Journal of Experimental Psychology: GeneralThis is an RSS file. You can use it to subscribe to this data in your favourite RSS reader, such as GoogleReader, or to display this data on your own website or blog. Subscribe to this data using MyMedWorm.Subscribe to this data using GoogleReader.Subscribe to this data using Bloglines.Subscribe to this data using MyYahoo.

This page shows you the latest items in this publication.

Pages: 1 2 3

145 records returned

Attention as inference: Selection is probabilistic; responses are all-or-none samples.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Theories of probabilistic cognition postulate that internal representations are made up of multiple simultaneously held hypotheses, each with its own probability of being correct (henceforth, “probability distributions”). However, subjects make discrete responses and report the phenomenal contents of their mind to be all-or-none states rather than graded probabilities. How can these 2 positions be reconciled? Selective attention tasks, such as those used to study crowding, the attentional blink, rapid serial visual presentation, and so forth, were recast as probabilistic inference problems and used to assess how graded...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - November 3, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Vul, Edward; Hanus, Deborah; Kanwisher, Nancy Source Type: journals

Negativity bias in attribution of external agency.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This research investigated whether people are more likely to attribute events to external agents when events are negative rather than neutral or positive. Participants more often believed that ultimatum game partners were humans rather than computers when the partners offered unusually unfavorable divisions than unusually favorable divisions (Experiment 1A), even when their human partners had no financial stake in the game (Experiment 1B). In subsequent experiments, participants were most likely to infer that gambles were influenced by an impartial participant when the outcomes of those gambles were losses rather than wins...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - November 3, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Morewedge, Carey K. Source Type: journals

Linda is not a bearded lady: Configural weighting and adding as the cause of extension errors.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This article explores the configural weighted average (CWA) hypothesis suggesting that extension biases, like conjunction and disjunction errors, occur because people estimate compound probabilities by taking a CWA of the constituent probabilities. The hypothesis suggests a process consistent with well-known cognitive constraints, which nonetheless achieves high robustness and bounded rationality in noisy real-life environments. Predictions by the CWA hypothesis are that in error-free data, conjunction and disjunction errors should be the rule rather than the exception when pairs of statements are randomly sampled from an ...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - November 3, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Nilsson, Håkan; Winman, Anders; Juslin, Peter; Hansson, Göran Source Type: journals

Seeing meaning in action: A bidirectional link between visual perspective and action identification level.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Actions do not have inherent meaning but rather can be interpreted in many ways. The interpretation a person adopts has important effects on a range of higher order cognitive processes. One dimension on which interpretations can vary is the extent to which actions are identified abstractly—in relation to broader goals, personal characteristics, or consequences—versus concretely, in terms of component processes. The present research investigated how visual perspective (own 1st-person vs. observer’s 3rd-person) in action imagery is related to action identification level. A series of experiments measured and manipulated...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - November 3, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Libby, Lisa K.; Shaeffer, Eric M.; Eibach, Richard P. Source Type: journals

Compression in visual working memory: Using statistical regularities to form more efficient memory representations.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The information that individuals can hold in working memory is quite limited, but researchers have typically studied this capacity using simple objects or letter strings with no associations between them. However, in the real world there are strong associations and regularities in the input. In an information theoretic sense, regularities introduce redundancies that make the input more compressible. The current study shows that observers can take advantage of these redundancies, enabling them to remember more items in working memory. In 2 experiments, covariance was introduced between colors in a display so that over trial...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - November 3, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Brady, Timothy F.; Konkle, Talia; Alvarez, George A. Source Type: journals

Metacognitive control and strategy selection: Deciding to practice retrieval during learning.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Retrieval practice is a potent technique for enhancing learning, but how often do students practice retrieval when they regulate their own learning? In 4 experiments the subjects learned foreign-language items across multiple study and test periods. When items were assigned to be repeatedly tested, repeatedly studied, or removed after they were recalled, repeated retrieval produced powerful effects on learning and retention. However, when subjects were given control over their own learning and could choose to test, study, or remove items, many subjects chose to remove items rather than practice retrieval, leading to poor r...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - November 3, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Karpicke, Jeffrey D. Source Type: journals

