Information sampling and group decision making: the effects of an advocacy decision procedure and task experience

Group discussions tend to focus on information that was previously known by all members (shared information) rather than information known by only 1 member (unshared information). If the shared information implies a suboptimal alternative, this sampling bias is associated with inaccurate group decisions. The present study examines the impact of 2 factors on information exchange and decision quality: (a) an advocacy group decision procedure versus unstructured discussion and (b) task experience. Results show that advocacy groups discussed both more shared and unshared information than free-discussion groups. Further, with increasing experience, more unshared information was mentioned in advocacy groups. In contrast, there was no such increase in unstructured discussions. Yet advocacy groups did not significantly improve their decision quality with experience.     

Dissociable parietal systems for primacy and subsequent memory effects

The frequently observed superior memory for the first items on a list is referred to as primacy. The aetiology of this effect in terms of cognitive processes and their neural substrate is subject to an ongoing debate. However, the brain areas generally involved in successful encoding are well described by subsequent memory studies in which activity during encoding is correlated with memory performance. We employed an object-location association paradigm to differentiate the neural correlate of the primacy from the subsequent memory effect. Activity in the intraparietal sulcus predicted memory performance across all encoding positions. Increased activity in the inferior parietal lobe and angular gyrus resulted exclusively in a more efficient encoding of the first item presented. These areas are part of the ventral frontoparietal network involved in stimulus driven attention. Our results implicate the relatively elevated attention to the first item probably due to its contextual distinctiveness, as a major contributor to the primacy effect.     

Crossmodal integration of emotional information from face and voice in the infant brain

We examined 7-month-old infants' processing of emotionally congruent and incongruent face-voice pairs using ERP measures. Infants watched facial expressions (happy or angry) and, after a delay of 400 ms, heard a word spoken with a prosody that was either emotionally congruent or incongruent with the face being presented. The ERP data revealed that the amplitude of a negative component and a subsequent positive component in infants' ERPs varied as a function of crossmodal emotional congruity. An emotionally incongruent prosody elicited a larger negative component in infants' ERPs than did an emotionally congruent prosody. Conversely, the amplitude of infants' positive component was larger to emotionally congruent than to incongruent prosody. Previous work has shown that an attenuation of the negative component and an enhancement of the later positive component in infants' ERPs reflect the recognition of an item. Thus, the current findings suggest that 7-month-olds integrate emotional information across modalities and recognize common affect in the face and voice.     

A meta-analysis on the correlation between the implicit association test and explicit self-report measures

Theoretically, low correlations between implicit and explicit measures can be due to (a) motivational biases in explicit self reports, (b) lack of introspective access to implicitly assessed representations, (c) factors influencing the retrieval of information from memory, (d) method-related characteristics of the two measures, or (e) complete independence of the underlying constructs. The present study addressed these questions from a meta-analytic perspective, investigating the correlation between the Implicit Association Test (IAT) and explicit self-report measures. Based on a sample of 126 studies, the mean effect size was .24, with approximately half of the variability across correlations attributable to moderator variables. Correlations systematically increased as a function of (a) increasing spontaneity of self-reports and (b) increasing conceptual correspondence between measures. These results suggest that implicit and explicit measures are generally related but that higher order inferences and lack of conceptual correspondence can reduce the influence of automatic associations on explicit self-reports.     

Coping with the stress of a painful medical procedure

To evaluate its effect on procedure-related distress, the focus of attention was manipulated by providing training to hospitalized acute burn patients (n=42). Participants were randomly assigned to attention focusing (i.e. attending to procedural sensations) or music distraction (i.e. attention diverting) coping interventions, or to usual care during the target dressing change. Coping behavior (i.e. distraction, focusing, and three confounding methods, ignoring, catastrophizing, reinterpreting), tension and intrusiveness were evaluated 24 h retrospectively (i.e. for the prior procedure), during the targeted procedure, and 30 min after the target procedure. When coping during the target procedure by ignoring, reinterpreting, and catastrophizing were covaried, the music distraction group experienced significantly fewer intrusions, and the attention focus group had more intrusions. Additionally, secondary analyses revealed that coping by ignoring during the prior day's procedure significantly predicted higher procedural tension during, and more intrusions following, the targeted procedure. Suppression-based forms of emotion-focused coping may be enhanced by training in the use of an explicit distractor.     

Electrophysiological evidence for modulation of lexical processing after repetitive exposure to foreign phonotactic rules

In two experiments we investigate how repeated exposure to native and non-native phonotactic regularities alters the N400, an event-related potential related to lexico-semantic access. Participants underwent a Passive Listening (Experiment 1) or a Categorization Training (Experiment 2) for monosyllabic pseudowords over 3 days. During Passive Listening participants solely listened to the stimuli while for Categorization Training they learned to assign items to two arbitrary categories by feedback. Notably, this task did not rely on phonotactic regularities. Before training, N400 was larger for legal compared to illegal items. Over the 3-day exposure Passive Listening yielded a significant decrease in N400-amplitude for illegal pseudowords, however, this effect was abolished and partially inverted by the Categorization Training. We suggest the decrease in N400-amplitude indicates more efficient discrimination between native and non-native pseudowords since only the former are potential lexical candidates. On the contrary, Categorization Training introduces a ‘protosemantic’ context overriding prelexical selection processes.     

Positive maternal interaction behavior moderates the relation between maternal anxiety and infant regulatory problems

Regulatory problems in infancy are determined by different risk factors. This study aims to examine how psychosocial risk factors are connected, and how they impact the early regulatory ability of 3-month-old infants. In a sample of 57 mother–infant dyads, maternal anxiety and infant crying, sleeping and feeding habits were assessed. As a possible moderator, the role of positive maternal behavior was analyzed by videotaping face-to-face interactions. During the interaction, interactive stress was provoked with the face-to-face still-face paradigm (FFSF). Thus, this study differentiated between the effects of maternal behavior in both an ordinary play context, as well as a stressful interaction context. Results revealed that the relation between maternal anxiety and infant regulatory problems in crying and sleeping varied as a function of positive maternal engagement in stressful situations. However, a significant moderation effect influencing infant feeding problems could not be demonstrated. These findings stress the importance of positive maternal interaction behavior in at least some parts of regulatory adjustment of at-risk infants.     

Impaired visual perception of hurtful actions in patients with chronic low back pain

Visually presented biological motion stimuli activate regions in the brain that are also related to musculo-skeletal pain. We therefore hypothesized that chronic pain impairs the perception of visually presented actions that involve body parts that hurt. In the first experiment, chronic back pain (CLBP) patients and healthy controls judged the lifted weight from point-light biological motion displays. An actor either lifted an invisible container (5, 10, or 15 kg) from the floor, or lifted and manipulated it from the right to the left. The latter involved twisting of the lower back and would be very painful for CLBP patients. All participants recognized the displayed actions, but CLBP patients were impaired in judging the difference in handled weights, especially for the trunk rotation. The second experiment involved discrimination between forward and backward walking. Here the patients were just as good as the controls, showing that the main result of the first experiment was indeed specific to the sensory aspects of the task, and not to general impairments or attentional deficits. The results thus indicate that the judgment of sensorimotor aspects of a visually displayed movement is specifically affected by chronic low back pain.