Re-construction of action awareness depends on an internal model of action-outcome timing

The subjective time of an instrumental action is shifted towards its outcome. This temporal binding effect is partially retrospective, i.e., occurs upon outcome perception. Retrospective binding is thought to reflect post-hoc inference on agency based on sensory evidence of the action – outcome association. However, many previous binding paradigms cannot exclude the possibility that retrospective binding results from bottom-up interference of sensory outcome processing with action awareness and is functionally unrelated to the processing of the action – outcome association. Here, we keep bottom-up interference constant and use a contextual manipulation instead. We demonstrate a shift of subjective action time by its outcome in a context of variable outcome timing. Crucially, this shift is absent when there is no such variability. Thus, retrospective action binding reflects a context-dependent, model-based phenomenon. Such top-down re-construction of action awareness seems to bias agency attribution when outcome predictability is low.     

Challenging perceptual tasks require more attention: The influence of task difficulty on the N1 effect of temporal orienting

Both filter and resource models of attention suggest an influence of task difficulty on the size of early attention effects. As for temporal orienting, the idea that early effects are modulated by task difficulty has not been tested directly, so far. To fill this empirical gap, the present study used an auditory temporal-orienting task, in which two differently pitched pure tones served as targets. To manipulate perceptual difficulty, the pitch difference between the targets was either small or large. Temporal orienting enhanced the N1 component of the auditory event-related potential. This early, sensory effect tended to be larger in the more difficult condition, particularly over the frontal scalp. Notably, increasing task difficulty affected predominantly the processing of attended stimuli. Hence, temporal orienting may operate by increasing processing resources or gain settings for the attended time point – rather than by withdrawing resources from the unattended time point.     

Within-person relationships between daily individual and job characteristics and daily manifestations of career adaptability

Previous research showed that daily manifestations of career adaptability fluctuate within individuals over short periods of time, and predict important daily job and career outcomes. Using a quantitative daily diary study design (N = 156 employees; 591 daily entries), the author investigated daily job characteristics (i.e., daily job demands, daily job autonomy, and daily supervisory career mentoring) and daily individual characteristics (i.e., daily Big Five personality characteristics, daily core self-evaluations, and daily temporal focus) as within-person predictors of daily career adaptability and its four dimensions (concern, control, curiosity, and confidence). Results showed that daily job demands, daily job autonomy, daily conscientiousness, daily openness to experience, as well as daily past and future temporal focus positively predicted daily career adaptability. Differential results emerged for the four career adaptability dimensions. Implications for future research on within-person variability in career adaptability are discussed.     

The effect of distance-dependent construals on schema-driven impression formation

Two experiments examine how distance-dependent construal can affect trait aggregation in impression formation. We propose that, because higher- versus lower-level construals promote the tendency to impose schematic structure on information processing, higher-level construals should enhance schema-driven trait aggregation. We test this by examining a classic impression formation phenomenon: the primacy effect (Asch, 1946). Increasing temporal distance (Study 1a) and priming higher-level construals (Study 1b) led participants to form more favorable impressions of targets described initially as intelligent versus envious. Decreasing temporal distance and priming lower-level construals, in contrast, reversed the primacy effect. Thus, the distance of a target, with its associated construal, can impact the aggregation of traits and consequently impacts people's evaluations of others.     

The effects of time perspective and level of construal on social distance

Psychological causes of social distance were examined from the perspective of Construal Level Theory (CLT; Liberman, Trope, & Stephan, 2007), which predicts that temporal distance from and abstract construal of a social target would create perception of social distance. Our studies demonstrate that expectations for temporally remote (versus proximal) social interaction produce greater social distance from a target person, measured as reduced familiarity (Study 1) and as reduced similarity to the self (Study 2). We also show that a more abstract, higher level construal of a social target results in less familiarity (Study 3) and in less allocation of resources (Study 4). The research sheds light on how social closeness can be promoted or hindered by previously unaddressed psychological factors.     

Distributed processing and cortical specialization for speech and environmental sounds in human temporal cortex

Using functional MRI, we investigated whether auditory processing of both speech and meaningful non-linguistic environmental sounds in superior and middle temporal cortex relies on a complex and spatially distributed neural system. We found that evidence for spatially distributed processing of speech and environmental sounds in a substantial extent of temporal cortices. Most importantly, regions previously reported as selective for speech over environmental sounds also contained distributed information. The results indicate that temporal cortices supporting complex auditory processing, including regions previously described as speech-selective, are in fact highly heterogeneous.     

Children's temporal judgments for autobiographical past and future events

We compared the performance of twenty 5-7-year-olds on two spatial-temporal judgment tasks. In a semantic task, children located temporal distances from today that were described using conventional, temporal terms on a spatial timeline. In an autobiographical task, children judged temporal distances on the same spatial timeline for events that they had experienced, or were going to experience, presented without explicit temporal references. Six-year-olds were equally accurate in judging temporal distances in the semantic and autobiographical tasks, but 7-year-olds were more accurate in the semantic task. Older children were more accurate than younger children in the semantic task, but no significant age differences were found for autobiographical events. Surprisingly, children were equally accurate in locating past and future events in time. Children at both ages were more accurate judging temporal distances up to one week away (both past and future) as compared to distances of two to four weeks across both tasks. Results suggest that knowledge of recurring time patterns and conventional time measurement systems is necessary, but not sufficient, for locating autobiographical events in time, and temporal distance plays an important role in children's temporal judgments.     

Children's reasoning about the temporal order of past and future events

Four- and five-year-olds completed two sets of tasks that involved reasoning about the temporal order in which events had occurred in the past or were to occur in the future. Four-year-olds succeeded on the tasks that involved reasoning about the order of past events but not those that involved reasoning about the order of future events, whereas 5-year-olds passed both types of tasks. Individual children who failed the past-event tasks were not particularly likely to fail the more difficult future-event tasks. However, children's performance on the reasoning tasks was predictive of their performance on a task assessing their comprehension of the terms “before” and “after.” Our results suggest that there may be a developmental change over this age range in the ability to flexibly represent and reason about the before-and-after relationships between events.     

儿童情景记忆绑定加工:研究范式、发展特点及影响因素

个体需要将亲身经历的核心事实信息及其发生的时间、空间等背景信息绑定起来形成情景记忆，绑定加工能力的发展是儿童情景记忆发展的基础。目前，儿童情景记忆绑定加工研究的主要范式有要素绑定范式和配对关联学习范式。绑定加工在儿童期的发展表现出项目-空间绑定记忆优于项目-时间绑定记忆，复杂任务的绑定加工水平较低的特点。儿童情景记忆绑定加工的发展依赖于编码和提取能力的发展、执行功能认知灵活性的提高以及内侧颞叶和前额叶皮层的发育。未来可以对情景记忆绑定加工的发展开展纵向研究、采用VR技术提高绑定加工研究的生态效度、加强对情景记忆绑定加工神经机制的探讨等。