Knowledge that Transforms

Being objectively close to or far from a place changes how people perceive the location of that place in a subjective, psychological sense. In the six studies reported here, we investigated whether people's spatial orientation (defined as moving toward or away from a place) will produce similar effects-by specifically influencing psychological closeness in each of its forms (i.e., spatial, temporal, probabilistic, and social distance). Orientation influenced subjective spatial distance at various levels of objective distance (Study 1), regardless of the direction people were facing (Study 2). In addition, when spatially oriented toward, rather than away from, a particular place, participants felt that events there had occurred more recently (Studies 3a and 3b) and that events there would be more likely to occur (Study 4). Finally, participants felt more similarity to people who were spatially oriented toward them than to people who were spatially oriented away from them (Study 5). Our investigation broadens the study of psychological distance from static spatial locations to dynamically moving points in space.

Gaze following is an essential human communication cue that orients the attention of two interacting people to the same external object. This capability is robustly observed after 7 months of age in full-term infants. Do healthy preterm infants benefit from their early exposure to face-to-face interactions with other humans to acquire this capacity sooner than full-term infants of the same chronological age, despite their immature brains? In two different experiments, we demonstrated that 7-month-old preterm infants performed like 7-month-old full-term infants (with whom they shared the same chronological age) and not like 4-month-old full-term infants (with whom they shared the same postmenstrual age). The duration of exposure to visual experience thus appears to have a greater impact on the development of early gaze following than does postmenstrual age.

Forgiveness is considered to play a key role in the maintenance of social relationships, the avoidance of unnecessary conflict, and the ability to move forward with one's life. But why is it that some people find it easier to forgive and forget than others? In the current study, we explored the supposed relationship between forgiveness and forgetting. In an initial session, 30 participants imagined that they were the victim in a series of hypothetical incidents and indicated whether or not they would forgive the transgressor. Following a standard think/no-think procedure, in which participants were trained to think or not to think about some of these incidents, more forgetting was observed for incidents that had been forgiven following no-think instructions compared with either think or baseline instructions. In contrast, no such forgetting effects emerged for incidents that had not previously been forgiven. These findings have implications for goal-directed forgetting and the relationship between forgiveness and memory.

It is generally thought that increased attention helps when one is learning a new task. However, using a dual-task paradigm, we showed that the rate of visuomotor learning was the same regardless of attentional distraction caused by a secondary task. Yet, when participants were tested later, a motor skill learned under distraction was remembered only when a similar distraction was present; when participants were tested without the distracting task, their performance reverted to untrained levels. This paradoxical result, in which the level of performance decreases when more attentional resources are available, suggests that the dual-task context, or the lack thereof, acts as a vital context for learning. This task-context-dependent "savings" was evident even when the specific secondary task or sensory modality differed between learning and recall; thus, the dual tasking, rather than the specific stimuli, provides context. This discovery suggests that the success of learning and rehabilitation programs may be diminished if they are developed without consideration of the role of task contexts.

In the study reported here, data from implicit and behavioral choice measures did not support sexual economics theory's (SET's) central tenet that women view female sexuality as a commodity. Instead, men endorsed sexual exchange more than women did, which supports the idea that SET is a vestige of patriarchy. Further, men's sexual advice, more than women's, enforced the sexual double standard (i.e., men encouraged men more than women to have casual sex)-a gender difference that was mediated by hostile sexism, but also by men's greater implicit investment in sexual economics. That is, men were more likely to suppress female sexuality because they resisted female empowerment and automatically associated sex with money more than women did. It appears that women are not invested in sexual economics, but rather, men are invested in patriarchy, even when it means raising the price of sexual relations.

Research on scene categorization generally concentrates on gist processing, particularly the speed and minimal features with which the "story" of a scene can be extracted. However, this focus has led to a paucity of research into how scenes are categorized at specific hierarchical levels (e.g., a scene could be a road or more specifically a highway); consequently, research has disregarded a potential diagnostically driven feedback process. We presented participants with scenes that were low-pass filtered so only their gist was revealed, while a gaze-contingent window provided the fovea with full-resolution details. By recording where in a scene participants fixated prior to making a basic- or subordinate-level judgment, we identified the scene information accrued when participants made either categorization. We observed a feedback process, dependent on categorization level, that systematically accrues sufficient and detailed diagnostic information from the same scene. Our results demonstrate that during scene processing, a diagnostically driven bidirectional interplay between top-down and bottom-up information facilitates relevant category processing.

Maximizing science achievement is a critical target of educational policy and has important implications for national and international economic and technological competitiveness. Previous research has identified both science interest and socioeconomic status (SES) as robust predictors of science achievement, but little research has examined their joint effects. In a data set drawn from approximately 400,000 high school students from 57 countries, we documented large Science Interest × SES and Science Interest × Per Capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) interactions in the prediction of science achievement. Student interest in science is a substantially stronger predictor of science achievement in higher socioeconomic contexts and in higher-GDP nations. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that in higher-opportunity contexts, motivational factors play larger roles in learning and achievement. They add to the growing body of evidence indicating that substantial cross-national differences in psychological effect sizes are not simply a logical possibility but, in many cases, an empirical reality.

Using functional MRI, we investigated reality monitoring for auditory information. During scanning, healthy young adults heard words in another person's voice and imagined hearing other words in that same voice. Later, outside the scanner, participants judged words as "heard," "imagined," or "new." An area of left middle frontal gyrus (Brodmann's area, or BA, 6) was more active at encoding for imagined items subsequently correctly called "imagined" than for items incorrectly called "heard." An area of left inferior frontal gyrus (BA 45, 44) was more active at encoding for items subsequently called "heard" than "imagined," regardless of the actual source of the item. Scores on an Auditory Hallucination Experience Scale were positively related to activity in superior temporal gyrus (BA 22) for imagined words incorrectly called "heard." We suggest that activity in these areas reflects cognitive operations information (middle frontal gyrus) and semantic and perceptual detail (inferior frontal gyrus and superior temporal gyrus, respectively) used to make reality-monitoring attributions.

Both emotional facial expressions and markers of racial-group belonging are ubiquitous signals in social interaction, but little is known about how these signals together affect future behavior through learning. To address this issue, we investigated how emotional (threatening or friendly) in-group and out-group faces reinforced behavior in a reinforcement-learning task. We asked whether reinforcement learning would be modulated by intergroup attitudes (i.e., racial bias). The results showed that individual differences in racial bias critically modulated reinforcement learning. As predicted, racial bias was associated with more efficiently learned avoidance of threatening out-group individuals. We used computational modeling analysis to quantitatively delimit the underlying processes affected by social reinforcement. These analyses showed that racial bias modulates the rate at which exposure to threatening out-group individuals is transformed into future avoidance behavior. In concert, these results shed new light on the learning processes underlying social interaction with racial-in-group and out-group individuals.