The role of memory and restricted context in repeated visual search

Previous studies have shown that the efficiency of visual search does not improve when participants search through the same unchanging display for hundreds of trials (repeated search), even though the participants have a clear memory of the search display. In this article, we ask two important questions. First, why do participants not use memory to help search the repeated display? Second, can context be introduced so that participants are able to guide their attention to the relevant repeated items? Experiments 1–4 show that participants choose not to use a memory strategy because, under these conditions, repeated memory search is actually less efficient than repeated visual search, even though the latter task is in itself relatively inefficient. However, when the visual search task is given context, so that only a subset of the items are ever pertinent, participants can learn to restrict their attention to the relevant stimuli (Experiments 5 and 6)

Time to guide: evidence for delayed attentional guidance in contextual cueing

Contextual cueing experiments show that, when displays are repeated, reaction times (RTs) to find a target decrease over time even when the observers are not aware of the repetition. Recent evidence suggests that this benefit in standard contextual cueing tasks is not likely to be due to an improvement in attentional guidance (Kunar, Flusberg, Horowitz, & Wolfe, 2007). Nevertheless, we ask whether guidance can help participants find the target in a repeated display, if they are given sufficient time to encode the display. In Experiment 1 we increased the display complexity so that it took participants longer to find the target. Here we found a larger effect of guidance than in a condition with shorter RTs. Experiment 2 gave participants prior exposure to the display context. The data again showed that with more time participants could implement guidance to help find the target, provided that there was something in the search stimuli locations to guide attention to. The data suggest that, although the benefit in a standard contextual cueing task is unlikely to be a result of guidance, guidance can play a role if it is given time to develop

Lay Theories of Obesity: Causes and Consequences

Both the scientific community and the general public have come to recognize the increasing prevalence of obesity as a significant public health crisis. To help address this issue, recent research has begun to explore lay theories of obesity—the mental models that structure how non-experts think about the causes and consequences of the condition. In this chapter, we develop an integrative review of the literature on lay theories of obesity, drawing on research in public health, communications, and psychology to illuminate the factors that shape beliefs and attitudes toward the condition, as well as the consequences of specific lay theories for cognition and behavior. At the individual level, we discuss how certain ways of thinking about obesity facilitate obesity treatment and prevention. At the societal level, we discuss how certain ways of thinking about obesity lead people to support (and oppose) specific types of obesity-related policy interventions. We pay special attention to the role of narrative framing and individual demographics in the etiology of lay beliefs and explore how particular psychological mechanisms (e.g., empathy) can affect attributions and attitudes

A Connectionist Approach to Embodied Conceptual Metaphor

A growing body of data has been gathered in support of the view that the mind is embodied and that cognition is grounded in sensory-motor processes. Some researchers have gone so far as to claim that this paradigm poses a serious challenge to central tenets of cognitive science, including the widely held view that the mind can be analyzed in terms of abstract computational principles. On the other hand, computational approaches to the study of mind have led to the development of specific models that help researchers understand complex cognitive processes at a level of detail that theories of embodied cognition (EC) have sometimes lacked. Here we make the case that connectionist architectures in particular can illuminate many surprising results from the EC literature. These models can learn the statistical structure in their environments, providing an ideal framework for understanding how simple sensory-motor mechanisms could give rise to higher-level cognitive behavior over the course of learning. Crucially, they form overlapping, distributed representations, which have exactly the properties required by many embodied accounts of cognition. We illustrate this idea by extending an existing connectionist model of semantic cognition in order to simulate findings from the embodied conceptual metaphor literature. Specifically, we explore how the abstract domain of time may be structured by concrete experience with space (including experience with culturally specific spatial and linguistic cues). We suggest that both EC researchers and connectionist modelers can benefit from an integrated approach to understanding these models and the empirical findings they seek to explain

An Emergent Approach to Analogical Inference

In recent years, a growing number of researchers have proposed that analogy is a core component of human cognition. According to the dominant theoretical viewpoint, analogical reasoning requires a specific suite of cognitive machinery, including explicitly coded symbolic representations and a mapping or binding mechanism that operates over these representations. Here we offer an alternative approach: we find that analogical inference can emerge naturally and spontaneously from a relatively simple, error-driven learning mechanism without the need to posit any additional analogy-specific machinery. The results also parallel findings from the developmental literature on analogy, demonstrating a shift from an initial reliance on surface feature similarity to the use of relational similarity later in training. Variants of the model allow us to consider and rule out alternative accounts of its performance. We conclude by discussing how these findings can potentially refine our understanding of the processes that are required to perform analogical inference

Molecular mechanisms of cell death: recommendations of the Nomenclature Committee on Cell Death 2018.

