Selective cues to forget can fail to cause forgetting

Recent research has found that individuals can selectively forget a subset of items through directed forgetting. The goal of the present study was to replicate this selective directed forgetting effect and elucidate its underlying mechanisms. Unfortunately, results from four experiments failed to find any evidence of selective directed forgetting. Participants failed to forget any items when instructed to forget a subset of items from a first list before learning a second list. Participants were only successful in forgetting items from the first list when they were instructed to forget all items from the first list before learning the second list.     

Environmental Reform Organizations and Undone Science in the United States: Exploring the Environmental,Health, and Safety Implications of Nanotechnology

Environmental organizations have raised concerns about the environmental, health, and safety (EHS) implications of the hundreds of products containing nanomaterials that are now on the market. In the process they have drawn attention to the ‘undone science’ of EHS research and called for changes in both research and regulatory policy. Environmental and other advocacy organizations have been active in three policy fields in the United States: funding levels for EHS research, moratoria on the production of new nanomaterials largely based on the precautionary principle, and negotiations over definitions of safe or responsible nanotechnology with the private sector and the federal government. During the administration of President George W. Bush, calls for more research and industry guidelines met with greater success than those that called for moratoria and enhanced mandatory regulation. The more successful strategies tend to reproduce scientistic politics associated with risk assessment, whereas the less successful strategies would open up a broader public debate on the extent to which nanotechnology is needed or socially desirable.     

Feature selection for inductive generalization

Judging similarities among objects, events, and experiences is one of the most basic cognitive abilities, allowing us to make predictions and generalizations. The main assumption in similarity judgment is that people selectively attend to salient features of stimuli and judge their similarities on the basis of the common and distinct features of the stimuli. However, it is unclear how people select features from stimuli and how they weigh features. Here, we present a computational method that helps address these questions. Our procedure combines image-processing techniques with a machine-learning algorithm and assesses feature weights that can account for both similarity and categorization judgment data. Our analysis suggests that a small number of local features are particularly important to explain our behavioral data.     

Predator odor avoidance as a rodent model of anxiety: learning-mediated consequences beyond the initial exposure

Prey animals such as rats display innate defensive responses when exposed to the odor of a predator, providing a valuable means of studying the neurobiology of anxiety. While the unconditioned behavioral and neural responses to a single predator odor exposure have been well documented, the paradigm can also be used to study learning-dependent adaptations that occur following repeated exposure to a stressor or associated stimuli. In developing preclinical models for human anxiety disorders this is advantageous, as anxiety disorders seldom involve a single acute experience of anxiety, but rather are chronic and/or recurring illnesses. Part 1 of this review summarizes current research on the three most commonly used predator-related odors: cat odor, ferret odor, and trimethylthiazoline (a component of fox odor). Part 2 reviews the learning-based behavioral and neural adaptations that underlie predator odor-induced context conditioning, one-trial tolerance, sensitization, habituation and dishabituation.     

Metaphor priming in sentence production: Concrete pictures affect abstract language production

People speak metaphorically about abstract concepts—for instance, a person can be “full of love” or “have a lot of love to give.” Over the past decade, research has begun to focus on how metaphors are processed during language comprehension. Much of this work suggests that understanding a metaphorical expression involves activating brain and body systems involved in perception and motor control. However, no research to date has asked whether the same is true while speakers produce language. We address this gap using a sentence production task. Its results demonstrate that visually activating a concrete source domain can trigger the use of metaphorical language drawn from that same concrete domain, even in sentences that are thematically unrelated to the primes, a metaphorical priming effect. This effect suggests that conceptual metaphors play a part in language production. It also shows that activation in the perceptual system that is not part of an intended message can nevertheless influence sentence formulation.     

