Understanding others: the face and person construal

The face is a critical stimulus in person perception, yet little research has considered the efficiency of the processing operations through which perceivers glean social knowledge from facial cues. Integrating ideas from work on social cognition and face processing, the current research considered the ease with which invariant aspects of person knowledge can be extracted from faces under different viewing and processing conditions. The results of 2 experiments demonstrated that participants extracted knowledge pertaining to the sex and identity of faces in both upright and inverted orientations, even when the faces were irrelevant to the task at hand. The results of an additional experiment, however, suggested that although the extraction of person knowledge from faces may occur unintentionally, the process is nonetheless contingent on the operation of a semantic processing goal. The authors consider the efficiency of person construal and the processes that support this fundamental facet of social-cognitive functioning.     

Categorizing others: the dynamics of person construal

A fundamental question in social cognition is whether people categorize others on the basis of the social groups to which they belong. Integrating ideas from related work on face processing, the current research explored the emergence and boundary conditions of person categorization. Using speeded responses to facial stimuli as a marker of category activation, the authors showed in 3 experiments that person categorization: (a) occurs only under active-encoding conditions and (b) does not extend to applicable but task-irrelevant categorical dimensions, but (c) is sensitive to overlap in the perceptual features that support multiple categorical construals. The authors consider the implications of these findings for models of social-cognitive functioning and the component processes that support person perception.     

Motivational control of second-order conditioning

Two experiments examined the motivational specificity of the associations that support 2nd-order conditioning. In the 1st phase of each experiment rats were exposed to 2 visual conditioned stimuli (CSs) paired with either a saline or food pellet unconditioned stimulus (US) prior to exposure to 2nd-order conditioning using 2 auditory CSs, 1 paired with each visual CS. Rats' motivational state was then shifted prior to a test such that if and only if specific motivational features of the 1st-order training US played a role in the 2nd-order associative structure would responding to the 2nd-order cues shift appropriately with the state change. Even when the US was irrelevant to the training motivational state, shifts in state revealed that it was encoded within the associative structure supporting 2nd-order responding.     

Sample size and the detection of correlation--a signal detection account: comment on Kareev (2000) and Juslin and Olsson (2005)

Simulations examined the hypothesis that small samples can provide better grounds for inferring the existence of a population correlation, p, than can large samples. Samples of 5, 7, 10, 15, or 30 data pairs were drawn either from a population with p=0 or from one with p>0. When decision accuracy was assessed independently for each level of the decision criterion, there was a criterion-specific small-sample advantage. For liberal criteria, accuracy was greater for large than for small samples, but for conservative criteria, the opposite result occurred. There was no small-sample advantage when accuracy was measured as the area under a receiver operating characteristic curve or as the posterior probability of a hit. The results show that small-sample advantages can occur, but under limited conditions.     

Total retrieval time and hypermnesia: Investigating the benefits of multiple recall tests

Hypermnesia is an increase in recall over repeated tests. A core issue is the role of repeated testing, per se, versus total retrieval time. Prior research implies an equivalence between multiple recall tests and a single test of equal total duration, but theoretical analyses indicate otherwise. Three experiments investigated this issue using various study materials (unrelated word lists, related word lists, and a short story). In the first experimental session, the study phase was followed by a series of short recall tests or by a single, long test of equal total duration. Two days later, participants took a final recall test. The multiple and single test conditions produced equivalent performance in the first session, but the multiple test group exhibited less forgetting and fewer item losses in the final test. In a fourth experiment, using a brief delay (15 min) between the recall sessions, the multiple recall condition produced greater hypermnesia as well as fewer item losses. In addition, final recall was significantly higher in the multiple than in the single test condition in three of the four experiments. Thus, single and repeated recall tests of equal total duration are not functionally equivalent, but rather produce differences observable in subsequent recall tests.     

Vicarious responses to pain in anterior cingulate cortex: Is empathy a multisensory issue?

Results obtained with functional magnetic resonance imaging show that both feeling a moderately painful pinprick stimulus to the fingertips and witnessing another person’s hand undergo similar stimulation are associated with common activity in a pain-related area in the right dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Common activity in response to noxious tactile and visual stimulation was restricted to the right inferior Brodmann’s area 24b. These results suggest a shared neural substrate for felt and seen pain for aversive ecological events happening to strangers and in the absence of overt symbolic cues. In contrast to ACC 24b, the primary somatosensory cortex showed significant activations in response to both noxious and innocuous tactile, but not visual, stimuli. The different response patterns in the two areas are consistent with the ACC’s role in coding the motivational-affective dimension of pain, which is associated with the preparation of behavioral responses to aversive events.     

Memory for actions: Self-performed tasks and the reenactment effect

Encoding action phrases by enactment (self-performed tasks, or SPTs) leads to better memory than does observing actions (experimenter-performed tasks, or EPTs) or hearing action phrases (Engelkamp, 1998). In addition, recognition memory for SPTs is enhanced when test items are reenacted. Experiment 1 demonstrated a reenactment effect for EPTs, as well as for SPTs, indicating that the effect can be based on visual, as well as motoric, feedback. However, the reenactment effect in SPTs was found even when the participants were blindfolded at test (Experiment 2), indicating that the basis for the reenactment effect differs across SPTs and EPTs. Experiments 3 and 4 provided additional evidence that visual feedback is not critical for reenactment recognition in the case of SPTs. In addition, these experiments failed to show a hand congruency effect (enhanced recognition when the same hand enacts at study and at test), indicating that this effect is not as generalizable as the reenactment effect. These results have important implications for the motor-encoding hypothesis of the enactment effect.     

Effects of cross-modal and intramodal division of attention on perceptual implicit memory

Extant results motivate 3 hypotheses on the role of attention in perceptual implicit memory. The first proposes that only intramodal manipulations of attention reduce perceptual priming. The second attributes reduced priming to the effects of distractor selection operating in a central bottleneck process. The third proposes that manipulations of attention only affect priming via disrupted stimulus identification. In Experiment 1, a standard cross-modal manipulation did not disrupt priming in perceptual identification. However, when study words and distractors were presented synchronously, cross-modal and intramodal distraction reduced priming. Increasing response frequency in the distractor task produced effects of attention regardless of target-distractor synchrony. These effects generalized to a different category of distractors arguing against domain-specific interference. The results support the distractor-selection hypothesis.     

Hemispheric asymmetries for gap detection depend on noise type

Studies of temporal processing asymmetries in the auditory modality have not produced consistent results. Some investigators have found a left hemisphere advantage, but others have failed to replicate this result. The present experiment investigated the possibility that differing properties of the noise employed between these experiments could be responsible for the conflicting results. Short bursts (300 ms) of white or brown noise were delivered monaurally to 42 participants. Half of the stimuli contained 3-5 ms gaps of silence. A right ear (left hemisphere) advantage in accuracy was observed in the white noise condition, but there was no such difference in the brown noise condition. This result demonstrates that the different acoustic properties of the stimuli between experiments can account for some of the discrepancies in their findings, and supports the position that the left hemisphere is superior at processing rapid temporal changes.     

A meta-analytic study of general mental ability validity for different occupations in the European community

A comprehensive meta-analysis of the validity of general mental ability (GMA) measures across 12 occupational categories in the European Community (EC) is presented. GMA measures showed that there is validity generalization and large operational validities for job performance and training success in 11 occupational groups. Results also showed that job complexity moderated the magnitude of the operational validity of GMA tests across three levels of job complexity: low, medium, and high. In general, results were similar to those found in the United States, although the European findings showed a slightly larger magnitude of operational validity in some cases. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings for personnel selection are discussed. ((c) 2003 APA, all rights reserved)