Psychotropic placebos create resistance to the misinformation effect

Can a placebo for a psychotropic drug help participants resist the misinformation effect? To answer this question, we gave participants a mixture of baking soda and water and told half of them that the mixture was a cognition-enhancing drug called R273 and told the other half that it was an inactive version of the drug. Shortly thereafter, all participants took part in a three-stage misinformation experiment. Compared with participants who were told that they had taken the placebo, the participants who were told that they had taken the drug reported improved cognitive abilities and were less susceptible to the misinformation effect. We provide sourcemonitoring and mindfulness accounts of our findings.     

Comparing self-esteem and perceived control as predictors of first-year college students’ academic achievement

Due to its widespread popularity, self-esteem is continually being promoted to students despite limited empirical support for its effectiveness in improving their academic achievement. As a result, constructs that are potentially more salient to academic performance, such as perceived control, have gone relatively unnoticed. Although past research has examined the link between students’ academic achievement and either their self-esteem or perceived control, few studies have compared both constructs simultaneously to elucidate which one is more important to academic success. This longitudinal study directly contrasted the effects of self-esteem and perceived control on the academic performance of 802 first-year college students. After accounting for incoming ability (high school grades), age, and gender, a structural equation model showed perceived control positively predicted students’ GPA. In contrast, the predictive effect of self-esteem on GPA was non-existent. Findings indicate that compared to self-esteem, perceived control is a more powerful predictor of first-year college students’ GPA. Implications for utilizing educational interventions to boost perceived control among college students are discussed.     

Electrophysiological evidence for cognitive control during conflict processing in visual spatial attention

Event-related potentials were measured to investigate the role of visual spatial attention mechanisms in conflict processing. We suggested that a more difficult target selection leads to stronger attentional top-down control, thereby reducing the effects of arising conflicts. This hypothesis was tested by varying the selection difficulty in a location negative priming (NP) paradigm. The difficult task resulted in prolonged responses as compared to the easy task. A behavioral NP effect was only evident in the easy task. Psychophysiologically the easy task was associated with reduced parietal N1, enhanced frontocentral N2 and N2pc components and a prolonged P3 latency for the conflict as compared to the control condition. The N2pc effect was also obvious in the difficult task. Additionally frontocentral N2 amplitudes increased and latencies of N2pc and P3 were delayed compared to the easy task. The differences at frontocentral and parietal electrodes are consistent with previous studies ascribing activity in the prefrontal and parietal cortex as the source of top-down attentional control. Thus, we propose that stronger cognitive control is involved in the difficult task, resulting in a reduced behavioral NP conflict.     

Assessing different aspects of pretend play within a play setting: Towards a standardized assessment of pretend play in young children

The present study suggests a method with which to assess the interrelations between different types of pretend play. In contrast to standard methods in this area, the various types of pretend play were measured within an interactive play scenario. The pretend play tasks were included in a semi‐structured play sequence and presented to young children between 24 and 30 months of age (N=30). Self‐ and doll‐directed pretence, object substitution, pretence with realistic objects, and self‐initiated pretend play, as well as the understanding that an object had been given two identities was tested. The capacity for dual representation was assessed by asking for the real and pretend identity of an object. Age differences were found in the overall score for elicited pretence but not for all items separately. Individual items also differed in difficulty and thus are of potential use for assessing intraindividual differences in pretend play. Findings are discussed in the context of current theories and methods concerning the development and assessment of pretend play.     

Affective influences on within-person changes in work performance as mediated by attentional focus

A great deal of research has investigated the performance consequences of affective experiences at work, but the mediating mechanisms that explain these consequences remain understudied. In this study, we used experience sampling method to examine within-person relationships between changes in affective states and episodic performance, as mediated by attentional allocation and regulation. Our findings show that within-person changes in negative affective states have a concurrent association with episodic performance as mediated by reduced attentional allocation and regulation, while positive affective states are associated with better performance, as mediated by enhanced attentional allocation and regulation. Our results are discussed in terms of their implications for understanding the performance and attentional consequences of affective states at work.     

Evidence for goal-independent attentional capture from validity effects with unexpected novel color cues—A response to Burnham (2007)

Can a stimulus capture attention independent of the observer’s goals and intentions? In a recent review, (Burnham, Psychonomic Bulletin &; Review, 14, 392–422, 2007) argued that there is no convincing evidence that attention capture is ever completely independent of the goals and intentions of the observer. By contrast, surprise capture studies have shown that a color singleton can capture attention on its unannounced first occurrence, if it is new and unexpected, and hence is not part of the intentional set. However, the evidence from surprise capture studies has been criticized on methodological grounds. Here, we tested surprise capture in a new paradigm that avoids previous methodological complications. The results refute the prior criticisms and reinstate surprise capture as prime evidence for goal-independent capture.     

Allergic to People: Building Bridges in a Ripped Psychic-Soma

An exploration of the use mind/body metaphors in a woman whose physical, environmental and psychoneurotic trauma culminated in an irreversible colostomy. She lived in a world of concrete symbols, her primary process damaged such that she could not create generative symbols to process her trauma. She regressed to a state of infantile megalomania, recoiling from the external reality of subjective others. Her introjective disorder mirrored her digestive disorder as she could absorb neither good objects nor good nutrients. The analytic situation has been an auxiliary fecal container and we work to bridge her mind body split with mind/body metaphors. As she reclaims lost development mastery, she displays a symbolized sphincter. As her capacity to form symbols grows, she rages and mourns for the loss of her fantasized ideal parents and her ideal body.     

Top-down knowledge modulates onset capture in a feedforward manner

How do we select behaviourally important information from cluttered visual environments? Previous research has shown that both top-down, goal-driven factors and bottom-up, stimulus-driven factors determine which stimuli are selected. However, it is still debated when top-down processes modulate visual selection. According to a feedforward account, top-down processes modulate visual processing even before the appearance of any stimuli, whereas others claim that top-down processes modulate visual selection only at a late stage, via feedback processing. In line with such a dual stage account, some studies found that eye movements to an irrelevant onset distractor are not modulated by its similarity to the target stimulus, especially when eye movements are launched early (within 150-ms post stimulus onset). However, in these studies the target transiently changed colour due to a colour after-effect that occurred during premasking, and the time course analyses were incomplete. The present study tested the feedforward account against the dual stage account in two eye tracking experiments, with and without colour after-effects (Exp. 1), as well when the target colour varied randomly and observers were informed of the target colour with a word cue (Exp. 2). The results showed that top-down processes modulated the earliest eye movements to the onset distractors (<150-ms latencies), without incurring any costs for selection of target matching distractors. These results unambiguously support a feedforward account of top-down modulation.