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The online world has brought us together on one diverse platform, and communicating in a language that is acceptable to all becomes crucial, thus making English language a priority for students and professionals alike. However, the success of online English learning depends on a lot of factors that can motivate or demotivate the students in the learning process. This study aims to identify such factors and develop models to depict how the interactions among them can lead to success or failure of online learning courses. The paper applies method of literature review, focus group discussion, and the technique of interpretive structural modelling (ISM) to analyse the interplay between the factors which have been analysed in light of the self-determination theory continuum. Further, the analysis also supports an understanding of which ones are the primary drivers of student success, thus providing insights on ways to maximize those that motivate student learning and minimize those that demotivate.

In this article, 10 award-winning post-secondary instructors use narrative inquiry to explore failure individually by reflecting on their own definition and framework of failure, by giving examples...

In light of our forced migration to the online world, this article argues in favor of a widespread evolution of our approach to education, drifting from rigid to flexible models. Such an optimal system would be able to change from one form and function to another, even in mid-course, without compromising pedagogy. This system has to be based on evidence-based innovative pedagogies and scholarships of teaching and learning. The article proposes a “Convertible Learning System” (CLS)—a synergistic optimization of relative strengths of traditional and online learning approaches, while simultaneously allowing the flexibility that we realize is now critical. Although the examples lie in the realms of tertiary education, the concepts and implications can be beneficial at educational levels.

Language comprehension is left-lateralized but with variable contributions from the right hemisphere. When both hemispheres are stimulated simultaneously using divided visual field presentation, performance may be enhanced or hindered depending on the complexity of the task, and these effects may relate to independent processing in both hemispheres or to information transfer between hemispheres. Simultaneous stimulation of both hemispheres is thought to suppress interhemispheric interactions, but information transfer may nonetheless occur. Studies with simultaneous bilateral displays have demonstrated that semantic information from the contralateral visual field (and hemisphere) can facilitate relatedness judgments and lexical decisions. The current study extends this line of research by assessing semantic information transfer in a bilateral word identification task. Task manipulations involving directed spatial attention and asymmetric primes (e.g., ATOM → BOMB) were used to isolate automatic priming as opposed to top-down processing. The results revealed 2 main findings: (a) interhemispheric priming in the form of improved word recognition occurred specifically in conditions designed to isolate automatic transfer of semantic information, that is, in the attended visual field for the target word in asymmetric prime pairs, and (b) there is evidence for an asymmetrical transfer of semantic information, in that the subordinate left visual field-right hemisphere benefited more from such transfer. Together, these results demonstrate evidence for automatic interhemispheric transfer of semantic information, even under conditions of simultaneous bilateral display. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

This article conveys how online technology in education has become increasingly popular, especially blended-learning and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Although, research to date on blended-learning and MOOCs have revealed various factors that contribute to student success; however, systematic research on the personality characteristics of the learner, and how this could affect course performance remains sparse. This article is based off of the authors survey of students in a MOOC and a blended-learning course in Introductory Psychology about various personality characteristics that they believed could influence course performance. The results indicate that students in the MOOC versus blended-learning course exhibit different personality traits, and that these traits are associated with MOOC but not blended-learning course performance. These findings have important implications for fine tuning online teaching techniques to the personality types of the learners, which could improve course performance.

Online learning allows one to escape traditional constraints and to create learning experiences that allow interactions, and support learning, that would be difficult or impossible in brick and mortar contexts. In this chapter, the authors present a new RIFS taxonomy (Relevance, Interestingness, Fun, and Sociality) to highlight the factors that can make a learning experience especially engaging. They then discuss what they want students to learn when they are engaged in support of 21st century learning. With this context, they describe an initiative called The Global Teenager Project as a concrete example of how, with heavy support from online technologies, these factors can be combined to produce deep learning that students truly find meaningful.

