Neither backward masking of T2 nor task switching is necessary for the attentional blink

Identification of the second of two targets (T1, T2, inserted in a stream of distractors) is impaired when presented within 500 ms after the first (attentional blink, AB). Barring a T1-T2 task-switch, it is thought that T2 must be backward-masked to obtain an AB (Giesbrecht & Di Lollo, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 24, 1454- 1466, 1998). We tested the hypothesis that Giesbrecht & Di Lollo's findings were vitiated by ceiling constraints arising from either response scale (experiment 1) or data limitations (experiment 2). In experiment 1, digitdistractors were replaced with pseudoletters to increase task difficulty, bringing performance below ceiling. An AB occurred without backward masking of T2. In experiment 2, a ceiling-free procedure estimated the number of noise dots needed for 80% T2 identification. An AB was revealed: fewer noise dots were required during the AB period than outside it. Both outcomes confirm that an AB can be obtained without either masking of T2 or task switching

Religious conversion among high security hospital patients: a qualitative analysis of patients’ accounts and experiences on changing faith

Research has shown the importance of religion in recovery from mental illness. Previous studies have investigated why individuals change faith during custody in prison, but there has been no research to date on religious conversion in forensic-psychiatric hospitals. The aim of this study was to understand the experience of religious conversion among patients detained in a UK secure hospital. Thirteen patients who had converted their religion were interviewed and the resultant data were analysed using thematic analysis. Three superordinate themes (‘reasons for changing faith’, ‘benefits of having a new faith’ and ‘difficulties with practising a faith’), incorporating eight subordinate themes, emerged. Understanding patients’ reasons for religious conversion is important for the treatment and support not merely of these individuals, but more broadly with patients in forensic psychiatric care

Social cohesion and the notion of 'suspect communities': A study of the experiences and impacts of being 'suspect' for Irish communities and Muslim communities in Britain

In this article, we consider how the practice of conceiving of groups within civil society as 'communities' meshes with conceptualisations of certain populations as 'suspect' and consider some of the impacts and consequences of this for particular populations and for social cohesion. We examine how Irish and Muslim people in Britain have become aware of and have experienced themselves to be members of 'suspect communities' in relation to political violence and counterterrorism policies from 1974 to 2007 and investigate the impacts of these experiences on their everyday lives. The study focuses on two eras of political violence. The first coincides with the Irish Republican Army's (IRA) bombing campaigns in England between 1973 and 1996, when the perpetrators were perceived as 'Irish terrorists'; and the second since 2001, when, in Britain and elsewhere, the main threat of political violence has been portrayed as stemming from people who are assumed to be motivated by extreme interpretations of Islam and are often labelled as 'Islamic terrorists'. We outline why the concept of 'suspect communities' continues to be analytically useful for examining: the impact of 'bounded communities' on community cohesion policies; the development of traumatogenic environments and their ramifications; and for examining how lessons might be learnt from one era of political violence to another, especially as regards the negative impacts of practices of suspectification on Irish communities and Muslim communities. The research methods included discussion groups involving Irish and Muslim people. These demonstrated that with the removal of discourses of suspicion the common ground of Britain's urban multiculture was a sufficient basis for sympathetic exchanges. © 2012 Taylor and Francis Group, LLC

A Purity Monitoring System for the H1 Liquid Argon Calorimeter

The ionization probes used for monitoring the liquid argon purity in the H1 calorimeter are described and results of their operation in tests at CERN and during the period 1992 to the end of 1998 at HERA are given. The high sensitivity of the charge measurements leads to refined charge collection models, and to the observation of a variation of the ionization yield of our electron sources with temperature.Comment: 26 pages, 14 figure

Supporting the attentional momentum view of IOR: Is attention biased to go right? Perception

The environment is full of a multitude of stimuli, and at any particular moment in time, our attention can be directed only toward a very small segment of them. Thus, our attentional-orienting system needs to operate in as efficient a manner as possible to ensure our survival. For example, if an animal seeking prey fails to find something at one location, it will be disadvantageous for that animal to keep returning its attention to that location. It will be more eff icient to reorient attention to novel locations once searches of previous locations have failed to locate the object of interest. Thus, evolutionarily, a mechanism that favors looking at novel locations would be highly adaptive. For humans, however, the search for prey and the avoidance of predators are no longer of paramount importance. Nevertheless, humans still actively engage in search behaviors. It is common for a person to be looking for a specific item on a desk or for a particular friend at a party. In these situations, just as it is for animals in the wild, perseverance in looking at one location will result in inefficient search. Thus, it would not be surprising to observe evidence for a mechanism that favors orienting to novel locations in the human attentional system. The focus of the present paper is on the mechanism that underlies this bias for orienting toward novel locations in humans. The examination will be restricted to the adult population and, specifically, to a phenomenon termed inhibition of return (IOR). To this end, the phenomenon will first be described, and a brief overview of some of the evidence supporting the existence of inhibitory processes underlying attentional orienting will be provided. Following the description of the inhibitory account, an alternative account based on attentional momentum will be described. According to the attentional momentum account of IOR, once attention is set in motion, it tends to continue moving along that vector. Past evidence in favor of the attentional momentum notion will be briefly provided, and then several experiments, the motive of which was to further test the attentional momentum account, will be presented. Is There Evidence for a Novelty-Biased Search Mechanism? Posner and Cohen (1984) conducted an experiment that had three possible target locations, one centrally located on the screen and the other two on either side of the first. Individuals were instructed to keep their eyes at the center location and to respond when they saw a target. During a trial, one of the peripheral locations would be cued by briefly flickering the outline of the box (this box will subsequently be referred to as the cued location), followed after some variable time interval by the target, which could appear in any of the three boxes. The participants were in- 219 Copyright 2004 Psychonomic Society, Inc. This research was supported by an NSERC research grant awarded to Steve Joordens, and by an Ontario Graduate Scholarship awarded to the first author. We thank Steve Joordens and Jay Pratt for their assistance with this work, as well as Tram Neill, John McDonald, Brad Gibson, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to T. M. Spalek, Department of Psychology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6, Canada (e-mail: [email protected]). Note-This article was accepted by the previous editorial team, headed by Neil Macmillan. Inhibition of return (IOR) refers to the finding that individuals are slower to respond to a target presented at a previously attended location than they are to respond to a target presented at a novel location (Posner & Cohen, 1984). The attentional momentum theory is a recent view of how attention moves around the environment, and it provides an account for the IOR effect that does not rely on an inhibitory mechanism (Pratt, Spalek, & Bradshaw, 1999). The present paper supports the attentional momentum viewpoint in two ways: first, by replicating the finding that reaction times to targets at the uncued locations are not all the same (Pratt et al., 1999) and second, by showing that responses made to all locations on the cued side of fixation, and not just to the locations that attention had previously traversed, are slower than are responses made to locations on the opposite side of fixation. We also demonstrate that there is a directional bias to the IOR effect that results in the effect' s being larger when attention moves in a left-to-right manner

Data Sets for Alerting Effects Occur in Simple - but not Compound - Visual Search Tasks

In simple visual search, a target (e.g., a square shape) must be singled out as a unique item from distractors (e.g., ring shapes). Generally, two effects are known to facilitate search performance: "alerting" (e.g., briefly brightening the screen before display onset) and "priming" (e.g., repeating the unique item on successive trials). Unlike simple search, compound search has two steps. For example: (a) locate the unique object in the display and (b) identify the tilt of a line inside that object. In the present work we examined the joint effects of alerting and priming in compound search. We found that alerting does occur in simple search but not in compound search, unless conditions allow the compound search to be performed as a simple search