Alexithymia is a trait where individuals have difficulty identifying feeling and finding a word to express emotion. Some studies have suggested that this deficit is due to dissociation (repression), or an inability to perceive emotions, whereas others argued that the deficit is due to suppression of emotional information after it...
Visual hindsight bias, also known as the “saw-it-all-along” effect, is the tendency to overestimate one’s perceptual abilities with the aid of outcome knowledge. The present study investigated visual hindsight bias for facial stimuli. Experiment 1 adopted the visual hindsight bias paradigm from Harley et al. (2004) and replicated their findings...
Visual working memory (VWM) allows us temporarily hold images in our minds and manipulate them. As an example, you can remember a face you just saw, or try to imagine how a room would look with a different arrangement of furniture. Previous studies have shown that individuals with low VWM...
In rapid serial visual presentation, identification of the second of two targets is impaired when it closely follows the first target. This phenomenon is known as the attentional blink (AB) effect. Awh and his colleagues (2004) found that face discrimination was immune to AB when performed together with a digit...
Task-set inhibition has been proposed to be an important mechanism for cognitive control in task switching. Its existence is supported largely by the observation of the N-2 repetition cost (e.g., A-B-A is slower than C-B-A). Many studies have reported an N-2 repetition cost, but several have not. Because of the...
Previous studies using an incidental learning paradigm have found that facial emotion enhances subsequent face recognition. The present study examined whether emotion enhances only memory for the specific emotional features, or whether it also enhances general memory of that person's identity. Prior to the study, we had 20 participants validate...
Previous studies have suggested that LEET words can automatically activate lexical information because of their physical similarity to real words (e.g., Perea, Duñabeitia, & Carreiras, 2008). Lien, Allen, and Martin (in press) recently used electrophysiological measures (event-related brain potentials; ERPs) to show similar lexical/semantic activation (based on the N400 effect,...
The present study examined whether semantic activation for words occurs by encoding whole word shape in addition to individual letters. We used LEET stimuli, where digits were used as parts of words, such as “R34DING” instead of “READING”. Previous studies have suggested that LEET stimuli are encoded in a letter-like...
The present study examined whether semantic activation for words occurs by encoding whole word shape in addition to individual letters. We used LEET stimuli, where digits were used as parts of words, such as “R34DING” instead of “READING”. Previous studies have suggested that LEET stimuli are encoded in a letter-like...
Jung, Ruthruff, Tybur, Gaspelin, and Miller (2012) reported behavioral evidence that the perception of facial attractiveness requires central attentional resources. We evaluated this conclusion using more sensitive electrophysiological measures. Participants first made an attractiveness rating on faces to validate the assigned level of attractiveness (low vs. high). They then performed...