A stability bias in human memory: Overestimating remembering and underestimating learning.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The dynamics of human memory are complex and often unintuitive, but certain features—such as the fact that studying results in learning—seem like common knowledge. In 12 experiments, however, participants who were told they would be allowed to study a list of word pairs between 1 and 4 times and then take a cued-recall test predicted little or no learning across trials, notwithstanding their large increases in actual learning. When queried directly, the participants espoused the belief that studying results in learning, but they showed little evidence of that belief in the actual task. These findings, when combined wit...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - November 3, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Kornell, Nate; Bjork, Robert A. Source Type: journals

Agenda-based regulation of study-time allocation: When agendas override item-based monitoring.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Theories of self-regulated study assume that learners monitor item difficulty when making decisions about which items to select for study. To complement such theories, the authors propose an agenda-based regulation (ABR) model in which learners’ study decisions are guided by an agenda that learners develop to prioritize items for study, given their goals and task constraints. Across 4 experiments, the authors orthogonally manipulated 1 task constraint—the reward structure of the task—with objective item difficulty, so that learners could use either item difficulty or potential reward in deciding how to allocate their...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - August 5, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Ariel, Robert; Dunlosky, John; Bailey, Heather Source Type: journals

When writing impairs reading: Letter perception’s susceptibility to motor interference.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The effect of writing on the concurrent visual perception of letters was investigated in a series of studies using an interference paradigm. Participants drew shapes and letters while simultaneously visually identifying letters and shapes embedded in noise. Experiments 1–3 demonstrated that letter perception, but not the perception of shapes, was affected by motor interference. This suggests a strong link between the perception of letters and the neural substrates engaged during writing. The overlap both in category (letter vs. shape) and in the perceptual similarity of the features (straight vs. curvy) of the seen and d...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - August 5, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: James, Karin H.; Gauthier, Isabel Source Type: journals

Distance-dependent processing of pictures and words.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
A series of 8 experiments investigated the association between pictorial and verbal representations and the psychological distance of the referent objects from the observer. The results showed that people better process pictures that represent proximal objects and words that represent distal objects than pictures that represent distal objects and words that represent proximal objects. These results were obtained with various psychological distance dimensions (spatial, temporal, and social), different tasks (classification and categorization), and different measures (speed of processing and selective attention). The authors...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - August 5, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Amit, Elinor; Algom, Daniel; Trope, Yaacov Source Type: journals

Preparing for novel versus familiar events: Shifts in global and local processing.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Six experiments examined whether novelty versus familiarity influences global versus local processing styles. Novelty and familiarity were manipulated by either framing a task as new versus familiar or by asking participants to reflect upon novel versus familiar events prior to the task (i.e., procedural priming). In Experiments 1–3, global perception was enhanced after novelty priming or framing, whereas familiarity priming facilitated local perception relative to a control group. In Experiment 4, participants used more inclusive categories under novelty priming and narrower categories under familiarity priming. In Expe...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - August 5, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Förster, Jens; Liberman, Nira; Shapira, Oren Source Type: journals

Immediacy bias in emotion perception: Current emotions seem more intense than previous emotions.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
People tend to perceive immediate emotions as more intense than previous emotions. This immediacy bias in emotion perception occurred for exposure to emotional but not neutral stimuli (Study 1), when emotional stimuli were separated by both shorter (2 s; Studies 1 and 2) and longer (20 min; Studies 3, 4, and 5) delays, and for emotional reactions to pictures (Studies 1 and 2), films (Studies 3 and 4), and descriptions of terrorist threats (Study 5). The immediacy bias may be partly caused by immediate emotion’s salience, and by the greater availability of information about immediate compared with previous emotion. Consis...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - August 5, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Van Boven, Leaf; White, Katherine; Huber, Michaela Source Type: journals

