Aging and performance on an everyday-based visual search task

Research on aging and visual search often requires older people to search computer screens for target letters or numbers. The aim of this experiment was to investigate age-related differences using an everyday-based visual search task in a large participant sample (n=261) aged 20-88 years. Our results show that: (1) old-old adults have more difficulty with triple conjunction searches with one highly distinctive feature compared to young-old and younger adults; (2) age-related declines in conjunction searches emerge in middle age then progress throughout older age; (3) age-related declines are evident in feature searches on target absent trials, as older people seem to exhaustively and serially search the whole display to determine a target's absence. Together, these findings suggest that declines emerge in middle age then progress throughout older age in feature integration, guided search, perceptual grouping and/or spreading suppression processes. Discussed are implications for enhancing everyday functioning throughout adulthood.     

Antecedentes y aparición de la Psicología del Procesamiento de Información: un estudio histórico

Resumen

El presente artículo recopila los grandes hitos asociados al surgimiento de la Psicología del Procesamiento de Información (principales autores, obras, instituciones, eventos científicos, etc.) en Gran Bretaña y Estados Unidos, países en donde este enfoque tiene su origen. Esto se hace a través de una perspectiva de análisis histórico que, remontándonos a los años veinte—y tras pasar revista a los acontecimientos más relevantes para la Historia de la Psicología acaecidos durante los años treinta, cuarenta y cincuenta—, nos conduce a 1958, fecha clave para el nacimiento y difusión de lo que hoy conocemos como Psicología del Procesamiento de Información.     

Anxiety, self-esteem and self-perceived satisfaction as predictors of health: differences between men and women

The main objective of this research is to analyze whether there are differences in physical health between men and women when considering their working situation. Three psychological variables are analyzed (anxiety, self-esteem and satisfaction) as well as several indicators of physical health for different working situations. The results seem to indicate that although women have worse health than men (when the group is analyzed in general), these differences vary when we take into account the working condition of the participants, and the differences even disappear. The psychological variables used in this survey only explain the variance of the subjective indicators of physical health, most of all, the Physiological Anxiety, which is responsible for the highest rate of the explained variance. The psychological variables predict women's physical health more than men's, what seems to indicate that women's physical health is closely related to psychological health.     

Memories of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001: a study of the consistency and phenomenal characteristics of flashbulb memories

In this study, I investigated students' memories of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, carried out by Al Qaeda terrorists against the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. Participants completed on two occasions (2 weeks and 8 months after the events took place) a memory questionnaire that included an assessment of the phenomenal richness of their memories. The results showed that the participants remembered very well the circumstances in which they first heard about the terrorist attacks, that they were very confident about this information, and that these memories were characterized by a high phenomenal richness. Over time, there was a decrease in all of these variables, but people's ratings of phenomenology and confidence were still very high.     

Object color affects identification and repetition priming

We investigated the influence of color on the identification of both non-studied and studied objects. Participants studied black and white and color photos of common objects and memory was assessed with an identification test. Consistent with our meta-analysis of prior research, we found that objects were easier to identify from color than from black and white photos. We also found substantial priming in all conditions, and study-to-test changes in an object's color reduced the magnitude of priming. Color-specific priming effects were large for color-complex objects, but minimal for color-simple objects. The pattern and magnitude of priming effects was not influenced either by the extent to which an object always appears in the same color (i.e., whether a color is symptomatic of an object) or by the object's origin (natural versus fabricated). We discuss the implications of our findings for theoretical accounts of object perception and repetition priming.     

The role of the amygdala in facial emotional expression during a discrimination task

A total of 50 patients with temporal lobe epilepsy with unilateral resection of the hippocampus and the amygdala were studied: --27 with left lobectomy (LTL group) and 23 with right lobectomy (RTL group)--; and 28 healthy control participants (HC group). The task consisted of identifying the dissimilar photograph from a group of photographs of the same face. The difference could correspond to the identity of the model or the facial expression (happiness, anger, sadness and fear). The results showed that when the difference in the photograph resided in the identity of the model, the RTL group made more mistakes than the HC group. When the facial expression was the distinguishing feature, mean response latency was longer in the LTL group than in the HC group. Comparison of the emotions revealed that the greatest differences were obtained with the fear expression, in all three participant groups. The dissociation of neural circuits responsible for processing facial expressions is discussed and, especially, the role of the left amygdala to discriminate between facial expressions.