Better late than never: how onsets and offsets influence prior entry and exit

The three experiments presented in the paper examine visual prior entry (determining which of two stimuli appeared first) and prior exit (determining which of two stimuli disappeared first) effects with a temporal order judgment (TOJ) task. In addition to using onset and offset targets, the preceding cues also consisted of either onset or offset stimuli. Typical, and equivalent, prior entry effects were found when either onset or offset cues preceded the onset targets. Unexpectedly large prior exit effects where found with the offset targets, with offset cues producing greater capture effects than onset cues. These findings are consistent with the notion that more attention is allocated to searching the visual field when targets are more difficult to find. In addition, the results indicate that attentional control settings may be more likely to occur with more difficult searches. In addition, these findings demonstrate that TOJ tasks provide extremely precise measures of the allocation of attention and are very sensitive to a range of task manipulations.     

Contributions of the medial temporal lobe to declarative memory retrieval: manipulating the amount of contextual retrieval

We investigated how the hippocampus and its adjacent mediotemporal structures contribute to contextual and noncontextual declarative memory retrieval by manipulating the amount of contextual information across two levels of the same contextual dimension in a source memory task. A first analysis identified medial temporal lobe (MTL) substructures mediating either contextual or noncontextual retrieval. A linearly weighted analysis elucidated which MTL substructures show a gradually increasing neural activity, depending on the amount of contextual information retrieved. A hippocampal engagement was found during both levels of source memory but not during item memory retrieval. The anterior MTL including the perirhinal cortex was only engaged during item memory retrieval by an activity decrease. Only the posterior parahippocampal cortex showed an activation increasing with the amount of contextual information retrieved. If one assumes a roughly linear relationship between the blood-oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) signal and the associated cognitive process, our results suggest that the posterior parahippocampal cortex is involved in contextual retrieval on the basis of memory strength while the hippocampus processes representations of item-context binding. The anterior MTL including perirhinal cortex seems to be particularly engaged in familiarity-based item recognition. If one assumes departure from linearity, however, our results can also be explained by one-dimensional modulation of memory strength.     

Judging Words at Face Value: Interference in a Word Processing Task Reveals Automatic Processing of Affective Facial Expressions

Earlier research has indicated that some characteristics of facial expressions may be automatically processed. This study investigated automaticity as evidenced by involuntary interference in a word evaluation task. Compound stimuli, consisting of words superimposed on pictures of affective faces, were presented to subjects who were given the task of evaluating the affective valence of the words while disregarding the faces. Results of three experiments showed that word evaluation was influenced by the concurrently shown affective faces. Overall, negative words were found to require longer latencies, indicating that more processing resources are invested in negative than in positive stimuli. This speed advantage for positive words was modified by the faces. Negative words were facilitated, relative to positive ones, when shown with a negative expression (e.g. a sad face). Correspondingly, negative words were inhibited, relative to positive ones, when shown with a positive expression (e.g. a happy face). The results are consistent with automatic, involuntary semantic processing of affective facial expressions.     

Depression-related Impairments in Prospective Memory

Time-based prospective memory, the ability to carry out a future intention at a specified time, was found to be impaired in a community sample of clinically depressed adults, relative to a nondepressed sample. Nondepressed participants monitored the time more frequently and, in the final block of the task, accelerated time-monitoring as the target time for the prospective memory response approached. These results are consistent with previous findings of depression-related impairments in retrospective memory tasks that require controlled, self-initiated processing.     

