Knowledge that Transforms

Lind, Hall, Breidegard, Balkenius, and Johansson (2014a, 2014b) recently published articles tackling a core question concerning speech production: At which stage of processing are communicative intentions specified? Taking a position contrary to dominant models of speech production (e.g., Levelt, 2001), they suggested that utterances “often are semantically underspecified” (Lind, Hall, Breidegard, Balkenius, & Johansson, 2014a, p. 8) before articulation, and that “auditory feedback” (Lind et al., 2014a, 2014b) is an important mechanism for specifying the meaning of what one says. In their experiment (Lind et al. 2014b), they used real-time speech exchange, in which auditory information was occasionally manipulated while participants performed a Stroop task (i.e., naming the colors in which color names were printed). This methodology created trials in which participants produced the correct response (i.e., named the color of the text) while simultaneously hearing over headphones a recording of their own voice producing the incorrect response (i.e., reading the text). On these trials, when asked what they had said, participants sometimes reported the word that they had heard, rather than the word that they had produced. Failure to detect these intrusions was interpreted as evidence that auditory feedback is a “prime channel” (Lind, Hall, Breidegard, Belkenius, & Johansson, 2014a, p. 2) for monitoring the meaning of spoken words. We suggest that (a) the authors’ data constitute evidence against a prime role for auditory feedback in monitoring the meaning of self-produced speech, (b) the experimental manipulation is not necessarily a manipulation of auditory feedback, and (c) the findings may be explained by task demands rather than by mechanisms of speech production. In the experiment (Lind et al., 2014b) participants always heard their own responses, via normal bone conduction and also via headphones. In a subset of trials (4 out of 250 per participant), the word they heard over headphones was a recording, from earlier in the experiment, of the word that they currently needed to inhibit. Lind et al. focused their analysis and interpretation exclusively on those trials within this subset in which participants did not notice that the word had been exchanged. However, according to the criteria Lind et al. used, there was evidence that the majority of these exchanges were in fact detected (~73%), and only a minority went unnoticed (~27%). The frequent detection of the manipulations suggests that auditory feedback is unlikely to be a prime mechanism (Lind et al., 2014a) by which spoken intentions are specified, as participants must have had some awareness of what they actually said when they detected the exchanges. Although the data seemingly contradict the authors’ claim that speakers “always use [auditory feedback] as a source of evidence in interpreting their own utterances” (Lind et al., 2014b, p. 1199), it remains possible that speakers use auditory feedback some of the time, when self-monitoring. However, we argue that the experience of hearing the audio recordings differed so much from the usual experience of hearing one’s own voice that it cannot be assumed to necessarily reflect the same processes. People who listen to a recording of their own voice notice that their voice sounds different from how they hear it when they speak; they primarily hear their own voice via bone conduction but other people’s voices through air conduction. Lind et al. accounted for some of the acoustic differences between self- and other-produced speech as it is heard at the ear (e.g., by low-pass filtering the speech), but made no attempt to address others (e.g., by mimicking the spatial location of participants’ own voices). Furthermore, Lind et al. could not eliminate the perception of the concurrent somatosensory and bone-conducted auditory information that always results from speaking aloud. Within the dorsolateral temporal lobes, the neural response to self-produced speech differs from the response to other-produced speech (Agnew, McGettigan, Banks, & Scott, 2012; Wise, Greene, Buchel, & Scott, 1999), and peripherally, the loudness of one’s voice is dampened by the stapedius reflex, which occurs when one speaks. It is critical to determine, therefore, whether the auditory feedback in the experiment reflected the auditory, somatosensory, and neural consequences of perceiving one’s own voice while speaking, or whether it simply functioned more generally as an auditory distractor. This distinction matters, because there are many instances in which hearing other-produced speech influences perception and production. Properties of the speech sounds in the environment can be assimilated into a speaker’s output (Delvaux & Soquet, 2007; Pickering & Garrod, 2004), and speech that a person is trying to ignore can be confused with attended speech, particularly if the utterances are semantically related (Brungart, 2001; Gray & Wedderburn, 1960). Thus, had participants heard any voice (not necessarily their own), they might have made the same misattributions. To ensure that the observed effect was dependent on participants hearing their own voice, the authors would have needed an additional control condition in which participants heard a voice other than their own overlaid on their vocal responses. Finally, we question the extent to which performance on the Stroop task generalizes to natural speech interactions. Stroop interference results from competition between the color of the text and the distractor (the incongruent written word; MacLeod, 1991; van Veen & Carter, 2005). Both are automatically processed and prepared for response production, and executive-control systems are required for the final response selection. Although manipulation of stimulus onset asynchrony shows that Stroop interference dissipates over relatively short latencies (~400–500 ms; for reviews, see MacLeod, 1991; Roelofs, 2003), congruency sequence effects suggest that cognitive control is sustained and adjusted over longer time scales (Egner, 2007; Kerns et al., 2004). Cognitive-control demands likely reduce capacity for error monitoring of one’s own speech. Indeed, individuals make fewer self-repairs of their speech in dual-task paradigms than in single-task paradigms (Oomen & Postma, 2002) and show poorer pre-articulatory self-monitoring when naming under time pressure than when naming under no time pressure (Dhooge & Hartsuiker, 2012)—effects that are concordant with the notion that error monitoring is under central control and is capacity limited (Levelt, 1983). The data reported by Lind et al. (2014b) seem best explained by breakdowns in error monitoring consequent to the executive processing demands of the Stroop task, rather than by processes underlying speech production more generally. To conclude, we are sympathetic to the wider concept that the act of speaking helps people construe their intended meanings in interactions. However, the articles by Lind et al. (2014a, 2014b) do not make a convincing case for placing auditory feedback at the heart of this mechanism.

