句子理解中颜色信息的心理表征

采用混合实验设计、实时和事后的句子-图片匹配范式, 以隐含物体典型颜色和非典型颜色信息的句子为实验材料, 以被试对图片的反应时间和阅读时间为因变量指标, 通过不同时间间隔的设置以及不同的实验程序, 探讨了句子理解中静态和动态颜色信息心理表征的特点。结果表明：(1)在加工时间有限的情况下, 两个加工任务是否竞争相同的认知资源是造成句-图范式下匹配易化和不匹配易化的关键因素。(2)对于句子隐含的静态颜色信息, 大脑对典型颜色信息的心理表征具有即时性和局部性, 而对非典型颜色信息的心理表征还具有非局部性的特点。(3)对于句子隐含的动态颜色信息, 大脑不能对其进行即时的心理表征, 这种动态颜色信息的心理表征是在句子阅读晚期发生的。     

How highlighted utensils influence consumption in a dark setting

Abstract

Objective: Previous research has shown that people consume less food in the dark compared to normal vision conditions. While this effect is commonly attributed to increased attention to internal cues, it could also be caused by increased difficulty to maneuver in a dark setting. This study investigated this potential alternative explanation.

Design: A 2 (dark versus normal vision setting)?×?2 (highlighted versus non-highlighted utensils) between-subjects design was employed.

Main outcome measures: Perceived difficulty of maneuvering and consumption of yoghurt were assessed as main outcome measures.

Results: Participants consumed marginally less in dark compared to normal vision conditions, and experienced higher difficulty of maneuvering. Importantly, both effects were qualified by a significant interaction with highlighting, which increased consumption and reduced perceived difficulty compared to no highlights. Difficulty of maneuvering did not mediate the interactive effect of vision and highlighting on consumption.

Conclusion: Difficulty to maneuver should be considered when investigating eating behaviour under dark conditions. In line with an embodied cognition account, results also reveal the necessity of visual information for interaction with objects in the environment and imply that detail-deprived object information may be sufficient for activation of the motor system.     

Time-Based Prospective Memory Performance and Time-Monitoring in Children with ADHD

The current study investigated prospective memory (PM) performance in children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and controls and aimed at exploring possible underlying factors of PM performance. Twenty-two children with ADHD and 39 age- and ability-matched typically developing children performed a computerized time-based PM task. As predicted, children with ADHD had fewer correct PM responses than controls. Neither differences in overall ongoing task performance nor, remarkably, differences in overall frequency and accuracy of time monitoring were found. Exploratory analyses suggest that individual differences in time monitoring in the final interval before target times may be related to PM performance in ADHD.     

The Entailment Problem and the Subset Account of Property Realization

Proponents of the subset account of property realization commonly make the assumption that the summing of properties entails the summing of their forward-looking causal features. This paper seeks to establish that this assumption is false. Moreover, it aims to demonstrate that without this assumption the fact that the subset account captures an entailment relation—which it must if it is to be of any use to non-reductive physicalism—becomes questionable.     

‘Tell me what I want to hear’: Motivated recall and attributions in media regarding asylum seekers

Within Australia, divisive debates regarding the processing of asylum seekers have delivered increasing polarisation rather than convergence on an evidence‐based, humane approach. In order to investigate the role of motivated reasoning (the idea that our judgment is based on our motivations) with respect to attributions of warmth and competence, 186 participants indicated the extent to which they accepted false beliefs regarding asylum seekers. They read an article rebutting such false beliefs and then reported their attitudes towards the author and the extent to which the author possessed warmth and competence traits. They then reported whether they agreed with the information in the article before completing a test of recall. Participants who disagreed with the article recalled less accurate information and rated authors significantly lower on warmth and competence. These findings suggest that motivated reasoning plays an important role in the way stereotypes are applied and in the way information is processed.     

