Effects of Practice upon the Metabolic Cost of Mental Work

Two experiments with isopods, Armadillidium vulgare, were reported. In Experiment I, two groups of five Ss each learned to run a T maze to escape light and heat. Both original learning (OL), and relearning (RL) the next day, were to a criterion 9/10 correct. Between OL and RL one group was immobilized (I), and the other group was given the opportunity for activity (A). The I treatment resulted in greater savings on RL than did the A treatment, and it was thus concluded that A is a retroaction treatment. Experiment II was like I except that all Ss were extinguished immediately following OL, and then given either A or I until RL. In this experiment, the A treatment led to no savings, but the I treatment produced negative savings (more trials on RL relative to OL). It was concluded that the A treatment had retroactively interfered with extinction, and this result was discussed as analogous to differential spontaneous recovery in favor of the A group. It was concluded that Liberman's (4, 5) theory (that spontaneous recovery is due to the forgetting of extinction) is supported by the result of Experiment II.     

Interaction Between Phonological and Semantic Representations: Time Matters

Computational modeling and eye‐tracking were used to investigate how phonological and semantic information interact to influence the time course of spoken word recognition. We extended our recent models (Chen & Mirman, 2012; Mirman, Britt, & Chen, 2013) to account for new evidence that competition among phonological neighbors influences activation of semantically related concepts during spoken word recognition (Apfelbaum, Blumstein, & McMurray, 2011). The model made a novel prediction: Semantic input modulates the effect of phonological neighbors on target word processing, producing an approximately inverted‐U‐shaped pattern with a high phonological density advantage at an intermediate level of semantic input—in contrast to the typical disadvantage for high phonological density words in spoken word recognition. This prediction was confirmed with a new analysis of the Apfelbaum et al. data and in a visual world paradigm experiment with preview duration serving as a manipulation of strength of semantic input. These results are consistent with our previous claim that strongly active neighbors produce net inhibitory effects and weakly active neighbors produce net facilitative effects.     

刻板印象错误知觉任务:区分刻板印象激活与刻板印象应用的新方法

刻板印象错误知觉任务(Stereotype Misperception Task,简称SMT)是一种能对刻板印象激活和刻板印象应用进行有效区分的研究范式,对应的多项式模型能对二者各自贡献量大小进行测算与评估。依托对二者关系的解构,介绍了SMT的操作程序、原理、多项式模型及其数据分析,比较了SMT和情感错误归因程序(AMP)以及四重模型的内在关联和本质区别,展望了未来的发展方向。     

Left orbital frontal activation in pathological anxiety

Twelve patients with anxiety disorder were studied with respect to regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) using a 32-detector system with the 133 Xe inhalation technique. Measurements were taken during a rest condition and during anxiety induction. Anxiety relevant to the patient's psychological disorder was induced with a projective test, the meta-contrast technique (MCT). Increased blood flow in the orbital frontal region of the left hemisphere was observed in each of the 11 subjects who showed evidence of experiencing anxiety during the procedure. In a second study four additional anxiety patients were studied with a high-resolution (254-detector)Xe rCBF system. In addition to the anxiety and resting conditions, a neutral verbalization condition was added to control for the verbal aspects of the anxiety induction procedure. The results again showed the experience of anxiety to be accompanied by increased blood flow in the left orbital frontal region, with the patients showing this flow increase to be greater in the posterior, paralimbic, areas of the region. These results are consistent with previous suggestions of left hemisphere involvement in anxiety. They also suggest that imaging methods may allow research into what appears to be exaggerated corticolimbic activity in this disorder.     

聚焦词素语义加工的时间轴——先形后义还是形义并行?

