Nebraska Symposium on Motivation最新文献

Recent research on recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse has shown that there are at least two types of recovered memory experiences: those that are gradually recovered within the context of suggestive therapy and those that are spontaneously recovered, without extensive prompting or explicit attempts to reconstruct the past. These recovered memory experiences have different origins, with people who recover memories through suggestive therapy being more prone to forming false memories, and with people who report spontaneously recovered memories being more prone to forgetting prior instances of remembering. Additionally, the two types of recovered memory experiences are linked to differences in corroborative evidence, implying that memories recovered spontaneously, outside of suggestive therapy, are more likely to correspond to genuine abuse events. This chapter highlights the background of the recovered memory debate, summarizes recent studies with individuals reporting recovered memory experiences and points towards applications in the justice system and in clinical practice.

The 59th Annual Nebraska Symposium on Motivation (The Influence of Attention, Learning, and Motivation on Visual Search) took place April 7-8, 2011, on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln campus. The symposium brought together leading scholars who conduct research related to visual search at a variety levels for a series of talks, poster presentations, panel discussions, and numerous additional opportunities for intellectual exchange. The Symposium was also streamed online for the first time in the history of the event, allowing individuals from around the world to view the presentations and submit questions. The present volume is intended to both commemorate the event itself and to allow our speakers additional opportunity to address issues and current research that have since arisen. Each of the speakers (and, in some cases, their graduate students and post docs) has provided a chapter which both summarizes and expands on their original presentations. In this chapter, we sought to a) provide additional context as to how the Symposium came to be, b) discuss why we thought that this was an ideal time to organize a visual search symposium, and c) to briefly address recent trends and potential future directions in the field. We hope you find the volume both enjoyable and informative, and we thank the authors who have contributed a series of engaging chapters.

To behave intelligently in the world, humans must be able to find objects efficiently within the complex environments they inhabit. A growing proportion of the literature on visual search is devoted to understanding this type of natural search. In the present chapter, I review the literature on visual search through natural scenes, focusing on the role of memory and knowledge in guiding attention to task-relevant objects.

This paper seeks out to reduce the role of the homunculus, the 'little man in the head' that is still prominent in most psychological theories regarding the control our behaviour. We argue that once engaged in a task (which is a volitional act), visual selection run off more or less in an automatic fashion. We argue that the salience map that drives automatic selection is not only determined by raw physical salience of the objects in the environment but also by the way these objects appear to the person. We provide evidence that priming (feature priming, priming by working memory and reward priming) sharpens the cortical representation of these objects such that these objects appear to be more salient above and beyond their physical salience. We demonstrate that this type of priming is not under volitional control: it occurs even if observers try to volitionally prepare for something else. In other words, looking at red prepares our brain for things that are red even if we volitionally try to prepare for green.

Statistical learning refers to an unconscious cognitive process in which repeated patterns, or regularities, are extracted from the sensory environment. In this chapter, I describe what is currently known about statistical learning. First, I classify types of regularities that exist in the visual environment. Second, I introduce a family of experimental paradigms that have been used to study statistical learning in the laboratory. Third, I review a series of behavioral and functional neuroimaging studies that seek to uncover the underlying nature of statistical learning. Finally, I consider ways in which statistical learning may be important for perception, attention, and visual search. The goals of this chapter are thus to highlight the prevalence of regularities, to explain how they are extracted by the mind and brain, and to suggest that the resulting knowledge has widespread consequences for other aspects of cognition.

This chapter summarizes the work of my research group on adults who report either repressed, recovered, or continuous memories of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) or who report no history of CSA. Adapting paradigms from cognitive psychology, we tested hypotheses inspired by both the "repressed memory" and "false memory" perspectives on recovered memories of CSA. We found some evidence for the false memory perspective, but no evidence for the repressed memory perspective. However, our work also suggests a third perspective on recovered memories that does not require the concept of repression. Some children do not understand their CSA when it occurs, and do not experience terror. Years later, they recall the experience, and understanding it as abuse, suffer intense distress. The memory failed to come to mind for years, partly because the child did not encode it as terrifying (i.e., traumatic), not because the person was unable to recall it.

In visual search tasks, observers look for targets in displays or scenes containing distracting, non-target items. Most of the research on this topic has concerned the finding of those targets. Search termination is a less thoroughly studied topic. When is it time to abandon the current search? The answer is fairly straight forward when the one and only target has been found (There are my keys.). The problem is more vexed if nothing has been found (When is it time to stop looking for a weapon at the airport checkpoint?) or when the number of targets is unknown (Have we found all the tumors?). This chapter reviews the development of ideas about quitting time in visual search and offers an outline of our current theory.

To summarize, ethnic and social class disparities are evident across a spectrum of markers of psychological, behavioral, and physical health. Furthermore, the pattern is often complex such that disparities are sometimes found within ethnic/racial groups as well as across those groups. Indeed, it is likely that the causes of health disparities may be different across specific subgroups. Moreover, theoretical models are needed that examine biological, contextual, and person-level variables (including culture-specific variables) to account for health disparities. The scholars in the present volume provide exemplary research that moves us towards more comprehensive and integrative models of health disparities. A brief glance at the work summarized by these scholars yields some common elements of focus for future researchers regarding risk (e.g., poverty, lack of contextual diversity) and protective (e.g., family support, cultural identity) factors yet they also identify aspects (e.g., genetic vulnerabilities) that may be unique to specific ethnic/racial groups. In addition to employing more integrative and culturally sensitive models of health disparities, future research studies could expand the scope of investigation to include transnational studies of health disparities and the processes contributing to them. They might also consider culture-specific health problems and syndromes such as "nervios" in Latino cultures. Within nations, further attention might be directed to the community contexts in which ethnic minority and low SES families reside, not only urban areas but the much less studied rural areas. Finally, efforts to assess health disparities and the factors contributing to them across cultural and ethnic groups need to attend closely to the issue of measurement equivalence in order to ensure valid cross-group comparisons. We would add that future research on health disparities will need to examine markers of positive health outcomes and well being (e.g., social competence) rather than focusing solely on risk and protective factors associated with health-related problems. We cannot assume that the relative absence of negative pathology and risk equals the presence of health and well being-thus research is needed that includes both positive and negative health outcomes. More attention to positive health indicators will further our understanding of normative, positive health outcomes and lead us away from traditional deficit and pathology-focused models of ethnic minorities. Finally, the scholars in this volume all present findings that have important implications for policy and intervention efforts-the lessons learned from their efforts should be heeded if we are to comprehensively and effectively address the existing health disparities in the US.