Knowledge that Transforms

Cultural assumptions about one's relation to others and one's place in the world can be literally embodied in the way one cognitively maps out one's position and motion in time and space. In three experiments, we examined the psychological perspective that Asian American and Euro-American participants embodied as they both comprehended and produced narratives and mapped out metaphors of time and space. In social situations, Euro-American participants were more likely to embody their own perspective and a sense of their own motion (rather than those of a friend), whereas Asian American participants were more likely to embody a friend's perspective and sense of motion (rather than their own). We discuss how these psychological perspectives represent the soft embodiment of culture by implicitly instantiating cultural injunctions (a) to think about how you look to others and to harmonize with them or (b) to know yourself, trust yourself, and act with confidence.

Under incidental instructions, thirty-eight 2-year-olds were trained on a six-element deterministic sequence of spatial locations. Following training, subjects were informed of the presence of a sequence and asked to either reproduce or suppress the learned material. Children's production of the trained sequence was modulated by these instructions. When asked to suppress the trained sequence, the children were able to increase generation of paths that were not from the training sequence. Their performance was thus dependent on active suppression of knowledge, rather than on a random generation strategy. This degree of control in 2-year-olds stands in stark contrast to 3-year-olds' failure to control explicitly instructed rule-based knowledge (as measured by the dimensional-change card-sort task). We suggest that the incidental nature of a learning episode enables the acquisition of a more procedural form of knowledge with which this age group has more experience prior to the onset of fluent language.

Evidence suggests that focus of attention and cognitive load may each affect emotional processing and that individual differences in anxiety moderate such effects. We examined (a) fear-potentiated startle (FPS) under threat-focused (TF), low-load/alternative-set (LL/AS), and high-load/alternative-set (HL/AS) conditions and (b) the moderating effect of trait anxiety on FPS across these conditions. As predicted, redirecting attentional focus away from threat cues and increasing cognitive load reduced FPS. However, the moderating effects of anxiety were specific to the LL/AS condition. Whereas FPS was comparable for high-anxiety and low-anxiety subjects in the TF and HL/AS conditions, FPS was significantly greater for high-anxiety than for low-anxiety subjects in the LL/AS condition. These results suggest that affective processing requires attentional resources and that exaggerated threat processing in anxious individuals relates to direction of attention rather than emotional reactivity per se.

This experiment examined the time course of integration of modifier-noun (conceptual) combinations during auditory sentence comprehension using cross-modal lexical priming. The study revealed that during ongoing comprehension, there is initial activation of features of the noun prior to activation of (emergent) features of the entire conceptual combination. These results support compositionality in conceptual combination; that is, they indicate that features of the individual words constituting a conceptual combination are activated prior to combination of the words into a new concept.

Peer Reviewed

Grapheme-color synaesthesia is a rare condition in which perception of a letter or a digit is associated with concurrent perception of a color. Synaesthetes report that these color experiences are vivid and realistic. We used a Stroop task to show that synaesthetically induced color, like real color, is processed in color-opponent channels (red-green or blue-yellow). Synaesthetic color produced maximal interference with the perception and naming of the real color of a grapheme if the real color was opponent to the synaesthetic color. Interference was reduced considerably if the synaesthetic and real colors engaged different color channels (e.g., synaesthetic blue and real red). No dependence on color opponency was found for semantic conflicts between shape and color (e.g., a blue lemon). Thus, the neural representation of synaesthetic colors closely resembles that of real colors. This suggests involvement of early stages of visual processing in color synaesthesia and explains the vivid and realistic nature of synaesthetic experiences.

In a multistage experiment, twelve 4- and 9-year-old children participated in a triad rating task. Their ratings were mapped with multidimensional scaling, from which euclidean distances were computed to operationalize semantic distance between items in target pairs. These children and age-mates then participated in an experiment that employed these target pairs in a story, which was followed by a misinformation manipulation. Analyses linked individual and developmental differences in suggestibility to children's representations of the target items. Semantic proximity was a strong predictor of differences in suggestibility: The closer a suggested distractor was to the original item's representation, the greater was the distractor's suggestive influence. The triad participants' semantic proximity subsequently served as the basis for correctly predicting memory performance in the larger group. Semantic proximity enabled a priori counterintuitive predictions of reverse age-related trends to be confirmed whenever the distance between representations of items in a target pair was greater for younger than for older children.

Iconic memory and spatial attention are often considered separately, but they may have functional similarities. Here we provide functional magnetic resonance imaging evidence for some common underlying neural effects. Subjects judged three visual stimuli in one hemifield of a bilateral array comprising six stimuli. The relevant hemifield for partial report was indicated by an auditory cue, administered either before the visual array (precue, spatial attention) or shortly after the array (postcue, iconic memory). Pre- and postcues led to similar activity modulations in lateral occipital cortex contralateral to the cued side. This finding indicates that readout from iconic memory can have some neural effects similar to those of spatial attention. We also found common bilateral activation of a fronto-parietal network for postcue and precue trials. These neuroimaging data suggest that some common neural mechanisms underlie selective spatial attention and readout from iconic memory. Some differences were also found; compared with precues, postcues led to higher activity in the right middle frontal gyrus.

Current theories of reading are divided between dual-route accounts, which propose that separable processes subserve word recognition for orthographically regular and irregular strings, and connectionist models, which propose a single mechanism mapping form to meaning. These theories make distinct predictions about the processing of acronyms, which can be orthographically illegal and yet familiar, as compared with the processing of pseudowords, which are regular but unfamiliar. This study examined whether acronyms are processed like pseudowords and words. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded as subjects viewed familiar and unfamiliar acronyms, words, pseudowords, illegal strings, and--as the targets of the substantive behavioral task--proper names. Familiar acronyms elicited repetition effects on the N400 component, a functionally specific index of semantic activation processes; repetition effects for familiar acronyms were similar in magnitude, timing, and scalp distribution to those for words and pseudowords. The similarity of the brain response to familiar--but--illegal and unfamiliar--but--legal classes of stimuli is inconsistent with predictions of dual-route models of reading.

Many studies of simulated eyewitness situations have shown that under certain laboratory conditions, people's confidence about their identifications predicts their accuracy, but that their reported confidence can be affected by telling them that they chose the suspect. In this study, eyewitnesses (n= 134) to real crimes took part in lineups at an identification suite in the United Kingdom and were asked questions about their memory both before and after they were told whether they had identified the suspect or a filler. Before the eyewitnesses were told whether they had identified the suspect or a filler, their responses to several questions reliably differentiated between those who identified the suspect and those who identified a filler. In addition, responses to the memory questions were affected by telling the eyewitnesses whether or not they had identified the suspect. These results show that postidentification feedback affects real eyewitnesses and highlight the importance of recording meta-memory variables before an eyewitness discovers whether he or she has identified the suspect.