目前学术界在词素的认知加工这一问题上存在两种观点.“先形后义”激活论认为词素加工首先经历词形分离,然后才能激活词素语义;“形义并行”激活论则认为上述两种加工同时发生.它们争论的焦点在于词素语义加工发生的阶段.“先形后义”有两种可能:词素形、义激活均发生于前词汇阶段,但形的激活发生更早些;或词素形的激活发生在前词汇阶段,而义的激活发生在后词汇阶段.“形义并行”则只有一种可能:词素形与义在前词汇阶段同时得到激活.两派观点均有相应的实证和理论支持(前词汇和后词汇模型).未来研究需解决研究范式及理论发展方面的问题.     

Inner speech slips exhibit lexical bias, but not the phonemic similarity effect

Inner speech, that little voice that people often hear inside their heads while thinking, is a form of mental imagery. The properties of inner speech errors can be used to investigate the nature of inner speech, just as overt slips are informative about overt speech production. Overt slips tend to create words (lexical bias) and involve similar exchanging phonemes (phonemic similarity effect). We examined these effects in inner and overt speech via a tongue-twister recitation task. While lexical bias was present in both inner and overt speech errors, the phonemic similarity effect was evident only for overt errors, producing a significant overtness by similarity interaction. We propose that inner speech is impoverished at lower (featural) levels, but robust at higher (phonemic) levels.     

Intuition in the context of object perception: intuitive gestalt judgments rest on the unconscious activation of semantic representations

Intuition denotes the ability to judge stimulus properties on the basis of information that is activated in memory, but not consciously retrieved. In three experiments we show that participants discriminated better than chance fragmented line drawings depicting meaningful objects (coherent fragments) from fragments consisting of randomly displaced line segments (incoherent fragments) or from fragments which were rotated by 180 degrees (inverted fragments), even if participants did not consciously recognize the objects. Unrecognized coherent, but not incoherent or inverted fragments produced reliable priming of correct object names in a lexical decision task, indicating that coherent fragments activated an unconscious semantic object representation. Priming effects were larger for coherent fragments judged as coherent compared to coherent fragments judged as incoherent. We conclude that intuitive gestalt judgments for coherent fragments rested on the activation of semantic object representations, which biased participants' intuitive impression of "gestalt-ness" even when the underlying object representations remained unconscious.     

For love or money? How activation of relational versus instrumental concerns affects reactions to decision-making procedures

We investigate how the direct activation of relational versus instrumental concerns affects reactions to decisions made by an authority. It is demonstrated that when instrumental concerns are experimentally induced, people’s evaluations of the authority (Studies 1 and 2) as well as their intentions to protest (Study 3) are more strongly affected by how the procedures used by the authority affect anticipated outcomes (i.e., whether procedures are favorably or unfavorably inaccurate) than when relational concerns are activated. By contrast, authority evaluations (Study 2) and protest intentions (Study 3) are more strongly affected by whether procedures used are fair (accurate) or unfair (inaccurate) when relational (versus instrumental) concerns are activated. These findings extend previous research where relational versus instrumental concerns were inferred, but not directly examined, to explain differences in responses to authorities’ decisions.     

Context Effects on Musical Chord Categorization: Different Forms of Top‐Down Feedback in Speech and Music?

A critical issue in perception is the manner in which top-down expectancies guide lower level perceptual processes. In speech, a common paradigm is to construct continua ranging between two phonetic endpoints and to determine how higher level lexical context influences the perceived boundary. We applied this approach to music, presenting participants with major/minor triad continua after brief musical contexts. Two experiments yielded results that differed from classic results in speech perception. In speech, context generally expands the category of the expected stimuli. We found the opposite in music: The major/minor boundary shifted toward the expected category, contracting it. Together, these experiments support the hypothesis that musical expectancy can feed back to affect lower-level perceptual processes. However, it may do so in a way that differs fundamentally from what has been seen in other domains.     

重读对语篇表征中的信息的激活的影响

考察在口语语篇表征中重读是如何影响新信息和旧信息的激活.结果表明,与无重读的基线条件相比,重读条件下,新信息和旧信息在语篇表征中的激活水平都提高.无论其信息结构如何,重读会提高它所标识的概念节点在语篇表征中的激活.