Knowledge that Transforms

The question of whether or not figure-ground segmentation can occur without attention is unresolved. Early theorists assumed it can, but the evidence is scant and open to alternative interpretations. Recent research indicating that attention can influence figure-ground segmentation raises the question anew. We examined this issue by asking participants to perform a demanding change-detection task on a small matrix presented on a task-irrelevant scene of alternating regions organized into figures and grounds by convexity. Independently of any change in the matrix, the figure-ground organization of the scene changed or remained the same. Changes in scene organization produced congruency effects on target-change judgments, even though, when probed with surprise questions, participants could report neither the figure-ground status of the region on which the matrix appeared nor any change in that status. When attending to the scene, participants reported figure-ground status and changes to it highly accurately. These results clearly demonstrate that figure-ground segmentation can occur without focal attention.

We compare the restorative effects on cognitive functioning of interactions with natural versus urban environments. Attention restoration theory (ART) provides an analysis of the kinds of environments that lead to improvements in directed-attention abilities. Nature, which is filled with intriguing stimuli, modestly grabs attention in a bottom-up fashion, allowing top-down directed-attention abilities a chance to replenish. Unlike natural environments, urban environments are filled with stimulation that captures attention dramatically and additionally requires directed attention (e.g., to avoid being hit by a car), making them less restorative. We present two experiments that show that walking in nature or viewing pictures of nature can improve directed-attention abilities as measured with a backwards digit-span task and the Attention Network Task, thus validating attention restoration theory.

In motion-induced blindness (MIB), salient objects in full view can repeatedly fluctuate into and out of conscious awareness when superimposed onto certain global moving patterns. Here we suggest a new account of this striking phenomenon: Rather than being a failure of visual processing, MIB may be a functional product of the visual system's attempt to separate distal stimuli from artifacts of damage to the visual system itself. When a small object is invariant despite changes that are occurring to a global region of the surrounding visual field, the visual system may discount that stimulus as akin to a scotoma, and may thus expunge it from awareness. We describe three experiments demonstrating new phenomena predicted by this account and discuss how it can also explain several previous results.

People construe the world along a continuum from concretely (focusing on specific, local details) to abstractly (focusing on global essences). We show that people are more likely to interpret the world abstractly when they experience cognitive disfluency, or difficulty processing stimuli in the environment, than when they experience cognitive fluency. We observed this effect using three instantiations of fluency: visual perceptual fluency (Study 1b), conceptual priming fluency (Study 2b), and linguistic fluency (Study 3). Adopting the framework of construal theory, we suggest that one mechanism for this effect is perceivers' tendency to interpret disfluently processed stimuli as farther from their current position than fluently processed stimuli (Studies 1a and 2a).

Central aspects of emotional experiences are often well remembered at the expense of background details. Previous studies of such memory trade-offs have focused on memory after brief delays, but little is known about how these components of emotional memories change over time. We investigated the evolution of memory for negative scenes across 30 min, 12 daytime hours spent awake, and 12 nighttime hours including sleep. After 30 min, negative objects were well remembered at the expense of information about their backgrounds. Time spent awake led to forgetting of the entire negative scene, with memories of objects and their backgrounds decaying at similar rates. Sleep, in contrast, led to a preservation of memories of negative objects, but not their backgrounds, a result suggesting that the two components undergo differential processing during sleep. Memory for a negative scene develops differentially across time delays containing sleep and wake, with sleep selectively consolidating those aspects of memory that are of greatest value to the organism.

People are motivated to maintain social connection with others, and those who lack social connection with other humans may try to compensate by creating a sense of human connection with nonhuman agents. This may occur in at least two ways—by anthropomorphizing nonhuman agents such as nonhuman animals and gadgets to make them appear more humanlike and by increasing belief in commonly anthropomorphized religious agents (such as God). Three studies support these hypotheses both among individuals who are chronically lonely (Study 1) and among those who are induced to feel lonely (Studies 2 and 3). Additional findings suggest that such results are not simply produced by any negative affective state (Study 3). These results have important implications not only for understanding when people are likely to treat nonhuman agents as humanlike (anthropomorphism), but also for understanding when people treat human agents as non-human (dehumanization).

A wealth of research has found that power leads to behavioral approach and action. Four experiments demonstrate that this link between power and approach is broken when the power relationship is illegitimate. When power was primed to be legitimate or when power positions were assigned legitimately, the powerful demonstrated more approach than the powerless. However, when power was experienced as illegitimate, the powerless displayed as much approach as, or even more approach than, the powerful. This moderating effect of legitimacy occurred regardless of whether power and legitimacy were manipulated through experiential primes, semantic primes, or role manipulations. It held true for behavioral approach (Experiment 1) and two effects associated with it: the propensity to negotiate (Experiment 2) and risk preferences (Experiments 3 and 4). These findings demonstrate that how power is conceptualized, acquired, and wielded determines its psychological consequences and add insight into not only when but also why power leads to approach.

Three studies examined the relationships among anger, gender, and status conferral. As in prior research, men who expressed anger in a professional context were conferred higher status than men who expressed sadness. However, both male and female evaluators conferred lower status on angry female professionals than on angry male professionals. This was the case regardless of the actual occupational rank of the target, such that both a female trainee and a female CEO were given lower status if they expressed anger than if they did not. Whereas women's emotional reactions were attributed to internal characteristics (e.g., “she is an angry person,” “she is out of control”), men's emotional reactions were attributed to external circumstances. Providing an external attribution for the target person's anger eliminated the gender bias. Theoretical implications and practical applications are discussed.

Which cognitive processes are accessible to conscious report? To study the limits of conscious reportability, we designed a novel method of quantified introspection, in which subjects were asked, after each trial of a standard cognitive task, to estimate the time spent completing the task. We then applied classical mental-chronometry techniques, such as the additive-factors method, to analyze these introspective estimates of response time. We demonstrate that introspective response time can be a sensitive measure, tightly correlated with objective response time in a single-task context. In a psychological-refractory-period task, however, the objective processing delay resulting from interference by a second concurrent task is totally absent from introspective estimates. These results suggest that introspective estimates of time spent on a task tightly correlate with the period of availability of central processing resources.