The emergent generation effect and hypermnesia: influences of semantic and nonsemantic generation tasks

The generation effect is moderated by experimental design, affecting recall in within-subjects designs but typically not in between-subjects designs. However, N. W. Mulligan (2001) found that the generation effect emerged over repeated recall tests in a between-subjects design, calling into question the generality of this limiting condition. In addition, the generate condition but not the read condition produced hypermnesia (increased recall over tests). The present experiments demonstrate that semantic-based (semantic-associate and category-associate) generation tasks produce this pattern of results whereas nonsemantic (letter transposition, rhyme, word fragment) generation tasks do not. Thus, the emergent generation effect appears to be a byproduct of semantic elaboration rather than a direct product of generation. In addition, high- and low-imagery words produced equivalent hypermnesia and emergent generation effects, arguing against a mediating role for imagistic encoding. Finally, there is no evidence of an emergent generation effect for nonwords, another traditional limiting condition of the generation effect.     

Visual similarity is greater for line drawings of nonliving than living things: the importance of musical instruments and body parts

It has been argued that greater intra-category structural similarity for living things, and the subsequent "visual crowding," makes them more difficult to recognize and name for neurologically damaged individuals and normal subjects (Humphreys et al., 1988). Nevertheless, the precise meaning and quantification of structural similarity remains unclear, as does the rationale for why it necessarily should be greater for living things. We derived a new measure of visual overlap from the Snodgrass and Vanderwart corpus of line drawings: the degree of pixel overlap within subcategories (Euclidean distance: ED). Contrary to existing notions of visual crowding and extant measures of contour overlap, within-category ED indicated less within-category visual overlap for living things. Furthermore, musical instruments clustered with living things (having low overlap), while body parts clustered with nonliving things (having high overlap). These counter-intuitive findings accord with patient data and thus, provide evidence for the psychological reality and utility of ED.     

Effects of death within 11 years on cognitive performance in old age

Six different cognitive tests and the Heck Depression Inventory (BDI) were given to 3,572 active community residents aged 49 to 93 years. Causes of death were ascertained for 443 who died between 36 and 3,903 days later. Subsequent survival predicted test scores during the 3,903 days and independently during Days 36 to 1,826 and Days 1,827 to 3,903. Scores on the BDI and cumulative verbal learning and vocabulary tests predicted mortality after demographics and performance on other cognitive tests had been considered. Predictors were similar for deaths from heart disease, malignancies, and other causes. A new finding that cognitive tests did not predict survival duration within the sample of deceased explains previous findings of greater terminal decline in performance for young than for elderly adults.     

Easily perceived, easily remembered? Perceptual interference produces a double dissociation between metamemory and memory performance

A recent candidate for explaining metamemory judgments is the perceptual fluency hypothesis, which proposes that easily perceived items are predicted to be remembered better, regardless of actual memory performance (Rhodes & Castel Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 137:615–625, 2008). In two experiments, we used the perceptual interference manipulation to test this hypothesis. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with intact and backward-masked words during encoding, followed by a metamemory prediction (a list-wide judgment of learning, JOL) and then a free recall test. Participants predicted that intact words would be better recalled, despite better actual memory for words in the perceptual interference condition, yielding a crossed double dissociation between predicted and actual memory performance. In Experiment 2, JOLs were made after each study word. Item-by-item JOLs were likewise higher for intact than for backward-masked words, despite similar actual memory performance for both types of words. The results are consistent with the perceptual fluency hypothesis of metamemory and are discussed in terms of experience-based and theory-based metamemory judgments.     

On the validity of implicit association measures of personality traits

Participants (N = 200) completed self-report and implicit association (IAT) measures of Extraversion, Conscientiousness, and Emotional Stability. Peer trait ratings and supervisor ratings of job performance were also collected. Results suggested low convergence between IAT and self-report trait measures. Cognitive ability and self-positive bias both explained significant portions of the method variance expressed by IAT measures. Correlations between IAT trait measures and job performance were statistically non-significant, of similar magnitudes to their self-report counterparts, and of magnitudes consistent with past research on criterion validities of self-report trait measures. The results offer only very limited support for the use of IAT trait measures in applied assessment settings.     

Visual Narrative Structure

Narratives are an integral part of human expression. In the graphic form, they range from cave paintings to Egyptian hieroglyphics, from the Bayeux Tapestry to modern day comic books ( Kunzle, 1973 ; McCloud, 1993 ). Yet not much research has addressed the structure and comprehension of narrative images, for example, how do people create meaning out of sequential images? This piece helps fill the gap by presenting a theory of Narrative Grammar. We describe the basic narrative categories and their relationship to a canonical narrative arc, followed by a discussion of complex structures that extend beyond the canonical schema. This demands that the canonical arc be reconsidered as a generative schema whereby any narrative category can be expanded into a node in a tree structure. Narrative “pacing” is interpreted as a reflection of various patterns of this embedding: conjunction, left‐branching trees, center‐embedded constituencies, and others. Following this, diagnostic methods are proposed for testing narrative categories and constituency. Finally, we outline the applicability of this theory beyond sequential images, such as to film and verbal discourse, and compare this theory with previous approaches to narrative and discourse.     

Dreading the boards: stress response to a competitive audition characterized by social-evaluative threat

The capacity of psychosocial stressors to provoke the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis has been demonstrated to vary depending upon a number of psychological factors. Laboratory stressors characterized by social-evaluative threat are proposed to be the most efficacious in the elicitation of a cortisol stress response. Salivary cortisol, cardiovascular, and subjective responses of 16 healthy adults facing a naturalistic stressor characterized by social-evaluative threat (competitive performance auditions) were examined. Audition exposure was sufficient to provoke significant cortisol, arterial blood pressure (systolic and diastolic), and subjective stress responses. Cortisol response reactivity (area under the curve with respect to increase [AUCi]) also correlated with participants' subjective rating of social-evaluative threat. The competitive performance audition context is therefore considered a promising context in which to further explore cortisol responsivity to social-evaluative threat.     

Experimenter Behavior as an Unintended Determinant of Experimental Results

Sound motion pictures were made of 19 Es conducting a person perception experiment with 53 Ss. Ss' task was to rate the degree of success or failure of people pictured in photos. From some of the Ss, Es had been led to expect ratings of success and from some ratings of failure. Actually, Ss were assigned at random to the “success-perceiving” or “failure-perceiving” group, Es showed significant behavioral variation in the way in which they conducted the experiment, Es whose experimental behavior reflected greater interpersonal involvement or warmth obtained ratings of the photos as more successful, Es whose experimental behavior reflected a greater task orientation, greater competence, and a more professional manner obtained ratings significantly more in accordance with their expectancy, regardless of the particular nature of that expectancy.     

Giving cognition a helping hand: The effect of congruent gestures on object name retrieval

The gestures that accompany speech are more than just arbitrary hand movements or communicative devices. They are simulated actions that can both prime and facilitate speech and cognition. This study measured participants’ reaction times for naming degraded images of objects when simultaneously adopting a gesture that was either congruent with the target object, incongruent with it, and when not making any hand gesture. A within‐subjects design was used, with participants (N= 122) naming 10 objects under each condition. Participants named the objects significantly faster when adopting a congruent gesture than when not gesturing at all. Adopting an incongruent gesture resulted in significantly slower naming times. The findings are discussed in the context of the intrapersonal cognitive and facilitatory effects of gestures and underline the relatedness between language, action, and cognition.