Perceiving a story outside of conscious awareness: When we infer narrative attributes from subliminal sequential stimuli

Perceiving a story behind successive movements plays an important role in our lives. From a general perspective, such higher mental activity would seem to depend on conscious processes. Using a subliminal priming paradigm, we demonstrated that such story perception occurs without conscious awareness. In the experiments, participants were subliminally presented with sequential pictures that represented a story in which one geometrical figure was chased by the other figure, and in which one fictitious character defeated the other character in a tug-of-war. Although the participants could not report having seen the pictures, their automatic mental associations (i.e., associations that are activated unintentionally, difficult to control, and not necessarily endorsed at a conscious level) were shifted to line up with the story. The results suggest that story perception operates outside of conscious awareness. Implications for research on the unconscious were also briefly discussed.     

Clinical issues in analyses over the telephone and the internet

There is professional consensus that teleanalysis, the practice of psychoanalysis conducted remotely using the telephone and the Internet, is increasing in response to more mobility in the population. But there is controversy as to whether the use of technology leads to a dilution of analysis or to adaptive innovation that is clinically effective and true to the tenets of psychoanalysis. The author reviews the psychoanalytic literature and shows the development of analytic thinking about this technology-assisted practice of psychoanalysis. She summarizes analysts' perceptions and experiences of the advantages and disadvantages, and considers the indications and contra-indications. She focuses on the clinical concerns that arise in terms of the frame, resistance, and the development of analytic process through the unconscious communication of internal objects, unconscious fantasy, transference and countertransference. She gives vignettes from the analysis of a man with trauma-related depression to address the concerns raised and to support her argument that analysis using the telephone and the Internet is a viable, clinically effective alternative to traditional analysis where necessary.     

Effects of Conflict Resolution Training Integrated Into a High School Social Studies Curriculum

Abstract

The authors examined the effectiveness of conflict resolution and peer mediation training among California high school students. The authors randomly assigned 2 of 4 classes to receive 5 weeks of conflict resolution and peer mediation training integrated into the required social studies curriculum. The remaining 2 classes studied the same social studies curriculum for an identical amount of time (105 min every other day) without conflict resolution and peer mediation training. The authors investigated 2 issues. The 1st was the effectiveness of the conflict resolution and peer mediation training. The trained students, compared with the untrained students, learned the integrative negotiation and peer mediation procedures better, applied the procedures more completely, chose an integrative over a distributive approach to negotiation, and developed more positive attitudes toward conflict. The 2nd issue was the impact of the training program on academic achievement. Integrating conflict resolution and peer mediation training into an academic course promoted higher achievement, greater long-term retention of the academic learning, and greater transfer of academic learning in social studies to language arts.     

Corralling the Ingroup: Deviant Derogation and Perception of Group Variability

ABSTRACT

Two experiments investigated the relationship between the evaluation of a deviant group member and the perceived group variability among participants with varying degrees of ingroup identification. In Experiment 1 (N?=?79) ingroup identification was negatively associated with perceived ingroup variability following the presentation of a deviant ingroup member. This relationship was mediated by ratings of the deviant: the stronger the identification, the more negatively the deviant was evaluated, and the more homogeneous the ingroup was perceived. These effects were replicated in Experiment 2 (N?=?169), which also showed that there was no association between ingroup identification and the representation of the outgroup following exposure to a deviant outgroup member. The findings suggest that deviant derogation may serve to isolate undesirable members from the rest of the ingroup and protect the group's identity.     

Relational learning in a context of transposition: a review

In a typical transposition task, an animal is presented with a single pair of stimuli (for example, S3+ S4−, where plus and minus denote reward and nonreward and digits denote stimulus location on a sensory dimension such as size). Subsequently, an animal is presented with a testing pair that contains a previously reinforced or nonreinforced stimulus and a novel stimulus (for example, S2–S3 and S4–S5). Does the choice of a novel S2 instead of previously reinforced S3 in a testing pair S2–S3 indicate that the animal has learned a relation (i.e., “select smaller”)? This review of empirical evidence and theoretical accounts shows that an organism''s behavior in a transposition task is undoubtedly influenced by prior reinforcement history of the training stimuli (Spence, 1937). However, it is also affected by two other factors that are relational in nature—a similarity of two testing stimuli to each other and an overall similarity of the testing pair as a whole to the training pair as a whole. The influence of the two latter factors is especially evident in studies that use multiple pairs of training stimuli and a wide range of testing pairs comprising nonadjacent stimuli (Lazareva, Miner, Young, & Wasserman, 2008; Lazareva, Wasserman, & Young, 2005). In sum, the evidence suggests that both prior reinforcement history and relational information affect an animal''s behavior in a typical transposition task.     

