Anxiety and sensitivity to eye gaze in emotional faces

This paper reports three studies in which stronger orienting to perceived eye gaze direction was revealed when observers viewed faces showing fearful or angry, compared with happy or neutral, emotional expressions. Gaze-related spatial cueing effects to laterally presented fearful faces and centrally presented angry faces were also modulated by the anxiety level of participants, with high- but not low-state anxious individuals revealing enhanced shifts of attention. In contrast, both high- and low-state anxious individuals demonstrated enhanced orienting to averted gaze when viewing laterally presented angry faces. These results provide novel evidence for the rapid integration of facial expression and gaze direction information, and for the regulation of gaze-cued attention by both the emotion conveyed in the perceived face and the degree of anxiety experienced by the observer.     

Effect of temporal constraints on hemispheric asymmetries during spatial frequency processing

Studies on functional hemispheric asymmetries have suggested that the right vs. left hemisphere should be predominantly involved in low vs. high spatial frequency (SF) analysis, respectively. By manipulating exposure duration of filtered natural scene images, we examined whether the temporal characteristics of SF analysis (i.e., the temporal precedence of low on high spatial frequencies) may interfere with hemispheric specialization. Results showed the classical hemispheric specialization pattern for brief exposure duration and a trend to a right hemisphere advantage irrespective of the SF content for longer exposure duration. The present study suggests that the hemispheric specialization pattern for visual information processing should be considered as a dynamic system, wherein the superiority of one hemisphere over the other could change according to the level of temporal constraints: the higher the temporal constraints of the task, the more the hemispheres are specialized in SF processing.     

With the future behind them: convergent evidence from aymara language and gesture in the crosslinguistic comparison of spatial construals of time

Cognitive research on metaphoric concepts of time has focused on differences between moving Ego and moving time models, but even more basic is the contrast between Ego‐ and temporal‐reference‐point models. Dynamic models appear to be quasi‐universal cross‐culturally, as does the generalization that in Ego‐reference‐point models, FUTURE IS IN FRONT OF EGO and PAST IS IN BACK OF EGO. The Aymara language instead has a major static model of time wherein FUTURE IS BEHIND EGO and PAST IS IN FRONT OF EGO; linguistic and gestural data give strong confirmation of this unusual culture‐specific cognitive pattern. Gestural data provide crucial information unavailable to purely linguistic analysis, suggesting that when investigating conceptual systems both forms of expression should be analyzed complementarily. Important issues in embodied cognition are raised: how fully shared are bodily grounded motivations for universal cognitive patterns, what makes a rare pattern emerge, and what are the cultural entailments of such patterns?     

Orthographic directionality and thematic role illustration in English and Arabic

This study tested the hypotheses that people had a bias for drawing agents on the left of a picture when given a verb stimulus targeting an active or passive event (e.g., "kicked" or "is kicked") and that orthographic directionality would influence the way events were illustrated. Monolingual English speakers, who read and write left-to-right, and Arabic speakers, who read and write right-to-left, drew agents and patients in response to verb stimuli. We found no significant orthographic directionality effects and no preference for positioning agents on the left of pictures in either group or sentence type. Instead, participants drew agents on the right regardless of language or sentence type, and this was exaggerated in English speakers illustrating passive verbs. These findings support the existence of a preference for placing agents in the right hemispace that may result from asymmetrical hemispheric (i.e., left>right) activation induced by language processing. Our results are consistent with findings that people prefer pictures in which focus is on the right, a preference strongest in pictures with no implicit directionality of movement. This suggests that the methodology of the current study encouraged a static rather than dynamic interpretation of the verb in most participants.     

The development of spatial frequency biases in face recognition

Previous research has suggested that a mid-band of spatial frequencies is critical to face recognition in adults, but few studies have explored the development of this bias in children. We present a paradigm adapted from the adult literature to test spatial frequency biases throughout development. Faces were presented on a screen with particular spatial frequencies blocked out by noise masks. A mid-band bias was found in adults and 9- and 10-year-olds for upright faces but not for inverted faces, suggesting a face-sensitive effect. However, 7- and 8-year-olds did not demonstrate the mid-band bias for upright faces but rather processed upright and inverted faces similarly. This suggests that specialization toward the mid-band for upright face recognition develops gradually during childhood and may relate to an advanced level of face expertise.     

