the "smallest"

The representation of 0 in healthy adults was studied with the physical comparison task. Automatic processing of numbers, as indicated by the size congruity effect, was used for detecting the basic numerical representations stored in long-term memory. The size congruity effect usually increases with numerical distance between the physically compared numbers. This increase was attenuated for comparisons to 0 or 1 (but not to 2) when they were perceived as the smallest number in the set. Furthermore, the size congruity effect was enlarged in these cases. These results indicate an end effect in automatic processing of numbers and suggest that 0, or 1 in the absence of 0, is perceived as the smallest entity on the mental number line. The implications of these findings are discussed with regard to models of number representation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).