Express saccade experiments imply that attention shifts take time. We extend this result with new experiments on manual reaction times. Reaction to a cued target is always slower than reaction to an uncued control, even when the cue is correct, if control trials are blocked to prevent interference from cued trials. Attention functions not to speed response, but to prevent responses at irrelevant locations.

ABSTRACTCognitive control enables us to adjust behaviours according to task demands, and emotion influences the cognitive control. We examined how task-irrelevant emotional stimuli impact the ability to inhibit a prepared response and then programme another appropriate response. In the study, either a single target or two sequential targets appeared after emotional face images. Subjects were required to freely viewed the emotional faces and make a saccade quickly upon target onset, but inhibit their initial saccades and redirect gaze to (...) the second target if it appeared. We found that subjects were less successful at inhibiting their initial saccades as the inter-target delay increased. Emotional faces further reduced their inhibition ability with a longer delay, but not with a shorter delay. When subjects failed to inhibit the initial saccade, the longer delay produced longer intersaccadic interval. Especially, positive faces lengthened the intersaccadic interval with a l... (shrink)

Recent work in psychology on ‘cultural cognition’ suggests that our cultural background drives our attitudes towards a range of politically contentious issues in science such as global warming. This work is part of a more general attempt to investigate the ways in which our wants, wishes and desires impact on our assessments of information, events and theories. Put crudely, the idea is that we conform our assessments of the evidence for and against scientific theories with clear political relevance to our (...) pre-existing political beliefs and convictions. In this paper I explore the epistemological consequences of cultural cognition. What does it mean for the rationality of our beliefs about issues such as global warming? I argue for an unsettling conclusion. Not only are those on the ‘political right’ who reject the scientific consensus on issues like global warming unjustified in doing so, some of those on the ‘political left’ who accept the consensus are also unjustified in doing so. I finish by addressing the practical implications of my conclusions. (shrink)

Political activists drive around with bumper stickers proclaiming their commitment to equality. Perhaps the bumper sticker loudly asserts “=!” Oppressed people lament their lack of equality. Political philosophers contemplate equality and try to formulate general principles about it. In recent days, some advocates of marriage rights for same-sex couples argued for their view by claiming it’s just a matter of equality. Indeed, one of their advocacy websites uses the name ‘Equality’.1 They want equal rights. Everyone seems to take it (...) for granted that equality is important. This seems entirely wrong to me. It seems to me that equality is legally (and politically and socially and economically and morally) irrelevant. (shrink)

Current perspectives on attractiveness-related prosocial biases emphasize the contribution of evolutionarily shaped mating drives. Here, we extend these concepts by highlighting the pivotal role of the hypothalamic peptide oxytocin in augmenting the salience and rewarding value of social stimuli, including the partner's face, thereby fostering social bonding in general and the stability of monogamous pair bonds and offspring care in particular.

Affect mirroring allows infants to distinguish emotional and intentional states of significant others, which – in the pursuit of their own drive satisfaction, including satisfaction of the affiliative drive – become important contextual stimuli predictive of reward. Learning to perceive and manipulate others' attitudes toward oneself in pursuit of affiliative reward may be an important step in social development that is impaired in autism.

Relevance drives our actions and channels our attention; it shapes how we make sense of the world and communicate with each other. Irrelevance spreads a twilight which blurs the line between information we do not want to access and information we cannot access. In disciplines as diverse as philosophy, sociology, the information sciences and linguistics, “relevance” has been proposed as a key concept. This book is the first to bring together the often unrelated traditions. Researchers from different fields discuss relevance (...) and relate it to the challenges of “irrelevance”, which have so far been neglected despite their significance for our chances of making well-informed decisions and understanding others. The contributions focus on theoretical and conceptual questions, on specific factors and fields, and on practical and political implications of relevance and irrelevance as forces which are even stronger when they remain in the background. (shrink)