Whereas most research on depletion focuses on its effect on the overall performance of a subsequent task requiring self-control, we examine the effect of depletion on self-control after performance has begun. Across different manipulations of depletion and using different measures of self-control (e.g., overriding an automatic behavioural tendency, enduring on a physically demanding task, and making healthy consumption choices), the results of three studies show that when self-control has been initiated, the effect of depletion has little influence on subsequent behaviour also requiring self-control: in other words, “getting started” on a self-control task attenuates the depletion effect. The results also show that the way in which self-control starts—that is, whether people choose to regulate, or whether this choice is forced—appears irrelevant. This research clarifies an effective way to facilitate self-control after depletion, while providing a better understanding of the process underlying depletion. Copyright © 2015 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Resume La majorite des etudes sur l'epuisement s'appesantissent sur son impact sur la performance generale pendant l'execution d'une tâche subsequente necessitant la maitrise de soi. Dans cette etude par contre, les effets de l'epuisement sur la maitrise de soi sont examines apres le debut de l'execution d'une tâche. Toutes les manipulations de l'epuisement et l'usage des differentes mesures de maitrise de soi (par exemple la neutralisation d'une tendance comportementale automatique, la perseverance dans l'execution d'une tâche physiquement ereintante et les choix de pratiques de consommation saines) revelent que dans les trois etudes, l'epuisement a peu d'impact sur l'execution de tâches subsequentes exigeant aussi la maitrise de soi lorsque celle-ci a deja ete enclenchee. En d'autres termes, » embrasser des l'entame « une tâche exigeant la maitrise de soi attenue l'effet de l'epuisement. Les resultats indiquent aussi que le mode de declenchement de la maitrise de soi – que les gens choisissent de reguler ou que le choix soit impose – n'a ici aucune importance. L'etude fait la lumiere sur une maniere efficace de declencher la maitrise de soi apres l'epuisement et permet de mieux comprendre le processus qui sous-tend l'epuisement. Copyright © 2015 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Middle- and high-school students’ attitudes towards online peer-assessment were described and examined in this study. One hundred and eighty-four (184) students answered a 16-item questionnaire about their experiences with an online peer-assessment tool called peerScholar. Overall, students in Canada converged with those in other countries with respect to attitude. That is, Canadian students tended to have a positive attitude towards the implementation of online peer-assessment in their classrooms. Additionally, students reported that they found the peer-assessment process helpful and that they felt that they benefited from the process. Unlike previous studies, students from a wider range of grade levels and subject areas were questioned. Directions for future studies that involve the peer-assessment process in the school system are discussed.

With the number and scope of environmental challenges continuing to increase, an understanding of the effectiveness of conservation programs is essential in order to allocate limited resources. This paper examines the effectiveness of environmental education within a zoo setting, focusing on the role of learners’ identity-related motivation. Results from survey (n = 296) and interview (n = 116) data collected from visitors to the Toronto Zoo suggest that education success is dependent on visitors’ dominant motivation, with preliminary data suggesting that Spiritual Pilgrims and Experience Seekers demonstrate greater gains in knowledge of environmental issues compared with Facilitators. Given that most zoo visitors fell into this Facilitator group, this finding may have an effect on future zoo management decisions. In addition, the proportion of visitors falling into each motivation group was significantly different than those previously found in the United States (p = 0.05), suggesting that zoo education ...

We examine the relationship between a measure of intelligence and estimates of conscious and unconscious memory influences derived using Jacoby's (Jacoby, L. L. [1991]. A process dissociation framework: Separating automatic from intentional uses of memory. Journal of Memory and Language, 30, 513-541.) process-dissociation procedure. We find a positive relationship between intelligence and conscious memory, and no relationship between intelligence and unconscious influences once the impact of conscious influences are removed (Experiment 1). We also find that when participants cannot engage in conscious strategies, such as when there is insufficient time for learning, the relationships observed in Experiment 1 are eliminated (Experiments 2A and 2B). Our results support the notion that individual differences in intelligence reflect differences in conscious strategic processes (Karis, D., Fabiani, M., & Donchin, E. [1984]. "P300" and memory: Individual differences in the von Restorff effect. Cognitive Psychology, 16, 177-216.) and not differences in mental speed (Eysenck, H. J. (1984). Intelligence versus behavior. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 7, 290-291; Jensen, A. R. [1982]. Bias in mental testing. New York, NY: Free Press).