Study for now,but judge for later: Delayed judgments of learning promote long‐term retention

Larsson Sundqvist, M., Todorov, I., Kubik, V. & Jönsson, F.U. (2012) Study for now, but judge for later: Delayed judgments of learning promote long‐term retention. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 53, 450–454. Delayed judgments of learning (JOL) are assumed to be based on covert retrieval attempts. A common finding is that testing memory during learning improves later retention (i.e., the testing effect), and even more so than an equivalent amount of study, but only after a longer retention interval. To test the assertion that also delayed JOLs improve memory, the participants either studied Swahili‐Swedish word pairs four times, or they both studied (two times) and performed delayed JOLs (two times) alternately. Final cued recall test were given after either five minutes or one week. Results showed a reliable learning‐group by retention‐interval interaction, with less forgetting in the group that alternated between studying and making JOLs. The results are discussed in relation to the self‐fulfilling prophecy account of Spellman and Bjork (1992) , and in terms of study advice, the results further underscore the importance of delaying JOLs when studying and evaluating one’s ongoing learning.     

Processing prefixes and suffixes in handwriting production

Previous research showed that handwriting production is mediated by linguistically oriented processing units such as syllables and graphemes. The goal of this study was to investigate whether French adults also activate another kind of unit that is more related to semantics than phonology, namely morphemes. Experiment 1 revealed that letter duration and inter-letter intervals were longer for suffixed words than for pseudo-suffixed words. These results suggest that the handwriting production system chunks the letter components of the root and suffix into morpheme-sized units. Experiment 2 compared the production of prefixed and pseudo-prefixed words. The results did not yield significant differences. This asymmetry between suffix and prefix processing has also been observed in other linguistic tasks. In suffixed words, the suffix would be processed on-line during the production of the root, in an analytic fashion. Prefixed words, in contrast, seem to be processed without decomposition, as pseudo-affixed words.     

The role of novelty in early word learning

What mechanism implements the mutual exclusivity bias to map novel labels to objects without names? Prominent theoretical accounts of mutual exclusivity (e.g., Markman, 1989, 1990 ) propose that infants are guided by their knowledge of object names. However, the mutual exclusivity constraint could be implemented via monitoring of object novelty (see Merriman, Marazita, & Jarvis, 1995 ). We sought to discriminate between these contrasting explanations across two preferential looking experiments with 22‐month‐olds. In Experiment 1, infants viewed three objects: one name‐known, two name‐unknown. Of the two name‐unknown objects, one was novel, and the other had been previously familiarized. The infants responded to hearing a novel label by increasing attention only to the novel, name‐unknown object. In a second experiment in which the name‐known object was absent, a novel label increased infants’ attention to a novel object beyond baseline preference for novelty. The experiments provide clear evidence for a novelty‐based mechanism. However, differences in the time course of disambiguation across experiments suggest that novelty processing may be influenced by contextual factors.     

The preference for symmetry in flower-naïve and not-so-naïve bumblebees

Truly flower-naïve bumblebees, with no prior rewarded experience for visits on any visual patterns outside the colony, were tested for their choice of bilaterally symmetric over asymmetric patterns in a radial-arm maze. No preference for symmetry was found. Prior training with rewarded black and white disks did, however, lead to a significant preference for symmetry. The preference was not specific to symmetry along the vertical axis: a preference for horizontal symmetry was found as well. The results challenge the notion that a preference for bilateral symmetry is unlearned. The preference for symmetry was the product of non-differential conditioning.     

Potentiation and overshadowing of shape by wall color in a kite-shaped maze using rats in a foraging task

The interaction between redundant geometric and featural cues in open field search tasks has been examined widely with results that are not always consistent. Cheng (1986) found evidence that when searching for food in rectangular environments, rats used the geometrical characteristics of the environment rather than local featural cues, suggesting that geometry had overshadowed featural cues. More recently, Graham et al. (2006) and Pearce et al. (2006) found that wall color facilitated (potentiated) learning about the shape of the environment by rats in a kite-shaped water maze. The first experiment in the present research replicated the paradigm used by Graham et al. and Pearce et al. using rats in a foraging situation, but with conditions similar, and found the same results, potentiation of shape by color. Experiments 2 and 3 revealed overshadowing instead of potentiation of shape by wall color under the same conditions except that the wall colors of the test environment were not the same as those used during training. The results are consistent with an analysis of the role of associations formed between wall color and geometry in such situations (Rhodes et al., 2009) and extend our understanding of how featural and spatial cues interact.