Knowledge that Transforms

On May 23, 1997, the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the American Psychological Society co-sponsored a conference titled “Cognitive Sciences Research: More Than Thinking About Drug Abuse.” The conference highlighted important lines of research, both within and outside of drug abuse, that may elucidate the relationships between substance abuse and cognitive processes. This Special Section of Psychological Science presents a compilation of articles from that conference by scientists who are working in the forefront of this exciting new research area. The research questions posed by these articles take the following forms: What are the cognitive and developmental effects (i.e., the consequences) of substance abuse? What are the antecedents or precursors of drug use that render persons vulnerable to taking drugs? How do the effects of drugs, in turn, become antecedents for changes in perception, behavior, and cognition that further enhance vulnerability to drugs?

Observations at The Mystery Spot, a roadside attraction near Santa Cruz, California, suggest intriguing visual illusions based on tilt-induced effects. Specifically, a tilted spatial background at The Mystery Spot induced misperceptions of the orientation of the cardinal axes (i.e., true horizontal and vertical), which then led to illusions in the perceived height of two individuals. This illusion was assessed at The Mystery Spot and replicated in the laboratory using pictorial and lined displays rotated in the picture plane. These findings are described in terms of the orientation framing theory, which suggests that these and other tilt-induced illusions (e.g., Ponzo illusion, Zöllner illusion) can be attributed to distorted frames of reference.

Over the past few years, a number of publications have reported the results of a variety of human classical eyeblink conditioning experiments. This renewed interest in human classical eyeblink conditioning appears to be caused by several factors, including the preference by some researchers to observe and report on behavior directly, the discovery that eyeblink conditioning can be used to assess basic biological and psychological processes, recent success in using eyeblink conditioning to determine the cause and expression of brain pathologies, and the successful use of this simple behavioral procedure in human imaging and electrophysiological experiments.

Previous evidence indicates that bilinguals are slowed when an unexpected language switch occurs when they are reading aloud. This anticipation effect was investigated using a picture-word translation task to compare English monolinguals and Spanish-English bilinguals functioning in “monolingual mode.” Monolinguals and half of the bilinguals drew pictures or wrote English words for picture or English word stimuli; the remaining bilinguals drew pictures or wrote Spanish words for picture or Spanish word stimuli. Production onset latency was longer in cross-modality translation than within-modality copying, and the increments were equivalent between groups across stimulus and production modalities. Assessed within participants, bilinguals were slower than monolinguals under intermixed but not under blocked trial conditions. Results indicate that the bilingual anticipation effect is not specific to language-mixing tasks. More generally, stimulus-processing uncertainty prevents establishment of a “base” symbolic-system procedure (concerning recognition, production, and intervening translation) and the inhibition of others. When this uncertainty is removed, bilinguals exhibit functional equivalence to monolinguals.

This study examines the role of componential knowledge and unitization processes in implicit memory. In two experiments, subjects studied novel words formed out of morphemes, syllables, or pseudosyllables. They then completed an implicit task requiring a judgment as to which of two items (one old, one new) was a better English word. Experiment 1 replicated previous results showing priming for nonwords formed out of morphemes and syllables but not pseudosyllables. This effect was present when orthographic factors were controlled and, unlike explicit (recognition) memory, was equally strong following visual and semantic processing. Experiment 2 showed that little priming was present across a variety of conditions in which the connections between components were altered across study and test. Results are interpreted as evidence for the role of perceptually based activation and integration processes in implicit memory for novel stimuli.

The accuracy with which a person recalls the orientation of a human figure or head has been shown to depend systematically on the person's handedness. This study investigated whether memory for the orientation of an inanimate object displays a similar effect. In contrast to previous work investigating memory for depictions encountered over many years, the present work focused on memory for a unique event that engaged considerable attention over a relatively brief period—Comet Hale-Bopp. The results showed that although right-handed and left-handed individuals did not differ in their memory for semantic information concerning the comet, they did differ in their memory for its orientation. Right-handed people were significantly more likely than left-handed people both to recall and to recognize the comet as facing to the left. The results suggest that memory performance may be influenced by patterns of underlying cerebral motor activation.

Performance in the Wason card selection task is often improved given thematic content. Such content effects have been considered evidence against human rationality. We propose that the role of content lies in specifying premises underlying “if P, then Q” rules. Unlike thematic rules, abstract conditional rules do not explicitly provide material interpretation ( P is a sufficient but not necessarily a necessary condition for Q), resulting in nonnormative responses. When necessity-sufficiency relations were explicated, normative responses were elicited and effects of other logically irrelevant components disappeared. The results suggest that content effects are compatible with human rationality.