The roles of handedness and stimulus asymmetry in aesthetic preference.

When some pictures are mirror reversed, aesthetic evaluations of them change dramatically. Stimulus features that may be important in contributing to this effect are: (a) location of areas of principal interest or weight in the picture space, (b) cues that suggest a direction of motion within the picture. Dextrals and inverted sinistrals preferred paintings with cues suggesting motion proceeding from left to right over their mirror-reversed versions and also preferred those with weight concentrated in the left portions of the picture space. The explanation that best fits these data is that preference is promoted when the picture content encourages attention to its rightmost portions, thus placing a majority of the picture in the left visual field where it is directly processed by the right hemisphere.     

Divergent and Convergent Group Creativity in an Asynchronous Online Environment

This study examined the influence of various group diversity dimensions on collaborative creativity related to the healthcare system. Research findings on the association between diversity and brainstorming performance has been mixed. Diversity that increases cognitive stimulation or promotes elaboration has been shown to increase group performance. Participants exchanged ideas, replied, and elaborated using an electronic discussion board in an asynchronous fashion in groups of five over a period of 4 weeks. The groups varied in diversity of ethnicity, gender, age, and political orientation, but participants were not made aware of this diversity. Age and gender diversity were related to lower levels of replying to ideas and lower idea novelty but political diversity was related to increased replies and novelty. If a topic engages people with different perspectives to actively respond to others’ ideas, this can increase the creative potential of idea sharing in groups. Political or value-based diversity has the potential for creative solutions if the other participants’ political or value-based identities are not made salient.     

Evidence for disproportionate dual-task costs in older adults for episodic but not semantic memory

Previous research demonstrates that older adults are poor at dual tasking, but there is less agreement on whether their decrement is worse than that predicted from single-task performance. This study investigated whether task domain moderates dual-task costs in old age. In two experiments, young and older adults retrieved either previously learned associates (episodic retrieval) or overlearned category members (semantic retrieval) under single or working-memory load conditions, using cued recall (Experiment 1) and recognition (Experiment 2) procedures. In both experiments the proportional costs of dual tasking were age invariant for semantic retrieval but were particularly marked for episodic retrieval, although the size of the age effect was reduced in recognition compared to cued recall. The data suggest that age effects in dual tasking may be domain specific.     

On the relation between feeling of knowing and lexical decision: persistent subthreshold activation or topic familiarity?

Experiment 1 replicated Yaniv and Meyer's (1987) finding that lexical decision and episodic recognition performance was better for words previously yielding high-accessibility levels (a combination of feeling-of-knowing and tip-of-the-tongue ratings) in comparison with those yielding low-accessibility levels in a rare word definition task. Experiment 2 yielded the same pattern even though lexical decisions preceded accessibility estimates by a full week. Experiment 3 dismissed the possibility that the Experiment 2 results may have been due to a long-term influence from the lexical decision task to the rare word judgment task. These results support a model in which Ss (a) retrieve topic familiarity information in making accessibility estimates in the rare word definition task and (b) use this information to modulate lexical decision performance.     

Are rats short-sighted? Effects of stimulus distance and size on visual detection

Behavioural evidence concerning short-sightedness in rats is apparently conflicting: in some experiments rats have performed poorly with visual stimuli further than about 60 cm distant, while in others they have made efficient use of more distant cues, for example to find their way through mazes. However, in the experiments suggesting short-sightedness, the physical size of the stimuli was not varied, so that stimulus distance and visual angle were confounded. In the present experiment, therefore, the size and distance of the stimuli to be detected were varied independently. Over the range tested (30-160 cm), distance was found to produce relatively slight effects on the smallest detectable visual angle, and these tended to diminish with practice. Thus, no good evidence was found for short-sightedness in rats up to 160 cm, a finding consistent with current views of the structure and image-forming capacities of the rat's eye. The smallest detectable targets were, however, surprisingly large in view of the rat's visual acuity (which is about 1c/deg): at the distances tested, animals required considerable training to run reliably to targets subtending less than 5-10° of visual angle. Difficulties in responding to stationary stimuli of this size are likely to restrict severely the use that rats make of vision both in the laboratory and in their natural surroundings.     

The recovery of structure from motion: no evidence for a special link with the convergent disparity mechanism

Convergent and divergent stereo mechanisms were compared in their ability to recover structure from motion. Contrary to a recent result reported by Richards and Lieberman, no difference in their performance was found; both mechanisms appeared equally capable of supporting the perception of good structure from motion. Possible reasons for the disparate results are discussed.