Knowledge that Transforms

Two experiments tested when and why women's typically negative, spontaneous reactions to sexual imagery would soften. Sexual economics theory predicts that women want sex to be seen as rare and special. We reasoned that this outlook would translate to women tolerating sexual images more when those images are linked to high worth as opposed to low worth. We manipulated whether an ad promoted an expensive or a cheap product using a sexually charged or a neutral scene. As predicted, women found sexual imagery distasteful when it was used to promote a cheap product, but this reaction to sexual imagery was mitigated if the product promoted was expensive. This pattern was not observed among men. Furthermore, we predicted and found that sexual ads promoting cheap products heightened feelings of being upset and angry among women. These findings suggest that women's reactions to sexual images can reveal deep-seated preferences about how sex should be used and understood.

Simple decisions require the processing and evaluation of perceptual and cognitive information, the formation of a decision, and often the execution of a motor response. This process involves the accumulation of evidence over time until a particular choice reaches a decision threshold. Using a random-dot-motion stimulus, we showed that simply delaying responses after the stimulus offset can almost double accuracy, even in the absence of new incoming visual information. However, under conditions in which the otherwise blank interval was filled with a sensory mask or concurrent working memory load was high, performance gains were lost. Further, memory and perception showed equivalent rates of evidence accumulation, suggesting a high-capacity memory store. We propose an account of continued evidence accumulation by sequential sampling from a simultaneously decaying memory trace. Memories typically decay with time, hence immediate inquiry trumps later recall from memory. However, the results we report here show the inverse: Inspecting a memory trumps viewing the actual object.

It has been suggested that a neural instantiation of the temporary multidimensional representations of objects might be synchrony of firing between the neurons representing the features that co-occur in a given location. In this article, we direct attention to a logical problem that arises when certain synchrony assumptions are applied to real situations in which multiple multidimensional objects are presented. We demonstrate a new behavioral effect that shows that this logical problem coincides with a genuine behavioral problem. Even when a display contains only a small number of objects characterized by features on two dimensions, the representation of the display becomes difficult when, according to our described assumptions, the object representations cannot be simultaneously synchronized on both features. This article outlines a new principle that governs object representation, and the experimental results might be unique behavioral evidence for a neural-based theory of feature binding.

Identifying the precise locus of general cognitive ability (g) in the flow of information between perception and action is an important goal of differential psychology. To localize the negative correlation between g and reaction time to a specific processing stage, we administered a speeded number-comparison task to two groups differing in average g. The participants had to respond to two stimuli in each trial, which produced the well-known slowing of the second reaction time known as the psychological refractory period. The difference in the second reaction time favoring the high-g group doubled as the stimulus onsets became very close together. This finding affirms that the faster reaction times of higher-g individuals reflect an advantage exclusively in the serial bottleneck of central processing and not in the parallel peripheral stages.

In the field study reported here (N = 222,924), we found that Germans with noble-sounding surnames, such as Kaiser ("emperor"), König ("king"), and Fürst ("prince"), more frequently hold managerial positions than Germans with last names that either refer to common everyday occupations, such as Koch ("cook"), Bauer ("farmer"), and Becker/Bäcker ("baker"), or do not refer to any social role. This phenomenon occurs despite the fact that noble-sounding surnames never indicated that the person actually held a noble title. Because of basic properties of associative cognition, the status linked to a name may spill over to its bearer and influence his or her occupational outcomes.

Bernard, Gervais, Allen, Campomizzi, and Klein (2012) report an inversion effect only when participants viewed sexualized male body images and not when they viewed sexualized female body images. On the basis of a belief that face and person recognition is subject to an inversion effect (Rossion, 2008; Yin, 1969) but that object recognition is not, the authors concluded that “at a basic cognitive level, sexualized men were perceived as persons, whereas sexualized women were perceived as objects” (p. 470). The inference is that different visual-recognition processes are applied to images of males and images of females. This conclusion is unwarranted on empirical, methodological, and logical grounds.

Recent studies have demonstrated that brief periods of training facilitate the ability to overcome distraction during future performance of a given task, and researchers have proposed that these effects rely on relational memory systems that enable individuals to link specific attentional states to their learned context. In the current work, we examined whether medial temporal lobe (MTL) structures critical for relational and contextual learning contribute to these effects. A group of amnesic patients with bilateral MTL damage and a group of matched comparison subjects both completed an attentional-capture task in which a brief training session typically leads to decreased distraction in a subsequent testing session. Whereas the comparison subjects showed normal training-related decreases in distractibility, the amnesic patients did not. Thus, our results indicate that MTL-mediated learning plays a critical role in the ability to use past experience to overcome distraction. This suggests a tight linkage between MTL-dependent relational-learning mechanisms and cognitive control.