Embodiment of abstract concepts: Good and bad in right- and left-handers.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Do people with different kinds of bodies think differently? According to the body-specificity hypothesis, people who interact with their physical environments in systematically different ways should form correspondingly different mental representations. In a test of this hypothesis, 5 experiments investigated links between handedness and the mental representation of abstract concepts with positive or negative valence (e.g., honesty, sadness, intelligence). Mappings from spatial location to emotional valence differed between right- and left-handed participants. Right-handers tended to associate rightward space with positive...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - August 5, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Casasanto, Daniel Source Type: journals

Friend or foe: Subjective expected relative similarity as a determinant of cooperation.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Subjective expected relative similarity (SERS) is a descriptive theory that explains cooperation levels in single-step prisoner’s dilemma (PD) games. SERS predicts that individuals cooperate whenever their subjectively perceived similarity with their opponent exceeds a situational index, namely the game’s similarity threshold. A thought experiment and 2 experimental studies illustrate and explore SERS’s characteristics, showing that the theory predicts cooperation and competition in single-step PD games under 3 informational structures: (a) clear and transparent similarity cues, (b) experienced similarity, and (c) se...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - August 5, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Fischer, Ilan Source Type: journals

Discounting future green: Money versus the environment.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In 3 studies, participants made choices between hypothetical financial, environmental, and health gains and losses that took effect either immediately or with a delay of 1 or 10 years. In all 3 domains, choices indicated that gains were discounted more than losses. There were no significant differences in the discounting of monetary and environmental outcomes, but health gains were discounted more and health losses were discounted less than gains or losses in the other 2 domains. Correlations between implicit discount rates for these different choices suggest that discount rates are influenced more by the valence of outcom...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - August 5, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Hardisty, David J.; Weber, Elke U. Source Type: journals

Segmentation in reading and film comprehension.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
When reading a story or watching a film, comprehenders construct a series of representations in order to understand the events depicted. Discourse comprehension theories and a recent theory of perceptual event segmentation both suggest that comprehenders monitor situational features such as characters’ goals, to update these representations at natural boundaries in activity. However, the converging predictions of these theories had previously not been tested directly. Two studies provided evidence that changes in situational features such as characters, their locations, their interactions with objects, and their goals ar...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - April 29, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Zacks, Jeffrey M.; Speer, Nicole K.; Reynolds, Jeremy R. Source Type: journals

Testing signal-detection models of yes/no and two-alternative forced-choice recognition memory.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The current study compared 3 models of recognition memory in their ability to generalize across yes/no and 2-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) testing. The unequal-variance signal-detection model assumes a continuous memory strength process. The dual-process signal-detection model adds a thresholdlike recollection process to a continuous familiarity process. The mixture signal-detection model assumes a continuous memory strength process, but the old item distribution consists of a mixture of 2 distributions with different means. Prior efforts comparing the ability of the models to characterize data from both test formats di...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - April 29, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Jang, Yoonhee; Wixted, John T.; Huber, David E. Source Type: journals

Parallel response selection disrupts sequence learning under dual-task conditions.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Some studies suggest that dual-task processing impairs sequence learning; others suggest it does not. The reason for this discrepancy remains obscure. It may have to do with the dual-task procedure often used. Many dual-task sequence learning studies pair the serial reaction time (SRT) task with a tone-counting secondary task. The tone-counting task, however, is not ideal for studying the cognitive processes involved in sequence learning. The present experiments sought to identify the nature of the interference responsible for disrupting sequence learning in dual-task situations using more tractable dual-task procedures. E...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - April 29, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Schumacher, Eric H.; Schwarb, Hillary Source Type: journals

Empty sets as part of the numerical continuum: Conceptual precursors to the zero concept in rhesus monkeys.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The goal of the current research was to explore whether monkeys possess conceptual precursors necessary for understanding zero. We trained rhesus monkeys on a nonsymbolic numerical matching-to-sample task, and on a numerical ordering task. We then introduced nondifferentially reinforced trials that contained empty sets to determine whether monkeys would treat empty sets as numerical values. All monkeys successfully matched and ordered the empty sets without any training. Accuracy showed distance effects, indicating that they treated empty sets as values on a numerical continuum. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all ...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - April 29, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Merritt, Dustin J.; Rugani, Rosa; Brannon, Elizabeth M. Source Type: journals