Experiences of activity and causality in schizophrenia: When predictive deficits lead to a retrospective over-binding

In this paper I discuss an intriguing and relatively little studied symptomatic expression of schizophrenia known as experiences of activity in which patients form the delusion that they can control some external events by the sole means of their mind. I argue that experiences of activity result from patients being prone to aberrantly infer causal relations between unrelated events in a retrospective way owing to widespread predictive deficits. Moreover, I suggest that such deficits may, in addition, lead to an aberrant intentional binding effect i.e., the subjective compression of the temporal interval between an intentional action and its external effects (Haggard et al., 2002a, Haggard et al., 2002b). In particular, it might be that patient’s thoughts are bound to the external events they aimed to control producing, arguably, a temporal contiguity between these two components. Such temporal contiguity would reinforce or sustain the (causal) feeling that the patient mind is directly causally efficient.     

Bias and learning in temporal binding: Intervals between actions and outcomes are compressed by prior bias

It has consistently been shown that agents judge the intervals between their actions and outcomes as compressed in time, an effect named intentional binding. In the present work, we investigated whether this effect is result of prior bias volunteers have about the timing of the consequences of their actions, or if it is due to learning that occurs during the experimental session. Volunteers made temporal estimates of the interval between their action and target onset (Action conditions), or between two events (No-Action conditions). Our results show that temporal estimates become shorter throughout each experimental block in both conditions. Moreover, we found that observers judged intervals between action and outcomes as shorter even in very early trials of each block. To quantify the decrease of temporal judgments in experimental blocks, exponential functions were fitted to participants’ temporal judgments. The fitted parameters suggest that observers had different prior biases as to intervals between events in which action was involved. These findings suggest that prior bias might play a more important role in this effect than calibration-type learning processes.     

Motor Programming Is Not the Only Process Which Can Influence RT

The current status of research on the memory drum theory is evaluated with emphasis on the issues raised by Marteniuk and MacKenzie (1981). A general theme emerging from this review is that response programming is not the only process which can influence RT and that distinguishing programming from non-programming effects clarifies rather than “clouds? the issues.     

Attentional bias in high- and low-anxious individuals: Evidence for threat-induced effects on engagement and disengagement

Attentional bias to threatening visual stimuli (words or pictures) is commonly present in anxious individuals, but not in non-anxious people. There is evidence to show that attentional bias to threat can be induced in all individuals when threat is imposed by threat not of symbolic nature, but by cues that predict aversive stimulation (loud noise or electric shock). However, it is not known whether attentional bias in such situations is still influenced by individual differences in anxiety. This question was addressed in two experiments using a spatial cuing task in which visual cues predicted the occurrence of an aversive event consisting of a loud human scream. Speeded attentional engagement to threat cues was positively correlated with trait anxiety in Experiment 1. Experiment 2 showed that speeded attentional engagement was present only in participants selected for high anxiety but not in low-anxious participants. In both experiments, slower disengagement from threat cues was found in all participants, irrespective of their trait anxiety levels.     

Individual Differences in the Encoding Processes of Egocentric and Allocentric Survey Knowledge

This study examined how different components of working memory are involved in the acquisition of egocentric and allocentric survey knowledge by people with a good and poor sense of direction (SOD). We employed a dual‐task method and asked participants to learn routes from videos with verbal, visual, and spatial interference tasks and without any interference. Results showed that people with a good SOD encoded and integrated knowledge about landmarks and routes into egocentric survey knowledge in verbal and spatial working memory, which is then transformed into allocentric survey knowledge with the support of all three components, distances being processed in verbal and spatial working memory and directions in visual and spatial working memory. In contrast, people with a poor SOD relied on verbal working memory and lacked spatial processing, thus failing to acquire accurate survey knowledge. Based on the results, a possible model for explaining individual differences in spatial knowledge acquisition is proposed.