Over the past decade, the Nomenclature Committee on Cell Death (NCCD) has formulated guidelines for the definition and interpretation of cell death from morphological, biochemical, and functional perspectives. Since the field continues to expand and novel mechanisms that orchestrate multiple cell death pathways are unveiled, we propose an updated classification of cell death subroutines focusing on mechanistic and essential (as opposed to correlative and dispensable) aspects of the process. As we provide molecularly oriented definitions of terms including intrinsic apoptosis, extrinsic apoptosis, mitochondrial permeability transition (MPT)-driven necrosis, necroptosis, ferroptosis, pyroptosis, parthanatos, entotic cell death, NETotic cell death, lysosome-dependent cell death, autophagy-dependent cell death, immunogenic cell death, cellular senescence, and mitotic catastrophe, we discuss the utility of neologisms that refer to highly specialized instances of these processes. The mission of the NCCD is to provide a widely accepted nomenclature on cell death in support of the continued development of the field

Beyond the retina: Evidence for a face inversion effect in the environmental frame of reference

Across a wide range of face perception tasks, observers show drastically worse performance when faces are oriented upside-down versus upright. However, the meaning of orientation must be established in relation to a particular frame of reference. In relation to which reference frame(s) does the face inversion effect occur? Here we describe a simple, novel method for investigating potentially independent effects of retinal and environmental reference frames on face processing. Participants performed one of two face-processing tasks (emotional expression classification and recognition memory) as they lay horizontally, which served to disassociate the retinal and environmental reference frames. In both experiments we found a large effect of retinal orientation on performance and a small but reliable effect of environmental orientation. In a follow-up control study, we consider an alternative explanation based on our experimental setup. We argue that environmental orientation influences face processing, which is revealed when retinal orientation is kept constant

Metaphorical Accounting: How Framing the Federal Budget Like a Household\u27s Affects Voting Intentions

Political discourse is saturated with metaphor, but evidence for the persuasive power of this language has been hard to come by. We addressed this issue by investigating whether voting intentions were affected by implicit mappings suggested by a metaphorically framed message, drawing on a real-world example of political rhetoric about the federal budget. In the first experiment, the federal budget was framed as similar to or different from a household budget, though the information participants received was identical in both conditions. When the federal budget was described as similar to a household\u27s, people considered the personal finances of a presidential candidate more relevant—a finding we replicated in a larger, pre-registered study. In a follow-up experiment, we presented participants with a more explicit rhetorical argument and found a similar effect, moderated by political affiliation. These studies illuminate how metaphorical comparison affects cognition for important real-world issues, sometimes in unintended ways

Why is Mother Earth on Life Support? Metaphors in Environmental Discourse

From mother nature and carbon footprints to greenhouse gasses and the race against global warming, popular discourse on environmental issues is saturated with metaphor. Some people view these metaphors as obfuscating or ineffective, while others believe they are crucial for improving climate communications and environmental attitudes. In this paper, we provide a systematic overview and evaluation of the use of English metaphors in Anglo environmental discourse, drawing on a range of empirical and popular media sources. We begin by discussing the role of metaphor in language in thought. Next, we introduce a range of metaphors used to frame discussions of (1) our relationship to nature (e.g., the earth is our common home), (2) our impact on the environment (e.g., we are knocking the climate off balance), and (3) how we should address this impact (e.g., reduce our ecological footprint). We classify these metaphors along several dimensions, including how conventional they are, how systemic they are, how emotionally impactful they are, and how aptly they capture the topics they are used to describe. From this analysis, we derive several promising candidate metaphors that may help increase public understanding and engagement with environmental issues. However, we note that such claims must be tested empirically in future research; currently, there are few large, systematic, replicable experiments in the literature assessing the impact of environmental metaphors. We conclude by offering general recommendations for using metaphors in communications about climate change and sustainability