The Prevention of Children's Maladaptive Fears

The authors address the prophylactic value of behavioral techniques in relation to children's maladaptive fears. The major settings of interest from the viewpoint of preventing children's maladaptive fears are the home, school and health-care settings. Encouraging findings have been reported in the use of film-modeling with children about to undergo dental treatment, tonsillectomies, injections, etc. Several theoretical explanations (stimulus pre-exposure, reciprocal inhibition, reinforcement contingencies, self-efficacy) of the success of such interventions can be advanced to affect the outcome of maladaptive fear prevention programs.     

From gaze cueing to perspective taking: Revisiting the claim that we automatically compute where or what other people are looking at

ABSTRACT

Two paradigms have shown that people automatically compute what or where another person is looking at. In the visual perspective-taking paradigm, participants judge how many objects they see; whereas, in the gaze cueing paradigm, participants identify a target. Unlike in the former task, in the latter task, the influence of what or where the other person is looking at is only observed when the other person is presented alone before the task-relevant objects. We show that this discrepancy across the two paradigms is not due to differences in visual settings (Experiment 1) or available time to extract the directional information (Experiment 2), but that it is caused by how attention is deployed in response to task instructions (Experiment 3). Thus, the mere presence of another person in the field of view is not sufficient to compute where/what that person is looking at, which qualifies the claimed automaticity of such computations.     

The Rôle of the Acquired Distinctiveness of Cues in the Acquisition of a Motor Skill in Children

The fears of 133 boys and girls aged 7 to 19, classified as educable mentally retarded (EMR), trainable mentally retarded (TMR), and specific learning disabled (SLD), were ascertained through self-report data and compared with those of 106 normal children aged 6 to 12. Similar developmental trends were found in all groups, with younger children reporting more unrealistic fears than older children. When mental age was calculated for the EMR and TMR children, their developmental trends closely approximated those of the normal children. In general, exceptional children were found to have a much wider range and a greater number of fears than normal children. Most fears were found to be realistic, learned, and dependent upon the child's intellectual and maturational level.     

Eye movements provide insights into the conscious use of context in prospective memory

Prior research examining the impact of context on prospective memory (PM) has produced mixed results. Our study aimed to determine whether providing progressive context information could increase PM accuracy and reduce costs to ongoing tasks. Seventy-two participants made ongoing true/false judgements for simple sentences while maintaining a PM intention to respond differently to four memorised words. The context condition were informed of the trial numbers where PM targets could appear, and eye-tracking recorded trial number fixation frequency. The context condition showed reduced costs during irrelevant contexts, increased costs during relevant contexts, and had better PM accuracy compared to a standard condition that was not provided with context. The context condition also made an increasing number of trial number fixations leading up to relevant contexts, indicating the conscious use of context. Furthermore, this trial number checking was beneficial to PM, with participants who checked more frequently having better PM accuracy.     

Automatic Mechanisms for Social Attention Are Culturally Penetrable

Are mechanisms for social attention influenced by culture? Evidence that social attention is triggered automatically by bottom‐up gaze cues and is uninfluenced by top‐down verbal instructions may suggest it operates in the same way everywhere. Yet considerations from evolutionary and cultural psychology suggest that specific aspects of one's cultural background may have consequence for the way mechanisms for social attention develop and operate. In more interdependent cultures, the scope of social attention may be broader, focusing on more individuals and relations between those individuals. We administered a multi‐gaze cueing task requiring participants to fixate a foreground face flanked by background faces and measured shifts in attention using eye tracking. For European Americans, gaze cueing did not depend on the direction of background gaze cues, suggesting foreground gaze alone drives automatic attention shifting; for East Asians, cueing patterns differed depending on whether the foreground cue matched or mismatched background cues, suggesting foreground and background gaze information were integrated. These results demonstrate that cultural background influences the social attention system by shifting it into a narrow or broad mode of operation and, importantly, provides evidence challenging the assumption that mechanisms underlying automatic social attention are necessarily rigid and impenetrable to culture.     

返回抑制对工作记忆储存和目标维持的影响

将线索一靶子范式和N—Back变式结合,以工作记忆的记忆错误和侵入错误数为指标,探讨了返回抑制与工作记忆的储存和加工之间的关系,并对返回抑制的机制进行了深入探讨。结果表明,当记忆项目出现在线索化位置时,两种错误数均显著高于出现于非线索化位置的情况,但侵入错误的抑制效应只出现于长SOA条件。这揭示了返回抑制既影响工作记忆的储存又影响对任务目标的维持,也为返回抑制的注意说提供了新证据。     

Identification and location tasks rely on different mental processes: a diffusion model account of validity effects in spatial cueing paradigms with emotional stimuli

Spatial cueing paradigms are popular tools to assess human attention to emotional stimuli, but different variants of these paradigms differ in what participants’ primary task is. In one variant, participants indicate the location of the target (location task), whereas in the other they indicate the shape of the target (identification task). In the present paper we test the idea that although these two variants produce seemingly comparable cue validity effects on response times, they rest on different underlying processes. Across four studies (total N?=?397; two in the supplement) using both variants and manipulating the motivational relevance of cue content, diffusion model analyses revealed that cue validity effects in location tasks are primarily driven by response biases, whereas the same effect rests on delay due to attention to the cue in identification tasks. Based on this, we predict and empirically support that a symmetrical distribution of valid and invalid cues would reduce cue validity effects in location tasks to a greater extent than in identification tasks. Across all variants of the task, we fail to replicate the effect of greater cue validity effects for arousing (vs. neutral) stimuli. We discuss the implications of these findings for best practice in spatial cueing research.     

Does attention impair temporal discrimination? Examining non-attentional accounts

Recently, Yeshurun and Levy (Psychol Sci 14:225-231, 2003) have provided evidence for the notion that visual attention impairs the temporal resolution of the visual system. Specifically, the detection of a temporal gap within a visual stimulus was impaired when a cue directed attention towards the spatial location of the stimulus. As this negative cueing effect is important to constrain theories about visual attention, we further investigated this novel effect and assessed whether it truly reflects an attentional effect. Experiment 1 examines whether the negative cueing effect is due to local temporal interference, and Experiments 2 and 3 investigate whether it reflects a luminance confound. The complete pattern of results argues against these alternatives and thus further strengthens the conclusion of Yeshurun and Levy (Psychol Sci 14: 225-231, 2003).     

背景线索效应的研究综述

背景线索效应(contextual cueing effect)是近年来场景知觉的一个研究热点。本文简要介绍了背景线索效应的发现及进展、理论解释和神经基础,并探讨了未来的发展方向。     

No reliable effects of emotional facial expression, adult attachment orientation, or anxiety on the allocation of visual attention in the spatial cueing paradigm

The primary goal of the current study was to examine the allocation of attention to emotional facial stimuli as a function of adult attachment orientation. Using a modified version of the spatial cueing paradigm we examined these effects in three experiments. In each experiment predictable cue validity effects were observed and these effects were always modulated by the expression of the facial cue. Furthermore, the magnitude of these cue validity effects was also influenced by individual differences in both adult attachment orientation and anxiety. The direction of these effects, however, was not consistent across experiments and did not replicate previous findings. We conclude that this paradigm may not usefully elucidate the processes underlying the allocation of attention to emotional stimuli.