Interfering with remembering and knowing: effects of divided attention at retrieval

A Remember-Know paradigm was used to examine the cognitive resource requirements of recollection and familiarity memory processes at retrieval. Younger and older adults studied a list of words, and in a later auditory recognition test indicated whether each word was Remembered, Known, or New. Retrieval was performed under full or divided attention (DA) conditions, with either a digit task to numbers, or an animacy task to words, presented visually. Younger and older adults showed an increase in false Remember responses during both DA conditions, indicating a general effect of attention on illusory recollection. Both age groups also showed decreased accuracy in Know responses, but only during the word-based DA condition, indicating a material-specific effect on familiarity. Aging was associated with decreased accuracy in Remember, but not Know, responses, and with increased latency in distracting task responses under DA conditions. Results suggest that avoiding false recollective responses during retrieval requires attentional resources, whereas accurate familiarity responses require the reactivation of content-specific representations.     

Schooling in western culture promotes context-free processing

Culture has been shown to influence the way people apprehend their physical environment. Cognitive orientation is more holistic in East Asian cultures, which emphasize relationships and connectedness among objects in the field, than in Western cultures, which are more prone to focus exclusively on the object and its attributes. We investigated whether, beyond, or in conjunction with culture, literacy and/or schooling may also have an influence on this cognitive orientation. Using the Framed-Line Test both in Portugal and in Thailand, we compared literate schooled adults with two groups of unschooled adults: one of illiterates and one of ex-illiterates. As in former studies on Western people, Portuguese-schooled literates were more accurate in the absolute task than in the relative task. In contrast, Portuguese illiterates and ex-illiterates were more accurate in the relative task than in the absolute task. Such an effect of schooling was not observed in the Thai groups, all of whom performed better on the relative task. Thus, the capacity to abstract from contextual information does not stem only from passive exposure to the culture or the physical environment of Western countries. Western schooling, as part of or in addition to culture, is a crucial factor.     

Value tradeoffs propel and inhibit behavior: Validating the 19 refined values in four countries

We assess the predictive and discriminant validity of the basic values in the refined Schwartz value theory by examining how value tradeoffs predict behavior in Italy, Poland, Russia, and the USA. One thousand eight hundred and fifty‐seven respondents reported their values and rated their own and a partner's behavior. Multigroup confirmatory factor analysis supported the distinctiveness of the 19 values and the 19 self‐rated and other‐rated behaviors. Multidimensional scaling analyses supported the circular motivational order of the 19 values. Findings affirmed the theorizing that behavior depends upon tradeoffs between values that propel and values that inhibit it. Across four countries, value importance, behavior frequency, and gender failed to moderate the strength of value–behavior relations. This raises the question of the conditions under which the widely cited assumption that normative pressure weakens value–behavior relations holds.     

Reading the Lucan call of the first disciples differently: the voices of sensing and intuition

Abstract

This article argues that discipleship is a notion of growing importance to the Christian denominations and that the Marcan narrative of the call of the first disciples has been of particular importance in giving shape to this notion. The Lucan narrative of the call of the first disciple, involving the great catch of fish, is problematic in two ways, concerning its relationship with the Marcan understanding of call and also with the Johannine post-resurrection narrative. Against this background this article reports on an empirical study, drawing on the reader perspective and on the SIFT approach to biblical hermeneutics, that illuminates the distinctive voices of sensing types and intuitive types reading Luke 5: 1–7.     

Enantiomorphy through the looking glass: literacy effects on mirror-image discrimination

To examine whether enantiomorphy (i.e., the ability to discriminate lateral mirror images) is influenced by the acquisition of a written system that incorporates mirrored letters (e.g., b and d), unschooled illiterate adults were compared with people reading the Latin alphabet, namely, both schooled literate adults and unschooled adults alphabetized in adulthood. In various sorting and same-different comparison tasks with nonlinguistic materials, illiterate participants displayed some sensitivity to enantiomorphic contrasts but performed far worse than all the other participant groups when the task required paying attention to such contrasts. The difficulties of illiterate participants were more severe with enantiomorphs than with rotations in the plane or shape contrasts. Learning a written system that incorporates enantiomorphic letters thus pushes the beginning reader to break the mirror invariance characteristic of the visual system, and this process generalizes beyond the realm of symbolic characters.     

Creativity as Identity Skill? Late Adolescents' Management of Identity,Complexity and Risk‐Taking

The link between identity and creativity has received surprisingly little attention from developmental psychology researchers, although flexibility and the ability to generate multiple solutions to problems are key competences for contemporary society based on continuous innovation and de‐standardization of development trajectories. These competences are critical for identity formation processes, mainly during late adolescence when young people have to explore and commit to defining themselves. This study was concerned with exploring the relationships between creative and identity processes to identify typologies of ‘creativity‐identity interplay’ in late adolescence. The participants comprised 315 late adolescents attending the last 2 years of Italian high schools. Two self‐report measures were used: Utrecht‐Management of Identity Commitments Scale and Test of Divergent Feeling. Participation was voluntary and anonymity was guaranteed. Our findings confirm the relationship between identity and creativity, identify six identity statuses (moratorium, critical exploration, achievement, early closure, diffusion, and searching moratorium), and they describe differences in terms of creativity processes involved in identity formation. Suggestions for future research and limitations are discussed.     

Phonological processing of words in right- and left-handers

It is commonly accepted that phonology is the exclusive domain of the left hemisphere. However, this pattern of lateralization, which posits a right visual field advantage, has been questioned by several studies. In fact, certain factors such as characteristics of the stimuli and subjects' handedness can modulate the right visual field advantage. Thus, the goal of this study was to compare the hemispheric dynamics of right-handers and left-handers during a divided visual field presentation of words that varied in terms of their phonological transparency. For non-transparent words, the left hemisphere seems more competent in both handedness groups. With regard to transparent words, the right hemisphere of both groups also appears competent. Surprisingly, left-handers achieved optimal processing with a functionally isolated left hemisphere, whereas right-handers needed the participation of both hemispheres. The pattern of performance cannot be fully explained by either the callosal or the direct access model.     

Divided attention and memory: evidence of substantial interference effects at retrieval and encoding

In 5 divided attention (DA) experiments, students (24 in each experiment) performed visual distracting tasks (e.g., recognition of words, word and digit monitoring) while either simultaneously encoding an auditory word list or engaging in oral free recall of the target word list. DA during retrieval, using either of the word-based distracting tasks, produced relatively larger interference effects than the digit-monitoring task. DA during encoding produced uniformly large interference effects, regardless of the type of distracting task. Results suggest that when attention is divided at retrieval, interference is created only when the memory and concurrent task compete for access to word-specific representational systems; no such specificity is necessary to create interference at encoding. During encoding, memory and concurrent tasks compete primarily for general resources, whereas during retrieval, they compete primarily for representational systems.     

You are Cruel Even If He Did It: Behavior and Face Processing in Spontaneous Trait Inference and Transference

Spontaneous trait inferences (STIs) occur when people infer, without intention or awareness, personality traits from other people’s behaviors. Spontaneous trait transferences (STTs) occur when the trait inferred from the behavior of an actor is erroneously transferred to a person who is not the actor of the behavior. Here, we show that STIs and STTs are similar in the activation of the trait from the behavior and they differ in the link that is established between the inferred trait and the person, with stronger link being created in the STIs than in STTs.