Exogenous Attention Enables Perceptual Learning
Practice can improve visual perception, and these improvements are considered to be a form of brain plasticity. Training-induced learning is time-consuming and requires hundreds of trials across multiple days. The process of learning acquisition is understudied. Can learning acquisition be potentiated by manipulating visual attentional cues? We developed a protocol in which we used task-irrelevant cues for between-groups manipulation of attention during training. We found that training with exogenous attention can enable the acquisition of learning. Remarkably, this learning was maintained even when observers were subseque...
Source: Psychological Science - December 10, 2015 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Szpiro, S. F. A., Carrasco, M. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Homosexuality as a Discrete Class
Previous research on the latent structure of sexual orientation has returned conflicting results, with some studies finding a dimensional structure (i.e., ranging quantitatively along a spectrum) and others a taxonic structure (i.e., categories of individuals with distinct orientations). The current study used a sample (N = 33,525) from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC). A series of taxometric analyses were conducted using three indicators of sexual orientation: identity, behavior, and attraction. These analyses, performed separately for women and men, revealed low-base-rate same-...
Source: Psychological Science - December 10, 2015 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Norris, A. L., Marcus, D. K., Green, B. A. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
On Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks
Although older adults rarely outperform young adults on learning tasks, in the study reported here they surpassed their younger counterparts not only by answering more semantic-memory general-information questions correctly, but also by better correcting their mistakes. While both young and older adults exhibited a hypercorrection effect, correcting their high-confidence errors more than their low-confidence errors, the effect was larger for young adults. Whereas older adults corrected high-confidence errors to the same extent as did young adults, they outdid the young in also correcting their low-confidence errors. Their ...
Source: Psychological Science - December 10, 2015 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Metcalfe, J., Casal-Roscum, L., Radin, A., Friedman, D. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Replication in Psychological Science
(Source: Psychological Science)
Source: Psychological Science - December 10, 2015 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Lindsay, D. S. Tags: Editorial Source Type: research
Retraction of "Sadness Impairs Color Perception"
At the request of the authors, the following article has been retracted by the Editor and publishers of Psychological Science:
Thorstenson, C. A., Pazda, A. D., & Elliot, A. J. (2015). Sadness impairs color perception. Psychological Science. Advance online publication. doi:10.1177/0956797615597672 (Source: Psychological Science)
Source: Psychological Science - November 5, 2015 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Tags: Retraction Source Type: research
Theory-of-Mind Training Causes Honest Young Children to Lie
Theory of mind (ToM) has long been recognized to play a major role in children’s social functioning. However, no direct evidence confirms the causal linkage between the two. In the current study, we addressed this significant gap by examining whether ToM causes the emergence of lying, an important social skill. We showed that after participating in ToM training to learn about mental-state concepts, 3-year-olds who originally had been unable to lie began to deceive consistently. This training effect lasted for more than a month. In contrast, 3-year-olds who participated in control training to learn about physical conc...
Source: Psychological Science - November 5, 2015 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Ding, X. P., Wellman, H. M., Wang, Y., Fu, G., Lee, K. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Weight Discrimination and Risk of Mortality
We examined whether this harmful association extends to risk of mortality. Participants in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS; N = 13,692) and the Midlife in the United States Study (MIDUS; N = 5,079) reported on perceived discriminatory experiences and attributed those experiences to a number of personal characteristics, including weight. Weight discrimination was associated with an increase in mortality risk of nearly 60% in both HRS participants (hazard ratio = 1.57, 95% confidence interval = [1.34, 1.84]) and MIDUS participants (hazard ratio = 1.59, 95% confidence interval = [1.09, 2.31]). This increased risk was not...
Source: Psychological Science - November 5, 2015 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Sutin, A. R., Stephan, Y., Terracciano, A. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
The Extravert Advantage: How and When Extraverts Build Rapport With Other People
Extraverts are better than introverts at building rapport, but it remains unknown what they do behaviorally to better connect with other individuals. We hypothesized that extraverts mimic more than introverts as a way to build rapport; however, we predicted that this social skillfulness of extraverts emerges only when they are motivated to affiliate. In Study 1, we found that extraversion predicted increased mimicry when an affiliation goal was present, but not when an affiliation goal was absent. In Study 2, we found that mimicry mediates the relationship between extraversion and rapport, but only when an affiliation goal...
Source: Psychological Science - November 5, 2015 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Duffy, K. A., Chartrand, T. L. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
On Race and Time
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 Whit...
