Knowledge that Transforms

Neurologically intact adults perseverate in immediate serial recall, intruding items from a previous trial into the current response. We applied the electroencephalogram/event-related-potential subsequent-memory paradigm to immediate serial recall to investigate the causes of these errors. In line with previous studies using this paradigm, results revealed that words that were correctly recalled elicited a greater frontal positivity during encoding when compared with words that were either perseverated over or not produced for some other reason. More surprisingly, differences were also found at encoding between the words perseverated into the subsequent response and words that were not perseverated. These findings support a theory stating that abnormalities in both how the current target and the previous trial are processed can contribute to perseveration errors. These results inform existing theories of immediate serial recall and theories of the control of irrelevant information.

Many activities, such as driving or playing sports, require simultaneous monitoring of multiple, often moving, objects. Such situations tap people's ability to attend selected objects without tracking them with their eyes--this is known as attentional tracking. It has been established that attentional tracking can be affected by the physical speed of a moving target. In the experiments reported here, we showed that this effect is primarily due to apparent speeds, as opposed to physical speeds. We used sensory adaptation--in this case, prolonged exposure to adapting stimuli moving faster or slower than standard test stimuli--to modulate perceived speed. We found performance decrements and increments for apparently sped and slowed test stimuli when participants attempted attentional tracking. Our data suggest that both perceived speed and the acuity of attention for moving objects reflect a ratio of responses in low-pass and band-pass temporal-frequency channels in human vision.

In this research, we examined the impact of physiological arousal on negotiation outcomes. Conventional wisdom and the prescriptive literature suggest that arousal should be minimized given its negative effect on negotiations, whereas prior research on misattribution of arousal suggests that arousal might polarize outcomes, either negatively or positively. In two experiments, we manipulated arousal and measured its effect on subjective and objective negotiation outcomes. Our results support the polarization effect. When participants had negative prior attitudes toward negotiation, arousal had a detrimental effect on outcomes, whereas when participants had positive prior attitudes toward negotiation, arousal had a beneficial effect on outcomes. These effects occurred because of the construal of arousal as negative or positive affect, respectively. Our findings have important implications not only for negotiation, but also for research on misattribution of arousal, which previously has focused on the target of evaluation, in contrast to the current research, which focused on the critical role of the perceiver.

A voluminous literature has examined how primates respond to nonverbal expressions of status, such as taking the high ground, expanding one's posture, and tilting one's head. We extend this research to human intergroup processes in general and interracial processes in particular. Perceivers may be sensitive to whether racial group status is reflected in group members' nonverbal expressions of status. We hypothesized that people who support the current status hierarchy would prefer racial groups whose members exhibit status-appropriate nonverbal behavior over racial groups whose members do not exhibit such behavior. People who reject the status quo should exhibit the opposite pattern. These hypotheses were supported in three studies using self-report (Study 1) and reaction time (Studies 2 and 3) measures of racial bias and two different status cues (vertical position and head tilt). For perceivers who supported the status quo, high-status cues (in comparison with low-status cues) increased preferences for White people over Black people. For perceivers who rejected the status quo, the opposite pattern was observed.

The perception of verticality is critical for balance control and interaction with the world. But this complex process fails badly under certain circumstances-usually as the result of an illusion. Here, we report on a real-world example of how the brain fails to disregard body position on a moving mountain tram and adopts an inappropriate frame of reference, which prompts passengers to perceive skyscrapers leaning by as much as 30°. To elucidate the sensory origin of this misperception, we conducted field experiments on the moving tram to systematically disentangle the contributions of four sensory systems known to affect verticality perception, namely, vestibular, tactile, proprioceptive, and visual cues. Our results refute the intuitive assumption that the perceived tilt of the buildings is based on visual error signals and demonstrate instead that a unified percept of verticality is a product of the synergistic interaction among multiple sensory systems and the contextual information available in the real world.

WOS:000324403000032

In the research reported here, we proposed and demonstrated the prediction-specificity effect, which states that people's prediction of the general outcome of an event (e.g., the winner of a soccer match) is less accurate when the prediction question is framed in a more specific manner (e.g., guessing the score) rather than in a less specific manner (e.g., guessing the winner). We demonstrated this effect by examining people's predictions on actual sports games both in field and laboratory studies. In Study 1, the analysis of 19 billion bets from a commercial sports-betting business provided evidence for the effect of prediction specificity. This effect was replicated in three controlled laboratory studies, in which participants predicted the outcomes of a series of soccer matches. Furthermore, the negative effect of prediction specificity was mediated by participants' underweighting of important holistic information during decision making.

Despite the central role of learning in visual recognition, it is largely unknown whether visual form learning is maintained in older age. We examined whether training improved performance in both young and older adults at two key stages of visual recognition: integration of local elements and global form discrimination. We used a shape-discrimination task (concentric vs. radial patterns) in which young and older adults showed similar performance before training. Using a parametric stimulus space that allowed us to manipulate global features and background noise, we were able to distinguish integration and discrimination processes. We found that training improves global form discrimination in both young and older adults. However, learning to integrate local elements is impaired in older age, possibly because of reduced tolerance to external noise. These findings suggest that visual selection processes, rather than global feature representations, provide a fundamental limit for learning-dependent plasticity in the aging brain.