The impact of Primacy/Recency Effects and Hazard Monitoring on attributions of other drivers

The present study examined the impact of Primacy/Recency Effects and Hazard Monitoring on driver attributions. Participants viewed a simulated near collision from the perspective of a trailing motorist. The amount of error free driving prior to the near collision varied between two groups, where the near incident occurred either early or later in their viewing experience. They were then given the opportunity to provide judgments of the offending driver based on how safe, dangerous, risky, and skilled the driver was in general, and to evaluate their overall performance. Results showed a Primacy Effect dominance in that judgments of the driver were most negative in the early group, but this was moderated by high Hazard Monitoring for ratings of “dangerous” and “safe”. This suggests that judgments of other drivers are likely to be quick and based on early information, but are impacted by personal factors such as a tendency to monitor for hazards.     

The Isolation, Primacy, and Recency Effects Predicted by an Adaptive LTD/LTP Threshold in Postsynaptic Cells

An item that stands out (is isolated) from its context is better remembered than an item consistent with the context. This isolation effect cannot be accounted for by increased attention, because it occurs when the isolated item is presented as the first item, or by impoverished memory of nonisolated items, because the isolated item is better remembered than a control list consisting of equally different items. The isolation effect is seldom experimentally or theoretically related to the primacy or the recency effects—that is, the improved performance on the first few and last items, respectively, on the serial position curve. The primacy effect cannot easily be accounted for by rehearsal in short-term memory because it occurs when rehearsal is eliminated. This article suggests that the primacy, the recency, and the isolation effects can be accounted for by experience-dependent synaptic plasticity in neural cells. Neurological empirical data suggest that the threshold that determines whether cells will show long-term potentiation (LTP) or long-term depression (LTD) varies as a function of recent postsynaptic activity and that synaptic plasticity is bounded. By implementing an adaptive LTP-LTD threshold in an artificial neural network, the various aspects of the isolation, the primacy, and the recency effects are accounted for, whereas none of these phenomena are accounted for if the threshold is constant. This theory suggests a possible link between the cognitive and the neurological levels.     

Changing Structures in Midstream: Learning Along the Statistical Garden Path

Previous studies of auditory statistical learning have typically presented learners with sequential structural information that is uniformly distributed across the entire exposure corpus. Here we present learners with nonuniform distributions of structural information by altering the organization of trisyllabic nonsense words at midstream. When this structural change was unmarked by low-level acoustic cues, or even when cued by a pitch change, only the first of the two structures was learned. However, both structures were learned when there was an explicit cue to the midstream change or when exposure to the second structure was tripled in duration. These results demonstrate that successful extraction of the structure in an auditory statistical learning task reduces the ability to learn subsequent structures, unless the presence of two structures is marked explicitly or the exposure to the second is quite lengthy. The mechanisms by which learners detect and use changes in distributional information to maintain sensitivity to multiple structures are discussed from both behavioral and computational perspectives.     

The influence of sentential position on noun phrase structure priming

This article explores the interaction between global sentence context and local syntactic decision making. Specifically, four noun phrase (NP) structural priming experiments investigated whether the position of an NP within a sentence increased speakers' tendency to repeat primed structure. We crossed the position of the NP with the structure of the NP, such that NPs could be sentence initial or final in prime sentences. We further manipulated whether the to-be-modified target NP was sentence initial or final. Structural persistence effects were consistently observed, but there was no influence of parallel position. Rather, sentence-initial NP primes had a stronger influence on subsequent syntactic decisions than sentence-final primes, suggesting a primacy effect. Sentence-initial target NPs contributed to this primacy effect, while sentence-final target NPs did not. We argue that this primacy effect arises as the result of greater processing demands and resources for early than for late sentence constituents as well as deeper encoding and more focused attention when processing the beginnings of sentences.     

