社会认知中的样例激活效应与内-外群体效应

采用信号检测论技术,以人格词单记忆为实验任务,探讨社会认知过程中样例激活效应与内-外群体效应对记忆过程的干扰作用.实验结果表明,(1)样例激活与群体范畴的交互效应对社会信息加工过程存在显著干扰作用.(2)与外群体相比,内群体的信息加工更不易受到干扰;与积极样例特质相比,消极他相关样例特质的信息加工更不易受到干扰.(3)在加工内群体成员信息而激活的是反面样例时,被试的判断标准最严.     

Neuroticism and extraversion share genetic and environmental effects with negative and positive mood spillover in a nationally representative sample

Work-family spillover research focuses on how negative and positive moods in one life domain carry over to another. Domain-specific etiologies (e.g., family conflict) are often emphasized to explain spillover. Yet, strong correlations exist between spillover variables of the same emotional valence but originating from different domains, suggesting individual differences in the tendencies to prolong mood-states. The current study (N = 1143 individuals) examined whether these general tendencies are associated with neuroticism and extraversion and how genetic and environmental effects contribute to these associations. Findings revealed that neuroticism and extraversion are related to these tendencies through both genetic and environmental pathways.     

Correspondence between children's and adults' ratings of stimulant-induced changes in ADHD behaviours in a crossover trial with medication-naive children

Correspondence between children's and adults' ratings of changes in ADHD behaviours was investigated in a paediatric ADHD stimulant crossover trial. Thirty-one children completed an ADHD self-report scale each week, and comparisons were made with an ADHD questionnaire completed by adults (combined parent and teacher ratings). Children's and adults' ratings demonstrated good internal consistency, were significantly associated with the assessment of ADHD behaviours in the placebo condition and showed comparable responsiveness to stimulants at the group level. Furthermore, a large and significant correlation was detected between the two sets of informants' ratings of changes from placebo to both methylphenidate and dextroamphetamine high-dosage conditions, but not from placebo to low-dosage conditions. Agreement in the categorization of best stimulant condition for individual children was significant, but modest from a clinical perspective. The results indicate that children's ratings correspond adequately with adults' ratings, and thus appear to be a complementary outcome measure.     

How preview space/time translates into preview cost/benefit for fixation durations during reading

Eye-movement control during reading depends on foveal and parafoveal information. If the parafoveal preview of the next word is suppressed, reading is less efficient. A linear mixed model (LMM) reanalysis of McDonald (2006) confirmed his observation that preview benefit may be limited to parafoveal words that have been selected as the saccade target. Going beyond the original analyses, in the same LMM, we examined how the preview effect (i.e., the difference in single-fixation duration, SFD, between random-letter and identical preview) depends on the gaze duration on the pretarget word and on the amplitude of the saccade moving the eye onto the target word. There were two key results: (a) The shorter the saccade amplitude (i.e., the larger preview space), the shorter a subsequent SFD with an identical preview; this association was not observed with a random-letter preview. (b) However, the longer the gaze duration on the pretarget word, the longer the subsequent SFD on the target, with the difference between random-letter string and identical previews increasing with preview time. A third pattern—increasing cost of a random-letter string in the parafovea associated with shorter saccade amplitudes—was observed for target gaze durations. Thus, LMMs revealed that preview effects, which are typically summarized under “preview benefit”, are a complex mixture of preview cost and preview benefit and vary with preview space and preview time. The consequence for reading is that parafoveal preview may not only facilitate, but also interfere with lexical access.     

Congruency effects in conceptualizing for speech

In naming a picture at the basic level, a semantically related distractor word induces interference in comparison to an unrelated word. When the task is changed from basic-level naming to categorization, however, this effect reverses to semantic facilitation. In previous studies, this semantic facilitation effect was attributed to “message congruency” at the conceptual level. The present study examines the nature of this message congruency effect: Is it due to competition between two activated category concepts in the incongruent condition or is it due to convergence of activity on a single category concept in the congruent condition? Two experiments show that neither the strength with which the context stimulus activates an incongruent category concept nor the semantic distance between the category concepts activated by target and distractor affect target categorization speed. We conclude that the message congruency effect is most likely due to convergence on a single category concept in the category-congruent condition.     

Articulation effects in melody recognition memory

Various surface features—timbre, tempo, and pitch—influence melody recognition memory, but articulation format effects, if any, remain unknown. For the first time, these effects were examined. In Experiment 1, melodies that remained in the same, or appeared in a different but similar, articulation format from study to test were recognized better than were melodies that were presented in a distinct format at test. A similar articulation format adequately induced matching processes to enhance recognition. Experiment 2 revealed that melodies rated as perceptually dissimilar on the basis of the location of the articulation mismatch did not impair recognition performance, suggesting an important boundary condition for articulation format effects on memory recognition—the matching of the memory trace and recognition probe may depend more on the overall proportion, rather than the temporal location, of the mismatch. The present findings are discussed in terms of a global matching advantage hypothesis.     

Hemispheric differences in the effects of context on vowel perception

Listeners perceive speech sounds relative to context. Contextual influences might differ over hemispheres if different types of auditory processing are lateralized. Hemispheric differences in contextual influences on vowel perception were investigated by presenting speech targets and both speech and non-speech contexts to listeners’ right or left ears (contexts and targets either to the same or to opposite ears). Listeners performed a discrimination task. Vowel perception was influenced by acoustic properties of the context signals. The strength of this influence depended on laterality of target presentation, and on the speech/non-speech status of the context signal. We conclude that contrastive contextual influences on vowel perception are stronger when targets are processed predominately by the right hemisphere. In the left hemisphere, contrastive effects are smaller and largely restricted to speech contexts.     

Is the go/no-go lexical decision task preferable to the yes/no task with developing readers?

The lexical decision task is probably the most common laboratory visual word identification task together with the naming task. In the usual setup, participants need to press the “yes” button when the stimulus is a word and the “no” button when the stimulus is not a word. A number of studies have employed this task with developing readers; however, error rates and/or response times tend to be quite high. One way to make the task easier for young readers is by employing a go/no-go procedure: “If word, press ‘yes’; if not, refrain from responding.” Here we conducted a lexical decision experiment that systematically compared the yes/no and go/no-go variants of the lexical decision task with developing readers (second- and fourth-grade children). Results showed that (a) error rates for words and nonwords were much lower in the go/no-go task than in the yes/no task, (b) lexical decision times were substantially faster in the go/no-go task, and (c) there was less variability in the latency data of the go/no-go task for high-frequency words. Thus, the go/no-go lexical decision task is preferable to the “standard” yes/no task when conducting experiments with developing readers.