Event boundaries in perception affect memory encoding and updating.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Memory for naturalistic events over short delays is important for visual scene processing, reading comprehension, and social interaction. The research presented here examined relations between how an ongoing activity is perceptually segmented into events and how those events are remembered a few seconds later. In several studies, participants watched movie clips that presented objects in the context of goal-directed activities. Five seconds after an object was presented, the clip paused for a recognition test. Performance on the recognition test depended on the occurrence of perceptual event boundaries. Objects that were p...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - April 29, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Swallow, Khena M.; Zacks, Jeffrey M.; Abrams, Richard A. Source Type: journals

A common-coding account of the bidirectional evaluation–behavior link.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Three experiments tested the influence of approach- and avoidance-related lever movements on the perception of masked affectively positive and negative stimuli. A motivational account of the bidirectional evaluation–behavior link predicted an enhanced detection of response-compatible stimuli, whereas a common-coding model predicted a reduced evaluative sensitivity toward such stimuli due to feature binding conflicts. The results consistently supported the common-coding explanation. In Experiment 1, detection (d') of positive and negative stimuli was selectively impaired by the generation of congruent approach- and avoida...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - April 29, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Eder, Andreas B.; Klauer, Karl Christoph Source Type: journals

Influence of peripheral and motivational cues on rigid–flexible functioning: Perceptual, behavioral, and cognitive aspects.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Recent research has shown that performing approach versus avoidance behaviors (arm flexion vs. extension) effectively influences cognitive functioning. In another area, lateralized peripheral activations (left vs. right side) of the motivational systems of approach versus avoidance were linked to various performances in cognitive tasks. By combining these 2 avenues of research, the influence of motor behaviors on flexible thinking was examined through the use of lateralized approach or/and avoidance behaviors. In 5 experiments reported in this article, a combination of the laterality and arm flexion versus extension variab...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - April 29, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Cretenet, Joël; Dru, Vincent Source Type: journals

Automatic optimism: The affective basis of judgments about the likelihood of future events.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
People generally judge that the future will be consistent with their desires, but the reason for this desirability bias is unclear. This investigation examined whether affective reactions associated with future events are the mechanism through which desires influence likelihood judgments. In 4 studies, affective reactions were manipulated for initially neutral events. Compared with a neutral condition, events associated with positive reactions were judged as likely to occur, and events associated with negative reactions were judged as unlikely to occur. Desirability biases were reduced when participants could misattribute ...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - April 29, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Lench, Heather C. Source Type: journals

Duration sensitivity depends on stimulus familiarity.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
When people are asked to assess or compare the value of experienced or hypothetical events, one of the most intriguing observations is their apparent insensitivity to event duration. The authors propose that duration insensitivity occurs when stimuli are evaluated in isolation because they typically lack comparison information. People should be able to evaluate the duration of stimuli in isolation, however, when stimuli are familiar and evoke comparison information. The results of 3 experiments support the hypothesis. Participants were insensitive to the duration of hypothetical (Experiment 1) and real (Experiment 2) unfam...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - April 29, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Morewedge, Carey K.; Kassam, Karim S.; Hsee, Christopher K.; Caruso, Eugene M. Source Type: journals

Long-term memory for the terrorist attack of September 11: Flashbulb memories, event memories, and the factors that influence their retention.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This article indicates that (a) the rate of forgetting for flashbulb memories and event memory (memory for details about the event itself) slows after a year, (b) the strong emotional reactions elicited by flashbulb events are remembered poorly, worse than nonemotional features such as where and from whom one learned of the attack, and (c) the content of flashbulb and event memories stabilizes after a year. The results are discussed in terms of community memory practices. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General)
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - April 29, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Hirst, William; Phelps, Elizabeth A.; Buckner, Randy L.; Budson, Andrew E.; Cuc, Alexandru; Gabrieli, John D. E.; Johnson, Marcia K.; Lustig, Cindy; Lyle, Keith B.; Mather, Mara; Meksin, Robert; Mitchell, Karen J.; Ochsner, Kevin N.; Schacter, Daniel L.; Source Type: journals

