The Sound of Smell: Associating Odor Valence With Disgust Sounds

Olfaction has recently been highlighted as a sense poorly connected with language. Odor is difficult to verbalize, and it has few qualities that afford mimicry by vision or sound. At the same time, emotion is thought to be the most salient dimension of an odor, and it could therefore be an olfactory dimension more easily communicated. We investigated whether sounds imitative of an innate disgust response can be associated with unpleasant odors. In two experiments, participants were asked to make a forced choice between a pseudoword including a disgust sound and a neutral pseudoword, for pleasant and unpleasant odors. Overall, participants chose more disgust pseudowords than neutral pseudowords for unpleasant odors, but this was not the case for pleasant odors. This effect was not driven by a general association between unpleasant sounds and unpleasant odors, but specifically the sounds [x/χ] and [f], thought to reflect physical responses to disgusting odors, as seen in the Polish fu! or the English ugh!. In line with growing evidence that language can encode odor, we provide the first experimental evidence for an association between the sound of a word and odor valence.     

Assessing Psychological Inflexibility Pertaining to Self in Patients With Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Using an Indirect Measure of (Nonassociative) Propositions

Relational frame theory (RFT) is a modern behavioral account of human language and cognition, which focuses on relations or propositions, rather than associations, as core explanatory constructs. In an attempt to measure such propositions, RFT researchers have developed the implicit relational assessment procedure (IRAP). It has been argued that the size of an IRAP effect may provide a metric for psychological inflexibility. The current study aimed to determine whether psychological inflexibility, as measured by the self-focused Natural Language-IRAP (NL-IRAP), would be higher in a clinical sample of individuals with a diagnosis of PTSD (N = 29) when compared to a nonclinical sample. Subsequently, the study investigated whether the self-focused NL-IRAP could be used to predict the presence of a clinical diagnosis, using a ROC analysis. As predicted, higher levels of psychological inflexibility were observed for the clinical group. The self-focused NL-IRAP also correctly classified the presence of PTSD (AUC = 76%) with a sensitivity level of 79.3% and a specificity level of 59.2%. Overall, the use of the IRAP as a nonassociative clinical measure appears promising.     

Sensitivity to lateral information on a perceptual word identification task in French third and fifth graders

This study aimed at examining sensitivity to lateral linguistic and nonlinguistic information in third and fifth grade readers. A word identification task with a threshold was used, and targets were displayed foveally with or without distractors. Sensitivity to lateral information was inferred from the deterioration of the rate of correct word identification when displayed with distractors. Results show that the two reader groups were sensitive to both right and left lateral information. The area of sensitivity to this information was more extended for the identification of easy words than difficult words. Examination of the detrimental effect of distractors suggests that in both third and fifth graders, the impact of lateral information on foveal processing is the result of a general distraction effect, but also of linguistic processing whose nature remains to be clarified.     

Mind-reading in strategic interaction: The impact of perceived similarity on projection and stereotyping

In social dilemmas, negotiations, and other forms of strategic interaction, mind-reading—intuiting another party’s preferences and intentions—has an important impact on an actor’s own behavior. In this paper, we present a model of how perceivers shift between social projection (using one’s own mental states to intuit a counterpart’s mental states) and stereotyping (using general assumptions about a group to intuit a counterpart’s mental states). Study 1 extends prior work on perceptual dilemmas in arms races, examining Americans’ perceptions of Chinese attitudes toward military escalation. Study 2 adapts a prisoner’s dilemma, pairing participants with outgroup targets. Study 3 employs an ultimatum game, asking male and female participants to make judgments about opposite sex partners. Study 4 manipulates perceived similarity as well as counterpart stereotype in a principal–agent context. Across the studies, we find evidence for our central prediction: higher levels of perceived similarity are associated with increased projection and reduced stereotyping.     

A kinematic comparison of successful and unsuccessful tennis serves across the elite development pathway

While velocity generation is an obvious prerequisite to proficient tennis serve performance, it is also the only stroke where players are obliged to negotiate a unique target constraint. Therefore, the dearth of research attending to the accuracy component of the serve is surprising. This study compared the body, racquet and ball kinematics characterising successful serves and service faults, missed into the net, in two groups of elite junior female players and one professional female tennis player. Three-dimensional body, racquet and ball kinematics were recorded using a 22-camera VICON motion analysis system. There were no differences in body kinematics between successful serves and service faults, suggesting that service faults cannot be attributed to a single source of biomechanical error. However, service faults missing into the net are characterized by projection angles significantly further below the horizontal, implying that consistency in this end-point parameter is critical to successful performance. Regulation of this parameter appears dependent on compensatory adjustments in the distal elbow and wrist joints immediately prior to impact and also perceptual feedback. Accordingly, coordination of the distal degrees of freedom and a refined perception-action coupling appear more important to success than any isolated mechanical component of the service action.     