Source: Psychological Science - November 5, 2015 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Moskowitz, G. B., Olcaysoy Okten, I., Gooch, C. M. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Decoding Visual Location From Neural Patterns in the Auditory Cortex of the Congenitally Deaf
Sensory cortices of individuals who are congenitally deprived of a sense can exhibit considerable plasticity and be recruited to process information from the senses that remain intact. Here, we explored whether the auditory cortex of congenitally deaf individuals represents visual field location of a stimulus—a dimension that is represented in early visual areas. We used functional MRI to measure neural activity in auditory and visual cortices of congenitally deaf and hearing humans while they observed stimuli typically used for mapping visual field preferences in visual cortex. We found that the location of a visual...
Source: Psychological Science - November 5, 2015 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Almeida, J., He, D., Chen, Q., Mahon, B. Z., Zhang, F., Goncalves, O. F., Fang, F., Bi, Y. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Nothing Happens by Accident, or Does It? A Low Prior for Randomness Does Not Explain Belief in Conspiracy Theories
Belief in conspiracy theories has often been associated with a biased perception of randomness, akin to a nothing-happens-by-accident heuristic. Indeed, a low prior for randomness (i.e., believing that randomness is a priori unlikely) could plausibly explain the tendency to believe that a planned deception lies behind many events, as well as the tendency to perceive meaningful information in scattered and irrelevant details; both of these tendencies are traits diagnostic of conspiracist ideation. In three studies, we investigated this hypothesis and failed to find the predicted association between low prior for randomness ...
Source: Psychological Science - November 5, 2015 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Dieguez, S., Wagner-Egger, P., Gauvrit, N. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
A Gender Bias in the Attribution of Creativity: Archival and Experimental Evidence for the Perceived Association Between Masculinity and Creative Thinking
We propose that the propensity to think creatively tends to be associated with independence and self-direction—qualities generally ascribed to men—so that men are often perceived to be more creative than women. In two experiments, we found that "outside the box" creativity is more strongly associated with stereotypically masculine characteristics (e.g., daring and self-reliance) than with stereotypically feminine characteristics (e.g., cooperativeness and supportiveness; Study 1) and that a man is ascribed more creativity than a woman when they produce identical output (Study 2). Analyzing archival data, we fou...
Source: Psychological Science - November 5, 2015 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Proudfoot, D., Kay, A. C., Koval, C. Z. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Direct Evidence for Active Suppression of Salient-but-Irrelevant Sensory Inputs
Researchers have long debated whether attentional capture is purely stimulus driven or purely goal driven. In the current study, we tested a hybrid account, called the signal-suppression hypothesis, which posits that stimuli automatically produce a bottom-up salience signal, but that this signal can be suppressed via top-down control processes. To test this account, we used a new capture-probe paradigm in which participants searched for a target shape while ignoring an irrelevant color singleton. On occasional probe trials, letters were briefly presented inside the search shapes, and participants attempted to report these ...
Source: Psychological Science - November 5, 2015 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Gaspelin, N., Leonard, C. J., Luck, S. J. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Conceptual Conditioning: Mechanisms Mediating Conditioning Effects on Pain
Classical conditioning can profoundly modify subsequent pain responses, but the mechanisms that drive this effect are unresolved. In pain-conditioning studies, cues are typically conditioned to primary aversive reinforcers; hence, subsequent pain modulation could reflect learned precognitive associations (i.e., those involving neural plasticity independent of expectations and other forms of conceptual thought) or conceptual expectancies. We isolated conceptual contributions using a thermal pain-conditioning procedure in which different conditioned stimulus (CS) cues were repeatedly paired with symbolic representations of h...
Source: Psychological Science - November 5, 2015 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Jepma, M., Wager, T. D. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Iconic Gestures Facilitate Discourse Comprehension in Individuals With Superior Immediate Memory for Body Configurations
To understand a speaker’s gestures, people may draw on kinesthetic working memory (KWM)—a system for temporarily remembering body movements. The present study explored whether sensitivity to gesture meaning was related to differences in KWM capacity. KWM was evaluated through sequences of novel movements that participants viewed and reproduced with their own bodies. Gesture sensitivity was assessed through a priming paradigm. Participants judged whether multimodal utterances containing congruent, incongruent, or no gestures were related to subsequent picture probes depicting the referents of those utterances. I...
Source: Psychological Science - November 5, 2015 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Wu, Y. C., Coulson, S. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