Song recognition without identification: When people cannot "name that tune" but can recognize it as familiar.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Recognition without identification (RWI) is a common day-to-day experience (as when recognizing a face or a tune as familiar without being able to identify the person or the song). It is also a well-established laboratory-based empirical phenomenon: When identification of recognition test items is prevented, participants can discriminate between studied and unstudied test items. The present study demonstrates this finding in the realm of music. A song RWI effect is reported across 4 experiments, despite very low identification rates in each. The effect was found with unidentifiable song fragments (Experiment 1), with song ...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - February 9, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Kostic, Bogdan; Cleary, Anne M. Source Type: journals

Don't look down: Emotional arousal elevates height perception.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In a series of experiments, it was found that emotional arousal can influence height perception. In Experiment 1, participants viewed either arousing or nonarousing images before estimating the height of a 2-story balcony and the size of a target on the ground below the balcony. People who viewed arousing images overestimated height and target size more than did those who viewed nonarousing images. However, in Experiment 2, estimates of horizontal distances were not influenced by emotional arousal. In Experiment 3, both valence and arousal cues were manipulated, and it was found that arousal, but not valence, moderated hei...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - February 9, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Stefanucci, Jeanine K.; Storbeck, Justin Source Type: journals

Integrative priming occurs rapidly and uncontrollably during lexical processing.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Lexical priming, whereby a prime word facilitates recognition of a related target word (e.g., nurse ? doctor), is typically attributed to association strength, semantic similarity, or compound familiarity. Here, the authors demonstrate a novel type of lexical priming that occurs among unassociated, dissimilar, and unfamiliar concepts (e.g., horse ? doctor). Specifically, integrative priming occurs when a prime word can be easily integrated with a target word to create a unitary representation. Across several manipulations of timing (stimulus onset asynchrony) and list context (relatedness proportion), lexical decisions for...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - February 9, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Estes, Zachary; Jones, Lara L. Source Type: journals

Relations between perceptual and conceptual scope: How global versus local processing fits a focus on similarity versus dissimilarity.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Nine studies showed a bidirectional link (a) between a global processing style and generation of similarities and (b) between a local processing style and generation of dissimilarities. In Experiments 1-4, participants were primed with global versus local perception styles and then asked to work on an allegedly unrelated generation task. Across materials, participants generated more similarities than dissimilarities after global priming, whereas for participants with local priming, the opposite was true. Experiments 5-6 demonstrated a bidirectional link whereby participants who were first instructed to search for similarit...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - February 9, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Förster, Jens Source Type: journals

Accessing information in working memory: Can the focus of attention grasp two elements at the same time?Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Processing information in working memory requires selective access to a subset of working-memory contents by a focus of attention. Complex cognition often requires joint access to 2 items in working memory. How does the focus select 2 items? Two experiments with an arithmetic task and 1 with a spatial task investigate time demands for successive operations that involve 2 digits or 2 spatial positions, respectively. When both items used in an operation have been used in the preceding operation, latencies are shortened. No such repetition benefit (arithmetic) or a much smaller benefit (spatial) was found when only 1 item was...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - February 9, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Oberauer, Klaus; Bialkova, Svetlana Source Type: journals

The architecture of intuition: Fluency and affect determine intuitive judgments of semantic and visual coherence and judgments of grammaticality in artificial grammar learning.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
People can intuitively detect whether a word triad has a common remote associate (coherent) or does not have one (incoherent) before and independently of actually retrieving the common associate. The authors argue that semantic coherence increases the processing fluency for coherent triads and that this increased fluency triggers a brief and subtle positive affect, which is the experiential basis of these intuitions. In a series of 11 experiments with 3 different fluency manipulations (figure-ground contrast, repeated exposure, and subliminal visual priming) and 3 different affect inductions (short-timed facial feedback, s...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - February 9, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Topolinski, Sascha; Strack, Fritz Source Type: journals

