When facing particular combinations of stimuli and responses, people create temporary event files integrating the corresponding stimulus and response features. Repeating one or more of these... Show moreWhen facing particular combinations of stimuli and responses, people create temporary event files integrating the corresponding stimulus and response features. Repeating one or more of these features retrieves the entire event file, which impairs performance if not all features repeat (partial-repetition costs). We studied how durable event files are over time and how sensitive they are to intervening objects or stimulus-response events. After-effects of relevant and irrelevant stimulus-response bindings were assessed after intervals of 1 to 5 s between creation and retrieval of the binding that were either unfilled (Experiment 1A), filled with 0, 2, or 4 presentations of the same neutral stimulus (1B), or of changing stimuli (1C), or filled with 0, 2, or 4 task-unrelated stimulus-response combinations (2A) or the same number of repetitions of the binding-inducing stimulus-response combination (2B). Taken altogether, the findings show a strong impact on the duration of the interval but no systematic effect of the type and number of intervening events. This suggests that event files disintegrate over time, as a function of spontaneous decay, but not due to interference from other bindings. Show less
Social cognition emerged in the 1970s and 80s as an attempt to answer social-psychological questions by adopting experimental techniques and theoretical concepts from cognitive psychology. Recently... Show moreSocial cognition emerged in the 1970s and 80s as an attempt to answer social-psychological questions by adopting experimental techniques and theoretical concepts from cognitive psychology. Recently, cognitive psychologists began to build complementary bridges between cognitive and social psychology by showing increasing interest in the cognitive implications of social situations. Here, we take a closer look at the remaining obstacles to join cognitive and social perspectives on human behavior. Using conformity as an example, we attempt to demonstrate that the social-cognition approach has been successful in adopting cognitive concepts and experimental methods, but is still lagging behind with respect to (1) mechanistic theorizing, as it often engages in merely describing phenomena in terms of reasons rather than explaining it in terms of causes and (2) reflecting the sociohistorical context of the phenomenon under investigation. As we try to show, developing mechanistic theories for social phenomena, including the effects of individual differences and their sociohistorical dependencies, is not only possible but necessary to eliminate the boundaries between cognitive and social accounts of human behavior. Show less
Everyday thinking and scientific theorizing about human action control are equally driven by the apparently obvious contrast between will and habit or, in their more modern disguise: intentional... Show moreEveryday thinking and scientific theorizing about human action control are equally driven by the apparently obvious contrast between will and habit or, in their more modern disguise: intentional and automatic processes, and model-based and model-free action planning. And yet, no comprehensive category system to systematically tell truly willed from merely habitual actions is available. As I argue, this is because the contrast is ill-conceived, because almost every single action is both willed and habitual, intentional and automatic, and model-based and model-free, simply because will and habit (and their successors) do not refer to alternative modes or pathways of action control but rather to different phases of action planning. I further discuss three basic misconceptions about action control that binary theorizing relies on: the assumption that intentional processes compete with automatic processes (rather than the former setting the stage for the latter), the assumption that action control is targeting processes (rather than representations of action outcomes), and the assumption that people follow only one goal at a time (rather than multiple goals). I conclude that (at least the present style of) binary theorizing fails to account for action control and should thus be replaced by a more integrative view. Show less
In this article, we challenge the usefulness of “attention” as a unitary construct and/or neural system. We point out that the concept has too many meanings to justify a single term, and that ... Show moreIn this article, we challenge the usefulness of “attention” as a unitary construct and/or neural system. We point out that the concept has too many meanings to justify a single term, and that “attention” is used to refer to both the explanandum (the set of phenomena in need of explanation) and the explanans (the set of processes doing the explaining). To illustrate these points, we focus our discussion on visual selective attention. It is argued that selectivity in processing has emerged through evolution as a design feature of a complex multi-channel sensorimotor system, which generates selective phenomena of “attention” as one of many by-products. Instead of the traditional analytic approach to attention, we suggest a synthetic approach that starts with well-understood mechanisms that do not need to be dedicated to attention, and yet account for the selectivity phenomena under investigation. We conclude that what would serve scientific progress best would be to drop the term “attention” as a label for a specific functional or neural system and instead focus on behaviorally relevant selection processes and the many systems that implement them. Show less
