To probe the motivational roles of hedonic gratification and social gratification in giving “Like” feedback on social media, we developed a set of novel pictures to simulate WeChat Moments. We subsequently examined how the personality trait of extraversion and stimulus content characteristics influenced “Liking” behavior. A 2 × 3 × 2 -mixed experimental design was applied to data obtained from 56 WeChat Moments users. These participants included 28 individuals with the highest extraversion scale scores, and 28 individuals with (...) the lowest extraversion scale scores, according to the NEO Five-Factor Inventory. Briefly, participants observed pictures on an interface similar to that of WeChat Moments and were given the option to “Like” each picture. “Like” rates and response time were then compared across groups and conditions by applying a mixed-design analysis of variance. Pearson's correlation coefficients were calculated to explore relationships between the “Like” rates under each condition and the scores for each personality trait. Compared with the neutral pictures, the positive and negative pictures were “Liked” more and less frequently, respectively. Compared with the poster-unrelated pictures, the personally related pictures were “Liked” more frequently. In the extrovert group, the frequency of “Likes” given to unrelated negative content positively associated with neuroticism and negatively associated with conscientiousness. No correlations were observed in the introvert group. Compared with not giving “Like” feedback, participants gave “Likes” to positive and negative pictures more quickly and slowly, respectively.These results support the hypothesis that hedonic gratification and social gratification motivate “Like” feedback for positive content and personally related content, respectively. “Liking” behavior was not affected by extraversion, but was related to neuroticism and conscientiousness. Content-related differences in time intervals for giving “Like” feedback in this study suggest that people do not hesitate to give “Like” feedback to positive content on WeChat Moments, yet linger in deciding to give “Like” feedback to negative content. (shrink)

Short-term or working memory provides temporary storage of information in the brain after an experience and is associated with conscious awareness. Neurons sensitive to the multiple stimulus attributes comprising an experience are distributed within many brain regions. Such distributed cell assemblies, activated by an event, are the most plausible system to represent the WM of that event. Studies with a variety of imaging technologies have implicated widespread brain regions in the mediation of WM for different categories of information. Each (...) kind of WM may thus be expected to involve many brain regions rather than a local, uniquely dedicated set of cells. Neurons in a distributed “cell assembly” may be self-selected by their temporally coherent activations. The process by which this fragmented representation of the recent past is reassembled to accomplish essentially automatic and reliable recognition of a recurrent event constitutes an important problem. One plausible mechanism to achieve the identification of past with previous events would require that the representational system mediating WM must coexist in spatial extent and somehow overlap in temporal activation with cell ensembles registering input from subsequent events. The detection of such a postulated mechanism required an experimental approach which would focus upon spatial patterns of coherent activation while information about different events was stored in WM and retrieved, rather than focusing upon the temporal sequences of activation in localized regions of interest. For this purpose, the familiar delayed matching from sample task was modified. A series of information-free flashes, or “noncontingent probes,” was presented before an initial series of visual information items, the Priming Sample, which were to be held in WM during a Delay Period. A second series of visual information items were then presented, the Matching Sample. The task required detection of any item in the second series which had beenabsentfrom the initial series. Thirty such trials with a particular category of visual information constituted a single task. Several DMS tasks with this standardized design, but with different categories of visual information, were presented within each test session. The information categories included letters of the alphabet, single digit numbers, or faces from a school yearbook. Event-related potentials , were computed from 21 standardized electrode placements, separately for information-free probes and for information items in each interval of the trials within a task. Because each electrode is particularly sensitive to coherent activation of neurons in the immediately underlying brain regions, topographic maps were constructed and interpolated across the surface of the scalp. The momentary fluctuations of the resulting voltage “landscapes” throughout the task were then subjected to quantitative analysis. Distinctive landscapes sometimes persisted for prolonged periods, implying sustained engagement of very large populations of neurons. “Difference landscapes” were constructed by subtraction of topographic maps evoked by noncontingent probes during the Delay Period from maps of probe ERPs before the presentation of the initial information in the Priming Sample. Such probe difference landscapes displayed recurrent high similarity to momentary landscapes elicited during subsequent presentation of the information items in the Matching Sample. It seemed as if the distributed cell assembly continuously engaged by mediation of WM of the diverse attributes of the initial stimuli was being dynamically compared to the ensembles engaged by registration of the subsequent stimuli. Spatial Principal Component Analysis was applied to the sequences of momentary voltage landscapes observed throughout trials of each task. This method sought a small number of spatial patterns with which these large sets of inhomogeneous spatial distributions of voltage could be reconstructed. This is the spatial analog of the reconstruction of local ERPs by temporal principal components, as often described previously. Five Spatial Principal Components were found which accounted for about 90% of the total variance of voltage across the surface of the scalp throughout every task. Theloadings,or distinguishing topographic features, of these SPCs, were highly similar during every cognitive task for every subject. However,factor scores,or relative average contribution to the overall voltage distributions, of the different SPCs varied substantially among subjects between the tasks and momentarily within successive intervals of each task. These five SPCs may reflect coherent activation of huge distributed ensembles of neurons which comprise independent but interacting functional brain subsystems. These subsystems may correspond to basic resources available to individuals for allocation to mediate conscious evaluation of information during cognitive activity, providing a filter to bind together fractionated representations of the past to evaluate the present. (shrink)