Decision makers conceive of their choices as interventions.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Causal considerations must be relevant for those making decisions. Whether to bring an umbrella or leave it at home depends on the causal consequences of these options. However, most current decision theories do not address causal reasoning. Here, the authors propose a causal model theory of choice based on causal Bayes nets. The critical ideas are (a) that people decide using causal models of the decision situation and (b) that people conceive of their own choice as an intervention. Four corroborating experiments are reported. The first 2 experiments showed that participants chose on the basis of the causal structure unde...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - February 9, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Hagmayer, York; Sloman, Steven A. Source Type: journals

Relatively fast! Efficiency advantages of comparative thinking.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Comparisons are a ubiquitous process in information processing. Seven studies examine whether, how, and when comparative thinking increases the efficiency of judgment and choice. Studies 1-4 demonstrate that procedurally priming participants to engage in more vs. less comparison influences how they process information about a target. Specifically, they retrieve less information about the target (Studies 1A, 1B), think more about an information-rich standard (Study 2) about which they activate judgment-relevant information (Study 3), and use this information to compensate for missing target information (Study 4). Studies 2-...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - February 9, 2009 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Mussweiler, Thomas; Epstude, Kai Source Type: journals

Spontaneous gestures during mental rotation tasks: Insights into the microdevelopment of the motor strategy.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study investigated the motor strategy involved in mental rotation tasks by examining 2 types of spontaneous gestures (hand-object interaction gestures, representing the agentive hand action on an object, vs. object-movement gestures, representing the movement of an object by itself) and different types of verbal descriptions of rotation. Hand-object interaction gestures were produced earlier than object-movement gestures, the rate of both types of gestures decreased, and gestures became more distant from the stimulus object over trials (Experiments 1 and 3). Furthermore, in the first few trials, object-movement gestur...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - November 12, 2008 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Chu, Mingyuan; Kita, Sotaro Source Type: journals

Stereotype threat and executive resource depletion: Examining the influence of emotion regulation.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Research shows that stereotype threat reduces performance by diminishing executive resources, but less is known about the psychological processes responsible for these impairments. The authors tested the idea that targets of stereotype threat try to regulate their emotions and that this regulation depletes executive resources, resulting in underperformance. Across 4 experiments, they provide converging evidence that targets of stereotype threat spontaneously attempt to control their expression of anxiety and that such emotion regulation depletes executive resources needed to perform well on tests of cognitive ability. They...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - November 12, 2008 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Johns, Michael; Inzlicht, Michael; Schmader, Toni Source Type: journals

Will a category cue attract you? Motor output reveals dynamic competition across person construal.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
People use social categories to perceive others, extracting category cues to glean membership. Growing evidence for continuous dynamics in real-time cognition suggests, contrary to prevailing social psychological accounts, that person construal may involve dynamic competition between simultaneously active representations. To test this, the authors examined social categorization in real-time by streaming the x, y coordinates of hand movements as participants categorized typical and atypical faces by sex. Though judgments of atypical targets were largely accurate, online motor output exhibited a continuous spatial attraction...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - November 12, 2008 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Freeman, Jonathan B.; Ambady, Nalini; Rule, Nicholas O.; Johnson, Kerri L. Source Type: journals

Retraction of Hard, Lozano, and Tversky (2006).Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Reports a retraction of "Hierarchical encoding of behavior: Translating perception into action" by Bridgette Martin Hard, Sandra C. Lozano and Barbara Tversky (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2006[Nov], Vol 135[4], 588-608). All authors retract this article. Co-author Tversky and co-author Hard believe that the research results cannot be relied upon; Sandra C. Lozano takes full responsibility for the need to retract this article. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2006-20327-007.) People encode goal-directed behaviors, such as assembling an object, by segmenting them into discre...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - November 12, 2008 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Hard, B. M.; Lozano, S. C.; Tversky, B. Source Type: journals

Automatic and controlled response inhibition: Associative learning in the go/no-go and stop-signal paradigms.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In 5 experiments, the authors examined the development of automatic response inhibition in the go/no-go paradigm and a modified version of the stop-signal paradigm. They hypothesized that automatic response inhibition may develop over practice when stimuli are consistently associated with stopping. All 5 experiments consisted of a training phase and a test phase in which the stimulus mapping was reversed for a subset of the stimuli. Consistent with the automatic-inhibition hypothesis, the authors found that responding in the test phase was slowed when the stimulus had been consistently associated with stopping in the train...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - November 12, 2008 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Verbruggen, Frederick; Logan, Gordon D. Source Type: journals

