Abstracts 2005 - The Psychonomic Society

Saturday Noon Posters 4064–4070
press). FMRI revealed that when participants did not have specific
target-information to aid ignoring, amygdala response to the emotional
distractors increased, relative to neutral distractors, but that
such modulation was evident especially among participants scoring
high on the personality measure “harm avoidance.” Thus, amygdala
responsiveness seems sensitive to the filtering out of emotional information,
but more in some people than in others.
(4064)
Emotional Blinking With No Sensory Cuing or Semantic Searching.
CYNTHIA KASCHUB & IRA S. FISCHLER, University of Florida—
Recent studies have shown that the attentional blink effect during
RSVP presentation can be enhanced by emotionality of the first (distractor
or T1) word and reduced by emotionality of the second. However,
these studies either superimposed word emotionality on an attentioncapturing
sensory cue (e.g., a unique color) or required some semantic
analysis of each word to identify the target (e.g., categorical exemplars).
In the present study, targets were specific words given at the
start of each trial, and all words in the 15 wps sequence had the same
visual attributes. Nonetheless, presentation of an emotional word one
or two words prior to a neutral target reduced target detection by about
5%, suggesting that the emotional connotation of words could capture
attention rapidly and automatically. With emotional target words,
these blink effects were eliminated. There was no effect of the emotional
congruence between distractor and target on target detection.
(4065)
Gender Differences in Selective Attention: Evidence From a Spatial-
Orienting Task. PAUL MERRITT, Texas A&M University, Corpus
Christi, & ELLIOT HIRSHMAN, WHITNEY WHARTON, & BETH-
ANY STANGL, George Washington University—Selective attention
is considered a central component of cognitive functioning. Although
a number of studies have demonstrated gender differences in cognitive
tasks, there has been little research conducted on gender differences
in selective attention. To test for gender differences in selective
attention, we tested 44 undergraduates, using a spatial-orienting task
with an endogenous (centrally located arrow) cue. Our primary finding
was that females showed larger validity effects at 500-msec stimulus
onset asynchrony (SOA). Although males and females showed
similar benefits from a valid cue across four cue–target intervals, females
showed greater costs from an invalid cue at 500-msec SOA. The
potential role of an inhibitory deficit in males is proposed as a possible
explanation for these results.
(4066)
Gaze Cues and Emotion: Affective Responses to Cue Faces and
Target Objects. ANDREW P. BAYLISS & STEVEN P. TIPPER, University
of Wales, Bangor—When we see someone look somewhere,
our attention is automatically oriented to the same location. Joint attention
helps us work out which stimulus is being looked at, and infer
the mental state of the other person. In studies measuring the effects
of gaze cues on attention, responses are quicker to targets that appear
where the cue face looks, as compared with targets that appear in uncued
locations. Here, we investigated the affective consequences of
such cuing effects in two separate studies. In Experiment 1, we
showed that faces that consistently cued the target location were chosen
as more trustworthy than faces that always looked away from target
location. In Experiment 2, household objects that were consistently
cued were liked more than objects that consistently appeared in
uncued locations. These studies demonstrate that the direction of another’s
gaze can modulate personality evaluations and our feelings
about the objects that receive the other’s attention.
(4067)
Human Action Directs Attention. WILL GERVAIS, CATHERINE L.
REED, PAULA M. BEALL, RALPH J. ROBERTS, MARTIN HO, &
KENDALL MCCARLEY, University of Denver—People’s actions tell
us about their intentions and important environmental events. This
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study investigated whether human actions could direct attention. A
covert-orienting task with nonpredictive central cues was used. Cues
were images of right-/left-facing static human figures in action (running,
throwing) or neutral (standing) poses. Results demonstrated that
only action poses (not neutral) produced validity effects, suggesting
that attention was shifted in the direction of the action. Also, throwing
poses produced the fastest responses overall, followed by the running
and neutral poses, suggesting that static action poses may have
primed motor responses. Experiment 2 disentangled the relative effects
of motor effort and directional action on spatial attention. When
validity effects were compared for jump, throw, and neutral cues,
motor effort (i.e., jumping and throwing) influenced only the speed of
the response. Action directed toward a target location (i.e., throwing)
was required to influence the direction of shifts in spatial attention.
(4068)
The Regulation of Stroop Interference by Social Context. DINKAR
SHARMA & ROBERT W. BOOTH, University of Kent, RUPERT J.
BROWN, University of Sussex, & PASCAL HUGUET, Université
Aix-Marseille 1 (sponsored by Toby J. Lloyd-Jones)—Recently, it has
been suggested that social context (mere presence and an upward social
comparison) can reduce interference in the Stroop task (Huguet,
Galvaing, Monteil, & Dumas, 1999). We assess the extent to which
social context can be described within a cognitive framework developed
by Lavie (e.g., Lavie et al., 2004) that highlights the role of perceptual
load and working memory load in the control of selective attention.
In a series of experiments on social presence and social comparison,
we extend the findings by Huguet et al. (1999) to show when and how
social context affects selective attention. Our data are consistent with
the approach taken by Lavie, and thus the discussion will focus on
how social context impinges on perceptual load and working memory
load in the control of selective attention.
(4069)
Directing One’s Attention by Picking Up Others’ Intentions. PINES
NUKU, OLIVER LINDEMANN, & HAROLD BEKKERING, Radboud
University Nijmegen (sponsored by Martin H. Fischer)—Joint
attention refers to the ability to use eye and pointing information from
others to direct one’s own action potential. Evidence that grasping and
pointing postures convey others’ intentions has prompted us to assess
exactly how observed hand postures prime our attentional system. In
a first series of experiments, we tested whether hand postures alone
influence observers’ attention, whereas in a second series, we tested
whether a perceived sensory consequence of a posture–object relation
(i.e., a hand moving an object or a hand aperture fitting an object),
conveys action intentions and influences action potentials. We found
that posture–object compatibility prompts observers’ attention more
than does posture alone. This study shows that perceived sensory consequences
of postures and objects, representing others’ intentions,
lead to changes in observers’ attention potentials. We conclude that
inferential processes, such as posture–object vicinity and posture–
object compatibility, are central in perceiving others’ intentions and
influencing others’ attention.
(4070)
Invariant Effects of Perceptual and Memory Loads on Implicit
Priming. EWALD NEUMANN, STEPHEN J. GAUKRODGER, &
PAUL N. RUSSELL, University of Canterbury—We present findings
from several selective attention experiments that question the conclusions
from two recent Science articles. By adding an ignored repetition
(negative priming) manipulation to the perceptual load paradigm
used by Rees et al. (1999) and the working memory load paradigm
used by de Fockert et al. (2001), we show that nontarget distractors
are not filtered out; instead, they are implicitly processed to the level
of semantic identification. Contrary to the predictions derived from
the work of Rees et al., if a nontarget word matched a target picture
on the subsequent trial, a small but significant negative priming effect
was obtained. Contrary to the predictions derived from the work