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.

We examined the potential cost of practicing suppression of negative thoughts on subsequent performance in an unrelated task. Cues for previously suppressed and unsuppressed (baseline) responses in a think/no-think procedure were displayed as irrelevant flankers for neutral words to be judged for emotional valence. These critical flankers were homographs with one negative meaning denoted by their paired response during learning. Responses to the targets were delayed when suppression cues (compared with baseline cues and new negative homographs) were used as flankers, but only following direct-suppression instructions and not when benign substitutes had been provided to aid suppression. On a final recall test, suppression-induced forgetting following direct suppression and the flanker task was positively correlated with the flanker effect. Experiment 2 replicated these findings. Finally, valence ratings of neutral targets were influenced by the valence of the flankers but not by the prior role of the negative flankers.

Upright static faces are widely thought to recruit holistic representations, whereby individual features are integrated into nondecomposable wholes for recognition and interpretation. In contrast, little is known about the perceptual integration of dynamic features when viewing moving faces. People are frequently exposed to correlated eye and mouth movements, such as the characteristic changes that accompany facial emotion, yawning, sneezing, and laughter. However, it is unclear whether the visual system is sensitive to these dynamic regularities, encoding facial behavior relative to a set of dynamic global prototypes, or whether it simply forms piecemeal descriptions of feature states over time. To address this question, we sought evidence of perceptual interactions between dynamic facial features. Crucially, we found illusory slowing of feature motion in the presence of another moving feature, but it was limited to upright faces and particular relative-phase relationships. Perceptual interactions between dynamic features suggest that local changes are integrated into models of global facial change.

The author discusses whether entering adulthood in a recession affect narcissism. An emerging literature has started to investigate the significance of sensitive periods of development for molding personality traits, as well as cognition and socioemotional traits. The potential scarring effects of living during the Great Depression has been investigated.

Previous research suggests that women's motivation to appear attractive is increased around the time of ovulation. However, the specific hormonal correlates of within-woman changes in motivation to appear attractive have not been investigated. To address this issue, we used a longitudinal design and a data-driven visual preference task. We found that women's preference for attractive makeup increases when their salivary testosterone levels are high. The relationship between testosterone level and preference for attractive makeup was independent of estradiol level, progesterone level, and estradiol-to-progesterone ratio. These results suggest that testosterone may contribute to changes in women's motivation to wear attractive makeup and, potentially, their motivation to appear attractive in general. Our results are also consistent with recent models of the role of testosterone in social behavior, according to which testosterone increases the probability of behaviors that could function to support the acquisition of mates and competition for resources.

Arousal is known to shape time perception, and heightened arousal causes one to perceive that time has slowed (i.e., a given length of time feels longer than it actually is). The current experiments illustrate that among White people who experience arousal when contemplating race (specifically those for whom appearing biased is an ongoing concern), time perception slows when they observe faces of Black men. We asked participants to judge the duration of presentation for faces of White and Black men (shown for periods ranging from 300 to 1,200 ms) relative to a standard duration of 600 ms. Evidence of bias emerged when White participants concerned with bias saw faces of Black men (e.g., durations of less than 600 ms were perceived as being greater than 600 ms). The current findings have implications for intergroup interactions in which timing is essential-for example, length of job interviews, police officers' perception of the length of an encounter and when force should be initiated, and doctors' perception of the length of medical encounters. Racially biased time perception is a new form of implicit bias, one exerted at the perceptual level.

Reanalysis of the survey data sets of Lewandowsky, Oberauer, and Gignac (2013) and Lewandowsky, Gignac, and Oberauer (2013) indicates that the conclusions of those articles—that conspiracist ideation predicts skepticism regarding the reality of anthropogenic climate change—are not supported by the data. Nonlinear relationships were overlooked in both analyses, and this resulted in model misspecification. The authors used structural equation modeling (SEM) assuming linear relationships between the variables, and it is essential to test this assumption (Bentler and Chou, 1987, p. 86; Ullman, 2007, p. 683). In this Commentary, we show, using nonparametric local regression, that this assumption does not hold for the relationship between conspiracist ideation and views on climate science, the relationship that produced one of the central claims of both articles and the majority of the press interest (e.g., Corner, 2012; Pearlman, 2012).

The mechanism by which nonspatial features, such as color and shape, are bound in visual working memory, and the role of those features' location in their binding, remains unknown. In the current study, I modified a redundancy-gain paradigm to investigate these issues. A set of features was presented in a two-object memory display, followed by a single object probe. Participants judged whether the probe contained any features of the memory display, regardless of its location. Response time distributions revealed feature coactivation only when both features of a single object in the memory display appeared together in the probe, regardless of the response time benefit from the probe and memory objects sharing the same location. This finding suggests that a shared location is necessary in the formation of bound representations but unnecessary in their maintenance. Electroencephalography data showed that amplitude modulations reflecting location-unbound feature coactivation were different from those reflecting the location-sharing benefit, consistent with the behavioral finding that feature-location binding is unnecessary in the maintenance of color-shape binding.