Models of how listeners understand speech must specify the types of representations that are computed, the nature of the flow of information, and the control structures that modify performance. Three experiments are reported that focus on the control processes in speech perception. Subjects in the experiments tried to discriminate stimuli in which a phoneme had been replaced with white noise from stimuli in which white...

When an extraneous sound (such as a cough or tone) completely replaces a speech sound in a recorded sentence, listeners believe they hear the missing sound. The extraneous sound seems to occur during another portion of the sentence without interfering with the intelligibility of any phoneme. If silence replaces a speech sound, the gap is correctly localized and the absence of the speech sound detected.  Warren,...

Evaluated the hypothesis that misleading postevent information impairs memory for the original event using 174 undergraduates in Exp I and 228 Ss in Exp II. Ss were assigned either to a recall test condition or an original recognition test condition. Ss viewed a sequence of slides depicting an event, read a postevent narrative that presented neutral or misleading information about critical details, and were tested...

In 5 experiments and a pilot study, a total of 1,232 undergraduates watched a series of slides depicting a single auto–pedestrian accident. The purpose of these experiments was to investigate how information supplied after an event influences a witness's memory for that event. Ss were exposed to either consistent, misleading, or irrelevant information after the accident event. Results show that misleading information produced less accurate...

In this chapter, we consider the degree to which individuals are pulled to behave by their conceptions of the future, pushed to act by their recollections of the past, or primarily driven by current exigencies. In examining conceptions of the future, we discuss how individuals bridge the present and the future, the origin of goals, their impact on behavior and cognition, and the motivational underpinnings...

This experiment examined individual differences in emotional responsivity by recording the startle eyeblink reflex while 57 college students viewed affect-laden pictures and then rated their pleasantness. All participants first completed measures of affect intensity, alexithymia, and depression. Startleprobes were some-times presented at 120, 300, 800, or 4,500 ms after slide onset. By 300 ns, blinks elicited during negative slides were larger than those elicited during...

Some patients can respond to visual stimuli presented within their clinically absolute visual field defects that have been caused by partial destruction of striate cortex. This puzzling phenomenon of looking, pointing, detecting and discriminating without seeing has been called blindsight, and has fascinated philosophers and neuroscientists alike as a spotlight on the nature of unconscious or covert awareness, and the means it provides of studying...

A distinction is drawn between non-conscious (unexperienced), conscious (experienced), and meta-conscious (re-represented) mental processes. There is evidence for two types of dissociations between consciousness and meta-consciousness, the latter being defined as the intermittent explicit re-representation of the contents of consciousness. Temporal dissociations occur when an individual, who previously lacked meta-consciousness about the contents of consciousness, directs meta-consciousness towards those contents; for example, catching one's mind...

Tested the notion that dissonance has arousal properties in a 2 * 3 design with 77 male college freshmen. 3 groups of Ss were induced to write counterattitudinal essays under either high- or low-choice conditions. Group 1 was led to believe that a pill, which they had just taken in the context of a separate experiment, would lead them to feel tense. Group 2 was...

Hypothesized that it is not emotional arousal per se which influences one to inhibit or avoid cheating, but one's interpretation of the meaning and significance of that arousal. 105 naive undergraduates were told that this was a study of a vitamin supplement's effects on vision, and given 1 of 2 lists of side effects associated with the placebo pill. While waiting for the visual-perception task,...