The present study was designed to explore the performance costs of negative emotional stimuli in a vigilance task. Forty participants performed a vigilance task in two conditions: one with task-irrelevant negative-arousing pictures and one with task-irrelevant neutral pictures. In addition to performance, we measured subjective state and frontal cerebral activity with near infrared spectroscopy. Overall performance in the negative picture condition was lower than in the neutral picture condition and the negative picture condition had elevated levels of (...) energetic arousal, tense arousal and task-related thoughts. Moreover, there was a significant relationship between the impact of the negative pictures on tense arousal and task-related thoughts and the impact of the negative pictures on performance . These results provide support for indirect cost models of negative emotional stimuli on target detection performance. (shrink)

A growing body of research indicates that attentional biases toward emotional stimuli are not automatic, but may depend on the relevance of emotion to the top-down search goals of the observer. To...

The effect of recent experience on current behavior has been studied extensively in simple laboratory tasks. We explore the nature of sequential effects in the more naturalistic setting of automobile driving. Driving is a safety-critical task in which delayed response times may have severe consequences. Using a realistic driving simulator, we find significant sequential effects in pedal-press response times that depend on the history of recent stimuli and responses. Response times are slowed up to 100 ms in particular cases, (...) a delay that has dangerous practical consequences. Further, we observe a significant number of history-related pedal misapplications, which have recently been noted as a cause for concern in the automotive safety community. By anticipating these consequences of sequential context, driver assistance systems could mitigate the effects of performance degradations and thus critically improve driver safety. (shrink)

Commentators usually agree that Locke's discussion of thinking matter is intended to undermine the plausibility of the belief in the existence of the soul. In this paper I argue that, instead of trying to reveal the implausibility of this belief, Locke seeks to rid the concept of the soul of its traditional cognitive and moral functions in order to render references to the soul redundant in philosophical explanations of the nature of human beings and their place in the world. On (...) this reading, the driving force behind Locke's discussion is not a sceptical problem posed by the impossibility of proving the existence of the soul, but the wish to maximize the ability of limited creatures such as ourselves to engage positively with their lives in the here and now. Locke's experience-focused philosophy will here present itself as a position with significant moral implications. (shrink)

Selective retrieval of task-relevant information often facilitates memory retention of that information. However, it is still unclear if selective retrieval of task-relevant information can alter memory for task-irrelevant information, and the role of emotional arousal in it. In two experiments, we used emotional and neutral faces as stimuli, and participants were asked to memorise the name (who is this person?) and location (where does he/she come from?) associated with each face in initial study. Then, half of the studied (...) faces were presented as cues, and participants were asked to retrieve the corresponding names (Experiment 1) or locations (Experiment 2). Finally, all the faces were presented and participants were asked to retrieve both the corresponding names and locations. The results of the final test showed that retrieval practice not only enhanced memory of task-relevant information but also enhanced memory of task-irrelevant information. More importantly, negative emotion amplified the retrieval practice effect overall, with a larger retrieval-induced benefit for the negative than neutral condition. These findings demonstrated an emotional arousal amplification effect on retrieval-induced enhancement effects, suggesting that the advantage of the retrieved memory representations can be amplified by emotional arousal even without explicit goals in a task setting. (shrink)

It has been consistently demonstrated that fear-relevant images capture attention preferentially over fear-irrelevant images. Current theory suggests that this faster processing could be mediated by an evolved module that allows certain stimulus features to attract attention automatically, prior to the detailed processing of the image. The present research investigated whether simplified images of fear-relevant stimuli would produce interference with target detection in a visual search task. In Experiment 1, silhouettes and degraded silhouettes of fear-relevant animals produced more interference (...) than did the fear-irrelevant images. Experiment 2, compared the effects of fear-relevant and fear-irrelevant distracters and confirmed that the interference produced by fear-relevant distracters was not an effect of novelty. Experiment 3 suggested that fear-relevant stimuli produced interference regardless of whether participants were instructed as to the content of the images. The three experiments indicate that even very simplistic images of fear-relevant animals can divert attention. (shrink)

