Trust my face: cognitive factors of head fakes in sports

In many competitive sports, players try to deceive their opponents about their behavioral intentions by using specific body movements or postures called fakes. For example, fakes are performed in basketball when a player gazes in one direction but passes or shoots the ball in another direction to avert efficient defense actions. The present study aimed to identify the cognitive processes that underlie the effects of fakes. The paradigmatic situation studied was the head fake in basketball. Observers (basketball novices) had to decide as quickly as possible whether a basketball player would pass a ball to the left or to the right. The player's head and gaze were oriented in the direction of an intended pass or in the opposite direction (i.e., a head fake). Responding was delayed for incongruent compared to congruent directions of the player's gaze and the pass. This head fake effect was independent of response speed, the presence of a fake in the immediately preceding trial, and practice with the task. Five further experiments using additive-factors logic and locus-of-slack logic revealed a perceptual rather than motor-related origin of this effect: Turning the head in a direction opposite the pass direction appears to hamper the perceptual encoding of pass direction, although it does not induce a tendency to move in the direction of the head's orientation. The implications of these results for research on deception in sports and their relevance for sports practice are discussed.     

Assortative mating in morningness-eveningness

Individuals differ in their morningness-eveningness preference (circadian preference); that is, some prefer morning hours for intellectual and physical activities and others prefer late afternoon or evening hours. This has been viewed as an interesting facet of personality. Assortative mating has been studied in personality research, but assortative mating in circadian preference has rarely been examined. Eighty-four couples participated in this study. They filled in the Composite Scale of Morningness; they also supplied data about rise times and bedtimes as well as information about relationship satisfaction and duration. The results revealed a moderate positive relationship between couple partners in morningness-eveningness which persisted after correcting for age. Similarly, correlations existed between the sleep-wake variables (rise time and bedtime) on weekdays and on the weekends, the association being higher for weekends. There was no significant correlation between length of the relationship and dissimilarity in morningness-eveningness, suggesting that the above-reported correlations reflect an initial assortment rather than convergence effects. Further, no significant correlation was found between dissimilarity in morningness-eveningness and relationship satisfaction. The results suggest that assortative mating in morningness-eveningness is likely and is probably based on an initial assortment. The likelihood to meet and mate may also be linked to chronotype. When differences in circadian preferences exist between possible partners, this reduces the likelihood that these persons meet either by accident or during work and leisure activities. Therefore, two extreme chronotypes are unlikely to meet each other because they have the smallest overlap in their preferred active time during the day due to the circadian rhythmicity.     

Attentional effects of negative faces: Top-down contingent or involuntary?

Recent research has substantiated that schematic negative faces are found more efficiently than positive faces among crowds of distractor faces of varying set sizes. The present study asks whether this relative search asymmetry (RSA) is intention driven or due to involuntary attentional capture. To that aim, participants were first tested in a condition in which negative and positive faces were searched for, and then in a condition in which negative or positive schematic faces appeared at chance level at the position of the target (valid trials) or of a distractor (invalid trials), the faces thus being task irrelevant (the 1/n paradigm). The expected search benefit for valid negative-face target trials most clearly occurred when participants searched for a target defined by a conjunction of color and position; when the target was defined either by an orientation or color singleton, we found rather weak or no evidence for involuntary attention capture by negative faces. We see the results as being (1) evidence that the RSA is partly based on stimulus-driven factors that occur independently of the intention to search for a positive or negative face, and (2) consistent with the assumption that the effects are mainly due to a more efficient rejection of positive-face than of negative-face distractors, rather than being due to attentional capture by the target     

The effect of global versus local processing styles on assimilation versus contrast in social judgment

The authors propose a global/local processing style model (GLOMO) for assimilation and contrast effects in social judgment. GLOMO is based on Schwarz and Bless' (1992, 2007) inclusion-exclusion model, which suggests that when information is included into a category, assimilation occurs, whereas when information is excluded from a category, contrast occurs. According to GLOMO, inclusion versus exclusion should be influenced by whether people process information globally or locally. In 5 experiments, using both disambiguation and social comparison, the authors induced local versus global processing through perceptual tasks and time perspective and showed that global processing produced assimilation, whereas local processing produced contrast. The experiments showed that processing styles elicited in one task can carry over to other tasks and influence social judgments. Furthermore, they found that hemisphere activation and accessibility of judgment-consistent knowledge partially mediated these effects. Implications for current and classic models of social judgment are discussed.     

Development and Validation of the Clutter Image Rating

Few instruments are available to assess compulsive hoarding and severity of clutter. Accuracy of assessment is important to understanding the clinical significance of the problem. To overcome problems associated with over- and under-reporting of hoarding symptoms, the clutter image rating (CIR) was developed. This pictorial scale contains nine equidistant photographs of severity of clutter representing each of three main rooms of most people’s homes: living room, kitchen, and bedroom. The psychometric properties of this measure were examined in two studies. Internal consistency, test–retest, and interobserver reliabilities were good and convergent validity with other questionnaire and interview measures was also good. The CIR correlated more strongly with measures of clutter than with other hoarding and psychopathology scales. The CIR’s very brief pictorial assessment method makes it useful in clinical and treatment contexts for measuring the clutter dimension of compulsive hoarding. The Clutter Image Rating (CIR) is available in conjunction with the following publication: Steketee, G., & Frost, R.O. (2007). Treatment of compulsive hoarding. New York: Oxford University Press at .     

Should I believe this? Reality monitoring of accounts of self‐experienced and invented recent and distant autobiographical events

To examine personal and interpersonal reality monitoring, 240 participants wrote accounts of invented or self‐experienced autobiographical events. Half the participants wrote about a distant event that happened before the age of 15 and half wrote about a recent event that happened after the age of 15. Using a yoked design, participants rated the qualitative details of their own accounts and the details of other participants' accounts. Consistent with previous research, we found that self‐experienced accounts contained more qualitative details than invented accounts, and that accounts of recent events contained more qualitative details than accounts of distant events. Participants rated their own accounts as more qualitatively detailed than other participants' accounts, which suggests that they did not base their self‐ratings solely on the written details. We discuss the practical and theoretical importance of our findings. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

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.