Repetition blindness: out of sight or out of mind?

Does repetition blindness represent a failure of perception or of memory? In Experiment 1, participants viewed rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) sentences. When critical words (C1 and C2) were orthographically similar, C2 was frequently omitted from serial report; however, repetition priming for C2 on a postsentence lexical decision task was equivalent whether or not C1 was similar to C2. In Experiment 2, participants monitored RSVP sentences for a predetermined target. Participants frequently failed to detect the target when it was preceded by an orthographically similar word. In Experiment 3, the authors investigated the role of the attentional blink in this effect. These experiments suggest that repetition blindness is a failure of conscious perception, consistent with predictions of the token-individuation hypothesis.     

Using video modeling and reinforcement to teach perspective-taking skills to children with autism

We evaluated video modeling and reinforcement for teaching perspective-taking skills to 3 children with autism using a multiple baseline design. Video modeling and reinforcement were effective; however, only 2 children were able to pass an untrained task, indicating limited generalization. The findings suggest that video modeling may be an effective technology for teaching perspective taking if researchers can continue to develop strategies for enhancing the generalization of these new skills.     

Learning new word meanings from context: a study of eye movements

This study examined how readers establish the meaning of a new word from the sentence context during silent reading. Readers' eye movements were monitored while they read pairs of sentences containing a target word, context, and a word related to the target word. The target word varied in familiarity (high, low, or novel). The context varied in informativeness about the meaning of the target word (informative or neutral). The amount of time readers spent on the context depended on both the familiarity of the target word and the informativeness of the context. Readers spent additional time on the related word only when the context was neutral and the target was novel. These results indicate that readers were able to determine which areas of text were relevant and used the information to infer a meaning for the novel word.     

The premack principle, response deprivation, and establishing operations

This paper describes response deprivation as an establishing operation. In this context, we review the concept of establishing operation, in particular, its reinforcer-establishing and evocative effects; we place response deprivation in the literature on the reinforcing effects of behavioral activity, wherein response deprivation subsumes the Premack principle; we describe the reinforcer-altering and evocative effects of response deprivation; and we address a methodological concern about the evocative effect. In closing, we discuss some conceptual and empirical implications of the foregoing analyses.     

A sublexical locus for repetition blindness: evidence from illusory words.

Six experiments used an illusory words paradigm to demonstrate that repetition blindness (RB) in orthographically similar words affects only the words' shared letters. Rapid serial visual presentation streams of words and word fragments allowed the unique letters of the 2nd critical word to combine with a subsequent fragment to create a word, as in rock shock ell. The illusory word shell was reported 2-3 times as frequently in RB conditions as in control conditions. Further experiments ruled out letter migration, contour summation, and differences in processing load as explanations for the results. These findings are inconsistent with current proposals that orthographic RB represents similarity inhibition or lexical competition or that it reflects problems with word-level token individuation.     

How awkward! Social anxiety and the perceived consequences of social blunders

Seventy high socially anxious (HSA) and 74 low socially anxious (LSA) participants rated perceived interpersonal and emotional consequences of both (a) autobiographical social blunders recalled from their own lives and (b) imagined blunders presented in standardized hypothetical social scenarios. Ratings of participants' autobiographical blunders were also provided by research assistants who were blind to hypotheses. Results indicated that HSA participants overestimated the negative consequences of their own autobiographical blunders. These negative perceptions among HSA participants extended to imagined blunders, even when participants were instructed to imagine a third party other than themselves as the person committing the blunder. This pattern of results suggests the conclusion that the perceived consequences of social blunders among HSA individuals are driven by the belief that social standards are high, inflexible, or both.