RESUMEN
In four experiments, a change detection task using emotional (i.e., angry and happy) faces as stimuli was implemented to investigate the effects of evaluative congruency on working-memory performance and to replicate the angry-face benefit (i.e., better performance for angry compared to happy and neutral faces) found in former studies. Although results of the single experiments were heterogeneous, an overall analysis revealed better performance in trials with evaluatively congruent compared to evaluatively incongruent displays and an angry-face benefit. The congruency effect is in line with recent assumptions that evaluative-priming effects might arise from a mutual facilitation of simultaneously active evaluatively congruent concepts. Research on the angry-face benefit is enriched by the finding that the benefit was also found in control experiments using inverted faces. This result suggests that the effect is based on perceptual features of angry faces.
Asunto(s)
Emociones , Memoria a Corto Plazo , Humanos , Felicidad , Ira , Cognición , Expresión FacialRESUMEN
It is well known that memory affects eye movements. However, the role of individual eye fixations for recognition memory processes has hardly been investigated. Recent findings show that second fixations are especially relevant for recollection, a process associated with the retrieval of context information, but less for recognition based solely on item familiarity. The aim of the present study was to overcome limitations of a previous study (Schwedes and Wentura in Memory, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2019.1567789 ) and to provide further evidence that second fixations are especially relevant for recollection-based recognition. Whereas recollection- and familiarity-based recognition was an unconstrained quasi-experimental variable in a previous study, here we manipulated the depth of stimulus processing in the encoding phase to experimentally manipulate the probability of subsequent item recollection. In the old/new recognition memory test, presentation of test probes was terminated after one or two stimulus fixations. "Old" responses in the recognition test were followed by a remember/know/guess procedure to assess recollection-based versus familiarity-based recognition. We found the expected depth of processing effect, with better recognition and more recollection-based responses after deep encoding. This effect, however, was significantly larger if two fixations instead of just one were allowed. There were no corresponding effects for familiarity-based recognition. Thus, a second fixation seems to play an important role only for recollection-based recognition.
Asunto(s)
Movimientos Oculares , Fijación Ocular/fisiología , Recuerdo Mental/fisiología , Reconocimiento en Psicología/fisiología , Femenino , Humanos , Masculino , Memoria/fisiologíaRESUMEN
Recent theories assume a mutual facilitation in case of semantic overlap for concepts being activated simultaneously. We provide evidence for this claim using a semantic priming paradigm. To test for mutual facilitation of related concepts, a perceptual identification task was employed, presenting prime-target pairs briefly and masked, with an SOA of 0 ms (i.e., prime and target were presented concurrently, one above the other). Participants were instructed to identify the target. In Experiment 1, a cue defining the target was presented at stimulus onset, whereas in Experiment 2 the cue was not presented before the offset of stimuli. Accordingly, in Experiment 2, a post-cue task was merged with the perceptual identification task. We obtained significant semantic priming effects in both experiments. This result is compatible with the view that two concepts can both be activated in parallel and can mutually facilitate each other if they are related.