The pseudoword effect is the finding that pseudowords (i.e., rare words or pronounceable nonwords) give rise to more hits and false alarms than words. Using the retrieving effectively from memory (REM) model of recognition memory, we tested a familiarity-based account of the pseudoword effect: Specifically, the pseudoword effect arises because pseudowords lack distinctive semantic meanings. Because semantics can differentiate orthographically similar words (e.g., horse vs. house), by lacking distinctive semantics, pseudowords have greater interitem similarity than words, and hence more familiarity, which gives rise to the pseudoword effect. Across two sets of simulations, we demonstrate that this account explains the pseudoword effect in addition to accounting for why the pseudoword effect is absent when irregular nonwords are compared with words. Furthermore, our modeling efforts suggest a novel experiment that leads us to the discovery of a new concordant effect. Namely, extremely high-frequency words behave like pseudowords (giving rise to more hits and false alarms than high-frequency words) and also have less distinctive semantics than high-frequency words. We conclude that our work provides strong evidence in favor of the familiarity-based accounts of the pseudoword effect. We discuss the implications of our research with regard to various issues surrounding the pseudoword effect and REM model.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of voluntary discussion forums in a higher education setting. Specifically, we examined intrinsic forum participation and investigated its relation to course performance across two experiments. In Experiment 1 (N = 1284) an online discussion forum was implemented at the beginning of an undergraduate introductory psychology course, and measures of course performance (i.e., writing assignment grades, exam grades, and extra-credits obtained) were compared with measures of forum participation. In Experiment 2 (N = 1334) an online discussion forum was implemented halfway through a second undergraduate introductory psychology course, after an initial measure of course performance was obtained, to control for the potential confound of student engagement (e.g., students who perform better in the course use the forum more). Overall, the results showed that students who participated in the forum tended to have better performance in the course, and furthermore that participating in the discussion forum, particularly reading posts on the forum, slightly improved exam performance. This study provides empirical support for the theoretical proposition that there is a facilitation effect of discussion forum participation on course performance. The results also suggest that implementation of an online discussion forum is beneficial even if a teacher only invests minimal time on the forum.

Physicians often begin the physical examination with an assessment of whether a patient looks older than his or her actual age. This practice suggests an implicit assumption that patients who appear older than their actual age are more likely to be in poor health.To determine the sensitivity and specificity of apparent age for the detection of poor health status.Cross-sectional.A total of 126 outpatients (ages 30-70) from four primary care clinics and one general internal medicine clinic at an academic medical institution.With the patient's actual age provided, physicians (n = 58 internal medicine residents and general internal medicine faculty) viewed patient photographs and assessed how old each patient looked. For each physician, we examined the sensitivity and specificity of the difference between how old the patient looked and the patient's actual age for the detection of poor health, defined using SF-12 physical health and mental health scores.Using the threshold of looking ≥ 5 years older than actual age and with poor health defined as an SF-12 score ≥ 2.0 SD below age group norms, median sensitivity was 29% (IQR, 19% to 35%), median specificity 82% (IQR, 77% to 88%), median positive likelihood ratio 1.7 (IQR, 1.3 to 2.2), and median negative likelihood ratio 0.9 (IQR, 0.8 to 0.9). Using the threshold of looking ≥ 10 years older than actual age, median sensitivity was 5% (IQR, 2% to 9%) and median specificity was 99% (IQR, 96% to 100%).The diagnostic value of apparent age depends on how many years older than his or her actual age a patient looks. A physician's assessment that a patient looks ≥ 10 years older than his or her actual age has very high specificity for the detection of poor health.

At the University of Toronto at Scarborough, we provide enhanced flexibility to our students using a blended-learning approach (i.e., the webOption) whereby students can attend lectures live, watch them online at their convenience, or both. The current research examines the use of pause and seeks features afforded by the webOption interface and how these features are related to students' learning approaches and their performance in calculus courses. These courses emphasize the teaching of mathematical proofs; cognitive skills that are enhanced with practice (Schneider & Shiffrin, 1977). Access to online lectures allows students to re-experience the professor as they teach these skills. Given this, it was predicted that use of the webOption might be especially potent in these learning contexts. The results we report here do not confirm that prediction. Students do use and appreciate the features of the webOption, however, those students who augmented their class attendance with online viewing, and those who used the lecture-control features the most, were actually the students who performed most poorly. We interpreted the results to be due to different learning strategies and the manner in which these strategies interact with course content. Our results suggest that using the pause feature is related to a surface strategy of learning, which is in turn related to poorer performance in the course.

While there is now general agreement that memory gives rise to both conscious and unconscious influences, there remains disagreement concerning the process architecture underlying these distinct influences. Do they arise from independent underlying systems (e.g., Jacoby, 1991) or from systems that are interactive (e.g., Joordens & Merikle, 1993)? In the current paper we present a novel "inside-out" technique that can be used with the process-dissociation paradigm to arrive at more concrete conclusions concerning this central question and demonstrate this technique via a meta-analysis of currently published findings. Our results suggest that the data presented in these studies vary in ways most consistent with the assumption that conscious and unconscious influences behave independently.

Virtual reality (VR) was used to create an ecologically valid spatial-navigation task in hand with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to articulate the neural basis of planning behavior. A virtual version of a traditional planning measure, the Tower of London, was also developed to ascertain convergent and divergent validity in terms of planning behavior and functional neuroanatomy. This VR-fMRI case study experiment was performed at 3.0 Tesla on a young healthy male subject. The obtained image data suggest both convergent and divergent specificity between the two conditions in terms of location and overall intensity of activation. Overall, the present case study provides supportive evidence that the activity of various brain regions associated with planning tasks is largely modulated by the ecological validity of the measure being used. This finding may extend to all domains of inquiry in neuropsychological research and assessment when deductive conclusions are formulated on the results of neuropsychological test measures that could be considered contrived in nature.

