Contour grouping inside and outside of facial contexts

We examine how contours group in isolation compared with when they are embedded in face-like contexts. As previously shown, contours that seem to group by phenomenological observation also show powerful effects on task performance: with contours that group, selective attention to one while ignoring another is poor (as indexed by Garner Interference (GI), but not Stroop Interference), whereas divided attention across contours is good. With contours that do not group, however, the reverse happens. Here we test pairs of curved lines (parentheses) displayed either in isolation or within contexts including cartoon faces, where these curves may serve as mouths or eyebrows. The results with isolated contours replicate previous findings of poor selective attention, but within face-like contexts the same contours showed nearly perfect selective attention (i.e., zero GI). Thus, contour grouping was weaker inside than outside of faces, a finding that contrasts with the widely-held belief that faces are processed configurally, not by local features.     

Once hurt,twice hurtful: how perceived regard regulates daily marital interactions

A daily diary study examined how chronic perceptions of a partner's regard affect how intimates interpret and respond to daily relationship stresses. Spouses each completed a diary for 21 days. Multilevel analyses revealed that people who felt less positively regarded read more into stressful events than did people who felt highly regarded, feeling more hurt on days after acute threats, such as those posed by a moody or ill-behaved partner. Intimates who felt less valued responded to feeling hurt by behaving badly toward their partner on subsequent days. In contrast, intimates who felt more valued responded to feeling hurt by drawing closer to their partner. Ironically, chronically activated needs for belongingness might lead people who are trying to find acceptance to undermine their marriage.     

Comprehension of indirect requests by persons with fluent aphasia

This study examined the judgments and response latencies of 10 participants with aphasia and 10 participants without aphasia for responses to indirect requests. Modals such as can and should were drawn from 5 indirect request categories. There was a significant difference in judgment errors and response latency between participants with and without aphasia. There were no significant differences between aphasic participants' judgments for literal versus nonliteral contrasts. There was a significant effect among the modals and among the categories of indirect requests. Response latency reflected aphasic participants' understanding of these indirect requests.     

Developments in long-term explicit memory late in the first year of life: behavioral and electrophysiological indices

Coincident with developments in the temporal-cortical explicit memory network, long-term recall abilities are newly emergent late in the first year of human life. We recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) in 9-month-olds as an index of the integrity of the neural substrate underlying a task thought to reflect explicit memory, namely, deferred imitation. ERP measures of recognition memory 1 week after unique laboratory experiences predicted whether and how much infants recalled of the experiences 1 month later. The findings further imply that memory storage and consolidation processes are a major source of variability in long-term recall memory late in the first year of life.     

Constructing a short form of the Smoking Consequences Questionnaire with adolescents and young adults

The goal of the present studies was to construct and validate a short form of the 50-item Smoking Consequences Questionnaire (SCQ; T.H. Brandon & T. B. Baker, 1991), a measure of smoking outcome expectancies. In Study 1, a 21-item short form (S-SCQ) was derived from a sample of 107 young adults previously treated for substance abuse. In Study 2, the measure was cross-validated on 125 adolescents in treatment for substance abuse. Confirmatory factor analyses revealed good model fit and factorial invariance for the 4 S-SCQ subscales across both samples. Validation analyses on each sample found that subscale scores generally correlated significantly with smoking-related variables. The present studies provide initial evidence for the utility of the S-SCQ when used with young adults and adolescents.     

The difference engine: A model of diversity in speeded cognition

A theory of diversity in speeded cognition, the difference engine, is proposed, in which information processing is represented as a series of generic computational steps. Some individuals tend to perform all of these computations relatively quickly and other individuals tend to perform them all relatively slowly, reflecting the existence of a general cognitive speed factor, but the time required for response selection and execution is assumed to be independent of cognitive speed. The difference engine correctly predicts the positively accelerated form of the relation between diversity of performance, as measured by the standard deviation for the group, and task difficulty, as indexed by the mean response time (RT) for the group. In addition, the difference engine correctly predicts approximately linear relations between the RTs of any individual and average performance for the group, with the regression lines for fast individuals having slopes less than 1.0 (and positive intercepts) and the regression lines for slow individuals having slopes greater than 1.0 (and negative intercepts). Similar predictions are made for comparisons of slow, average, and fast subgroups, regardless of whether those subgroups are formed on the basis of differences in ability, age, or health status. These predictions are consistent with evidence from studies of healthy young and older adults as well as from studies of depressed and age-matched control groups.     

Visual perspective taking for avatars in a Simon task

In modern digital applications, users often interact with virtual representations of themselves or others, called avatars. We examined how these avatars and their perspectives influence stimulus–response compatibility in a Simon task. Participants responded to light/dark blue stimuli with left/right key presses in the presence of a task-irrelevant avatar. Changes in stimulus–response compatibility were used to quantify changes in the mental representation of the task and perspective taking toward this avatar. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that perspective taking for an avatar occurred in orthogonal stimulus–response mappings, causing a compatibility effect from the avatar’s point of view. In the following two experiments we introduced a larger variety of angular disparities between the participant and avatar. In Experiment 3, the Simon effect with lateralized stimulus positions remained largely unaffected by the avatar, pointing toward an absence of perspective taking. In Experiment 4, after avatar hand movements were added in order to strengthen the participants’ sense of agency over the avatar, a spatial compatibility effect from the avatar’s perspective was observed again, and hints of the selective use of perspective taking on a trial-by-trial basis were found. Overall, the results indicate that users can incorporate the perspective of an avatar into their mental representation of a situation, even when this perspective is unnecessary to complete a task, but that certain contextual requirements have to be met.