Auditory Long term Memory: Repetition Priming of Voice Recognition

Two experiments examined repetition priming in the recognition of famous voices. In Experiment 1, reaction times for fame decisions to famous voice samples were shorter than in an unprimed condition, when voices were primed by a different voice sample of the same person having been presented in an earlier phase of the experiment. No effect of voice repetition was observed for non-famous voices. In Experiment 2, it was investigated whether this priming effect is voice-specific or whether it is related to post-perceptual processes in person recognition. Recognizing a famous voice was again primed by having earlier heard a different voice sample of that person. Although an earlier exposure to that person's name did not cause any priming, there was some indication of priming following an earlier exposure to that person's face. Finally, earlier exposure to the identical voice sample (as compared to a different voice sample from the same person) caused a considerable bias towards responding 'famous'-i.e. performance benefits for famous but costs for nonfamous voices. The findings suggestthat (1) repetition priming invoice recognition primarily involves the activation of perceptual representations of voices, and (2) it is important to determine the conditions in which priming causes bias effects that need to be disentangled from performance benefits.     

William King’s Influence on Locke’s Second Edition Change of Mind about Human Action and Freedom

ABSTRACT

Locke’s influential discussion of agency in the chapter ‘Of Power’ in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding underwent important changes between the first and second edition. He reconsidered many of his central claims about the mind’s deliberation about actions. Locke’s position in the two editions is not only different but, as he himself points out, sometimes incompatible. This has suggested to some commentators that his change of mind was at least partly due to an external influence. Locke himself gestures towards this conclusion in the new ‘Epistle’ in the second edition Essay. One view is that William Molyneux was a notable influence, while another position is that Ralph Cudworth’s work on free will, either directly or indirectly through the influence of his daughter Damaris Masham, was an important influence. The position I develop in this paper is that the strongest candidate for an important external influence on Locke’s second edition revision is Molyneux’s close associate and friend, Irish philosopher and Archbishop of Dublin, William King. I argue that King’s criticism is a plausible influence on Locke’s reconceptualization of will and desire. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, King’s criticism appears to have been instrumental in Locke’s new emphasis on the agent’s capacity to determine what to value.     

Postnatal development of respiratory and vocal responses during aversive classical conditioning in cats

Respiratory rate, respiration amplitude, and vocal responses were recorded in cats of different ages during classic conditioning. Vocal responses to the conditional stimulus (CS) appeared first in 8-week-old kittens, and became prominent at older ages. An increase in respiration rate occurred after the onset of the CS in cats of all ages. Similarly, the decrease of respiration amplitude was observed at all ages, but only in 8-week-old and older subjects did this response resemble an adult pattern. In 4-week-old kittens the response was characterized by an early and brief peak, suggesting an alpha conditional response (CR). Clear and significant discrimination between a warning and a safety signal was present in both respiratory and vocal responses after the age of 8 weeks.     

Pain in the eye of the beholder: Variations in pain visual representations as a function of face ethnicity and culture

Pain experienced by Black individuals is systematically underestimated, and recent studies have shown that part of this bias is rooted in perceptual factors. We used Reverse Correlation to estimate visual representations of the pain expression in Black and White faces, in participants originating from both Western and African countries. Groups of raters were then asked to evaluate the presence of pain and other emotions in these representations. A second group of White raters then evaluated those same representations placed over a neutral background face (50% White; 50% Black). Image-based analyses show significant effects of culture and face ethnicity, but no interaction between the two factors. Western representations were more likely to be judged as expressing pain than African representations. For both cultural groups, raters also perceived more pain in White face representations than in Black face representations. However, when changing the background stimulus to the neutral background face, this effect of face ethnic profile disappeared. Overall, these results suggest that individuals have different expectations of how pain is expressed by Black and White individuals, and that cultural factors may explain a part of this phenomenon     

Does medics' social identification increase handicap for mentally retarded patients?

Briefs about mentally retarded people are more negative than briefs about other social categories; professionals, such as medical doctors evaluate them most negatively of all. It was hypothesized (a) that medics' beliefs about mentally retarded people are mediated by psychological salience of their clinical social identification, rather than by personal characteristics that medics happen to share and (b) that such beliefs will bias decisions, rather than enhance accuracy. Forty-five doctors and medical students were randomly assigned to conditions designed to enhance salience of their shared clinical social identification or individual self-perceptions. Subjects completed semantic differentials about mentally retarded people and distinguished between slides of ‘mentally retarded’ and ‘normal’ children. Beliefs of subjects in the medical condition were significantly more negative than those in the personal condition. A signal detection analysis revealed no difference between conditions in subjects' ability to distinguish between children but showed that subjects in the medical condition were significantly more likely to judge a child ‘mentally retarded’ when in doubt. Results were discussed within an information processing framework and supported the idea that a salient clinical social identity can mediate beliefs that are likely to handicap patients.     

Updating an object’s orientation and location during nonvisual navigation: A comparison between two processing modes

In the present study, we compared the effects of two processing modes on the updating of the location and orientation of a previously viewed object in space during a guided walk without vision. In Experiment 1, in order to measure the error for initial perception of object’s orientation, 12 subjects rotated a miniature model until it matched the memorized orientation of its counterpart object in space. In Experiment 2, they attempted either to keep track of the object continuously (in the object-centered [OC] task) or to estimate the object’s perspective only at the terminal vantage point given the trajectory they walked (in the trajectory-centered [TC] task). Subjects indicated the location of the object by facing it, and then rotated the model in order to indicate its orientation from the new vantage point. Results showed that, with respect to the TC mode, the OC mode induced a slowdown of the subjects’ self-paced locomotion velocity for both linear and angular movements, and a decrease of the latencies as well as smaller absolute errors for the orientation-of-the-object response. Mean signed errors on object’s orientation were equivalent for both processing modes, suggesting that the latter induced different allocations of processing resources on a common representation of space updated by “path integration.”