As educational technologies become more commonplace, they are often created with the intention of benefiting students through some novel approach, or to fill a perceived educational gap. While these rationales are good ones, it should also be realized that through the use of innovative technologies educators and researchers alike are presented with a unique and powerful opportunity to conduct laboratory-like research in a naturalistic environment. Thus giving the invisible "researcher" the ability to test the desired effectiveness of the tool, and to use the tool as a vehicle to understand learning, all in an unobtrusive manner. This not only ensures that new educational technologies are doing what they were designed to do, but also promises to create pedagogically superior tools and an improved learning environment for both students and educators. To illustrate how this can be successfully implemented, two evidence-based technologies are discussed (the webOption and peerScholar) where research has assisted in tool development and also furthered our understanding of educational theory.

As class sizes increase, methods of assessments shift from costly traditional approaches (e.g. expert-graded writing assignments) to more economic and logistically feasible methods (e.g. multiple-choice testing, computer-automated scoring, or peer assessment). While each method of assessment has its merits, it is peer assessment in particular, especially when made available online through a Web-based interface (e.g. our peerScholar system), that has the potential to allow a reintegration of open-ended writing assignments in any size class - and in a manner that is pedagogically superior to traditional approaches. Many benefits are associated with peer assessment, but it was the concerns that prompted two experimental studies (n = 120 in each) using peerScholar to examine mark agreement between and within groups of expert (graduate teaching assistants) and peer (undergraduate students) markers. Overall, using peerScholar accomplished the goal of returning writing into a large class, while producing grades similar in level and rank order as those provided by expert graders, especially when a grade accountability feature was used.

In his analysis of the pseudoword effect, [Greene, R.L. (2004). Recognition memory for pseudowords. Journal of Memory and Language, 50, 259–267.] suggests nonwords can feel more familiar that words in a recognition context if the orthographic features of the nonword match well with the features of the items presented at study. One possible account he mentions relies on two assumptions: (1) that items are matched to study only on the basis of the features the item affords, and (2) that the tendency to say old to a test item is proportional to the extent of featural overlap with study items. We find strong support for these assumptions with respect to accounting for the pseudoword effect observed in false alarms. However, our findings also suggest that the pseudoword effect on hits, when observed, reflects a different set of underlying processes, that appear more in line with the discrepancy-attribution notions of [Whittlesea, W.A., & Williams, L.D. (1998). Why do strangers feel familiar, but friends do not? A discrepancy-attribution account of feelings of familiarity. Acta Psychologica, 98, 141–165; Whittlesea, W.A., & Williams, L.D. (2000). The source of feelings of familiarity: The discrepancy-attribution hypothesis. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 26, 547–565.].

The mixed-list paradox is the finding that high-frequency words show a recall advantage in blocked lists, but that this advantage is reversed or nullified in mixed lists. We argue that this paradox has been poorly defined. Specifically, researchers should investigate random and alternating lists separately. We examine blocked, random, and alternating lists in our experiment. We hypothesize that a low-frequency recall advantage could arise due to asymmetrically strong links between low- and high-frequency words. Supporting our hypothesis, a low-frequency recall advantage is observed in the random list, as is an asymmetry of association. In the alternating list, no recall advantage is observed, and neither is any asymmetry of association. Our results offer a clear challenge to future research to (1) consider the associations between word frequencies and (2) consider random and alternating lists separately.

Unlike other forms of priming, semantic priming appears only to occur at short lags. In apparent contrast to this, S. Becker, M. Moscovitch, M. Behrmann, and S. Joordens (1997) described a theory of priming that predicts long-term effects for all forms of relatedness. This prediction is reconciled with previous failures to observe long-term semantic priming on the basis of 2 claims: (a) that previously used pairs share few semantic features and (b) that tasks typically used to study priming are not especially sensitive to semantic influences. The present experiments provide further support for these claims by demonstrating long-term semantic priming in the lexical-decision task when the stimuli and task are modified in a way that increases semantic involvement. However, the findings' suggest that in addition to the mechanism advocated by Becker et al., a second mechanism is necessary to provide a complete account of semantic priming effects.

