How Reading Difficulty Influences Mind-Wandering: The Theoretical Importance of Measuring Interest

In many situations, increasing task difficulty decreases thoughts that are unrelated to the task (i.e., mind-wandering; see Smallwood & Schooler, 2006, for a review). However, Feng, D’Mello, and Graesser (2013) recently reported a discrepant finding in the context of reading. They showed that increasing the objective reading difficulty of passages (by decreasing word frequency and complicating sentence structure) actually increased mind-wandering. The primary goal of this work was to gain insight into the mechanism that drives this positive relation between objective reading difficulty and mind-wandering. This effect is investigated over three chapters. Chapter 1 demonstrates that the effect of objective difficulty on mind-wandering is confounded by differences in passage section-length between easy and hard passages when they are presented one sentence at a time. Chapter 2 more broadly explores the possibility that distinctive processing influences subjective impressions of passage difficulty and interest (which may consequently influence mind-wandering). And Chapter 3 shows that mind-wandering increases over time spent reading, which may be related to decreasing subjective interest. This research builds to the conclusion that subjective interest is of central theoretical importance to research on difficulty and mind-wandering: A manipulation designed to influence the difficulty of a task may also influence participants’ subjective interest in the task, which may in turn influence their tendency to mind-wander

Capturing egocentric biases in reference reuse during collaborative dialogue

Words that are produced aloud—and especially self-produced ones—are remembered better than words that are not, a phenomenon labeled the production effect in the field of memory research. Two experiments were conducted to determine whether this effect can be generalized to dialogue, and how it might affect dialogue management. Triads (Exp. 1) or dyads (Exp. 2) of participants interacted to perform a collaborative task. Analyzing reference reuse during the interaction revealed that the participants were more likely to reuse the references that they had presented themselves, on the one hand, and those that had been accepted through verbatim repetition, on the other. Analyzing reference recall suggested that the greater accessibility of self-presented references was only transient. Moreover, among partner-presented references, those discussed while the participant had actively taken part in the conversation were more likely to be recalled than those discussed while the participant had been inactive. These results contribute to a better understanding of how individual memory processes might contribute to collaborative dialogue

Spoken word recognition of novel words, either produced or only heard during learning

This document is the Accepted Manuscript Version of the following article: Tania S. Zamuner, Elizabeth Morin-Lessard, Stephanie Strahm, and Michael P. A. Page, 'Soke word recognition of novel words, either produced or only heard during learning', Journal of Memory and Language, Vol. 89, August 2016, pp. 55-67, doi: 10.1016/j.jml.2015.10.003. Under embargo. Embargo end date: 1 December 2017. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Psycholinguistic models of spoken word production differ in how they conceptualize the relationship between lexical, phonological and output representations, making different predictions for the role of production in language acquisition and language processing. This work examines the impact of production on spoken word recognition of newly learned non-words. In Experiment 1, adults were trained on non-words with visual referents; during training, they produced half of the non-words, with the other half being heard-only. Using a visual world paradigm at test, eye tracking results indicated faster recognition of non-words that were produced compared with heard-only during training. In Experiment 2, non-words were correctly pronounced or mispronounced at test. Participants showed a different pattern of recognition for mispronunciation on non-words that were produced compared with heard-only during training. Together these results indicate that production affects the representations of newly learned words.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Affect Conditioning Associated With The Onset And Termination Of Electricshock.

PhDExperimentsPsychologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/182144/2/5807714.pd

Individuals rely more on dispositional information when making affective forecasts for others than for themselves

Research on affective forecasting has, thus far, focused on how individuals predict their own future emotions. Daily experience, however, suggests that people also make affective forecasts for others on a regular basis. Across five studies, we found that people making affective forecasts for others relied more on dispositional information than those who made forecasts for the self. This trend emerged for affective forecasts of both hypothetical (Studies 1-3) and real events (Studies 4 and 5), and regardless of whether the other person was a stranger (Studies 1, 2, 4, and 5) or a friend (Study 3). Further, individuals made less biased affective forecasts for others than for themselves (Study 5), perhaps due to the greater weight placed on dispositional information when making forecasts for others. These findings suggest that individuals can benefit from asking others how they will feel in the futureArts, Faculty ofPsychology, Department ofGraduat

Data for: In the eye of the beholder: Evaluative context modulates mind-wandering

SPSS files containing the data for each experiment and the combined data

Contingency learning decreases when associations are shared

In the color-word contingency learning paradigm, each word appears more often in one color (HI contingency) than in other colors (LO contingency). Despite the words being irrelevant, responses to the relevant colors quickly become faster to HI than to LOs—the contingency learning effect. Across four experiments (N = 1,490), the number of response-irrelevant word stimuli linked to each of the three response-relevant colors varied from 1 to 2 to 4. Our prediction, derived from the Parallel Episodic Processing (PEP) 2.0 model, was borne out: The magnitude of the contingency learning effect declined monotonically as more words were linked as HIs to each color. Inconsistent with the PEP model, however, we observed changes in response times not only in HI but also in LO trials, indicating a need to amend the model. Associative learning may therefore be a function of prioritizing high probability items at the expense of low probability items