Visual image retention does not contribute to modulation of event-related potentials by mental rotation

Rotation of a visual image in mind is associated with a slow posterior negative deflection of the event-related potential (ERP), termed rotation-related negativity (RRN). Retention of a visual image in short-term memory is also associated with a slow posterior negative ERP, termed negative slow wave (NSW). We tested whether short-term memory retention, indexed by the NSW, contributes to the RRN. ERPs were recorded in the same subjects in two tasks, a mental rotation task, eliciting the RRN, and a visual short-term memory task, eliciting the NSW. Over both right and left parietal scalp, no association was found between the NSW and the RRN amplitudes. Furthermore, adjusting for the effect of the NSW had no influence on a significant association between the RRN amplitude and response time, an index of mental rotation performance. Our data indicate that the RRN reflects manipulation of a visual image but not its retention in short-term memory.     

A case of hand waving: Action synchrony and person perception

While previous research has demonstrated that people’s movements can become coordinated during social interaction, little is known about the cognitive consequences of behavioral synchrony. Given intimate links between the systems that regulate perception and action, we hypothesized that the synchronization of movements during a dyadic interaction may prompt increased attention to be directed to an interaction partner, hence facilitate the information that participants glean during a social exchange. Our results supported this prediction. Incidental memories for core aspects of a brief interaction were facilitated following in-phase behavioral synchrony. Specifically, participants demonstrated enhanced memory for an interaction partner’s utterances and facial appearance. These findings underscore the importance of action perception to social cognition.     

Is language necessary for human spatial reorientation? Reconsidering evidence from dual task paradigms

Being able to reorient to the spatial environment after disorientation is a basic adaptive challenge. There is clear evidence that reorientation uses geometric information about the shape of the surrounding space. However, there has been controversy concerning whether use of geometry is a modular function, and whether use of features is dependent on human language. A key argument for the role of language comes from shadowing findings where adults engaged in a linguistic task during reorientation ignored a colored wall feature and only used geometric information to reorient [Hermer-Vazquez, L., Spelke, E., & Katsnelson, A. (1999). Sources of flexibility in human cognition: Dual task studies of space and language. Cognitive Psychology, 39, 3-36]. We report three studies showing: (a) that the results of Hermer-Vazques et al. [Hermer-Vazquez, L., Spelke, E., & Katsnelson, A. (1999). Sources of flexibility in human cognition: Dual task studies of space and language. Cognitive Psychology, 39, 3-36] are obtained in incidental learning but not with explicit instructions, (b) that a spatial task impedes use of features at least as much as a verbal shadowing task, and (c) that neither secondary task impedes use of features in a room larger than that used by Hermer-Vazquez et al. These results suggest that language is not necessary for successful use of features in reorientation. In fact, whether or not there is an encapsulated geometric module is currently unsettled. The current findings support an alternative to modularity; the adaptive combination view hypothesizes that geometric and featural information are utilized in varying degrees, dependent upon the certainty and variance with which the two kinds of information are encoded, along with their salience and perceived usefulness.     

Attending to threat: Race-based patterns of selective attention

The present research investigated the extent to which the stereotype that young Black men are threatening and dangerous has become so robust and ingrained in the collective American unconscious that Black men now capture attention, much like evolved threats such as spiders and snakes. Specifically, using a dot-probe detection paradigm, White participants revealed biased attention toward Black faces relative to White faces (Study 1). Because the faces were presented only briefly (30-ms), the bias is thought to reflect the early engagement of attention. The attentional bias was eliminated, however, when the faces displayed averted eye-gaze (Study 2). That is, when the threat communicated by the Black faces was attenuated by a relevant, competing socio-emotional cue—in this case, averted eye-gaze—they no longer captured perceivers’ attention. Broader implications for social cognition, as well as public policies that reify these prevailing perceptions of young Black men are discussed.     

Know thy sound: Perceiving self and others in musical contexts

This review article provides a summary of the findings from empirical studies that investigated recognition of an action's agent by using music and/or other auditory information. Embodied cognition accounts ground higher cognitive functions in lower level sensorimotor functioning. Action simulation, the recruitment of an observer's motor system and its neural substrates when observing actions, has been proposed to be particularly potent for actions that are self-produced. This review examines evidence for such claims from the music domain. It covers studies in which trained or untrained individuals generated and/or perceived (musical) sounds, and were subsequently asked to identify who was the author of the sounds (e.g., the self or another individual) in immediate (online) or delayed (offline) research designs. The review is structured according to the complexity of auditory–motor information available and includes sections on: 1) simple auditory information (e.g., clapping, piano, drum sounds), 2) complex instrumental sound sequences (e.g., piano/organ performances), and 3) musical information embedded within audiovisual performance contexts, when action sequences are both viewed as movements and/or listened to in synchrony with sounds (e.g., conductors' gestures, dance). This work has proven to be informative in unraveling the links between perceptual–motor processes, supporting embodied accounts of human cognition that address action observation. The reported findings are examined in relation to cues that contribute to agency judgments, and their implications for research concerning action understanding and applied musical practice.     

