Phasic auditory alerting improves visual conscious perception

Attention is often conceived as a gateway to consciousness (Posner, 1994). Although endogenous spatial attention may be independent of conscious perception (CP) (Koch Tsuchiya, 2007), exogenous spatial orienting seems instead to be an important modulator of CP ( [Chica et al., 2010] and Chica, Lasaponara, et al., 2011). Here, we investigate the role of auditory alerting in CP in normal observers. We used a behavioral task in which phasic alerting tones were presented either at unpredictable or at predictable time intervals prior to the occurrence of a near-threshold visual target. We find, for the first time in neurologically intact observers, that phasic alertness increases CP, both objectively and subjectively. This result is consistent with evidence showing that phasic alerting can ameliorate the spatial bias exhibited by visual neglect patients (Robertson, Mattingley, Rorden, & Driver, 1998). The alerting network may increase the activity of fronto-parietal networks involved in top-down amplification required to bring a stimulus into consciousness (Dehaene, Changeux, Naccache, Sackur, & Sergent, 2006).     

Seeing the “forest” or the “trees” of organizational justice: Effects of temporal perspective on employee concerns about unfair treatment at work

What events do employees recall or anticipate when they think of past or future unfair treatment at work? We propose that an employee’s temporal perspective can change the salience of different types of injustice through its effect on cognitions about employment. Study 1 used a survey in which employee temporal focus was measured as an individual difference. Whereas greater levels of future focus related positively to concerns about distributive injustice, greater levels of present focus related positively to concerns about interactional injustice. In Study 2, an experimental design focused employee attention on timeframes that differed in temporal orientation and temporal distance. Whereas distributive injustice was more salient when future (versus past) orientation was induced, interactional injustice was more salient when past orientation was induced and at less temporal distance. Study 3 showed that the mechanism underlying the effect of employee temporal perspective is abstract versus concrete cognitions about employment.     

Episodic memory and episodic foresight in 3- and 5-year-old children

In the present study, we examined the development of episodic memory and episodic foresight. Three- and 5-year-olds were interviewed individually using a personalised timeline that included photographs of them at different points in their life. After constructing the timeline with the experimenter, each child was asked to discuss a number of different events: an event that happened yesterday, an event that happened earlier today, an event that would happen later today, and an event that would happen tomorrow. As judged by their parents, children's accounts were highly accurate. After controlling for age and language scores, there was a strong relation between amount of information reported about past and future events. Overall, 5-year-olds reported more total information than 3-year-olds; however, reports by 3-year-olds included a similar proportion of first-person reference as did reports by 5-year-olds. No age difference appeared in proportion of future-oriented talk. We conclude that the present task provides a promising method of exploring the emergence of mental time travel during early childhood.     

Commentary: The past and present of the future

Recent research on children's thinking about the future has taken multiple directions, many of which are illustrated in the contributions to this special issue. In this commentary the topic is discussed in the context of research on children's understanding of time, and some of the adaptive challenges of thinking about the future are considered. The studies in this issue show the emergence of some components of thinking about the future in early childhood. More research will be needed to illuminate abilities acquired at later ages and the representations and processes underlying humans’ thinking about the future.     

"When did I learn and when shall I act?": The developmental relationship between episodic future thinking and memory

This study investigated the development of the ability to reflect on one’s personal past and future. A total of 64 4- to 6-year-olds received tasks of delayed self-recognition, source memory, delay of gratification, and a newly developed task of future-oriented action timing. Although children’s performance on delayed self-recognition, source memory, and action timing improved with age, their performance on delay of gratification did not. Children’s errors in source memory and action timing were solely and strongly associated with each other in older children (5–6 years) even after controlling for age and verbal ability. Results are discussed in terms of mental time travel underlying episodic memory and future thinking that includes both the projection of oneself into the past and future and the appreciation of events’ temporal relations.     

Time in language: event duration in language comprehension

This work investigates how we process and represent event duration in on-line language comprehension. Specifically, it examines how events of different duration are processed and what type of knowledge underlies their representations. Studies 1–4 examined verbs and phrases in different contexts. They showed that durative events took longer to process than non-durative events and that the duration attributed to the stimulus events correlated with on-line processing times. Studies 5 and 6 indicated that durative events occur in semantically more diverse contexts and elicit semantically more diverse associations than non-durative events. Semantic and contextual diversity also correlated with attributed durations and processing times. Results indicate that (a) event-specific durations are computed on-line from multiple unfolding cues, (b) processing cost and duration representations emerge from semantic and contextual diversity reflecting our experience, and (c) key components of duration representations may be situation-specific knowledge of causal and contingency relations between events.     

Differential information use for near and distant decisions

Whether choosing a cell phone, a senator, or a kitchen appliance, consumers today quickly find themselves awash in information from commercials, magazines, and websites. Whereas some of this information is broad, decontextualized, and abstracted across multiple individuals and instances, other information is more closely tied to a single experience within one specific context. The present research asks: under what circumstances do people rely on abstracted averages, and when are they swayed by another individual’s particular experience? Across three studies, we show that temporal distance increases the relative weight placed on aggregate vs. individualized information when participants are asked to choose between two sleeping pills, migraine medications, or kitchen appliances, and that this process impacts not only evaluation but also willingness to pay and choice. Potential implications for evaluation, decision-making, and base-rate utilization are discussed.     

Seven-month-olds detect ordinal numerical relationships within temporal sequences

Previous evidence has shown that 11-month-olds represent ordinal relations between purely numerical values, whereas younger infants require a confluence of numerical and non-numerical cues. In this study, we show that when multiple featural cues (i.e., color and shape) are provided, 7-month-olds detect reversals in the ordinal direction of numerical sequences relying solely on number when non-numerical quantitative cues are controlled. These results provide evidence for the influence of featural information and multiple cue integration on infants’ proneness to detect ordinal numerical information.