Memory activation of multiple hypotheses in sequential diagnostic reasoning

In sequential diagnostic reasoning, observed evidence activates hypotheses about possible causes in memory. These memory activations have been previously examined with a probe reaction task for problems with a single correct diagnosis. We applied this process tracing method to ambiguous problems with multiple compatible hypotheses. When participants reasoned about the causes of ambiguous symptom sequences, they were prompted to respond to probes representing hypotheses. The response time to a probe was shorter if the current support for the respective hypothesis was stronger indicating that the processing of compatible hypotheses can be traced. For sequences with two equally supported hypotheses, the initial hypothesis was more often chosen as the final diagnosis (a primacy effect). Probe reaction times suggest that the initial hypothesis has been activated more strongly already early, when it was finally chosen as the diagnosis. Nevertheless, substantial variance in response times limits the task's applicability for process tracing.     

Serial-position effects for items and relations in short-term memory

Two experiments used immediate probed recall of words to investigate serial-position effects. Item memory was tested through probing with a semantic category. Relation memory was tested through probing with the word's spatial location of presentation. Input order and output order were deconfounded by presenting and probing items in different orders. Primacy and recency effects over input position were found for both item memory and relation memory. Both item and relation memory declined over output position. The finding of a U-shaped input position function for item memory rules out an explanation purely in terms of positional confusions (e.g., edge effects). Either these serial-position effects arise from variations in the intrinsic memory strength of the items, or they arise from variations in the strength of item–position bindings, together with retrieval by scanning.     

On Getting First Things First:Assessing Claims for the Primacy of Christ

Adopting modal logic the doctrine of the primacy of Christ is defined and defended in relation to the Thomistic – Scotistic debates over the primary and efficient causes of the incarnation. This leads to a defence of the Scotistic thesis and a reserved affirmation for the Scotistic hypothesis that there would have been an incarnation irrespective of the fall. This hypothesis is tested by reference to the work of four recent theologians, Thomas Weinandy O.F.M. cap., Karl Barth, Jürgen Moltmann, and Thomas Torrance. Finally, a sketch describing another possible-world incarnation that builds upon the Scotistic hypothesis is provided.     

Serial-position effects on a free-recall task in bilinguals

In this study, we examined mechanisms that underlie free-recall performance in bilinguals' first language (L1) and second language (L2) through the prism of serial-position effects. On free-recall tasks, a typical pattern of performance follows a U-shaped serial-position curve, where items from the beginning of the list (the primacy effect) and items from the end of the list (the recency effect) are recalled with higher accuracy than items from the middle of the list. The present study contrasted serial-position effects on the free-recall task in Korean-English bilinguals' L1 vs. L2 and examined the relationship between an independent working memory (WM) measure and serial-position effects in bilinguals' two languages. Results revealed stronger pre-recency (primacy and middle) effects in L1 than in L2, but similar recency effects in the two languages. A close association was observed between WM and recall performance in the pre-recency region in the L1 but not in the L2. Together, these findings suggest that linguistic knowledge constrains free-recall performance in bilinguals, but only in the pre-recency region.     

Information distortion in the evaluation of a single option

Extending previous work on biased predecisional processing, we investigate the distortion of information during the evaluation of a single option. A coherence-based account of the evaluation task suggests that individuals will form an initial assessment of favorability toward the option and then bias their evaluation of subsequent information to cohere with their initial disposition. Three experiments tested this hypothesis. Initial disposition was manipulated (Studies 1 and 3) or measured (Study 2), and attribute ratings were collected as indicators of information distortion. Results from all three experiments indicate that attribute evaluations were biased to favor initial dispositions. These findings provide evidence that information distortion is one cause of primacy effects in judgment and decision-making settings involving a single option.     

Dissociable parietal systems for primacy and subsequent memory effects

The frequently observed superior memory for the first items on a list is referred to as primacy. The aetiology of this effect in terms of cognitive processes and their neural substrate is subject to an ongoing debate. However, the brain areas generally involved in successful encoding are well described by subsequent memory studies in which activity during encoding is correlated with memory performance. We employed an object-location association paradigm to differentiate the neural correlate of the primacy from the subsequent memory effect. Activity in the intraparietal sulcus predicted memory performance across all encoding positions. Increased activity in the inferior parietal lobe and angular gyrus resulted exclusively in a more efficient encoding of the first item presented. These areas are part of the ventral frontoparietal network involved in stimulus driven attention. Our results implicate the relatively elevated attention to the first item probably due to its contextual distinctiveness, as a major contributor to the primacy effect.