Poor effort by examinees during neuropsychological testing has a profound effect on test performance. Although neuropsychological experiments often utilize healthy undergraduate students, the test-taking effort of this population has not been investigated previously. The purpose of the present study was to determine whether undergraduate students exercise variable effort in neuropsychological testing. During two testing sessions, participants (N = 36) were administered three Symptom Validity Tests (SVTs), the Test of Memory Malingering, the Dot Counting Test, and the Victoria Symptom Validity Test (VSVT), along with various neuropsychological tests. Analyses revealed 55.6% of participants in Session 1 and 30.8% of participants in Session 2 exerted poor effort on at least one SVT. Poor effort on the SVTs was significantly correlated with poor performance on various neuropsychological tests and there was support for the temporal stability of effort. These preliminary results suggest that the base rate of suboptimal effort in a healthy undergraduate population is quite high. Accordingly, effort may serve as a source of variance in neuropsychological research when using undergraduate students.

A number of reports claim that humans perform lexical decisions faster to words with many meanings than to words with only one meaning. It is a challenge to simulate this ambiguity effect with a parallel distributed processing model because activation of ambiguous words produces competition at the semantic level; this ought to lead to less rather than more efficient processing of ambiguous words. Despite this problem, the present simulations show that it is possible to produce an ambiguity effect when the network settles into a learned semantic pattern through use of a proximity factor. However, competition is not completely countered by proximity as the network fails to settle into a learned semantic pattern for ambiguous words on more than 50% of the trials. Further simulations show that manipulations that increase the proportion of correct settling result in the loss of thi ambiguity effect

Paralleling the recent work by Reichle, Reineberg, and Schooler (2010), we explore the use of eye movements as an objective measure of mind wandering while participants performed a reading task. Participants were placed in a self-classified probe-caught mind wandering paradigm while their eye movements were recorded. They were randomly probed every 2-3 min and were required to indicate whether their mind had been wandering. The results show that eye movements were generally less complex when participants reported mind wandering episodes, with both duration and frequency of within-word regressions, for example, becoming significantly reduced. This is consistent with the theoretical claim that the cognitive processes that normally influence eye movements to enhance semantic processing during reading exert less control during mind wandering episodes.

L. L. Jacoby, J. P. Toth, and A. P. Yonelinas (1993) assume that conscious and unconscious processes make independent contributions to task performance. As an alternative to the independence model, we suggest that a redundancy model based on the assumption that conscious processes are always associated with correlated unconscious processes can also be used to dissociate the separate influences of these processes. Using data reported by L. L. Jacoby et al., we show that each model leads to different but equally plausible estimates of conscious and unconscious influences, following both variations in attention (i.e., focused vs. divided) and in encoding (i.e., read vs. generate)

Jacoby and Whitehouse (1989) demonstrated that the probability of calling new test words “old” (i.e., false recognition) is biased by context words. When context words were briefly exposed and subjects were not informed of their presence, new words were called “old” more of ten if the context and test words were identical than if the context and test words were different. When the context words were presented at longer exposure durations and subjects were informed of their presence, the opposite pattern of results occurred. In Experiment 1, we replicated the critical qualitative difference across conditions reported by Jacoby and Whitehouse. In addition, the combined results of Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that the exposure duration of the context words, and not the instructions to the subjects, is the primary factor determining which pattern of false recognition occurs. However, in contrast with the findings of Jacoby and Whitehouse, both patterns of false recognition were associated with significant recognition memory for the context words. The latter finding presents problems for any interpretation of false recognition, which implies that the briefly exposed context words are perceived without awareness.

When faced with a relatively novel task, it is reasonable to assume that increases in performance efficiency depend upon processing adjustments that occur in response to errant or suboptimal performance. For such dynamic corrections to occur, the errors must first be noted, which can be challenging in contexts where no external feedback is provided. In the present article, the authors describe how a "double cross" error monitoring and correction process can be added to diffusion models of binary decision. The authors first outline the logick of our proposed error detection system, and then demonstrate that the addition of this double-cross process in the context of a simulation of lexical decision leads to more efficient responding. That is, with such a mechanism in place, the model was able to gradually respond more quickly and the distribution of errors became more consistent with human response patterns.

T he Turing test was originally conceived by Alan Turing [20] to determine if a machine had achieved human-level intelligence. Although no longer taken as a comprehensive measure of human intelligence, passing the Turing test remains an interesting challenge as evidenced by the still unclaimed Loebner prize[7], a high profile prize for the first AI to pass a Turing style test. In this paper, we sketch the development of an artificial “Turing judge” capable of critically evaluating the likelihood that a stream of discourse was generated by a human or a computer. The knowledge our judge uses to make the assessment comes from a model of human lexical semantic memory known as latent semantic analysis[9]. We provide empirical evidence that our implemented judge is capable of distinguishing between human and computer generated language from the Loebner Turing test competition with a degree of success similar to human judges.

