Individual differences in information order effects: The importance of right-hemisphere access in belief updating

The order in which information is received alters the evaluation of causal hypotheses. Specifically, research suggests that the last piece of information oftentimes has the greatest impact on the evaluation and that the difference in subjective value between two pieces of information is an important factor influencing the magnitude of this recency effect. The present paper extends this line of work by exploring individual differences in this phenomenon via one's degree of handedness. Two hundred and five participants were given two hypothetical scenarios and related causal hypotheses accompanied by two pieces of additional information and asked to revise their belief in each hypothesis as information accumulated. Results confirmed predictions that 1) inconsistent/mixed-handers (those who use their non-dominant hand for at least some activities) show a larger effect with two pieces of inconsistent weak or strong information, and 2) neither mixed-handers nor consistent/strong-handers (those who use their dominant hand for almost all activities) show an effect with strong and weak pieces of consistent information. Mixed-handers' susceptibility to persuasive arguments and Ramachandran’s (1995; Ramachandran and Blakeslee, 1998) belief-updating theory centered around communication between the two halves of the brain and functional access to the right hemisphere are used to account for these data.     

Audiovisual beat induction in complex auditory rhythms: Point-light figure movement as an effective visual beat

This study investigated whether explicit beat induction in the auditory, visual, and audiovisual (bimodal) modalities aided the perception of weakly metrical auditory rhythms, and whether it reinforced attentional entrainment to the beat of these rhythms. The visual beat-inducer was a periodically bouncing point-light figure, which aimed to examine whether an observed rhythmic human movement could induce a beat that would influence auditory rhythm perception. In two tasks, participants listened to three repetitions of an auditory rhythm that were preceded and accompanied by (1) an auditory beat, (2) a bouncing point-light figure, (3) a combination of (1) and (2) synchronously, or (4) a combination of (1) and (2), with the figure moving in anti-phase to the auditory beat. Participants reproduced the auditory rhythm subsequently (Experiment 1), or detected a possible temporal change in the third repetition (Experiment 2). While an explicit beat did not improve rhythm reproduction, possibly due to the syncopated rhythms when a beat was imposed, bimodal beat induction yielded greater sensitivity to a temporal deviant in on-beat than in off-beat positions. Moreover, the beat phase of the figure movement determined where on-beat accents were perceived during bimodal induction. Results are discussed with regard to constrained beat induction in complex auditory rhythms, visual modulation of auditory beat perception, and possible mechanisms underlying the preferred visual beat consisting of rhythmic human motions.     

Parallel averaging of size is possible but range-limited: A reply to Marchant,Simons, and De Fockert

In their recent paper, Marchant, Simons, and De Fockert (2013) claimed that the ability to average between multiple items of different sizes is limited by small samples of arbitrarily attended members of a set. This claim is based on a finding that observers are good at representing the average when an ensemble includes only two sizes distributed among all items (regular sets), but their performance gets worse when the number of sizes increases with the number of items (irregular sets). We argue that an important factor not considered by Marchant et al. (2013) is the range of size variation that was much bigger in their irregular sets. We manipulated this factor across our experiments and found almost the same efficiency of averaging for both regular and irregular sets when the range was stabilized. Moreover, highly regular sets consisting only of small and large items (two-peaks distributions) were averaged with greater error than sets with small, large, and intermediate items, suggesting a segmentation threshold determining whether all variable items are perceived as a single ensemble or distinct subsets. Our results demonstrate that averaging can actually be parallel but the visual system has some difficulties with it when some items differ too much from others.     

Different mechanisms for role relations versus verb–action congruence effects: Evidence from ERPs in picture–sentence verification

Extant accounts of visually situated language processing do make general predictions about visual context effects on incremental sentence comprehension; these, however, are not sufficiently detailed to accommodate potentially different visual context effects (such as a scene–sentence mismatch based on actions versus thematic role relations, e.g., (Altmann & Kamide, 2007; Knoeferle & Crocker, 2007; Taylor & Zwaan, 2008; Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998)). To provide additional data for theory testing and development, we collected event-related brain potentials (ERPs) as participants read a subject–verb–object sentence (500 ms SOA in Experiment 1 and 300 ms SOA in Experiment 2), and post-sentence verification times indicating whether or not the verb and/or the thematic role relations matched a preceding picture (depicting two participants engaged in an action). Though incrementally processed, these two types of mismatch yielded different ERP effects. Role–relation mismatch effects emerged at the subject noun as anterior negativities to the mismatching noun, preceding action mismatch effects manifest as centro-parietal N400s greater to the mismatching verb, regardless of SOAs. These two types of mismatch manipulations also yielded different effects post-verbally, correlated differently with a participant's mean accuracy, verbal working memory and visual-spatial scores, and differed in their interactions with SOA. Taken together these results clearly implicate more than a single mismatch mechanism for extant accounts of picture–sentence processing to accommodate.     