The origins of belief representation: Monkeys fail to automatically represent others’ beliefs

Young infants’ successful performance on false belief tasks has led several researchers to argue that there may be a core knowledge system for representing the beliefs of other agents, emerging early in human development and constraining automatic belief processing into adulthood. One way to investigate this purported core belief representation system is to examine whether non-human primates share such a system. Although non-human primates have historically performed poorly on false belief tasks that require executive function capacities, little work has explored how primates perform on more automatic measures of belief processing. To get at this issue, we modified Kovács et al. (2010)’s test of automatic belief representation to examine whether one non-human primate species—the rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta)—is automatically influenced by another agent’s beliefs when tracking an object’s location. Monkeys saw an event in which a human agent watched an apple move back and forth between two boxes and an outcome in which one box was revealed to be empty. By occluding segments of the apple’s movement from either the monkey or the agent, we manipulated both the monkeys’ belief (true or false) and agent’s belief (true or false) about the final location of the apple. We found that monkeys looked longer at events that violated their own beliefs than at events that were consistent with their beliefs. In contrast to human infants, however, monkeys’ expectations were not influenced by another agent’s beliefs, suggesting that belief representation may be an aspect of core knowledge unique to humans.     

Covert shifts of attention function as an implicit aid to insight

Previous research shows that directed actions can unconsciously influence higher-order cognitive processing, helping learners to retain knowledge and guiding problem solvers to useful insights (e.g. Cook, S. W., Mitchell, Z., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2008). Gesturing makes learning last. Cognition, 106, 1047-1058; Thomas, L. E., & Lleras, A. (2007). Moving eyes and moving thought: on the spatial compatibility between eye movements and cognition. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 14, 663-668). We examined whether overt physical movement is necessary for these embodied effects on cognition, or whether covert shifts of attention are sufficient to influence cognition. We asked participants to try to solve Duncker’s radiation problem while occasionally directing them, via an unrelated digit-tracking task, to shift their attention (while keeping their eyes fixed) in a pattern related to the problem’s solution, to move their eyes in this pattern, or to keep their eyes and their attention fixed in the center of the display. Although they reported being unaware of any relationship between the digit-tracking task and the radiation problem, participants in both the eye-movement and attention-shift groups were more likely to solve the problem than were participants who maintained fixation. Our results show that by shifting attention in a pattern compatible with a problem’s solution, we can aid participants’ insight even in the absence of overt physical movements.     

From domain-generality to domain-sensitivity: 4-Month-olds learn an abstract repetition rule in music that 7-month-olds do not

Learning must be constrained for it to lead to productive generalizations. Although biology is undoubtedly an important source of constraints, prior experience may be another, leading learners to represent input in ways that are more conducive to some generalizations than others, and/or to up- and down-weight features when entertaining generalizations. In two experiments, 4-month-old and 7-month-old infants were familiarized with sequences of musical chords or tones adhering either to an AAB pattern or an ABA pattern. In both cases, the 4-month-olds learned the generalization, but the 7-month-olds did not. The success of the 4-month-olds appears to contradict an account that this type of pattern learning is the provenance of a language-specific rule-learning module. It is not yet clear what drives the age-related change, but plausible candidates include differential experience with language and music, as well as interactions between general cognitive development and stimulus complexity.     

Spontaneous trait inference and construal level theory: Psychological distance increases nonconscious trait thinking

Can psychological distance affect how much perceivers form spontaneous trait inferences (STI) from others’ behaviors? On the basis of construal level theory (CLT) which posits that distant (vs. near) entities are represented more in terms of their abstract, global, and decontextualized features, we predicted that perceived distance would increase the tendency for perceivers to draw spontaneous trait inferences from behavioral information about actors. In two experiments, participants learned about people who were perceived as being distant or proximal to the self, and STI formation was subsequently assessed. We found that perceivers were more likely to form STIs about distant vs. near actors from the same behavioral information. These findings generalized across two distance dimensions: space and time. In addition, we found that priming individuals to adopt a high-level (vs. low-level) construal mindset also resulted in increased STI (Experiment 3). In sum, psychological distance facilitates STI formation, and this occurs via high-level construal of actors and their behaviors.     

Message sidedness in advertising: the moderating roles of need for cognition and time pressure in persuasion

Persuasion has been extensively researched for decades. Much of this research has focused on different message tactics and their effects on persuasion (e.g., Chang & Chou, 2008; Lafferty, 1999). This research aims to assess whether the persuasion of a specific type of message is influenced by need for cognition (NFC) and time pressure. The 336 undergraduates participated in a 2 (message sidedness: one-sided/two-sided) × 3 (time pressure: low/moderate/high) between-subjects design. Results indicate that two-sided messages tend to elicit more favorable ad attitudes than one-sided messages. As compared with low-NFC individuals, high-NFC individuals are likely to express more favorable ad attitudes, brand attitudes and purchase intention. Moderate time pressure tends to lead to more favorable ad attitudes than low time pressure and high time pressure. In addition, moderate time pressure is likely to elicit more favorable brand attitudes and purchase intentions than high time pressure, but does not elicit more favorable brand attitudes and purchase intentions than low time pressure. Furthermore, when high-NFC individuals are under low or moderate time pressure, two-sided messages are more persuasive than one-sided messages; however, message sidedness does not differentially affect the persuasion when high-NFC individuals are pressed for time. In contrast, one-sided messages are more persuasive than two-sided messages when low-NFC individuals are under low or high time pressure, and two-sided messages are more persuasive than one-sided messages when low-NFC individuals are under moderate time pressure.