Knowledge that Transforms

Young, L. N., & Cordes, S. (2013). Fewer things, lasting longer: The effects of emotion on quantity judgments. Psychological Science, 24, 1057-1059. (Original DOI: 10.1177/0956797612465294 ) A summary of the 2013 article by Laura N. Young and Sara Cordes ("Fewer Things, Lasting Longer: The Effects of Emotion on Quantity Judgments") was published as an Object Perception, Attention, and Memory conference abstract: Young, L. N., & Cordes, S. (2012). Time and number under the influence of emotion. Visual Cognition, 20, 1048-1051.

Auditory Feedback Is Used for Self-Comprehension : When We Hear Ourselves Saying Something Other Than What We Said, We Believe We Said What We Hear

How does the neural representation of simple visual features affect perceptual operations, such as perceptual grouping? If the strength of feature representations in the brain is indicative of how the perceptual system partitions information into visual elements, then identifying the underlying neural representation may determine why things look the way they do. During functional MRI, participants viewed objects that varied along three feature dimensions: shape, color, and orientation. Afterward, participants performed an independent perceptual-grouping task outside the scanner to measure the strength of feature grouping. In lateral occipital cortex, neural feature discriminability, characterized using functional MRI multivariate pattern classification, positively predicted feature grouping strength: The more distinct the neural representations of a particular feature, the stronger the grouping was for that feature outside the scanner. Thus, variation in neural feature representation can be quantified to predict perceptual organization.

The authors comments on the article Orthographic coding in illiterates, by J. A. Dunabeitia, et al. There is a high degree of flexibility in letter-position coding during visual word recognition and reading. This phenomenon is explained based on the presence of perceptual noise in the information used for locating the positions of objects, namely, letters, across space.

Violations of spatiotemporal continuity disrupt performance in many tasks involving attention and working memory, but experiments on this topic have been limited to the study of moment-by-moment on-line perception, typically assessed by passive monitoring tasks. We tested whether persisting object representations also serve as underlying units of longer-term memory and active spatial navigation, using a novel paradigm inspired by the visual interfaces common to many smartphones. Participants used key presses to navigate through simple visual environments consisting of grids of icons (depicting real-world objects), only one of which was visible at a time through a static virtual window. Participants found target icons faster when navigation involved persistence cues (via sliding animations) than when persistence was disrupted (e.g., via temporally matched fading animations), with all transitions inspired by smartphone interfaces. Moreover, this difference occurred even after explicit memorization of the relevant information, which demonstrates that object persistence enhances spatial navigation in an automatic and irresistible fashion.

The author discusses the impact of literacy on position uncertainty. J. A. Dunabeitia et al., showed that illiterates demonstrated a total absence of transposed-character effects and were unable to determine individual characters fixed within strings. M. Perea et al., indicated that this lack of effects had nothing to do with literacy acquisition per se but rather with the acquisition of orthographic representations.

In the study reported here, I tracked one process through which stereotypes affect choice. The Implicit Association Test (IAT) and a measurement of predecisional information distortion were used to assess the influence of the association between male gender and career on the evaluation of information related to the job performance of stereotypical targets (male) and nonstereotypical targets (female). When the IAT revealed a strong association between male gender and career and the installed leader in the choice process was a stereotypical target, decision makers supported the leader with more proleader distortion; when the IAT revealed a strong association between male gender and career and the installed leader in the choice process was a nonstereotypical target, decision makers supported the trailer with less antitrailer distortion. A stronger association between male gender and career therefore resulted in an upward shift of the evaluation related to the stereotypical target (both as a trailer and a leader), which subsequently biased choice.

The author comments on the article Does entering adulthood in a recession affect narcissism? Robust evidence is still needed, by J. Fletcher. Fletcher's concerns focus around the problems of utilizing cross-sectional data to separate age and cohort effects. Birth year and economic conditions in early adulthood are not indistinguishable.