May the force be with you
Mark Mills et al.
Behavioural Brain Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Processing an abstract concept such as political ideology by itself is difficult but becomes easier when a background situation contextualizes it. Political ideology within American politics, for example, is commonly processed using space metaphorically, i.e., the political "left" and "right" (referring to Democrat and Republican views, respectively), presumably to provide a common metric to which abstract features of ideology can be grounded and understood. Commonplace use of space as metaphor raises the question of whether an inherently non-spatial stimulus (e.g., picture of the political "left" leader, Barack Obama) can trigger a spatially-specific response (e.g., attentional bias toward "left" regions of the visual field). Accordingly, pictures of well-known Democrats and Republicans were presented as central cues in peripheral target detection (Experiment 1) and saccadic free-choice (Experiment 2) tasks to determine whether perception of stimuli lacking a direct association with physical space nonetheless induce attentional and oculomotor biases in the direction compatible with the ideological category of the cue (i.e., Democrat/left and Republican/right). In Experiment 1, target detection following presentation of a Democrat (Republican) was facilitated for targets appearing to the left (right). In Experiment 2, participants were more likely to look left (right) following presentation of a Democrat (Republican). Thus, activating an internal representation of political ideology induced a shift of attention and biased choice of gaze direction in a spatially-specific manner. These findings demonstrate that the link between conceptual processing and spatial attention can be totally arbitrary, with no reference to physical or symbolic spatial information.
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Shared Experiences Are Amplified
Erica Boothby, Margaret Clark & John Bargh
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
In two studies, we found that sharing an experience with another person, without communicating, amplifies one's experience. Both pleasant and unpleasant experiences were more intense when shared. In Study 1, participants tasted pleasant chocolate. They judged the chocolate to be more likeable and flavorful when they tasted it at the same time that another person did than when that other person was present but engaged in a different activity. Although these results were consistent with our hypothesis that shared experiences are amplified compared with unshared experiences, it could also be the case that shared experiences are more enjoyable in general. We designed Study 2 to distinguish between these two explanations. In this study, participants tasted unpleasantly bitter chocolate and judged it to be less likeable when they tasted it simultaneously with another person than when that other person was present but doing something else. These results support the amplification hypothesis.
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Illusions of Learning: Irrelevant Emotions Inflate Judgments of Learning
Roy Baumeister, Jessica Alquist & Kathleen Vohs
Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, forthcoming
Abstract:
People use assessments of how much they have learned to choose and recommend instructors, seminars, and weekend trips. How do people assess how much they have learned? Recent theorizing has depicted emotion as a cue for learning, and so people may be misled by recent emotional states to infer that they have learned more than they actually have. Four studies showed that people associated emotion with learning and believed, often falsely, that they learned more when in an emotional than unemotional state. Factual lessons were coupled with manipulations of arbitrary, irrelevant emotional states. Participants rated that they learned more after an emotion had been induced than in emotionally neutral control conditions. These differences remained significant after controlling for actual learning as measured by objective tests, which was unaffected by emotion. This illusion of learning caused by emotion was robust with respect to changes of procedure and sample, including whether the emotion came before or after the information to be learned. Alternative explanations were ruled out, including that emotion would intensify ratings generally, that emotion would make incoming information seem particularly personally relevant, that emotion increased engagement in the research, and that illusory learning would depend on retrospective exaggeration of one's prior ignorance. Because irrelevant emotions can increase people's judgments that they have learned something, incidental emotional experiences could increase a person's likelihood of deciding to take another class with a particular instructor, to sign up for another leadership seminar, or to engage in a risky (but emotion-filled) excursion.
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John Gaspar et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Cell-phone use impairs driving safety and performance. This impairment may stem from the remote partner's lack of awareness about the driving situation. In this study, pairs of participants completed a driving simulator task while conversing naturally in the car and while talking on a hands-free cell phone. In a third condition, the driver drove while the remote conversation partner could see video of both the road ahead and the driver's face. We tested the extent to which this additional visual information diminished the negative effects of cell-phone distraction and increased situational awareness. Collision rates for unexpected merging events were high when participants drove in a cell-phone condition but were reduced when they were in a videophone condition, reaching a level equal to that observed when they drove with an in-car passenger or drove alone. Drivers and their partners made shorter utterances and made longer, more frequent traffic references when they spoke in the videophone rather than the cellphone condition. Providing a view of the driving scene allows remote partners to help drivers by modulating their conversation and referring to traffic more often.
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Vanessa Buechner et al.
PLoS ONE, September 2014
Abstract:
Color research has shown that red is associated with avoidance of threat (e.g., failure) or approach of reward (e.g., mating) depending on the context in which it is perceived. In the present study we explored one central cognitive process that might be involved in the context dependency of red associations. According to our theory, red is supposed to highlight the relevance (importance) of a goal-related stimulus and correspondingly intensifies the perceivers' attentional reaction to it. Angry and happy human compared to non-human facial expressions were used as goal-relevant stimuli. The data indicate that the color red leads to enhanced attentional engagement to angry and happy human facial expressions (compared to neutral ones) - the use of non-human facial expressions does not bias attention. The results are discussed with regard to the idea that red induced attentional biases might explain the red-context effects on motivation.