Not a Page-turner, but a Very Intellectually-Challenging Book: Review of S. Pinker, How the mind works. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1998 (660 pages). Often when describing a good book, reviewers will call it a "page-turner." The apparent implication is that the work was so well written, and the story so engrossing, that the reader simply could not put the book down. Given this viewpoint, books are not judged by their covers, but by the time it takes to get from one cover to the next. Steve Pinker's book How the mind works is not a page-turner. At least, it was not for me. In fact, as the editor of this journal can easily validate, I spent a very long time traversing the terrain from the front cover to the back cover. I had no problems at all putting the book down, and did so on a number of occasions, sometimes for days at a time. By the "page-turning" theory of good books then, How the mind works does not fair well. However, if we consider the "quick read" index of book quality in more detail, it becomes immediately obvious that whereas reading speed may be a good index of quality in the fiction domain, it fails miserably in the scientific domain. A good fiction book is one that prompts you to give over your mind and imagination to the author, allowing him or her to take you on a journey they create. Any two readers of the same fiction should recount it similarly, insofar as they themselves played little role in the reading experience. They were merely privileged viewers of a series of events in which they themselves had little stake. Thus, the book is read more with the imagery part of the brain than with the logic and problem-solving part. In contrast, a good scientific book should force readers to think about the path they are being led on, rather than describing how pretty that path is. In fact, a very good scientific book should challenge readers to decide for themselves whether the path onto which they are led is even the right path at all. The reader should become an integral part of the story being told, and the final product of that story could consist of not only the author's words, but also of the reader's reactions, agreements, and disagreements. As such, any two readers should have a similar but different recounting of the story, with the similarity due to what the author said, and the differences due to their own thoughts and ideas. How the mind works provides an excellent example of what I consider a very good, thought-provoking scientific book. It is true that I often put the book down, sometimes for long periods. But during those down times I still continued to read, in the sense described earlier. That is, I continued to consider the thoughts and issues raised by Pinker, often discussing them with colleagues, in an attempt to decide for myself where I stood on the issues. I found that I agreed with some of Pinker's views while disagreeing with others. However, I will not recount my opinions here, because I expect a different reader would have very different opinions for the reasons described above. Instead, I will highlight the characteristics of Pinker's book that make it such a nonpage-turner. In my view, the strengths of the book are rooted in three characteristics: (a) the perspective, (b) the subject matter, and (c) the writing style. I now comment on each of these briefly. PERSPECTIVE The book is written from a reverse-engineering, cognitive science perspective. That is, the mind is seen as the workings of some amazing and complicated machinery that we do not understand well, despite the fact that we interact with and observe the machine most of the time every day. It is as though a different kind of computer suddenly appeared on our desk and nobody knew how it worked -- perhaps a computer of extra-terrestrial origins, not built by us and therefore not necessarily conforming to our engineering principles. The question then is, how is it able to do the things it does? …

When memory is contrasted for stimuli belonging to distinct stimulus classes, one of two patterns is observed: a mirror pattern, in which one stimulus gives rise to higher hits but lower false alarms (e.g., the frequency-based mirror effect) or a concordant pattern, in which one stimulus class gives rise both to higher hits and to higher false alarms (e.g., the pseudoword effect). On the basis of the dual-process account proposed by Joordens and Hockley (2000), we predict that mirror patterns occur when one stimulus class is more familiar and less distinctive than another, whereas concordant patterns occur when one stimulus class is more familiar than another. We tested these assumptions within a video game paradigm using novel stimuli that allow manipulations in terms of distinctiveness and familiarity (via similarity). When more distinctive, less familiar items are contrasted with less distinctive, more familiar items, a mirror pattern is observed. Systematically enhancing the familiarity of stimuli transforms the mirror pattern to a concordant pattern as predicted. Although our stimuli differ considerably from those used in examinations of the frequency-based mirror effect and the pseudoword effect, the implications of our findings with respect to those phenomena are also discussed.