It has been claimed that a broad attentional breadth buffers the impact of negative stimuli on human perception and cognition. Here we identify issues with the research on which this claim is based, and then rigorously test the claim. To induce narrow versus broad attentional breadth participants attended to the local versus global elements of Navon stimuli, and to investigate the impact of emotionally salient stimuli on performance we measured the effect of task-irrelevant stimuli of (...) varying emotional salience (negative, neutral, or positive) on task performance. Across a series of experiments, we found that the Navon stimuli were effective in inducing different attentional breadths, and that both negative and positive task-irrelevant stimuli slowed responses relative to neutral stimuli, but that the magnitude of this emotion-induced slowing was invariant to whether attentional breadth was broad or narrow. This indicates that a broad attentional breadth did not buffer against the effect of either negative or positive emotionally salient stimuli. These results challenge the claim the broadening attentional breadth protects against the impact of emotionally salient stimuli. (shrink)

Anxiety has been associated with enhanced unconscious processing of threat and attentional biases towards threat. Here, we focused on the phenomenology of perception in anxiety and examined whether threat-related material more readily enters anxious than non-anxious individuals’ awareness. In six experiments, we compared the stimulus exposures required for each anxiety group to become objectively or subjectively aware of masked facial stimuli varying in emotional expression. Crucially, target emotion was task irrelevant. We found that high trait-anxiety individuals required less (...) sensory evidence to become aware of the face targets. This anxiety-based difference was observed for fearful faces in all experiments, but with non-threat faces, it emerged only when these were presented among threatening faces. Our findings suggest a prominent role for affective context in high-anxiety individuals’ conscious perception of visual stimuli. Possible mechanisms underlying the influence of context in lowering awareness thresholds in anxious individuals are discussed. (shrink)

There is widespread agreement in neuroscience and psychology that the visual system identifies objects and faces based on a pattern of activation over many neurons, each neuron being involved in representing many different categories. The hypothesis that the visual system includes finely tuned neurons for specific objects or faces for the sake of identification, so‐called “grandmother cells”, is widely rejected. Here it is argued that the rejection of grandmother cells is premature. Grandmother cells constitute a hypothesis of how familiar visual (...) categories are identified, but the primary evidence against this hypothesis comes from studies that have failed to observe neurons that selectively respond to unfamiliar stimuli. These findings are reviewed and it is shown that they are irrelevant. Neuroscientists need to better understand existing models of face and object identification that include grandmother cells and then compare the selectivity of these units with single neurons responding to stimuli that can be identified. (shrink)

As documented by Darwin 150 years ago, emotion expressed in human faces readily draws our attention and promotes sympathetic emotional reactions. How do such reactions to the expression of emotion affect our goal-directed actions? Despite the substantial advance made in the neural mechanisms of both cognitive control and emotional processing, it is not yet known well how these two systems interact. Here, we studied how emotion expressed in human faces influences cognitive control of conflict processing, spatial selective attention and inhibitory (...) control in particular, using the Eriksen flanker paradigm. In this task, participants viewed displays of a central target face flanked by peripheral faces and were asked to judge the gender of the target face; task-irrelevant emotion expressions were embedded in the target face, the flanking faces, or both. We also monitored how emotion expression affects gender judgment performance while varying the relative timing between the target and flanker faces. As previously reported, we found robust gender congruency effects, namely slower responses to the target faces whose gender was incongruent with that of the flanker faces, when the flankers preceded the target by 0.1 s. When the flankers further advanced the target by 0.3 s, however, the congruency effect vanished in most of the viewing conditions, except for when emotion was expressed only in the flanking faces or when congruent emotion was expressed in the target and flanking faces. These results suggest that emotional saliency can prolong a substantial degree of conflict by diverting bottom-up attention away from the target, and that inhibitory control on task-irrelevant information from flanking stimuli is deterred by the emotional congruency between target and flanking stimuli. (shrink)