Selective attention in human associative learning and recognition memory.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Four experiments examined the role of selective attention in a new causal judgment task that allowed measurement of both causal strength and cue recognition. In Experiments 1 and 2, blocking was observed; pretraining with 1 cue (A) resulted in reduced learning about a 2nd cue (B) when those 2 cues were trained in compound (AB+). Participants also demonstrated decreased recognition performance for the causally redundant Cue B, suggesting that less attention had been paid to it in training. This is consistent with the idea that attention is preferentially allocated toward the more predictive Cue A, and away from the less pre...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - November 12, 2008 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Griffiths, Oren; Mitchell, Chris J. Source Type: journals

Memory predictions are influenced by perceptual information: Evidence for metacognitive illusions.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Although perceptual information is utilized to judge size or depth, little work has investigated whether such information is used to make memory predictions. The present study examined how the font size of to-be-remembered words influences predicted memory performance. Participants studied words for a free-recall test that varied in font size and made judgments of learning (JOLs) for each item. JOLs were influenced by font size, as larger font sizes were given higher JOLs, whereas little relationship was evident between font size and recall. The effect was modified when other, more valid, sources of information (e.g., asso...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - November 12, 2008 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Rhodes, Matthew G.; Castel, Alan D. Source Type: journals

Memory in posttraumatic stress disorder: Properties of voluntary and involuntary, traumatic and nontraumatic autobiographical memories in people with and without posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
One hundred fifteen undergraduates rated 15 word-cued memories and their 3 most negatively stressful, 3 most positive, and 7 most important events and completed tests of personality and depression. Eighty-nine also recorded involuntary memories online for 1 week. In the first 3-way comparisons needed to test existing theories, comparisons were made of memories of stressful events versus control events and involuntary versus voluntary memories in people high versus low in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptom severity. For all participants, stressful memories had more emotional intensity, more frequent voluntary and ...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - November 12, 2008 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Rubin, David C.; Boals, Adriel; Berntsen, Dorthe Source Type: journals

Decomposition of repetition priming components in picture naming.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Cognitive mechanisms underlying repetition priming in picture naming were decomposed in several experiments. Sets of encoding manipulations meant to selectively prime or reduce priming in object identification or word production components of picture naming were combined factorially to dissociate processes underlying priming in picture naming. Experiments 1, 2, and 3 were conducted with Spanish-English bilingual participants and bilingual materials. Experiments 4, 5A, and 5B were single-language experiments in English or Spanish. A simple process model was used to formalize the theoretical predictions and test them across ...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - October 16, 2008 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Francis, Wendy S.; Corral, Nuvia I.; Jones, Mary L.; Sáenz, Silvia P. Source Type: journals

The acquisition of robust and flexible cognitive skills.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The authors introduce a model of skill acquisition that incorporates elements of both traditional models and models based on embedded cognition by striking a balance between top-down and bottom-up control. A knowledge representation is used in which pre- and postconditions are attached to actions. This model captures improved performance due to learning not only in terms of shorter solution times and lower error rates during the task but also in an increased flexibility to solve similar problems and robustness against unexpected events. In 3 experiments using a complex aviation task, the authors contrasted instructions tha...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - October 16, 2008 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Taatgen, Niels A.; Huss, David; Dickison, Daniel; Anderson, John R. Source Type: journals

Multiple confidence estimates as indices of eyewitness memory.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Eyewitness identification decisions are vulnerable to various influences on witnesses' decision criteria that contribute to false identifications of innocent suspects and failures to choose perpetrators. An alternative procedure using confidence estimates to assess the degree of match between novel and previously viewed faces was investigated. Classification algorithms were applied to participants' confidence data to determine when a confidence value or pattern of confidence values indicated a positive response. Experiment 1 compared confidence group classification accuracy with a binary decision control group's accuracy o...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - October 16, 2008 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Sauer, James D.; Brewer, Neil; Weber, Nathan Source Type: journals