Using a novel referent size-selection task, MacDonald, Joordens, and Seergobin (1999; MacDonald & Joordens, 2000) found that negative priming persisted even when participants were encouraged to attend to distractors before selectively responding to targets. This finding suggested that negative priming is not caused by processes that operate on stimuli that are to be ignored in the traditional selective attention sense. Mackintosh, Mathews, and Holden’s (2002) attempt to replicate the MacDonald et al. study resulted in the discovery of possible artifacts in the referent size-selection task, thereby making the implications with respect to the role of attention less clear. In the present study, we describe a different method for directing attention to distractors in a negative priming context, one that does not suffer from the same potential artifacts as the referent size-selection task. Our results are consistent with those found by MacDonald et al., in that negative priming persisted even when participants were explicitly encouraged to attend to distractors. Implications are discussed in the context of the related concepts of selective attention (e.g., Broadbent, 1965) versus selection for action (e.g., Allport, 1987).

Libet, Gleason, Wright, and Pearl's (1983; Libet, 1985) influential work using a clock-watching task suggests that voluntary actions are initiated in motor cortex prior to the point where the participant claims to have initiated that action. Joordens, van Duijn, and Spalek (2002) showed that a bias exists in this task with respect to the participants' reports of initiation times. Joordens et al. assumed that this bias was primarily due to motion cues that are very much like those used to elicit phenomena such as representational momentum. In the present Experiment 1, it is demonstrated that this bias disappears when a mouse-click response is used in place of a temporal-order judgment. This finding, however, is actually more confusing than clarifying given that the procedural parallels with representational momentum are still present and should be supporting a bias. In the three subsequent experiments the view that a bias is indeed present, but that it is opposed by an opposite-acting compensation process, is proposed and tested. Implications for both representational momentum and for the general use of clock-watching tasks (e.g., Libet et al., 1983) are highlighted.

Strayer and colleagues (Grison & Strayer, 2001; Malley & Strayer, 1995; Strayer & Grison, 1999) have reported experiments in which negative priming by ignored stimuli occurred only for stimuli that were repeatedly sampled from small sets. These results were argued to be inconsistent with episodic/mismatch accounts of negative priming. We show here that a dependence of negative priming on multiple repetition is wholly consistent with such theories. Furthermore, we argue that the inhibitory theory proposed by Strayer and colleagues cannot account for major findings regarding negative priming and that anomalies in the data reported by Grison and Strayer are more parsimoniously explained by episodic/mismatch accounts.

Trevena and Miller (2002, this issue) provide further evidence that readiness potentials occur in the brain prior to the time that participants claim to have initiated a voluntary movement, a contention originally forwarded by Libet, Gleason, Wright, and Pearl (1983). In their examination of this issue, though, aspects of their data lead them to question whether their measurement of the initiation of a voluntary movement was accurate. The current article addresses this concern by providing a direct analysis of biases in this task. This was done by asking participants to make subjective timing decisions regarding a stimulus that could be measured objectively. Our findings suggest that their timing task was indeed biased such that participants' tend to report events as happening approximately 70 ms later than they actually happened. Implications for the original Libet et al. claims are discussed.

When performing a lexical decision task, participants can correctly categorize letter strings as words faster if they have multiple meanings (i.e., ambiguous words) than if they have one meaning (i.e., unambiguous words). In contrast, when reading connected text, participants tend to fixate longer on ambiguous words than on unambiguous words. Why are ambiguous words at an advantage in one word recognition task, and at a disadvantage in another? These disparate results can be reconciled if it is assumed that ambiguous words are relatively fast to reach a semantic-blend state sufficient for supporting lexical decisions, but then slow to escape the blend when the task requires a specific meaning be retrieved. We report several experiments that support this possibility.

In a series of experiments, we examined the effect of requiring subjects to attend to distractors in a test of negative priming. This was accomplished by using a referent size-selection task in which subjects were instructed to name the larger animal and to ignore the smaller animal in a word pair. The result was a quadrupling of the standard negative priming effect, suggesting that negative priming not only occurs for attended distractors, it is actually enhanced. We demonstrated that this enhancement of the effect was not due solely to increased latencies in the referent size-selection task, because neither decreasing base response times in other referent size-selection tasks nor increasing base response times in typical color-selection tasks substantially affected the respective negative priming effects. Although these findings can be accommodated within current theories of negative priming, they challenge the basic assumption that the negative priming effect arises because the critical item was ignored or not attended to on the prime trial.

The notion that inhibitory processes play a critical role in selective attention has gained wide support. Much of this support derives from studies of negative priming. The authors note that the attribution of negative priming to an inhibitory mechanism of attention draws its support from a common assumption underlying priming procedures, together with the procedure that has been used to measure negative priming. The results from a series of experiments demonstrate that selection between 2 competing prime items is not required to observe negative priming. This result is demonstrated across several experiments in which participants named 1 of 2 items in a second display following presentation of a single-item prime. The implications of these results for existing theories of negative priming are discussed, and a theoretical framework for interpreting negative priming and several related phenomena is forwarded.