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John Meixner & Peter Rosenfeld
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Autobiographical memory for events experienced during normal daily life has been studied at the group level, but no studies have yet examined the ability to detect recognition of incidentally acquired memories among individual subjects. We present the first such study here, which employed a concealed-information test in which subjects were shown words associated with activities they had experienced the previous day. Subjects wore a video-recording device for 4 hr on Day 1 and then returned to the laboratory on Day 2, where they were shown words relating to events recorded with the camera (probe items) and words of the same category but not relating to the subject's activities (irrelevant items). Electroencephalograms were recorded, and presentation of probe items was associated with a large peak in the amplitude of the P300 component. We were able to discriminate perfectly between 12 knowledgeable subjects who viewed stimuli related to their activities and 12 nonknowledgeable subjects who viewed only irrelevant items. These results have strong implications for the use of memory-detection paradigms in criminal contexts.
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Advertising Memory: The Power of Mirror Neurons
Sophie Lacoste-Badie & Olivier Droulers
Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
As part of the insights of neuroscience available for the study of advertising, the concept of mirror neurons provides opportunities for new research. Mirror neurons are a particular class of visuomotor neurons in the brain that show activity both when an individual performs an action and when he observes another individual performing the same action. According to researchers in cognitive neuroscience, mirror neurons are the brain basis for learning by imitation. The observation of 2 types of movement specifically causes the mirror neurons activation: "grasping with the hand" and "bringing to the mouth." This article seeks to show that TV commercials, in which a character grabs a food product and brings it to his mouth, are more effective. To investigate this research question we designed a between-subjects experiment (n = 130) to compare the memorization of 2 versions of the same ad (featuring an unfamiliar mineral water brand). In the first ad version, the character grabs the product, while there is no contact between the product and the character in the second version. The article outlines that memory was higher in the grasping and drinking condition. Although we cannot conclusively say that the mirror neurons were activated when people saw the character grabbing the product in the ad, the literature on mirror neurons provides an explanatory framework for the observed results. In other words, this study points out that the discovery of mirror neurons is a very new concept for marketing, which can enrich our understanding of advertising processing.
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Jan Van Strien, Ingmar Franken & Jorg Huijding
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, September 2014
Abstract:
According to the snake detection hypothesis (Isbell, 2006), fear specifically of snakes may have pushed evolutionary changes in the primate visual system allowing pre-attentional visual detection of fearful stimuli. A previous study demonstrated that snake pictures, when compared to spiders or bird pictures, draw more early attention as reflected by larger early posterior negativity (EPN). Here we report two studies that further tested the snake detection hypothesis. In Study 1, we tested whether the enlarged EPN is specific for snakes or also generalizes to other reptiles. Twenty-four healthy, non-phobic women watched the random rapid serial presentation of snake, crocodile, and turtle pictures. The EPN was scored as the mean activity at occipital electrodes (PO3, O1, Oz, PO4, O2) in the 225-300 ms time window after picture onset. The EPN was significantly larger for snake pictures than for pictures of the other reptiles. In Study 2, we tested whether disgust plays a role in the modulation of the EPN and whether preferential processing of snakes also can be found in men. 12 men and 12 women watched snake, spider, and slug pictures. Both men and women exhibited the largest EPN amplitudes to snake pictures, intermediate amplitudes to spider pictures and the smallest amplitudes to slug pictures. Disgust ratings were not associated with EPN amplitudes. The results replicate previous findings and suggest that ancestral priorities modulate the early capture of visual attention.
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"Good Is Up" Is Not Always Better: A Memory Advantage for Words in Metaphor-Incompatible Locations
Elizabeth Crawford, Stephanie Cohn & Arnold Kim
PLoS ONE, September 2014
Abstract:
Four experiments examined whether memory for positive and negative words depended on word location and vertical hand movements. Cognitive processing is known to be facilitated when valenced stimuli are presented in locations that are congruent with the GOOD is UP conceptual metaphor, relative to when they are presented in incongruent locations. In both free recall and recognition tasks, we find a memory advantage for words that had been studied in metaphor incongruent locations (positive down, negative up). This incongruity advantage depends on the location of words during encoding, but no evidence was found to suggest that other spatial associations, such as the vertical position of the hand at encoding or word location during retrieval, affect memory. The results indicate that metaphors, like schemas, categories, and stereotypes, can influence cognition in complex ways, producing variable outcomes across different tasks.
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From threat to safety: Instructed reversal of defensive reactions
Vincent Costa, Margaret Bradley & Peter Lang
Psychophysiology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Cues that signal the possibility of receiving an electric shock reliably induce defensive activation. To determine whether cues can also easily reverse defensive reactions, a threat reversal paradigm was developed in which a cue signaling threat of shock reversed its meaning across the course of the study. This allowed us to contrast defensive reactions to threat cues that became safe cues, with responses to cues that continued to signal threat or safety. Results showed that, when participants were instructed that a previously threatening cue now signaled safety, there was an immediate and complete attenuation of defensive reactions compared to threat cues that maintained their meaning. These findings highlight the role that language can play both in instantiating and attenuating defensive reactions, with implications for understanding emotion regulation, social communication, and clinical phenomena.