Emotional processing and emotional memory are modulated by interoceptive awareness

The ability to perceive interoceptive signals plays a central role in many theories of emotions. The present study was designed to investigate the relationship between interoceptive awareness and the conscious processing and memory of emotional information. Heart-rate changes were recorded during baseline and affective picture presentation in two groups of participants, differing in cardiac awareness. After a 60-minute break, a recognition task was conducted. Statistical analyses revealed significantly stronger heart-rate deceleration to pleasant and unpleasant stimuli in participants with high interoceptive awareness. In the subsequent picture recognition task, participants with high interoceptive awareness demonstrated a superior recall of pleasant and unpleasant pictures, while no differences were found between interoceptive awareness groups for pictures of neutral content. Our results demonstrate a strong relationship between the perception of cardiac signals and both the processing as well as the recognition of emotional stimuli. High interoceptive awareness was related to increased physiological responses to emotional stimuli and is therefore an important mediating variable when investigating cardiovascular reactivity both in healthy subjects as well as in clinical populations.     

Response selection difficulty and asymmetrical costs of switching between tasks and stimuli: no evidence for an exogenous component of task-set reconfiguration

Four task-switching experiments examined the notion of an exogenous component of task-set reconfiguration (i.e., a process needed to shift task set that is not initiated in the absence of a task-associated figuration stimulus). The authors varied the complexity and familiarity of stimulus-response (SR) mapping rules to produce differentially time-consuming reconfiguration demands. Tasks with more complex or less familiar rules did not display increased switch costs, given that stimulus repetitions were excluded from the analysis. These results do not support the idea of exogenous reconfiguration. Moreover, stimulus repetitions inflated task-switch costs and did so disproportionately for tasks with increased response selection difficulty, thereby demonstrating that insufficient control of the sequence of stimuli may yield results that mimic those predicted by exogenous reconfiguration accounts.     

Sex differences in mental rotation strategy

When humans decide whether two visual stimuli are identical or mirror images of each other and one of the stimuli is rotated with respect to the other, the time discrimination takes usually increases as a rectilinear function of the orientation disparity. On the average, males perform this mental rotation at a faster angular speed than females. This experiment required the rotation of both mirror-image-different and non-mirror-different stimuli. The polygonal stimuli were presented in either spatially unfiltered, high-pass or low-pass filtered versions. All stimulus conditions produced mental rotation-type effects but with graded curvilinear trends. Women rotated faster than men under all conditions, an infrequent outcome in mental rotation studies. Overall, women yielded more convexly curvilinear response functions than men. For both sexes the curvilinearity was more pronounced under the non-mirror-different, low-pass stimulus condition than under the mirror different, high-pass stimulus condition. The results are considered as supporting the occurrence of two different mental rotation strategies and as suggesting that the women were predisposed to use efficiently an analytic feature rotation strategy, while the men were predisposed to employ efficiently a holistic pattern rotation strategy. It is argued that the overall design of this experiment promoted the application of an analytic strategy and thus conferred an advantage to the female participants.     

Associative sequence learning in humans

In a series of experiments using the serial reaction time paradigm, the authors compared the predictions of a powerful associative model of sequence learning (the simple recurrent network; J. L. Elman, 1990) with human performance on the problem devised by A. Maskara and W. Noetzel (1993). Even though the predictions made by the simple recurrent network for variants of this problem are often counterintuitive, they matched human performance closely, suggesting that performance was associatively based rather than rule based. Simple associative chaining models of sequence learning, however, have difficulty in accommodating these results. The authors' conclusion is that, under the conditions of the experiments, human sequence learning is associatively driven, as long as this is understood to mean that a sufficiently powerful means of extracting the statistical regularities in the sequences is in play.     

Investigating the mechanisms underlying affective priming effects using a conditional pronunciation task

Recently, using a conditional pronunciation task, De Houwer and Randell (2004) reported evidence of affective priming effects only when pronunciation depended on the semantic category of targets. Although these findings support the notion that spreading of activation is the mechanism underlying affective priming effects, an explanation in terms of postlexical mechanism could not be ruled out. To clarify this point, we conducted two experiments in which nouns for both the to-be-pronounced as well as the not-to-be pronounced targets were used and all stimuli were affectively valenced words. In Experiment 1, the to-be-pronounced targets were object-words, and the not-to-be-pronounced targets were person-words, whereas in Experiment 2, the instructions were reversed. Results of experiment 1 showed affective priming effects only when pronunciation of target words was conditional upon their semantic category. Most importantly, affective priming effects were observed for both object-words (Experiment 1) and person-words (Experiment 2). These results are compatible with a spreading activation account, but not with a postlexical mechanism account of affective priming effects in the pronunciation task.     

Experiencing activation: energetic arousal and tense arousal are not mixtures of valence and activation

R. E. Thayer (1989) proposed 2 types of activation: energetic arousal (awake-tired) and tense arousal (tense-calm). This view has been challenged by claims that energetic arousal and tense arousal are mixtures of valence and a single activation dimension. The authors present a direct test of this hypothesis by computing the correlation between the residuals of energetic arousal and tense arousal after removing the shared variance with valence. Whereas the valence activation hypothesis predicts a strong positive correlation between the 2 residuals, the authors found that it was not significantly different from 0. This finding reaffirms the view of energetic arousal and tense arousal as 2 distinct types of activation.     

Internet experts' planning of explanations for laypersons: a Web experimental approach in the Internet domain

How flexible are Internet experts in taking the perspective of laypersons? A Web experimental approach is presented that examines the Internet experts' perspective taking in planning explanations for laypersons. The Internet was the topic to be communicated and it also provided the means to implement the experimental method. Participants rated how extensively they would treat some specific concepts when explaining a topic such as the WWW. Independent variables were the addressee's intention, their level of domain knowledge, and the importance of the concepts to be evaluated. The results show that the experts preferred planning strategies that integrated all three types of information. Though their planning decisions were mainly guided by conceptual constraints, the Internet experts also took into account information about the addressee's intention and prior knowledge.