Meaning is Not a Reflex: Context Dependence of Spatial Congruity Effects

In two experiments, Brookshire, Ivry, and Casasanto (2010) showed that words with positive and negative emotional valence can activate spatial representations with a high degree of automaticity, but also that this activation is highly context dependent. Lebois, Wilson‐Mendenhall, and Barsalou (2015) reported that they “aimed to replicate” our study but found only null results in the “Brookshire et al. replication” conditions. Here we express concerns about three aspects of this paper. First, the study was not an attempt to replicate ours; it was a different study that adapted our method. Second, Lebois et al. did not accurately represent our theoretical position. Third, Lebois et al.’s main conclusion, that spatial congruity effects depend on the task context, was not supported by their data. Despite these concerns, we agree with Lebois et al.'s overall message that spatial aspects of words' meanings are activated differently in different contexts. This was a main conclusion of our study as well.     

Valuable orientations capture attention

Visual attention has long been known to be drawn to stimuli that are physically salient or congruent with task-specific goals. Several recent studies have shown that attention is also captured by stimuli that are neither salient nor task relevant, but that are rendered in a colour that has previously been associated with reward. We investigated whether another feature dimension—orientation—can be associated with reward via learning and thereby elicit value-driven attentional capture. In a training phase, participants received a monetary reward for identifying the colour of Gabor patches exhibiting one of two target orientations. A subsequent test phase in which no reward was delivered required participants to search for Gabor patches exhibiting one of two spatial frequencies (orientation was now irrelevant to the task). Previously rewarded orientations robustly captured attention. We conclude that reward learning can imbue features other than colour—in this case, specific orientations—with persistent value.     

Bidirectional associations of power and size in a priming task

Recent studies have shown that the size of a word's font affects people's judgements of its power. This result has been regarded as evidence for the association between power and size. It remains unclear, however, whether this association is bidirectional. The present study used a priming paradigm to determine whether processing power words was not only affected by processing size but also whether the reverse was true, consistent with metaphor representation being bidirectional. In Experiment 1, shapes in different sizes were used as priming materials, and power words were used as targets. In Experiment 2, to test the directionality of power and size, we tested two conditions using the exact same tasks but in reverse order: power words priming shapes and shapes priming power words. In Experiment 3, a significant priming effect was replicated when power words primed shapes in a lexical decision task rather than a powerful/powerless decision task. We found an interplay between power and size in all of the experiments. The bidirectional associations between power and size were in line with the strong version of Metaphoric Structuring, which claims that concrete concepts should influence abstract concepts and abstract domains should affect concrete domains. Thus, power is partially understood in terms of size, which demonstrates that abstract concepts are grounded in sensory motor processing.     

Effects of resource demanding processing on context memory for context-related versus context-unrelated items

In two experiments, context memory was compared between conditions of higher versus lower cognitive load. The ease of the item–context binding was manipulated using words whose meaning was preexperimentally related versus unrelated to context (colour). Experiment 1 showed that an item generation task may lead to a decrease in memory for font colour without enhancing item recognition. Experiment 2 used a dual-task paradigm, that is, participants performed a concurrent task during the study phase of the memory task. The divided-attention condition decreased both item and context memory. However, in both experiments, the influence of resource demanding conditions on context memory was apparent only when the item–context binding process was not facilitated by preexperimental associations.     

Representation of object orientation in children: Evidence from mirror-image confusions

Although many cognitive functions require information about the orientations of objects, little is known about representation or processing of object orientation. Mirror-image confusion provides a potential clue. This phenomenon is typically characterized as a tendency to confuse images related by left–right reflection (reflection across an extrinsic vertical axis). However, in most previous studies the stimuli were inadequate for identifying a specific mirror-image (or other) relationship as the cause of the observed confusions. Using stimuli constructed to resolve this problem, Gregory and McCloskey (2010) found that adults’ errors were primarily reflections across an object axis, and not left–right reflections. The present study demonstrates that young children's orientation errors include both object–axis reflections and left–right reflections. We argue that children and adults represent object orientation in the same coordinate-system format (McCloskey, 2009), with orientation errors resulting from difficulty encoding or retaining one (adults) or two (children) specific components of the posited representations.