Attentional orienting and awareness: evidence from a discrimination task

We used several cue–target SOAs (100, 500, 1000 ms) and three different degrees of cue predictability (Non-predictive-50%, Predictive-75%, Counter-predictive-25%), to investigate the role of awareness of cue–target predictability on cueing effects. A group of participants received instructions about the informative value of the cue, while another group did not receive such instructions. Participants were able to extract the predictive value of a spatially peripheral cue and use it to orient attention, whether or not specific instructions about the predictive value of the cue were given, and no matter their ability to correctly report it in a post-test questionnaire. In the non-predictive block, bad estimators who received no instructions showed regular cueing effects, while good estimators exhibited smaller and non-significant facilitatory effects at the short SOA and an absence of significant IOR at longer SOAs. However, for the instructions group, the pattern of results reversed.     

Markedness effects in Norwegian–English bilinguals: Task-dependent use of language-specific letters and bigrams

This study investigates how bilinguals use sublexical language membership information to speed up their word recognition process in different task situations. Norwegian–English bilinguals performed a Norwegian–English language decision task, a mixed English lexical decision task, or a mixed Norwegian lexical decision task. The mixed lexical decision experiments included words from the nontarget language that required a “no” response. The language specificity of the Bokmål (a Norwegian written norm) and English (non)words was varied by including language-specific letters (“smør”, “hawk”) or bigrams (“dusj”, “veal”). Bilinguals were found to use both types of sublexical markedness to facilitate their decisions, language-specific letters leading to larger effects than language-specific bigrams. A cross-experimental comparison indicates that the use of sublexical language information was strategically dependent on the task at hand and that decisions were based on language membership information derived directly from sublexical (bigram) stimulus characteristics instead of indirectly via their lexical representations. Available models for bilingual word recognition fail to handle the observed marker effects, because all consider language membership as a lexical property only.     

Differential effects of cue specificity and list length on the prospective and retrospective prospective-memory components

Event-based prospective memory (PM) refers to the ability to remember to perform an intended action at an appropriate moment that is indicated by some cue. It has been shown that increasing the number of PM cues as well as decreasing the cues' specificity can impair PM performance. Although both manipulations result in similar detrimental effects to PM accuracy, they may affect different underlying cognitive processes. To test this hypothesis, we manipulated both the number of cues and cue specificity and found the expected detrimental effects on PM accuracy. Analyses with the multinomial model of PM, which considers false PM responses and accounts for guessing biases, imply that the cue-list-length manipulation affected cue singularisation as well as intention retrieval, whereas cue specificity selectively affected intention retrieval. These results are original evidence that the performance decrements from the two manipulations have different cognitive underpinnings.     

Predicting stress patterns in an unpredictable stress language: The use of non-lexical sources of evidence for stress assignment in Russian

The main goal of this research was to examine how readers of Russian assign stress to disyllabic words. In particular, we tested the claim that the process of stress assignment in Russian can only be accomplished lexically. Eleven potential non-lexical sources of evidence for stress in Russian were examined in regression and factorial studies. In Study 1, onset complexity, coda complexity, the orthography of the first syllable (CVC1), of the second syllable (CVC2), and of the ending of the second syllable (VC2) were found to be probabilistically associated with stress in Russian disyllables. In Studies 2 and 3, it was shown that Russian speakers do use 3 of these cues (CVC1, CVC2, and VC2) when making stress-assignment decisions. These results provide evidence against the idea that the nature of stress in the Russian language is so unpredictable that stress assignment can only be accomplished lexically. These results also suggest that any successful model of stress assignment in Russian needs to contain mechanisms allowing these 3 orthographic cues to play a role in the stress-assignment process.     

Distinguishing Between Causes and Enabling Conditions—Through Mental Models or Linguistic Cues?

The mental model theory of naive causal understanding and reasoning (Goldvarg & Johnson-Laird, 2001, Cognitive Science, 25, 565–610) claims that people distinguish between causes and enabling conditions on the basis of sets of models that represent possible causal situations. In the tasks used to test this hypothesis, however, the proposed set of models was confounded with linguistic cues that frame which event to assume as given (the enabling condition) and which to consider as responsible for the effect under this assumption (the cause). By disentangling these two factors, we were able to show that when identifying causes and enabling conditions in these tasks, people rely strongly on the linguistic cues but not on the proposed set of models and that this set of models does not even reflect people's typical interpretation of the tasks. We propose an alternative explanation that integrates syntactic and causal considerations.     