Adaptive behavioral control involves a balance between top-down persistence and flexible updating of goals under changing demands. According to the metacontrol state model (MSM), this balance... Show moreAdaptive behavioral control involves a balance between top-down persistence and flexible updating of goals under changing demands. According to the metacontrol state model (MSM), this balance emerges from the interaction between the frontal and the striatal dopaminergic system. The attentional blink (AB) task has been argued to tap into the interaction between persistence and flexibility, as it reflects overpersistence—the too-exclusive allocation of attentional resources to the processing of the first of two consecutive targets. Notably, previous studies are inconclusive about the association between the AB and noninvasive proxies of dopamine including the spontaneous eye blink rate (sEBR), which allegedly assesses striatal dopamine levels. We aimed to substantiate and extend previous attempts to predict individual sizes of the AB in two separate experiments with larger sample sizes (N = 71 & N = 65) by means of noninvasive behavioral and physiological proxies of dopamine (DA), such as sEBR and mood measures, which are likely to reflect striatal dopamine levels, and color discrimination, which has been argued to tap into the frontal dopamine levels. Our findings did not confirm the prediction that AB size covaries with sEBR, mood, or color discrimination. The implications of this inconsistency with previous observations are discussed. Show less
Few articles in psychology and cognitive neuroscience do without the promise to get into the “mechanisms underlying” particular psychological phenomena. And yet the progress in our mechanistic... Show moreFew articles in psychology and cognitive neuroscience do without the promise to get into the “mechanisms underlying” particular psychological phenomena. And yet the progress in our mechanistic understanding of human cognition and behavior must be considered disappointing: Most “explanations” merely classify the phenomenon under investigation as falling into a broader category of (not any better understood) phenomena, specify the context conditions under which the phenomenon is likely to occur, or specify a particular kind of neural activity (such as the activation of a particular brain area) that is correlated with the phenomenon. None of these meets the criteria of a truly mechanistic explanation, which needs to account for phenomena in terms of “a structure performing a function in virtue of its component parts, component operations, and their organization” (Bechtel, 2006). This contribution characterizes the problem and some of its implications and discusses possible solutions. Show less
Anecdotal evidence suggests that cocaine use will help overcome creative ‘blocks’ by enhancing flexible thinking. Given that cocaine is likely to enhance dopamine (DA) levels, which in turn are... Show moreAnecdotal evidence suggests that cocaine use will help overcome creative ‘blocks’ by enhancing flexible thinking. Given that cocaine is likely to enhance dopamine (DA) levels, which in turn are positively associated with divergent thinking (DT); is a possibility that is tested in the present study. Furthermore, the impact of cocaine is tested on convergent thinking (CT), another aspect of creative thinking, which has been reported to be impaired with high DA levels. It was hypothesized that cocaine would enhance DT and impair CT. A placebo-controlled within-subjects study including 24 healthy poly-drug users was set up to test the influence of oral cocaine (300 mg) on creativity. Verbal CT was assessed with the Remote Associates Task (RAT); figural CT was assessed with the Picture Concepts Task (PCT) and the Tower of London (TOL). Verbal DT was assessed with the Alternative Uses Task (AUT); figural DT was assessed with the Pattern/Line Meanings Task (PLMT). Findings showed that, compared to placebo, cocaine impaired figural CT (TOL) and flexible DT of verbal stimuli (AUT), while it enhanced figural DT (PLMT). No significant effects of cocaine were observed regarding the PCT and RAT. It was demonstrated that cocaine-induced effects on creativity in poly-drug users are stimulus-dependent. Cocaine enhanced performance on figural DT but impaired performance on verbal (flexible) DT. Cocaine impaired CT on only one figural task and but not on the other tasks. As creativity is an important aspect in cognitive therapies, it is important to further understand these discrepancies in creativity task performance. Show less
This article provides an update of the Theory of Event Coding (TEC), which claims that perception and action are identical processes operating on the same codes – event files consisting of... Show moreThis article provides an update of the Theory of Event Coding (TEC), which claims that perception and action are identical processes operating on the same codes – event files consisting of integrated networks of sensorimotor feature codes. The original version of the theory emphasized its representational underpinnings, but recent theoretical developments provide the basis for a more integrated view consisting of both the codes that are shared between perception and action in the control processes operating on these codes. Four developments are discussed in more detail: The degree to which the integration and retrieval of event files depends on current goals, how metacontrol states impact the handling of event files, how feature binding relates to event learning, and how the integration of non-social events relates to the integration of social events. Case examples using various versions of the Simon task are used to explain how the new version of TEC explains interactions between perception and action in non-social and social situations. Show less
Accumulating theoretical and empirical evidence suggests that task-irrelevant mood states have specific effects on insightful and analytical problem solving, but few studies have directly related... Show moreAccumulating theoretical and empirical evidence suggests that task-irrelevant mood states have specific effects on insightful and analytical problem solving, but few studies have directly related those states to these two problem-solving strategies. The present research investigated the impact of pre-existing mood and experimentally induced mood states on solving problems that could be solved analytically or by insight. Results revealed that an induced negative moods, as compared to an induced neutral mood, increases the probability of analytic solutions. In contrast, spontaneous positive moods facilitated problem solving performance regardless of the specific solution strategy. Additionally, the process of generating solutions had a marked effect on subsequent memory recall regardless of recall interval. These findings provide support for the cognitive tuning theory. Show less
