Human attention can be guided by semantic information conveyed by individual objects in the environment. Over time, we learn to allocate attention resources towards stimuli that are behaviourally relevant to ongoing action, leading to attention capture by meaningful peripheral stimuli. A common example includes, while driving, stimuli that imply a…

Category learning is fundamental to cognition, but little is known about how it proceeds in real-world environments when learners do not have instructions to search for category-relevant information, do not make overt category decisions, and do not experience direct feedback. Prior research demonstrates that listeners can acquire task-irrelevant…

THE SPECIFIC PROBLEM WAS WHETHER HUMANS, AFTER HAVING BEEN TRAINED ON A GIVEN REWARD SCHEDULE TO ACT IN A GIVEN WAY IN GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES, WILL EXHIBIT FIXED EXTINCTION BEHAVIOR REGARDLESS OF THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE TRAINING AND THE EXTINCTION PERIODS. SUBJECTS WERE 360 COLLEGE STUDENTS WHO HAD VOLUNTEERED FOR THE EXPERIMENT. AN APPARATUS WAS…

Surveyed college student (N=34) and general public (N=48) smokers regarding frequency, onset age, and daily situations associated with their habit. Results indicated no differences in either sample for responses according to sex, and correlations between smoking rate and onset age or years of smoking were not significant. (LLL)

Two enduring questions in psychology concern the effects on behavior of traits and of attitudes. One method of altering the relative influence of traits or attitudes is by manipulating the activity of those areas of the brain which attend more to the self or to the external environment. Two experiments were conducted to test whether manipulation…

Investigated the differential effect of two kinds of behavior simulation (role-playing) interventions: spontaneous and mimetic-pretend, on the readiness and the responsibility attributions associated with delivering electric shocks to others (N=25). Results showed that the spontaneous subjects were more ego-oriented and inhibited in administering…

This investigation with 122 college students, including 45 deaf students, found that neither deaf nor hearing students demonstrated a statistically significant advantage in accuracy or recall of nonverbal information about people in photographs. Deaf subjects, however, were more than twice as likely as hearing subjects to base their judgments upon…

The influence of aversive conditions on interpersonal attraction was investigated using 60 female undergraduates as subjects. Dyads were formed and equally divided into aversive (loud-noise) and neutral (low-noise) conditions. After completing an attitude survey questionnaire subjects completed a short filler task while the experimenter…