Sublexical and morphological information in speech processing

Three experiments investigated the impact of syllabic boundary information and of morphological structure on performance in a sequence-monitoring task. In sequence monitoring, participants detect pre-specified sequences of phonemes in spoken carrier words. Sequences corresponded to the first syllable of the carrier word, to its first morpheme, or simultaneously to both. The data from Experiments 1 and 2, using different variants of the monitoring task, showed a strong impact of syllable boundary cues on monitoring latencies. An effect of morphological match between targets and carrier words was also evident. Experiment 3, in which parts of the spoken carrier words were cross-spliced, revealed that syllabic boundary information takes precedence over morphological information. The results are in line with an early process of speech processing, in which syllabic cues are used to aid lexical access. The morphological effect is better understood as a later, probably lexical, contribution of morphological decomposition to monitoring performance.     

TEACHING CHILDREN WITH AUTISM TO USE PHOTOGRAPHIC ACTIVITY SCHEDULES: MAINTENANCE AND GENERALIZATION OF COMPLEX RESPONSE CHAINS

We used a graduated guidance procedure to teach 4 boys with autism to follow photographic activity schedules to increase on-task and on-schedule behavior. The multiple baseline across participants design included baseline, teaching, maintenance, resequencing of photographs, and generalization to novel photographs phases. The results indicated that photographic activity schedules (albums depicting after-school activities) produced sustained engagement, and skills generalized to a new sequence of photographs and to new photographs. The acquisition of schedule-following skills enabled these children with severe developmental disabilities to display lengthy response chains, independently change activities, and change activities in different group home settings in the absence of immediate supervision and prompts from others.     

Context specificity of operant discriminative performance in pigeons: II. Necessary and sufficient conditions

Six experiments were performed to explore the necessary and sufficient conditions for producing context specificity of discriminative operant performance in pigeons. In Experiment 1, pigeons learned a successive discrimination (red S+/blue S−) in two chambers that had a particular odor present and between which they were frequently switched. The birds subsequently learned the reversal (blue S+/ red S−) in one of these chambers with a different odor present. When switched to the alternative chamber, although the odor and the reinforcement contingency were still appropriate to the reversal, performance appropriate to the original discrimination recurred in subjects for which the houselights were on during training and testing but not for those for which the houselights were off. This indicated the importance of visual contextual cues in producing context specificity. Experiment 2 showed that the frequent switching between boxes in initial training was of no consequence, presumably because the apparatus cues were highly salient to the subjects. Experiment 3 showed significantly less context specificity when odor cues were omitted. Experiment 4 showed that simply using a different reinforced stimulus in each phase of training was ineffective in producing context specificity. Experiment 5 showed that the generalization test procedure used in Experiment 4 was sensitive to context specificity when discrimination-reversal training was used with different odors in the two training phases. Experiment 6 replicated the results of Experiment 4, but then showed that when different odors accompanied the two training phases, context specificity was obtained with the single-stimulus paradigm. Thus in both single-stimulus and discrimination-reversal paradigms, redundant odor cues potentiated learning about apparatus cues.     

Group affiliation and confidence in denominational categorization in Northern Ireland

The effects of group affiliation on group categorization confidence were examined in Northern Ireland. Subjects were presented with stereotypic name, school and location cues and a group affiliation scale devised by Brown, Condor, Mathews, Wade and Williams (1986). The results suggest that group affiliation has no effect on subjects' confidence in making denominational categorizations.     

Perceiving the inertial properties of actions in anticipation skill

Inertial properties of throwing or striking actions constrain action outcomes, but their role in anticipation skill has not been investigated yet. Therefore, the aim of this study was to systematically investigate the effect of inertial constraints on anticipation skill. Fifteen semi-professional and fifteen novice soccer players were tasked with determining the kick direction of penalty kicks occluded at 160 ms, 80 ms before ball-foot contact, at ball-foot contact, or 80 ms after ball-foot contact. The inertial constraints were manipulated by loading the kicking leg with a 2.25 kg weight around the shank of the kicking leg and were compared with unloaded kicks. Anticipation accuracy of kick direction, response time, and decision confidence were recorded. It was found that loaded kick directions were anticipated more accurately, faster, and at earlier occlusion periods than unloaded kicks. The higher accuracy for the loaded kicks was found in the earlier occlusion conditions in experts compared to novices, as were the positive relationships between accuracy and confidence. It was concluded that the perception of the inertial constraints of the kicking action allowed for earlier anticipation of kick direction. It is proposed that accurate perception of the biomechanical property radius of gyrations in the body segments linking proximal to distal towards the kicking foot may provide this information.