The special status of actions in causal reasoning in rats.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
A. P. Blaisdell, K. Sawa, K. J. Leising, and M. R. Waldmann (2006) reported evidence for causal reasoning in rats. After learning through Pavlovian observation that Event A (a light) was a common cause of Events X (an auditory stimulus) and F (food), rats predicted F in the test phase when they observed Event X as a cue but not when they generated X by a lever press. Whereas associative accounts predict associations between X and F regardless of whether X is observed or generated by an action, causal-model theory predicts that the intervention at test should lead to discounting of A, the regular cause of X. The authors rep...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - October 16, 2008 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Leising, Kenneth J.; Wong, Jared; Waldmann, Michael R.; Blaisdell, Aaron P. Source Type: journals

Associative and strategic components of episodic memory: A life-span dissociation.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The authors investigated the strategic component (i.e., elaboration and organization of episodic features) and the associative component (i.e., binding processes) of episodic memory and their interactions in 4 age groups (10-12, 13-15, 20-25, and 70-75 years of age). On the basis of behavioral and neural evidence, the authors hypothesized that the two components are functionally related but follow different life-span gradients. In a fully crossed design, age differences in recognition memory for single words versus word pairs (associative demand manipulation) were examined under instructions that emphasized item, pair, or ...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - October 16, 2008 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Shing, Yee Lee; Werkle-Bergner, Markus; Li, Shu-Chen; Lindenberger, Ulman Source Type: journals

Detection of emotional faces: Salient physical features guide effective visual search.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In this study, the authors investigated how salient visual features capture attention and facilitate detection of emotional facial expressions. In a visual search task, a target emotional face (happy, disgusted, fearful, angry, sad, or surprised) was presented in an array of neutral faces. Faster detection of happy and, to a lesser extent, surprised and disgusted faces was found both under upright and inverted display conditions. Inversion slowed down the detection of these faces less than that of others (fearful, angry, and sad). Accordingly, the detection advantage involves processing of featural rather than configural i...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - October 16, 2008 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Calvo, Manuel G.; Nummenmaa, Lauri Source Type: journals

The goal of consistency as a cause of information distortion.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Why, during a decision between new alternatives, do people bias their evaluations of information to support a tentatively preferred option? The authors test the following 3 decision process goals as the potential drivers of such distortion of information: (a) to reduce the effort of evaluating new information, (b) to increase the separation between alternatives, and (c) to achieve consistency between old and new units of information. Two methods, the nonconscious priming of each goal and assessing the ambient activation levels of multiple goals, reveal that the goal of consistency drives information distortion. Results sug...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - October 16, 2008 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Russo, J. Edward; Carlson, Kurt A.; Meloy, Margaret G.; Yong, Kevyn Source Type: journals

Perception as evidence accumulation and Bayesian inference: Insights from masked priming.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The authors argue that perception is Bayesian inference based on accumulation of noisy evidence and that, in masked priming, the perceptual system is tricked into treating the prime and the target as a single object. Of the 2 algorithms considered for formalizing how the evidence sampled from a prime and target is combined, only 1 was shown to be consistent with the existing data from the visual word recognition literature. This algorithm was incorporated into the Bayesian Reader model (D. Norris, 2006), and its predictions were confirmed in 3 experiments. The experiments showed that the pattern of masked priming is not a ...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - October 16, 2008 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Norris, Dennis; Kinoshita, Sachiko Source Type: journals

Propagation of innovations in networked groups.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
A novel paradigm was developed to study the behavior of groups of networked people searching a problem space. The authors examined how different network structures affect the propagation of information in laboratory-created groups. Participants made numerical guesses and received scores that were also made available to their neighbors in the network. The networks were compared on speed of discovery and convergence on the optimal solution. One experiment showed that individuals within a group tend to converge on similar solutions even when there is an equally valid alternative solution. Two additional studies demonstrated t...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General - October 16, 2008 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Mason, Winter A.; Jones, Andy; Goldstone, Robert L. Source Type: journals