It is thought that just as hunger itself, the expectancy to eat impacts attention and cognitive control toward food stimuli, but this theory has not been extensively explored at a behavioral level. In order to study the effect of expectancy to eat on attentional and cognitive control mechanisms, 63 healthy fasting participants were presented with an affective priming spatial compatibility Simon task that included both food and object distracters. The participants were randomly assigned to two groups: an “immediate expectancy” (...) group made up of participants who expected to eat immediately after the task and a “delayed expectancy” cohort made up of individuals who expected to eat a few hours later. Slower reaction times toward the food and non-food distracters and a more pronounced effect on the RTs in the incompatible condition [i.e., the Simon effect ] were noted in both groups. The effect of the food and non-food distracters on the RTs was more pronounced in the immediate with respect to the delayed expectancy group. The magnitude of the SE for the food and the non-food distracters was also greater in the immediate with respect to the delayed expectancy group. These results seem to indicate that when the expectancy to eat is short, the RTs are delayed, and the SE is more pronounced when food and non-food distracters are presented. Instead, when the expectancy to eat is more distant, the distracters have less of an effect on the RTs and the correspondence effect is smaller. Our results suggest that the expectancy to eat can modulate both attention orienting and cognitive control mechanisms in healthy fasting individuals when distracting details are competing with information processing during goal directed behavior. (shrink)

ABSTRACTOther people’s emotional reactions to a third person’s behaviour are potentially informative about what is appropriate within a given situation. We investigated whether and how observers’ inferences of such injunctive norms are shaped by expressions of anger and disgust. Building on the moral emotions literature, we hypothesised that angry and disgusted expressions produce relative differences in the strength of autonomy-based versus purity-based norm inferences. We report three studies using different types of stimuli to investigate how emotional reactions shape norms (...) about potential norm violations, and contexts. Consistent with our theoretical argument, the results indicate that observers use others’ emotional reactions not only to infer whether a particular behaviour is inappropriate, but also why it is inappropriate: because it primarily violates auto... (shrink)

This book offers a radical alternative to the positive orientation of popular psychology. This positive orientation has been criticized numerous times. However, there has yet to be a coherent alternative proposed. We all know today that life hurts and that there is no ultimate remedy to this pain. The positive approach feels to us as dishonest and irrelevant. We require a new, more negative, perspective and practice, one that is honest and does not pretend to offer an escape from (...) the agonies of the world. This book offers in three main chapters a ‘depressive realist’ perspective that explores the structural role of negativity and tragedy in relation to the individual psyche, society, and nature. It explores the possibility of ‘negative psychoanalysis’ which takes into account the tragedy of human existence instead of adopting escapist positions. (shrink)

"Golf day 2005 @ federal golf club, red hill." Ethos: Official Publication of the Law Society of the Australian Capital Territory, (196), pp. 7.

Irrelevant emotional stimuli often capture attention, disrupting ongoing cognitive processes. In two experiments, we examined whether availability of rewards can prevent...

The mere presence of irrelevant external stimuli results in interference with the fidelity of details retrieved from long-term memory (LTM). Recent studies suggest that distractibility during LTM retrieval occurs when the focus of resource-limited, top-down mechanisms that guide the selection of relevant mnemonic details is disrupted by representations of external distractors. We review findings from four studies that reveal distractibility during episodic retrieval. The approach cued participants to recall previously studied visual details when their eyes were closed, or (...) were open and irrelevant visual information was present. The results showed a negative impact of the distractors on the fidelity of details retrieved from LTM. An fMRI experiment using the same paradigm replicated the behavioral results and found that diminished episodic memory was associated with the disruption of functional connectivity in whole-brain networks. Specifically, network connectivity supported recollection of details based on visual imagery when eyes were closed, but connectivity declined in the presence of visual distractors. Another experiment using auditory distractors found equivalent effects for auditory and visual distraction during cued recall, suggesting that the negative impact of distractibility is a domain-general phenomenon in LTM. Comparisons between older and younger adults revealed an aging-related increase in the negative impact of distractibility on retrieval of LTM. Finally, a new study that compared categorization abilities between younger and older adults suggests a cause underlying age-related decline of visual details in LTM. The sum of our findings suggests that cognitive control resources, although limited, have the capability to resolve interference from distractors during tasks of moderate effort, but these resources are overwhelmed when additional processes associated with episodic retrieval, or categorization of complex prototypes, are required. (shrink)