Young children follow pointing over words in interpreting acts of reference

Adults refer young children's attention to things in two basic ways: through the use of pointing (and other deictic gestures) and words (and other linguistic conventions). In the current studies, we referred young children (2- and 4-year-olds) to things in conflicting ways, that is, by pointing to one object while indicating linguistically (in some way) a different object. In Study 1, a novel word was put into competition with a pointing gesture in a mutual exclusivity paradigm; that is, with a known and a novel object in front of the child, the adult pointed to the known object (e.g. a cup) while simultaneously requesting 'the modi'. In contrast to the findings of Jaswal and Hansen (2006) , children followed almost exclusively the pointing gesture. In Study 2, when a known word was put into competition with a pointing gesture – the adult pointed to the novel object but requested 'the car'– children still followed the pointing gesture. In Study 3, the referent of the pointing gesture was doubly contradicted by the lexical information – the adult pointed to a known object (e.g. a cup) but requested 'the car'– in which case children considered pointing and lexical information equally strong. Together, these findings suggest that in disambiguating acts of reference, young children at both 2 and 4 years of age rely most heavily on pragmatic information (e.g. in a pointing gesture), and only secondarily on lexical conventions and principles.     

When the death makes you smoke: A terror management perspective on the effectiveness of cigarette on-pack warnings

One of the principal vehicles for informing tobacco consumers about the risks of smoking is the warning message on each cigarette package. Based on terror management theory, the present study investigates the impact of mortality-salient warnings on cigarette packages compared to warnings with no mortality threat. Results suggest that to the degree that smoking is a source of self-esteem, later attitudes towards smoking become more positive if the warning message is mortality-salient. On the contrary, if the warning is terrifying but not mortality-salient and relates to the source of self-esteem, smoking attitudes become more negative with higher smoking-based self-esteem. Thus, mortality-salient warnings may increase the tendency to favor smoking under certain circumstances. This fatal ironic effect highlights the importance of a risk communication that matches the self-esteem contingencies of the recipients, and it has urgent implications for health care policy.     

Auditory negative priming in younger and older adults

Two experiments are reported in which performance of old and young adults in an auditory negative priming task was compared. Auditory negative priming was not smaller in old than in young adults. This result was independent of whether or not conditions were present that had previously been assumed to favour episodic retrieval, as opposed to inhibitory processes, as a basis of the negative priming phenomenon. The data from the present auditory negative priming experiments are incompatible with the global assumption that the efficiency of inhibitory attentional processes in general diminishes across the adult life span.     

Counter-regulation triggered by emotions: Positive/negative affective states elicit opposite valence biases in affective processing

The present study investigated whether counter-regulation in affective processing is triggered by emotions. Automatic attention allocation to valent stimuli was measured in the context of positive and negative affective states. Valence biases were assessed by comparing the detection of positive versus negative words in a visual search task (Experiment 1) or by comparing interference effects of positive and negative distractor words in an emotional Stroop task (Experiment 2). Imagining a hypothetical emotional situation (Experiment 1) or watching romantic versus depressing movie clips (Experiment 2) increased attention allocation to stimuli that were opposite in valence to the current emotional state. Counter-regulation is assumed to reflect a basic mechanism underlying implicit emotion regulation.     

Contextual modulation of prime response retrieval processes: Evidence from auditory negative priming

Contextual similarity between learning and test phase has been shown to be beneficial for memory retrieval. Negative priming is known to be caused by multiple processes; one of which is episodic retrieval. Therefore, the contextual similarity of prime and probe presentations should influence the size of the negative priming effect. This has been shown for the visual modality. In Experiment 1, an auditory four-alternative forced choice reaction time task was used to test the influence of prime-probe contextual similarity on negative priming and the processes underlying the modulation by context. The negative priming effect was larger when the auditory context was repeated than when it was changed from prime to probe. The modulation by context was exclusively caused by an increase in prime response retrieval errors in ignored repetition trials with context repetition, whereas repeating only the context but not the prime distractor did not lead to an increase in prime response retrieval. This exact pattern of results was replicated in Experiment 2. The findings suggest that contextual information is integrated with prime distractor and response information. Retrieval of the previous episode, including prime distractor, prime response, and context (event file), can be triggered when the former prime distractor is repeated, whereas a context cue alone does not retrieve the event file. This suggests an event file structure that is more complicated than its usually assumed binary structure.