Musical experts recruit action-related neural structures in harmonic anomaly detection: Evidence for embodied cognition in expertise

Humans are extremely good at detecting anomalies in sensory input. For example, while listening to a piece of Western-style music, an anomalous key change or an out-of-key pitch is readily apparent, even to the non-musician. In this paper we investigate differences between musical experts and non-experts during musical anomaly detection. Specifically, we analyzed the electroencephalograms (EEG) of five expert cello players and five non-musicians while they listened to excerpts of J.S. Bach’s Prelude from Cello Suite No. 1. All subjects were familiar with the piece, though experts also had extensive experience playing the piece. Subjects were told that anomalous musical events (AMEs) could occur at random within the excerpts of the piece and were told to report the number of AMEs after each excerpt. Furthermore, subjects were instructed to remain still while listening to the excerpts and their lack of movement was verified via visual and EEG monitoring. Experts had significantly better behavioral performance (i.e. correctly reporting AME counts) than non-experts, though both groups had mean accuracies greater than 80%. These group differences were also reflected in the EEG correlates of key-change detection post-stimulus, with experts showing more significant, greater magnitude, longer periods of, and earlier peaks in condition-discriminating EEG activity than novices. Using the timing of the maximum discriminating neural correlates, we performed source reconstruction and compared significant differences between cellists and non-musicians. We found significant differences that included a slightly right lateralized motor and frontal source distribution. The right lateralized motor activation is consistent with the cortical representation of the left hand – i.e. the hand a cellist would use, while playing, to generate the anomalous key-changes. In general, these results suggest that sensory anomalies detected by experts may in fact be partially a result of an embodied cognition, with a model of the action for generating the anomaly playing a role in its detection.     

Source misattributions and false recognition errors: Examining the role of perceptual resemblance and imagery generation processes

In three experiments, we examine the extent to which participants’ memory errors are affected by the perceptual features of an encoding series and imagery generation processes. Perceptual features were examined by manipulating the features associated with individual items as well as the relationships among items. An encoding instruction manipulation was included to examine the effects of explicit requests to generate images. In all three experiments, participants falsely claimed to have seen pictures of items presented as words, committing picture misattribution errors. These misattribution errors were exaggerated when the perceptual resemblance between pictures and images was relatively high (Experiment 1) and when explicit requests to generate images were omitted from encoding instructions (Experiments 1 and 2). When perceptual cues made the thematic relationships among items salient, the level and pattern of misattribution errors were also affected (Experiments 2 and 3). Results address alternative views about the nature of internal representations resulting in misattribution errors and refute the idea that these errors reflect only participants’ general impressions or beliefs about what was seen.     

Visual learning of statistical relations among nonadjacent features: Evidence for structural encoding

Recent results suggest that observers can learn, unsupervised, the co-occurrence of independent shape features in viewed patterns (e.g., Fiser & Aslin, 2001). A critical question with regard to these findings is whether learning is driven by a structural, rule-based encoding of spatial relations between distinct features or by a pictorial, template-like encoding, in which spatial configurations of features are embedded in a “holistic” fashion. In two experiments, we test whether observers can learn combinations of features when the paired features are separated by an intervening spatial “gap”, in which other, unrelated features can appear. This manipulation both increases task difficulty and makes it less likely that the feature combinations are encoded simply as larger unitary features. Observers exhibited learning consistent with earlier studies, suggesting that unsupervised learning of compositional structure is based on the explicit encoding of spatial relations between separable visual features. More generally, these results provide support for compositional structure in visual representation.     

Characterizing typographic expertise: Do we process typefaces like faces?

Studies of face recognition and discrimination provide a rich source of data and debate on the nature of their processing, in particular through using inverted faces. This study draws parallels between the features of typefaces and faces, as letters share a basic configuration, regardless of typeface, that could be seen as similar to faces. Typeface discrimination is compared using paragraphs of upright letters and inverted letters at three viewing durations. Based on previously reported effects of expertise, the prediction that designers would be less accurate when letters are inverted, whereas nondesigners would have similar performance in both orientations, was confirmed. A proposal is made as to which spatial relations between typeface components constitute holistic and configural processing, posited as the basis for better discrimination of the typefaces of upright letters. Such processing may characterize designers' perceptual abilities, acquired through training.