My Recency,Our Primacy: How Social Connection Influences Evaluations of Sequences

Individuals have many life experiences (e.g., work and vacations) that consist of a series of interconnected episodes (i.e., temporal sequences). Assessments of such experiences are integral to daily life in that they facilitate future planning and behaviors for individuals. Therefore, these experiences often culminate in evaluations of their global affect. Past work has shown that retrospective, affective evaluations of these sequences generally exhibit an “end effect,” whereby a sequence's end intensity—but not its start intensity—is disproportionately weighted. Yet, researchers have largely investigated experiences that occur alone. In contrast, many real‐world experiences vary in their extent of social connection to others (e.g., working in an office with others versus alone in a cubicle). The present work fills this gap by showing the moderating role of social connection on how episodes are weighted in global affective ratings. Five studies involving two autobiographical experiences spanning several days each (workweek and spring break) and two brief simulated experiences show that high social connection leads to greater (lesser) weighting of the first (last) episode. To our knowledge, we are the first to demonstrate that these effects persist across different forms of social connection (i.e., interpersonal interaction versus semantic priming tasks) and are supported regardless of whether social connection occurs at encoding or retrieval of an experience. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A role of goals for social inhibition of return?

The social inhibition of return (sIOR) effect refers to the finding that response initiation times are longer if a movement is executed to a location where another person has responded to just before. Previous studies have examined the influence of the goal of the action on sIOR. In these studies, however, the movement endpoint and to-be-attained goal (e.g., touching/pressing a response key) were at the same spatial location. In the present two experiments, we disentangled movement endpoint and goal's identity and locations by means of introducing action effects that followed directly from a movement. Similar methods were previously shown powerful enough to clearly show the importance of action goals for other phenomena—a finding consistent with effect-based theories of action control, such as the ideomotor theory. The results of the present study revealed that sIOR was shaped by the movement endpoint location, not the goal's identity or location. That is, in both experiments, an sIOR effect was observed, but the magnitude of the sIOR effect was not modulated by repetitions/switches of goals or their locations. Thus, results indicate that goals play a negligible role in the emergence of the sIOR and, consequently, highlight the importance of action observation for the emergence of the sIOR effect.     

Congruency effects in dot comparison tasks: convex hull is more important than dot area

The dot comparison task, in which participants select the more numerous of two dot arrays, has become the predominant method of assessing Approximate Number System (ANS) acuity. Creation of the dot arrays requires the manipulation of visual characteristics, such as dot size and convex hull. For the task to provide a valid measure of ANS acuity, participants must ignore these characteristics and respond on the basis of number. Here, we report two experiments that explore the influence of dot area and convex hull on participants’ accuracy on dot comparison tasks. We found that individuals’ ability to ignore dot area information increases with age and display time. However, the influence of convex hull information remains stable across development and with additional time. This suggests that convex hull information is more difficult to inhibit when making judgements about numerosity and therefore it is crucial to control this when creating dot comparison tasks.     

Increased training complexity reduces the effectiveness of brief working memory training: evidence from short-term single and dual n-back training interventions

N-back training has recently come under intense scientific scrutiny due to reports of training-related improvements in general fluid intelligence. As of yet, relatively little is known about the effects of short-term n-back training interventions, however. In a pretest-training-posttest design, we compared brief dual and single n-back training regimen in terms of training gains and transfer effects relative to a passive control group. Transfer effects indicated that, in the short-term, single n-back training may be the more effective training task: At the short training duration we employed, neither training group showed far transfer to specific task switch costs, Stroop inhibition costs or matrix reasoning indexing fluid intelligence. Yet, both types of training resulted in a reduction of general task switch costs indicating improved cognitive control during the sustained maintenance of competing task sets. Single but not dual n-back training additionally yielded near transfer to an untrained working memory updating task.     

Not lost in translation: writing auditorily presented words at study increases correct recognition “at no cost”

Previous studies have reported a translation effect in memory, whereby encoding tasks that involve translating between processing domains produce a memory advantage relative to tasks that involve a single domain. We investigated the effects of translation on true and false memories using the Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) procedure [Deese, J. (1959). On the prediction of occurrence of particular verbal intrusions in immediate recall. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 58, 17–22; Roediger, H. L., III, & McDermott, K. B. (1995). Creating false memories: Remembering words not presented in lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 21, 803–814]. Translation between modalities enhanced correct recognition but had no effect on false recognition. Results are consistent with previous research showing that correct memory can be enhanced “at no cost” in terms of accuracy. Findings are discussed in terms of understanding the relationship between true and false memories produced by the DRM procedure.     