When linking is stronger than thinking: Associative transfer of valence disrupts the emergence of cognitive balance after attitude change

The present research investigated the role of cognitive balance vs. associative transfer of valence in attitude change. Participants first formed positive or negative attitudes toward several source individuals. Subsequently, participants were shown source–target pairs along with information about the source–target relationship (‘likes’/‘dislikes’). Afterwards, participants’ attitudes toward the sources were changed by means of information that was opposite to the initially induced attitude. In a control condition, initial source attitudes remained unqualified. Results in the control condition showed that initially formed attitudes and available relationship information produced target evaluations that were consistent with the notion of cognitive balance. However, when attitudes toward the sources changed, target evaluations directly matched attitudes toward individually associated sources, irrespective of the relation between source and target. These results suggest that associative transfer of valence can disrupt the emergence of cognitive balance after attitude change.     

Mutual influence of implicit and explicit attitudes

Research and theory distinguish two types of attitude: automatic evaluative reactions and deliberate evaluative judgments, referred to as implicit and explicit attitudes, respectively. Although these attitudes are distinct, they may influence each other. Four studies tested whether implicit and explicit attitudes are both influenced by propositional and associative learning. We also tested whether changes in one kind of attitude mediate changes in the other. Study 1 found that propositional learning about novel individuals directly influenced explicit attitudes and indirectly influenced implicit attitudes through changes in explicit attitudes. Studies 2 and 3 replicated this finding and extended it by simultaneously demonstrating that associative learning through Evaluative Conditioning directly influences implicit attitudes and indirectly influences explicit attitudes through changes in implicit attitudes. Study 4 replicated these effects for attitudes toward familiar, rather than novel, targets. These results suggest that implicit and explicit attitudes can share common antecedents and influence each other.     

Cultivating the Opinionated: The Need to Evaluate Moderates the Relationship Between Crime Drama Viewing and Scary World Evaluations

The literature on cultivation processes assumes that second‐order judgments (e.g., attitudes) are repeatedly updated during viewing (i.e., on‐line) and can be reported when asked. In this article, we propose this reasoning only holds for people high in their need to evaluate (NTE). Low‐NTE individuals do not update their opinions on‐line and have to construct their attitudes memory‐based, limiting the likelihood of finding second‐order relationships. Results from a cross‐sectional survey among 226 adolescents indicate that crime drama viewing and scary world beliefs are only correlated among high‐NTE individuals. NTE does not moderate cultivation through nonfiction. The theoretical implications of memory‐based attitudes for second‐order cultivation are discussed, and suggestions are made for future research on attitudinal media effects.     

Formation of semantic associations between subliminally presented face-word pairs

Recent evidence suggests that consciousness of encoding is not necessary for the rapid formation of new semantic associations. We investigated whether unconsciously formed associations are as semantically precise as would be expected for associations formed with consciousness of encoding during episodic memory formation. Pairs of faces and written occupations were presented subliminally for unconscious associative encoding. Five minutes later, the same faces were presented suprathreshold for the cued unconscious retrieval of face-occupation associations. Retrieval instructions required participants to classify the presented individuals according to their putative (1) regularity of income, (2) length of education, and (3) creativity value of occupational activity. The three instructions yielded more classifications consistent with a person’s occupation if the person had been subliminally presented with his written occupation versus a meaningless word (control condition). This suggests that consciousness is not necessary to encode, long-term store, and retrieve semantically precise associations between primarily unrelated items.     

Unconscious transfer of meaning to brands

We examine semantic conditioning in a consumer context. We subliminally paired neutral ideographs with attributes. In experiment 1, the ideographs served as primes during a lexical decision task and slowed down response times to target words with the opposite semantic meaning. In experiment 2, the ideographs served as brand names of beverages, and attitudinal responses to them were less favorable when the associated attributes were incongruent with existing schemas. These results showed that semantic conditioning (1) can occur unconsciously, (2) can have significant and meaningful consequences for brand evaluation, and (3) influences subsequent attitudinal responses via conceptual disfluency processes.     

Intracellular calcium chelation and pharmacological SERCA inhibition of Ca2+ pump in the insular cortex differentially affect taste aversive memory formation and retrieval

Variation in intracellular calcium concentration regulates the induction of long-term synaptic plasticity and is associated with a variety of memory/retrieval and learning paradigms. Accordingly, impaired calcium mobilization from internal deposits affects synaptic plasticity and cognition in the aged brain. During taste memory formation several proteins are modulated directly or indirectly by calcium, and recent evidence suggests the importance of calcium buffering and the role of intracellular calcium deposits during cognitive processes. Thus, the main goal of this research was to study the consequence of hampering changes in cytoplasmic calcium and inhibiting SERCA activity by BAPTA-AM and thapsigargin treatments, respectively, in the insular cortex during different stages of taste memory formation. Using conditioned taste aversion (CTA), we found differential effects of BAPTA-AM and thapsigargin infusions before and after gustatory stimulation, as well as during taste aversive memory consolidation; BAPTA-AM, but not thapsigargin, attenuates acquisition and/or consolidation of CTA, but neither compound affects taste aversive memory retrieval. These results point to the importance of intracellular calcium dynamics in the insular cortex during different stages of taste aversive memory formation.