The cost of being watched: Stroop interference increases under concomitant eye contact

Current models in social neuroscience advance that eye contact may automatically recruit cognitive resources. Here, we directly tested this hypothesis by evaluating the distracting strength of eye contact on concurrent visual processing in the well-known Stroop’s paradigm. As expected, participants showed stronger Stroop interference under concomitant eye contact as compared to closed eyes. Two control experiments allowed ruling out low-level account of this effect as well as non-specific effect of the presence of open eyes. This suggests that refraining from processing eye contact is actually as difficult as refraining from word reading in the Stroop task. Crucially, the eye contact effect was obtained while gaze was not under the direct focus of attention and the participants were faced with another powerful distracter (the incongruent word) in the task at hand. Thus, there is a cost of being watched even in circumstances where the processing of direct gaze is strongly disfavored. The present results emphasize the crucial status of eye contact in human cognition.     

Eye movements,the perceptual span,and reading speed

The perceptual span or region of effective vision during eye fixations in reading was examined as a function of reading speed (fast readers were compared with slow readers), font characteristics (fixed width vs. proportional width), and intraword spacing (normal or reduced). The main findings were that fast readers (reading at about 330 wpm) had a larger perceptual span than did slow readers (reading about 200 wpm) and that the span was not affected by whether or not the text was fixed width or proportional width. In addition, there were interesting font and intraword spacing effects that have important implications for the optimal use of space in a line of text.     

Acquisition of Reading and Intellectual Development Disorder

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research - We propose a review of the literature of the studies investigating reading acquisition in intellectual deficiency (ID), with particular focus on the...     

Sneaking in through the back door: How category-based stereotype suppression leads to rebound in feature-based effects

Given the dramatic shifts in societal norms to curb overt stereotyping and prejudice, these biases may leak out in more subtle ways than were apparent in the past. Accordingly, we examined how the suppression of stereotypes might affect post-suppression category-based stereotyping and the more subtle feature-based stereotyping. In support of our proposition, participants in the suppression condition used more feature-based, but less category-based stereotypes in their post-suppression task than participants in the control condition. Furthermore, a relation between post-suppression category-based and feature-based stereotyping existed in the suppression condition such that decreases in category-based stereotyping were associated with increases in feature-based stereotyping. Findings as a whole suggest that norms against the expression of stereotypic biases may ironically lead people to be more vulnerable to biases as a function of within-category features.     

On the origins of age‐of‐acquisition effects in the perception of printed words

Children from different grades were tested in a lexical decision task. Word‐stimuli consisted of words acquired in their respective grades, and in grades previous to their own. The results showed that the proportion of errors for newly acquired words increased steadily with grade (i.e. first graders made fewer errors with words of grade one than fifth graders with words of grade five). However, the proportion of errors for words acquired in a given grade remained constant throughout the following grades (fifth graders made as many errors with words acquired in grade one as first graders did). These results indicate that the strong impact that age‐ or order‐of‐acquisition of words has on the way words will be recognized is in place at a very young age.     

Conditional Reinforcers and Informative Stimuli in A Constant Environment

Five pigeons responded on steady-state concurrent variable-interval variable-interval schedules of food presentation in which half of the foods were removed and replaced with nonfood stimuli. Across conditions, the stimuli were either paired or unpaired with food, and the correlation between the ratio of food deliveries on the two alternatives and the ratio of nonfood stimuli was either −1, 0, or +1. Neither the pairing of stimuli with food, nor the correlation between stimuli and food, affected generalized-matching performance, but paired stimuli had a demonstrable effect at a local level of analysis. This effect was independent of the food–stimulus correlation. These results differ from results previously obtained in a frequently changing environment. We attribute this difference in results to differences in the information value of response-contingent stimuli in frequently changing versus relatively constant environments, as well as to differences between forward pairing and simultaneous pairing of the stimuli with food.     

Common Genetic but Specific Environmental Influences for Aggressive and Deceitful Behaviors in Preadolescent Males

Although both aggressive (AGG) and deceitful behaviors (DEC) are symptoms of childhood conduct problems, few studies have examined common vs. specific etiological influences. Early intervention is encouraged for conduct problems and findings from genetically informative studies can suggest whether interventions should focus on conduct problems in general or groupings of conduct problems more specifically. Twin model-fitting analyses were conducted on same and different teacher ratings of AGG and DEC for 872 9-year old male twin pairs. Common genetic influences were found to underlie the susceptibility for both AGG and DEC. The same teacher ratings resulted in somewhat higher heritability estimates than different teacher ratings. Results also indicated stronger environmental effects for DEC as compared with AGG, with a significant shared environmental component for same teachers and a substantial non-shared environmental component for different teachers. Our data suggest that AGG and DEC share risk genes and environmental factors may differentiate these two types of conduct problems. Characterizing these specific environmental factors may be useful when developing interventions.     

Relationships between redundancy analysis,canonical correlation,and multivariate regression

This paper attempts to clarify the nature of redundancy analysis and its relationships to canonical correlation and multivariate multiple linear regression. Stewart and Love introduced redundancy analysis to provide non-symmetric measures of the dependence of one set of variables on the other, as channeled through the canonical variates. Van den Wollenberg derived sets of variates which directly maximize the between set redundancy. Multivariate multiple linear regression on component scores (such as principal components) is considered. The problem is extended to include an orthogonal rotation of the components. The solution is shown to be identical to van den Wollenberg's maximum redundancy solution.This research was supported in part by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency contract 68-02-3402. The author gratefully acknowledges the stimulation of Maurice Tatsuoka and Beth Dawson-Saunders in first interesting him in redundancy analysis, as well as a useful change suggested by Warren Sarle.