Semantic effects on sensory-motor modality switching

Language processing always involves a combination of sensory (auditory or visual) and motor modalities (vocal or manual). In line with embodied cognition theories, we additionally assume a semantically implied modality (SIM) due to modality references of the underlying concept. Understanding ear-related words (e.g. “noise”), for example, should activate the auditory SIM. In the present study, we investigated the influence of the SIM on sensory-motor modality switching (e.g. switching between the auditory-vocal and visual-manual combination). During modality switching, participants categorised words with regard to their SIM (e.g. ear- versus eye-related words). Overall performance was improved and switch costs were reduced whenever there was concordance between SIMs and sensory-motor modalities (e.g. an auditory presentation of ear-related words). Thus, the present study provides first evidence for semantic effects during sensory-motor modality switching in terms of facilitation effects whenever the SIM was in concordance with sensory-motor modalities.     

Improving Psychological Measurement: Does It Make a Difference? A Comment on Nesselroade and Molenaar (2016)

Nesselroade and Molenaar advocate the use of an idiographic filter approach. This is a fixed-effects approach, which may limit the number of individuals that can be simultaneously modeled, and it is not clear how to model the presence of subpopulations. Most important, Nesselroade and Molenaar's proposal appears to be best suited for modeling long time series on a few variables for a few individuals. Long time series are not common in psychological applications. Can it be applied to the usual longitudinal data we face? These are characterized by short time series (four to five points in time), hundreds of individuals, and dozens of variables. If so, what do we gain? Applied settings most often involve between-individual decisions. I conjecture that their approach will not outperform common, simpler, methods. However, when intraindividual decisions are involved, their approach may have an edge.     

Information Medicine: An Application of the New Paradigm in Medicine

Information medicine is a new application and development of an age-old method of healing. It re-creates and re-discovers a method that has proved its merits for thousands of years through a synthesis with new developments in new-paradigm physics and biology. The basic premise of information medicine is the use of information to correct faulty or blocked information-flows in the organism. As the latest discoveries, among others by Dr. Biava, show, even cancerous cells can be reprogrammed through the introduction of substances that provide the correct information. Also, electromagnetic information can produce corrective re-programming, introducing an era of soft, information-based healing not as a substitute for, but as a complement to, the current biochemical substance and physical intervention-based methods. The information-based method I have developed is the one created by the Austrian scientist Erich Koerbler, called New Homeopathy. It harmonizes the electromagnetic field in the body through the use of specific geometrical forms. This article outlines the basic elements of this application of the new paradigm in medicine, with more detailed information provided in the references.     

Breaking Down the Bilingual Cost in Speech Production

Bilinguals have been shown to perform worse than monolinguals in a variety of verbal tasks. This study investigated this bilingual verbal cost in a large‐scale picture‐naming study conducted in Spanish. We explored how individual characteristics of the participants and the linguistic properties of the words being spoken influence this performance cost. In particular, we focused on the contributions of lexical frequency and phonological similarity across translations. The naming performance of Spanish‐Catalan bilinguals speaking in their dominant and non‐dominant language was compared to that of Spanish monolinguals. Single trial naming latencies were analyzed by means of linear mixed models accounting for individual effects at the participant and item level. While decreasing lexical frequency was shown to increase naming latencies in all groups, this variable by itself did not account for the bilingual cost. In turn, our results showed that the bilingual cost disappeared when naming words with high phonological similarity across translations. In short, our results show that frequency of use can play a role in the emergence of the bilingual cost, but that phonological similarity across translations should be regarded as one of the most important variables that determine the bilingual cost in speech production. Low phonological similarity across translations yields worse performance in bilinguals and promotes the bilingual cost in naming performance. The implications of our results for the effect of phonological similarity across translations within the bilingual speech production system are discussed.     

“Blind” interviewing: Is ignorance bliss?

Current investigative interviewing guidelines [e.g., Technical Working Group: Eyewitness evidence. (1999). Eyewitness evidence: A guide for law enforcement. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, National Institute of Justice. Retrieved from https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/178240.pdf] suggest that interviewers review available case information prior to conducting a witness interview. The present study investigated the effect of interviewers’ pre-interview awareness of crime details on eyewitnesses’ memory and interviewer behaviour shortly after a mock crime or a week later. Results indicate that blind interviewers with no knowledge about the crime elicited more correct information than those who were correctly informed about the crime. Differences in interviewer behaviour emerged only in the very first question of the interview: Blind interviewers were more likely to begin the interview with a non-suggestive question than the informed interviewers. Blind interviewers also recalled more details than the informed interviewers when asked to generate a report after the witness interview documenting the witness’ account.