The current contents of visual working memory can be disrupted by previously formed memories. This phenomenon is known as proactive interference, and it can be used to index the availability of old memories. However, there is uncertainty about the robustness and lifetime of proactive interference, which raises important questions about the role of temporal factors in forgetting. The present study assessed different factors that were expected to influence the persistence of proactive interference over an inter-trial interval in the visual recent (...) probes task. In three experiments, participants encoded arrays of targets and then determined whether a single probe matched one of those targets. On some trials, the probe matched an item from the previous trial, whereas on other trials the probe matched a more distant item. Prior studies have found that recent negative probes can increase errors and slow response times in comparison to non-recent negative probes, and this offered a behavioral measure of proactive interference. In Experiment 1, factors of array size and inter-trial interval were manipulated in the recent probes task. There was a reduction in proactive interference when a longer delay separated trials on one measure, but only when participants encoded two targets. When working memory capacity was strained by increasing the array size to four targets, proactive interference became stronger after the long delay. In Experiment 2, the inter-trial interval length was again manipulated, along with stimulus novelty. Proactive interference was modestly stronger when a smaller number of stimuli were used throughout the experiment, but proactive interference was minimally affected by the inter-trial interval. These findings are problematic for temporal models of forgetting, but Experiment 3 showed that proactive interference also resisted disruption produced by a secondary task presented within the inter-trial interval. Proactive interference was constantly present and generally resilient to the different manipulations. The combined data suggest a relatively durable, passive representation that can disrupt current working memory under a variety of different circumstances. (shrink)

Two experiments were conducted for the derivation of psychophysical scales of the following audio descriptors: spectral centroid, spectral spread, spectral skewness, odd-to-even harmonic ratio, spectral deviation, and spectral slope. The stimulus sets of each audio descriptor were synthesized and independently controlled through appropriate synthesis techniques. Partition scaling methods were used in both experiments, and the scales were constructed by fitting well-behaving functions to the listeners' ratings. In the first experiment, the listeners' task was the estimation of the relative differences (...) between successive levels of a particular audio descriptor. The median values of listeners' ratings increased with increasing feature values, which confirmed listeners' abilities to estimate intervals. However, there was a large variability in the reliability of the derived interval scales depending on the stimulus spacing in each trial. In the second experiment, listeners had control over the stimulus values and were asked to divide the presented range of values into perceptually equal intervals, which provides a ratio scale. For every descriptor, the reliability of the derived ratio scales was excellent. The unit of a particular ratio scale was assigned empirically so as to facilitate qualitative comparisons between the scales of all audio descriptors. The construction of psychophysical scales based on univariate stimuli allowed for the establishment of cause-and-effect relations between audio descriptors and perceptual dimensions, contrary to past research that has relied on multivariate stimuli and has only examined the correlations between the two. Most importantly, this study provides an understanding of the ways in which the sensation magnitudes of several audio descriptors are apprehended. (shrink)

Logical metonymy resolution (begin a book begin reading a book or begin writing a book) has traditionally been explained either through complex lexical entries (qualia structures) or through the integration of the implicit event via post-lexical access to world knowledge. We propose that recent work within the words-as-cues paradigm can provide a more dynamic model of logical metonymy, accounting for early and dynamic integration of complex event information depending on previous contextual cues (agent and patient). We first present a self-paced (...) reading experiment on German subordinate sentences, where metonymic sentences and their paraphrased version differ only in the presence or absence of the clause-final target verb (Der Konditor begann die Glasur Der Konditor begann, die Glasur aufzutragen/The baker began the icing The baker began spreading the icing). Longer reading times at the target verb position in a high-typicality condition (baker + icing spread ) compared to a low-typicality (but still plausible) condition (child + icing spread) suggest that we make use of knowledge activated by lexical cues to build expectations about events. The early and dynamic integration of event knowledge in metonymy interpretation is bolstered by further evidence from a second experiment using the probe recognition paradigm. Presenting covert events as probes following a high-typicality or a low-typicality metonymic sentence (Der Konditor begann die Glasur AUFTRAGEN/The baker began the icing SPREAD), we obtain an analogous effect of typicality at 100 ms interstimulus interval. (shrink)

The adaptation-by-binding account and the arousal-biased competition model suggest that emotional arousal increases binding effects for transient links between stimuli and responses. Two highly-powered, pre-registered experiments tested whether transient stimulus-response bindings are stronger for high versus low arousing stimuli. Emotional words were presented in a sequential prime-probe design in which stimulus relation, response relation, and stimulus arousal were orthogonally manipulated. In Experiment 1 (N = 101), words with high and low arousal levels were presented individually in (...) prime and probe displays. In Experiment 2 (N = 170), a high arousing affective word was presented simultaneously with a neutral word during the prime display; in the subsequent probe display, either the arousing or the neutral word repeated or a different high versus low arousal word was shown. Data from both experiments did not demonstrate a modulation of SRBR effects by stimulus arousal and SRBR effects were of equal magnitude for word stimuli of high and low arousal levels. These null results are not in line with binding accounts that hypothesise a modulatory influence of emotional arousal on perception-action binding. (shrink)