Do studies of perception without awareness and studies of perception without attention address a similar underlying concept of awareness? To answer this question, we compared qualitative differences in performance across variations in stimulus quality (i.e., short vs. long prime-mask stimulus onset asynchrony) with qualitative differences in performance across variations in the direction of attention (i.e., focused vs. divided). The qualitative differences were based on three different phenomena: Stroop priming, false recognition, and exclusion failure. In all cases, variations in stimulus quality and variations in the direction of attention led to parallel findings. These results suggest that perception with and without awareness and perception with and without attention are equivalent ways of describing the same underlying process distinction.

Negative Priming Without Overt Prime Selection BRUCE MILLIKEN, McMaster University STEVE JOORDENS, University of Toronto at Scarborough Abstract The procedure typically used to demonstrate negative priming requires subjects to respond to one of two simultaneously presented stimuli across two consecutive displays. Negative priming is defined by slower responses to targets in the second display that appeared as distractors in the first display, than to targets in the second display that did not appear in the first display. It is widely assumed that negative priming occurs as a result of the selection that occurs in the first display. In the present article, we show that negative priming can be observed without requiring subjects to respond selectively to one of two items in the first display. We argue that this result is useful for two reasons. First, it points out a fundamental misunderstanding concerning the procedure required to measure negative priming, a misunderstanding that has shaped much of the theoretical work done in this area. Second, we suggest that the procedure introduced here is of considerable utility in evaluating theoretical accounts of negative priming. To demonstrate this utility we report the results of two studies that assess the code co - ordination account of negative priming (Lowe, 1985; Tipper & Cranston, 1985). The priming paradigm is an empirical tool commonly used to examine the state of an internal representation of a recently presented stimulus. In a typical priming study, subjects are asked to identify or categorize visually presented target stimuli as quickly and accurately as possible. On some trials the target stimulus is identical to or semantically related to a stimulus that was displayed previously. On other trials the target is unrelated to previous stimuli. The conventional result obtained in such studies is that less time is required to respond accurately to a target when it follows an identical prime (e.g., Scarborough, Cortese, & Scarborough, 1977; Scarborough, Gerard, & Cortese, 1979) or a semantically related prime (e.g., Meyer & Schvaneveldt, 1971; Meyer, Schvaneveldt, & Ruddy, 1975) than when it follows an unrelated prime. The cause of priming effects remains a matter of considerable debate (e.g., see Becker, Moscovitch, & Behrmann, 1995; Joordens & Besner, 1992; Masson, 1991; 1995; McKoon & Ratcliff, 1992; McNamara, 1992; 1994; Neely, 1991; Ratcliff & McKoon, 1988; Whittlesea & Jacoby, 1990). However, the traditional account of priming assumes that the level of activation of an internal representation of a target item increases as a result of prior presentation of an identical or semantically related prime. In the case of repetition priming, this enhanced level of activation is a direct consequence of the previous occurrence of the target item. In the case of semantic/associative priming, the enhanced activation of the target item is assumed to occur as a result of spreading activation from the representation of the prime to representations of its semantic/associative neighbours in memory (e.g., Collins & Loftus, 1975; Anderson, 1983). Thus, presentation of 'DOG' speeds a subsequent response to 'CAT' because when 'DOG' becomes active in memory, activation spreads to related items such as 'CAT'. For the present purpose, the critical property of such accounts of priming is that the time required to respond to a target stimulus faithfully reflects the activation state of its internal representation. Thus, the priming effect is determined at the time the prime item is presented and is measured at the time the target is responded to. In contrast to the benefit often observed in such priming studies, several experimenters have described situations in which stimulus repetition leads to slower or more error prone responses (e.g., Kanwisher, 1987; Posner & Cohen, 1984, Tipper, 1985). In the current article, we focus on one of these empirical phenomena, now commonly known as negative priming (Tipper, 1985). …

Several studies have reported priming effects that span an intervening unrelated word (DavelaarColtheart, 1975; Meyer, Schvaneveldt,Ruddy, 1972). More recently, other investigators have suggested that such relatedness effects are the result of postaccess processes (Gough, Alford,Holley-Wilcox, 1981; Masson, 1991; RatcliffMcKoon, 1988). In fact, these investigators claim that when procedures are used that discourage the use of postaccess processes, relatedness effects do not span intervening unrelated words. The present experiments demonstrate reliable relatedness effects with procedures that eliminate postaccess processes. These results are consistent with the notion of spreading activation among local representations in memory. Implications for the issue of local versus distributed representations are discussed.