Spectral information for detection of acoustic time to arrival

The exponential increase of intensity for an approaching sound source provides salient information for a listener to make judgments of time to arrival (TTA). Specifically, a listener will experience a greater rate of increasing intensity for higher than for lower frequencies during a sound source’s approach. To examine the relative importance of this spectral information, listeners were asked to make judgments about the arrival times of nine 1-octave-band sound sources (the bands were consecutive, nonoverlapping single octaves, ranging from 40–80 Hz to ~10–20 kHz). As is typical in TTA tasks, listeners tended to underestimate the arrival time of the approaching sound source. In naturally occurring and independently manipulated amplification curves, bands with center frequencies between 120 and 250 Hz caused the least underestimation, and bands with center frequencies between 2000 and 7500 Hz caused the most underestimation. This spectral influence appears to be related to the greater perceived urgency of higher-frequency sounds.     

New knowledge for old credences: Asymmetric information search about in-group and out-group members

Three experiments examined how people gather information on in-group and out-group members. Previous studies have revealed that category-based expectancies bias the hypothesis-testing process towards confirmation through the use of asymmetric-confirming questions (which are queries where the replies supporting the prior expectancies are more informative than those falsifying them). However, to date there is no empirical investigation of the use of such a question-asking strategy in an intergroup context. In the present studies, participants were asked to produce (Study 1) or to choose (Studies 2 and 3) questions in order to investigate the presence of various traits in an in-group or an out-group member. Traits were manipulated by valence and typicality. The results revealed that category-based expectancies do not always lead to asymmetric-confirming testing: whereas participants tended to ask questions that confirmed positive in-group and negative out-group stereotypical attributes, they used a more symmetric strategy when testing for the presence of negative in-group or positive out-group traits. Moreover, Study 3 also revealed a moderation effect of in-group identification. The findings point to the role played by motivational factors associated with preserving a positive social identity. Possible consequences of these hypothesis-testing processes in preserving a positive social identity for intergroup relations are discussed.     

Vibrotactile discrimination of musical timbre

Five experiments investigated the ability to discriminate between musical timbres based on vibrotactile stimulation alone. Participants made same/different judgments on pairs of complex waveforms presented sequentially to the back through voice coils embedded in a conforming chair. Discrimination between cello, piano, and trombone tones matched for F0, duration, and magnitude was above chance with white noise masking the sound output of the voice coils (Experiment 1), with additional masking to control for bone-conducted sound (Experiment 2), and among a group of deaf individuals (Experiment 4a). Hearing (Experiment 3) and deaf individuals (Experiment 4b) also successfully discriminated between dull and bright timbres varying only with regard to spectral centroid. We propose that, as with auditory discrimination of musical timbre, vibrotactile discrimination may involve the cortical integration of filtered output from frequency-tuned mechanoreceptors functioning as critical bands. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Franz Brentano and Cornelio Fabro: A Forgotten Chapter of the Brentanian Reception

In celebration of the centenary of the Italian philosopher Cornelio Fabro’s birth (1911–1995), this paper investigates the essential theoretical traits that undergird the framework of Fabro’s 1941 texts, by comparing them with Franz Brentano’s (1838–1817) project of renewing Thomism through a new understanding of Aristotle. The secondary literature concerning the comparison of both these authors is almost nonexistent. Our goal is to clarify some of the central issues regarding the relation between Fabro and Brentano through direct textual analysis of unpublished letters exchanged between Fabro and Agostino Gemelli about Brentano and his pupil Carl Stumpf.     

Mood-congruent free recall bias in anxiety

The present study evaluated the status of mood-congruent free recall bias in anxious individuals following incidental encoding of target words. In the first experiment, high trait anxiety individuals showed increased recall of threat-related information after an orienting task promoting lexical processing of target words. In a second experiment, both lexical and semantic orienting tasks were performed at study. In this experiment, anxious individuals displayed a mood-congruent recall bias only for target information processed at a lexical level. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.