A Quantitative Estimate of Schema Abnormality in Socially Anxious and Non‐Anxious Individuals

Although cognitive theories of anxiety suggest that anxious individuals are characterized by abnormal threat‐relevant schemas, few empirical studies have estimated the nature of these cognitive structures using quantitative methods that lend themselves to inferential statistical analysis. In the present study, socially anxious (n = 55) and non‐anxious (n = 62) participants completed 3 Q‐Sort tasks to assess their knowledge of events that commonly occur in social or evaluative scenarios. Participants either sorted events according to how commonly they personally believe the events occur (i.e. “self” condition), or to how commonly they estimate that most people believe they occur (i.e. “other” condition). Participants' individual Q‐Sorts were correlated with mean sorts obtained from a normative sample to obtain an estimate of schema abnormality, with lower correlations representing greater levels of abnormality. Relative to non‐anxious participants, socially anxious participants' sorts were less strongly associated with sorts of the normative sample, particularly in the “self” condition, although secondary analyses suggest that some significant results might be explained, in part, by depression and experience with the scenarios. These results provide empirical support for the theoretical notion that threat‐relevant self‐schemas of anxious individuals are characterized by some degree of abnormality.     

Depth of processing and recall of threat material in fearful and nonfearful individuals

Abstract

Although many studies have examined the nature of memory distortions in anxious individuals, few have considered biases in specific memory processes, such as encoding or retrieval. To investigate whether the presentation of threat material facilitates encoding biases, spider fearful (n=63), blood fearful (n=73), and nonfearful (n=75) participants encoded spider related, blood related, and neutral words as a function of three levels of processing (i.e., structural, semantic, and self referent). Participants subsequently completed either a free recall or a recognition task. All participants demonstrated a partial depth of processing effect, such that they recalled more words encoded in the self referent condition than in the other two conditions, but groups did not differ in their recall of stimuli as a function of word type. Relative to participants in the other groups, spider fearful participants had fewer spider related intrusions in the recall condition, and they made fewer errors in responding to structural and semantic encoding questions when spider related words were presented. These results contribute to an increasingly large body of literature suggesting that anxious individuals are not characterized by a memory bias toward threat, and they raise the possibility that individuals with spider fears process threat-relevant information differently than individuals with blood fears.     

Eye movements across viewpoint changes in multiple object tracking

Observers can visually track multiple objects that move independently even if the scene containing the moving objects is rotated in a smooth way. Abrupt scene rotations yield tracking more difficult but not impossible. For nonrotated, stable dynamic displays, the strategy of looking at the targets' centroid has been shown to be of importance for visual tracking. But which factors determine successful visual tracking in a nonstable dynamic display? We report two eye tracking experiments that present evidence for centroid looking. Across abrupt viewpoint changes, gaze on the centroid is more stable than gaze on targets indicating a process of realigning targets as a group. Further, we show that the relative importance of centroid looking increases with object speed.     

A cross-cultural study of hindsight bias and conditional probabilistic reasoning

Hindsight bias is a mistaken belief that one could have predicted a given outcome once the outcome is known. Choi and Nisbett (2000 Choi, I. and Nisbett, R. E. 2000. Cultural psychology of surprise: Holistic theories and recognition of contradiction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79: 890–905. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) reported that Koreans showed stronger hindsight bias than Americans, and explained the results using the distinction between analytic cognition (Westerners) and holistic cognition (Easterners). The purpose of the present study was to see whether hindsight bias is stronger among Easterners than among Westerners using a probability judgement task, and to test an “explicit–implicit” hypothesis and a “rule-dialectics” hypothesis. We predicted that the implicit process is more active among Easterners to generate hindsight bias, and that Easterners are more dialectical thinkers, whereas Westerners are more rule-based thinkers. French, British, Japanese, and Korean participants were asked to make probabilistic judgements in a Good Samaritan scenario (Experiment 1) and in a scenario including conditional probabilistic judgement (Experiment 2). In both Experiments, we presume that the implicit revision of causal models is made just by being given unexpected outcome information, and that explicit revision is made by being asked to point out possible factors for an unexpected outcome. In the results Easterners showed greater hindsight bias generally and it was greater in the Good Samaritan scenario. We conclude that the reason why hindsight bias was lower among Westerners is primarily that they tried to follow a rule to suppress the bias.