Metacognition and change detection: do lab and life really converge?

Studies of change blindness indicate that more intentional monitoring of changes is necessary to successfully detect changes as scene complexity increases. However, there have been conflicting reports as to whether people are aware of this relation between intention and successful change detection as scene complexity increases. Here we continue our dialogue with [Beck, M. R., Levin, D. T., & Angelone, B. (2007a). Change blindness blindness: Beliefs about the roles of intention and scene complexity in change detection. Consciousness and Cognition, 16, 31-51; Beck, M. R., Levin, D. T., & Angelone, B. (2007b). Metacognitive errors in change detection: Lab and life converge. Consciousness and Cognition, 16, 58-62] by reporting two experiments that show participants do in fact intuit that more intentional monitoring is needed to detect changes as scene complexity increases. We also discuss how this dialogue illustrates the need for psychological studies to be grounded in measurements taken from real world situations rather than laboratory experiments or questionnaires.     

Glued to the Image: A Critical Phenomenology of Racialization through Works of Art

I develop a phenomenological account of racialized encounters with works of art and film, wherein the racialized viewer feels cast as perpetually past, coming “too late” to intervene in the meaning of her own representation. This points to the distinctive role that the colonial past plays in mediating and constructing our self‐images. I draw on my experience of three exhibitions that take Muslims and/or Arabs as their subject matter and that ostensibly try to interrupt or subvert racialization while reproducing some of its tropes. My examples are the Jean‐Joseph Benjamin‐Constant exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2015), the exposition Welten der Muslime at the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin (2011–2017), and a sculpture by Bob and Roberta Smith at the Leeds City Art Gallery, created in response to the imperial power painting, General Gordon's Last Stand, that is housed there. My interest is in how artworks contribute to the experience of being racialized in ways that not only amplify the circulation of images but also constitute difficult temporal relations to images. Drawing on Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, I argue that such racialized images are temporally gluey, or stuck, so that we are weighted and bogged down by them.     

Human brain activity time-locked to narrative event boundaries

Readers structure narrative text into a series of events in order to understand and remember the text. In this study, subjects read brief narratives describing everyday activities while brain activity was recorded with functional magnetic resonance imaging. Subjects later read the stories again to divide them into large and small events. During the initial reading, points later identified as boundaries between events were associated with transient increases in activity in a number of brain regions whose activity was mediated by changes in the narrated situation, such as changes in characters' goals. These results indicate that the segmentation of narrated activities into events is a spontaneous part of reading, and that this process of segmentation is likely dependent on neural responses to changes in the narrated situation.     

Mechanisms of the associated nontargets effect: processes influenced by statistical learning in a simple visual environment

In three visual search experiments participants were asked to make a target response if either of two targets was present and to make a nontarget response if neither target was present. Some target-absent displays included only nontarget features that never occurred in the same displays as target features, whereas other target-absent displays included nontarget features that did sometimes occur with target features. Nontarget responses were reliably faster in the former case than in the latter. This “associated nontargets effect” appears to arise from participants' ability to learn and to use contingencies between the presence of certain nontargets and the absence of any target.     

The validity of the five-factor model prototypes for personality disorders in two clinical samples

The authors examined the validity of D. R. Lynam and T. A. Widiger's (2001) prototypes for personality disorders (PDs) derived from the facets of the 5-factor model (FFM) of personality in 2 clinical samples. In the 1st sample (N = 94), there was good agreement between the prototypes generated by experts and the profiles reported by patients. These FFM PD similarity scores also demonstrated good convergent and discriminant validity with results from a semistructured interview and a self-report measure of Axis II pathology. In the 2nd sample (N = 132), the FFM PD similarity scores demonstrated excellent longitudinal stability and good predictive validity with regard to consensus ratings of PD features. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

Sequential Memory: A Developmental Perspective on Its Relation to Frontal Lobe Functioning

The multidimensional nature of the frontal lobes serves to organize and coordinate brain functionings playing a central and pervasive role in human cognition. The executive processes implicated in complex cognition such as novel problem solving, modifying behavior as appropriate in response to changes in the environment, inhibiting prepotent or previous responses, and the implementation of schemas that organize behavior over time are believed to be mediated by the frontal regions of the brain. Overall, the functioning of the frontal lobes assists individuals in goal directed and self-regulatory behavior. Additional theories of frontal lobe functioning have focused on its involvement in temporal, or time-related domains. The organizational and strategic nature of frontal lobe functioning affects memory processes by enhancing the organization of to-be-remembered information. Among the specific memory systems presumed to be based on anterior cerebral structures is the temporal organization of memory. An essential component of memory that involves temporal organization is sequential ordering entailing the ability to judge which stimuli were seen most recently and the temporal ordering of events in memory. Focal lesion studies have demonstrated the importance of the frontal lobes on retrieval tasks in which monitoring, verification, and placement of information in temporal and spatial contexts of critical importance. Similarly, frontal lobe damage has been associated with deficits in memory for the temporal ordering, or sequencing, of events. The acquisition of abilities thought to be mediated by the frontal lobes, including sequential memory, unfolds throughout childhood, serving to condition patterns of behavior for the rest of the brain. Development of the frontal regions of the brain is known to continue through late adolescence and into early adulthood, in contrast to the earlier maturation of other cortical regions. The developmental patterns of the frontal lobes are thought to involve a hierarchical, dynamic, and multistage process.     

Evidence of immediate activation of gender information from a social role name

Two experiments investigated whether the stereotypical gender of a character is encoded immediately into the discourse representation and influences later comprehension. In Experiment 1 people read, and were confused by, a short story in which an incongruity arises at the end if the gender of a character introduced by a social role name has been inferred. In Experiment 2 online measures confirmed that readers were slower to read the final clause of the passage. In addition, a follow-up verification question revealed that these readers did not immediately resolve the inconsistency by inferring the appropriate gender for the role term. These findings provide strong evidence for gender activation at the time that a role name is encoded. The implications of these results for the mental representation of gender information and for constraints on inference during text comprehension are discussed.