Stimulus-response compatible orienting and the effect of an action not taken: Perception delayed is automaticity denied

Orienting to a signal source is widely viewed asautomatic in the sense that it is triggered by the stimulus. However, this behavior is typically assessed in a context in which the subject knows beforehand what he or she has to do. In the present experiments, the role of task set was investigated by having the response vary randomly from trial to trial. On some trials, a cue signaled the subject to respond, and on the remaining trials, another cue signaled the subject to withhold a response. Stimulus contrast and temporal overlap between task cue and target were manipulated. The effect of a reduction in stimulus contrast was sometimes absorbed into the time taken to decode the cue, but critically, other times not. These results highlight the theoretical importance of considering task set as an essential element in processing, and they undermine the theoretical claim that putatively automatic processes are not subject to interference from other mental activities.     

A new look at social attention: Orienting to the eyes is not (entirely) under volitional control

People tend to look at other people's eyes, but whether this bias is automatic or volitional is unclear. To discriminate between these two possibilities, we used a "don't look" (DL) paradigm. Participants looked at a series of upright or inverted faces, and were asked either to freely view the faces or to avoid looking at the eyes, or as a control, the mouth. As previously demonstrated, participants showed a bias to attend to both eyes and mouths during free viewing. In the DL condition, participants told to avoid the eyes of upright faces were unable to fully suppress the tendency to fixate on the faces' eyes, whereas participants told to avoid the mouth of upright faces successfully eliminated their bias to overtly attend to that feature. When faces were inverted, participants were equally able to suppress looks to the eyes and mouth. Together, these results suggest that the tendency to look at the eyes reflects orienting that is both volitional and automatic, and that the engagement of holistic or configural face processing mechanisms during upright face viewing has an influence in guiding gaze automatically to the eyes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Rotating With Rotated Text: A Natural Behavior Approach to Investigating Cognitive Offloading

Determining how we use our body to support cognition represents an important part of understanding the embodied and embedded nature of cognition. In the present investigation, we pursue this question in the context of a common perceptual task. Specifically, we report a series of experiments investigating head tilt (i.e., external normalization) as a strategy in letter naming and reading stimuli that are upright or rotated. We demonstrate that the frequency of this natural behavior is modulated by the cost of stimulus rotation on performance. In addition, we demonstrate that external normalization can benefit performance. All of the results are consistent with the notion that external normalization represents a form of cognitive offloading and that effort is an important factor in the decision to adopt an internal or external strategy.     

Filling a gap in the semantic gradient: Color associates and response set effects in the Stroop task

In the Stroop task, incongruent color associates (e.g., LAKE) interfere more with color identification than neutral words do (e.g., SEAT). However, color associates have historically been related to colors in the response set. Response set membership is an important factor in Stroop interference, because color words in the response set interfere more than color words not in the response set. It has not been established whether response set membership plays a role in the ability of a colorassociate to interfere with color identification. This issue was addressed in two experiments (one using vocal responses and one using manual responses) by comparing the magnitude of interference caused by color associates related to colors in the response set with that of interference caused by color associates unrelated to colors in the response set. The results of both experiments show that color associates unrelated to colors in the response set interfered with color identification more than neutral words did. However, the amount of interference was less than that from color associates that were related to colors in the response set. In addition, this pattern was consistent across response modalities. These results are discussed with respect to various theoretical accounts of Stroop interference.     

Mathematics anxiety affects counting but not subitizing during visual enumeration

Individuals with mathematics anxiety have been found to differ from their non-anxious peers on measures of higher-level mathematical processes, but not simple arithmetic. The current paper examines differences between mathematics anxious and non-mathematics anxious individuals in more basic numerical processing using a visual enumeration task. This task allows for the assessment of two systems of basic number processing: subitizing and counting. Mathematics anxious individuals, relative to non-mathematics anxious individuals, showed a deficit in the counting but not in the subitizing range. Furthermore, working memory was found to mediate this group difference. These findings demonstrate that the problems associated with mathematics anxiety exist at a level more basic than would be predicted from the extant literature.     

Fooled by the brain: Re-examining the influence of neuroimages

A series of highly-cited experiments published in 2008 demonstrated a biasing effect of neuroimages on lay perceptions of scientific research. More recent work, however, has questioned this bias, particularly within legal contexts in which neuroscientific evidence is proffered by one of the parties. The present research moves away from the legal framework and describes five experiments that re-examine this effect. Experiments 1 through 4 present conceptual and direct replications of some of the original 2008 experiments, and find no evidence of a neuroimage bias. A fifth experiment is reported that confirms that, when laypeople are allowed multiple points of reference (e.g., when directly comparing neuroimagery to other graphical depictions of neurological data), a neuroimage bias can be observed. Together these results suggest that, under the right conditions, a neuroimage might be able to bias judgments of scientific information, but the scope of this effect may be limited to certain contexts.     

Motion influences gaze direction discrimination and disambiguates contradictory luminance cues

In two experiments, we investigated the role of apparent motion in discriminating left/right gaze deviation judgments. We demonstrated that discrimination accuracy and response confidence was significantly higher when the eyes were moved to the left or right, compared to when the eyes were presented in their final shifted position (static images). To dissociate the role of motion signals from luminance signals, gaze stimuli were also presented in reverse contrast. Replicating past studies polarity reversal had a profound and detrimental effect on gaze discrimination in static images, although, intriguingly, while response confidence remained low, participant performance improved as gaze angle increased. In striking contrast to these data, polarity reversal had no negative effect on performance when the eyes were moved. We discuss these findings in the context of a multiple-cue account of gaze perception.     

Evaluating Effort: Influences of Evaluation Mode on Judgments of Task‐specific Efforts

The claim that humans adapt their actions in ways that avoid effortful processing (whether cognitive or physical) is a staple of various theories of human behavior. Although much work has been carried out focusing on the determinants of such behaviors, less attention has been given to how individuals evaluate effort. In the current set of experiments, we utilized the general evaluability theory to examine the evaluability of effort by examining subjective value functions across different evaluation modes. Individuals judged the anticipated effort of four task‐specific efforts indexed by stimulus rotation, items to be remembered, weight to be lifted, and stimulus degradation across joint (i.e., judged comparatively) and single evaluation modes (i.e., judged in isolation). General evaluability theory hypothesizes that highly evaluable attributes should be consistently evaluated (i.e., demonstrate similar subjective value functions) between the two modes. Across six experiments, we demonstrate that the perceived effort associated with items to be remembered, weight to be lifted, and stimulus degradation can be considered relatively evaluable, while the effort associated with stimulus rotation may be relatively inevaluable. Results are discussed within the context of subjective evaluation, internal reference information, and strategy selection. In addition, methodological implications of evaluation modes are considered. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Basic processes in reading: the effect of interletter spacing

Reading is acutely sensitive to the amount of space between letters within a string. In the present investigation, we explore the impairment caused by increasing interletter spacing when reading single words and nonwords aloud. Specifically, 2 hypotheses are tested: (a) whether increasing interletter spacing induces serial processing while reading aloud and (b) whether this serial processing results from an increased reliance on a serial sublexical mechanism similar to that implemented in dual route models of reading. Implications of the present results for understanding basic processes in reading are discussed with particular reference to different types of serial processing in reading aloud and the role of attention in reading.