Preemptive control of attentional capture by colour: evidence from trial-by-trial analyses and orderings of onsets of capture effects in reaction time distributions

According to the preemptive-control hypothesis, participants can specify their control settings to attend to relevant target colours or to ignore the irrelevant distractor colours in advance of the displays. Two predictions of this hypothesis were tested. First, with the control settings being specified in advance, capture by a stimulus that better matches the settings was expected to temporally precede capture by a stimulus that matches the setting less well. Second, with the control settings being specified in advance, stronger capture by the better matching than by the less matching stimulus was predicted not to be a stimulus-driven consequence of the target colour in a preceding trial. Both predictions were shown to hold true under different conditions in three experiments.     

When one cue is not enough: combining fast and frugal heuristics with compound cue processing

One-reason decision-making heuristics as proposed by Gigerenzer, Todd, and the ABC Research Group (1999) have been shown to perform accurately. However, such strategies cannot deal with compound cues. We propose the Take The Best Configural Cue (TTB-Configural) as a fast and frugal heuristic that processes compound cues. In a series of three experiments, we analysed whether participants used this heuristic when making cue-based inferences on which of two alternatives had a higher criterion value. In two of the experiments, two cues were amalgamated into a valid compound cue by applying the AND or the OR logical rule, respectively. In the third experiment, there was no valid compound cue. Within each experiment, we also manipulated causal mental models through instructions. In the configural causal model, cues were said to act through the same causal mechanism. In the elemental causal model, cues were said to act through different causal mechanisms. In the neutral causal model, the causal mechanism was not specified. When a highly valid compound existed, and participants had a configural causal model, for the majority of them the strategy that could best account for their choices was TTB-Configural. Otherwise, the strategy that best predicted their choices was the Take The Best (TTB) heuristic.     

Pleasures and subjective well‐being

In two daily diary studies we examined the moderating role of sensation seeking in the patterns of relations between physical pleasure and life satisfaction. In study 1 (a 52‐day daily diary study), daily physical pleasure was a significantly stronger predictor of daily social satisfaction among high sensation seekers than among low sensation seekers. We extended the finding of study 1 to more general daily satisfaction in study 2 (a 23‐day diary study). The present findings indicate that physical pleasure is associated with daily satisfaction to the degree that one seeks for such an experience. In addition, we tested whether the association between physical pleasure and daily satisfaction would be moderated also by other facets of extraversion and extraversion as a whole. With the exception of the positive emotion facet in study 1, no facet or extraversion as a whole moderated the relation between physical pleasure and daily satisfaction. The present studies show specificity and replicability of the role that sensation seeking plays in understanding the link between daily physical pleasure and daily satisfaction. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Locus of the redundant-signals effect in bimodal divided attention: a neurophysiological analysis.

We reanalyzed the data from the study of Lamarre, Busby, and Spidalieri (1983). In that study, the activity of single neurons in area 4 of the motor cortex was recorded during a bimodal detection task in which a monkey (Macaca mulatta) had to respond as quickly as possible to a visual or an auditory signal or to both (redundant trials). Manual responses on redundant trials were speeded by the presence of both signals, as is typically found. The times between signal onsets and the first changes in neuronal activity were also speeded by redundant signals, but there was no difference between redundant-signals and single-signal trials in the time between the change in neuronal activity and movement onset. These results suggest that late motor processes are not speeded by redundant signals in bimodal detection tasks.