Within-modality and cross-modality attentional blinks in a simple discrimination task

Following up on studies of the "attentional blink," we studied interference between successive target stimuli in visual and auditory modalities. In each experiment, stimuli were two tones and four dots, simultaneously presented for 1,800 msec. Targets were brief intensity changes in either a tone or a dot. Subjects gave unspeeded responses. In four experiments, our results showed interference between targets in the same modality, but not across modalities. We conclude that, under our experimental conditions, restrictions in concurrent target identification are largely modality specific.     

Syllable-internal structure and the sonority hierarchy: Differential evidence from lexical decision,naming, and reading

Treiman (1983) and others have argued that spoken syllables are best characterized not as linear strings of phonemes, but as hierarchically organized units consisting of an onset (initial consonant or consonant cluster) and a rime (the vowel and any following consonants) and that the rime is further divided into a peak or nucleus (the vowel) and a coda (the final consonants). It has also been argued that the sonority (or vowel-likeness) of the consonant closest to the peak, which is a function of its phonetic class, may have an effect on the strength of boundaries determined by the hierarchical division of the syllable (e.g., Treiman, 1984). We examined the evidence for syllable-internal structure and for sonority in two experiments that employed visually presented stimuli and lexical decision, naming, and reading tasks. Our results provide support for the breakdown of the rime into a peak and a coda and for an effect of the sonority of the postvocalic consonant on that break. This pattern occurred only in our lexical decision tasks, so the effect is assumed to be postlexical. We did not find an effect of the onset-rime boundary, perhaps because of an unanticipated effect of word frequency. Our results are discussed in terms of phonological coding in short-term memory.     

Whatever happened to Kony2012? Understanding a global Internet phenomenon as an emergent social identity

Kony2012 was a viral Internet video that attracted unprecedented online interest in promoting a campaign to arrest the leader of an African militant group. The current research considers the social psychological bases of social media‐based collective action. In three cross‐sectional surveys (N = 304) collected before, on, and after the key action date of 20 April 2012, we consider the nature (opinion based or global) and function (emergent or transforming) of social identity in modern forms of social action. Multigroup structural equation modelling showed that Kony2012 action was best captured by an emergent opinion‐based social identity. Moreover, the same factors that predicted Kony2012 action generally also predicted engagement in new repertoires of protest (involving the use of social media) and an observable traditional socio‐political action (signing a letter to a government minister). The results suggest that there is no sharp dividing line between traditional and new forms of collective action and that both may be understood as valid expressions of collective selfhood. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Paradoxical experiential therapy: A description of the technique and rationale of a nonbehavioral therapy for an unselected patient population

Paradoxical Experiential Therapy, a new technique of psychotherapy, is a nonbehavioral, short-term, experiential form of individual psychotherapy which produces long-lasting changes in ego strength, anxiety, depression, guilt, anger, and other common psychiatric symptoms, in an unselected patient population, in approximately 40 to 60 hours of therapy. This is accomplished by the use of structured fantasies accompanied by feelings which are instantly paradoxical to the content and nature of the fantasies themselves, and by other structured fantasies with paradoxical input from the therapist.     

Rats build and update topological representations through exploration

Although rats are able to build complex spatial representations of their surroundings during exploration, the nature of the encoded information is still a matter for debate. In particular, it is not well established if rats can process the topological structure of the environment in such a way that they are aware of the connections existing between remote places. Here, rats were first exposed for four 5-min trials to a complex environment divided into several sectors that were separated by doors allowing either unrestricted or restricted access to other sectors. In the fifth test trial, we measured the behavior of the animals while they explored the same environment in which, however, they faced changes that either altered or did not alter the topological structure of the environment. In experiment 1, closing previously opened doors prevented the rat from having direct access between corresponding sectors. In experiment 2, opening previously closed doors allowed direct access between sectors that had not been directly accessible. In each experiment, control doors allowed us to discard the mere influence of door manipulation. We compared the rats’ exploratory behavior in response to door manipulations that either strongly altered or did not alter the ability to commute between sectors and found evidence that the animals displayed differential reactions to the two types of door manipulations. This implies that during exploration rats build a precise map of the connectivity of space that can be flexibly updated and used for efficient navigation.     

Pathways to vocational services: factors affecting entry by veterans enrolled in Veterans Health Administration mental health services

The current study provides naturalistic data documenting the pathways-to-care to vocational services for 155 veterans who were receiving some form of mental health care from the Veterans Health Administration and had a vocational need but were not currently enrolled in vocational services. Of the participants, 94.2% had recognized their vocational need, 80.6% reported that they or someone else had sought help to alleviate the need, and 77.4% had previously received some form of vocational services. The median length of the participants' vocational need was more than 4.2 years. Delays associated with recognition, help-seeking, and treatment entry all contributed to the overall delay in entering appropriate care. Filtering factors associated with quicker recognition, seeking help, and receiving services included diagnosis, level of disability, type of vocational need, and support from primary providers, family, and friends. The results provide information for designing interventions to improve service entry by adults with mental health problems and vocational needs.     

Item and order information in semantic memory: students’ retention of the “CU fight song” lyrics

University of Colorado (CU) students were tested on memory for the “CU Fight Song” in order to examine serial position effects in semantic memory while controlling for familiarity across positions. In Experiment 1, students reconstructed the order of the nine lines of the song. Students with previous exposure to the song performed better and showed a more bowed serial position function than did students with no knowledge of the song. Experiment 2 added a task assessing memory of item information. One word was removed and replaced with a blank in each line, and an alternative word was offered as an option, along with the correct word. Students selected the word that fit into each blank and then reconstructed the order of the lines. There was a bow-shaped curve for order reconstruction, but not for item selection, which implies that the serial position function in semantic memory stems from order, rather than item, information.     

Questioning Pygmalion in the twenty-first century: the formation,transmission, and attributional influence of teacher expectancies

Teacher expectancy effects, the class of phenomena in which teacher beliefs about students influence student outcomes, are widely believed to operate through recursive processes of teacher-student interaction. Recent work in “wise” interventions has shown profound and robust effects in educational domains, and has attributed these effects to similar recursive processes (Yeager and Walton 2011). In this paper, we lay a foundation for forging connections between what we know about expectancy effects and how we might envision applying that knowledge as a lever in intervention research. We review the evidence for the existence and significance of teacher expectancy effects, as well as their possible mediators, including perceptual biases, confirmation biases, stereotyping, and attributional biases. We also hypothesize that empathy could play a role in mediating a relationship between expectancies and attributions. Finally, we propose a research agenda focused on the transmission, mediation, and attributional effects of teacher expectancies.     

Learning the moves: the effect of familiarity and facial motion on person recognition across large changes in viewing format

Familiarity with a face or person can support recognition in tasks that require generalization to novel viewing contexts. Using naturalistic viewing conditions requiring recognition of people from face or whole body gait stimuli, we investigated the effects of familiarity, facial motion, and direction of learning/test transfer on person recognition. Participants were familiarized with previously unknown people from gait videos and were tested on faces (experiment 1a) or were familiarized with faces and were tested with gait videos (experiment 1b). Recognition was more accurate when learning from the face and testing with the gait videos, than when learning from the gait videos and testing with the face. The repetition of a single stimulus, either the face or gait, produced strong recognition gains across transfer conditions. Also, the presentation of moving faces resulted in better performance than that of static faces. In experiment 2, we investigated the role of facial motion further by testing recognition with static profile images. Motion provided no benefit for recognition, indicating that structure-from-motion is an unlikely source of the motion advantage found in the first set of experiments.