Searching for stimulus-driven shifts of attention

Several types of dynamic cues (e.g., abrupt onsets, motion) draw attention in visual search tasks even when they are irrelevant. Although these stimuli appear to capture attention in a stimulus-driven fashion, typical visual search tasks might induce an intentional strategy to focus on dynamic events. Because observers can only begin their search when the search display suddenly appears, they might orient to any dynamic display change (Folk, Remington, & Johnston, 1992; Gibson & Kelsey, 1998). If so, the appearance of capture might result from task-induced biases rather than from the properties of the stimulus. In fact, such biases can even create the appearance of stimulus-driven capture by stimuli that typically do not capture attention (Gibson & Kelsey, 1998). The possibility of task-induced, topdown biases plagues the interpretation of all previous studies claiming stimulus-driven attention capture by dynamic stimuli. In two experiments, we attempt to eliminate potential task-induced biases by removing any need to monitor for display changes. In the first experiment, search displays did not change on most trials. In the second experiment, although new search displays appeared on each trial, we ensured that observers never saw the changes, by making them during large saccades. In both cases, dynamic events still received search priority, suggesting that some dynamic stimuli capture attention in a stimulus-driven fashion.     

Specific- and partial-source memory: effects of aging

Normal aging can be associated with impairments in source memory (recollecting an event's context). This study examined the effects of aging on specific-source memory (e.g., remembering which of 4 people spoke a word) and partial-source memory (e.g., remembering the gender of the person who spoke the word). When young and older adults were matched in terms of old-new recognition, age-related deficits were observed on both specific- and partial-source recollection. When the groups were matched on partial-source performance, no disproportionate specific-source impairment was seen. The results suggest that aging does not differentially affect specific- versus partial-source memory.     

The Universe

It is often said by philosophers that the term ‘the universe’ is illegitimate, whether because the notion of ‘all things’ is incoherent, or inconsistent, or cannot even be meaningfully expressed. The reasons may be drawn from metaphysics, or logic, or the philosophy of language, or the philosophy of mathematics. In this essay I argue that the term is legitimate, withstanding all criticisms, and that there is a single best meaning for it, which is that it is a semantically plural term standing equally for every existing object.

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It's about timing and change: pubertal transition effects on symptoms of major depression among African American youths

Effects of early physical maturation and accelerated pubertal changes on symptoms of major depression were examined in 639 African American children. Three rival hypotheses, early timing, off-time, and stressful change, were tested using 2 waves of data (mean ages = 11 and 13 years). The pubertal effect operates differently according to children's gender and age. For girls, early maturation was consistently associated with elevated levels of depressive symptoms. For boys, early maturers manifested elevated levels of depression only at age 11, but these symptoms subsided by age 13. Boys who experienced accelerated pubertal growth over time displayed elevated symptom levels. Results support the early timing hypothesis for girls and the stressful change hypothesis for boys. Time at assessment is critical when examining boys' pubertal transition.     

Motivating learning, performance, and persistence: the synergistic effects of intrinsic goal contents and autonomy-supportive contexts

Three field experiments with high school and college students tested the self-determination theory hypotheses that intrinsic (vs. extrinsic) goals and autonomy-supportive (vs. controlling) learning climates would improve students' learning, performance, and persistence. The learning of text material or physical exercises was framed in terms of intrinsic (community, personal growth, health) versus extrinsic (money, image) goals, which were presented in an autonomy-supportive versus controlling manner. Analyses of variance confirmed that both experimentally manipulated variables yielded main effects on depth of processing, test performance, and persistence (all ps <.001), and an interaction resulted in synergistically high deep processing and test performance (but not persistence) when both intrinsic goals and autonomy support were present. Effects were significantly mediated by autonomous motivation.     

How not to be seen: the contribution of similarity and selective ignoring to sustained inattentional blindness

When people attend to objects or events in a visual display, they often fail to notice an additional, unexpected, but fully visible object or event in the same display. This phenomenon is now known as inattentional blindness . We present a new approach to the study of sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events in order to explore the roles of similarity, distinctiveness, and attentional set in the detection of unexpected objects. In Experiment 1, we found that the similarity of an unexpected object to other objects in the display influences attentional capture: The more similar an unexpected object is to the attended items, and the greater its difference from the ignored items, the more likely it is that people will notice it. Experiment 2 explored whether this effect of similarity is driven by selective ignoring of irrelevant items or by selective focusing on attended items. The results of Experiment 3 suggest that the distinctiveness of the unexpected object alone cannot entirely account for the similarity effects found in the first two experiments; when attending to black items or white items in a dynamic display, nearly 30% of observers failed to notice a bright red cross move across the display, even though it had a unique color, luminance, shape, and motion trajectory and was visible for 5 s. Together, the results suggest that inattentional blindness for ongoing dynamic events depends both on the similarity of the unexpected object to the other objects in the display and on the observer's attentional set.     

Processing without noticing in inattentional blindness: A replication of Moore and Egeth (1997) and Mack and Rock (1998)

Surreptitious online measures can reveal the processing of stimuli that people do not report noticing or cannot describe. People seem to glean everything from low-level Gestalt grouping information to semantic meaning from unattended and unreported stimuli, and this information seems capable of influencing performance and of priming semantic judgments. Moore and Egeth (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 23, 339–352, 1997) provided evidence that judgments about the lengths of two lines were influenced by the grouping of background dots, even when subjects did not notice the pattern the dots formed. Mack and Rock (1998) reported that subjects could be primed to complete a stem with a word to which they were inattentionally blind. In this registered report, we replicated these two classic findings using large online samples (Ns = 260 and 448), finding support for the influence of grouping despite inattentional blindness, but not for word-stem priming.