Memory performance is usually impaired when participants have to encode information while performing a concurrent task. Recent studies using recall tasks have found that emotional items are more resistant to such cognitive depletion effects than non-emotional items. However, when recognition tasks are used, the same effect is more elusive as recent recognition studies have obtained contradictory results. In two experiments, we provide evidence that negative emotional content can reliably reduce the effects of cognitive depletion on recognition memory only if stimuli with high levels of emotional intensity are used. In particular, we found that recognition performance for realistic pictures was impaired by a secondary 3-back working memory task during encoding if stimuli were emotionally neutral or had moderate levels of negative emotionality. In contrast, when negative pictures with high levels of emotional intensity were used, the detrimental effects of the secondary task were significantly attenuated.
This study expands on previous SLA research by focusing on learning collocational rules. The study also explores the interaction between exposure conditions, awareness, and item-related variables in the context of collocation learning. Chinese learners of English were exposed to sentences from large corpora, featuring four target node verbs (replaced with pseudowords) and their respective noun collocates. There are two pairs of novel verbs with different L1-L2 congruencies in the experimental material. Participants were divided into incidental and intentional groups. The learning effectiveness was assessed through a plausibility judgment test (PJT), which included trained, new, and swapped items. Awareness of the underlying rules was measured using source attributions, retrospective verbal reports, and posttest thinking aloud. The results revealed that participants acquired both explicit and implicit knowledge of collocational rules. Rule-searching led to greater explicit knowledge but did not improve overall learning outcomes. Additionally, an interaction was observed among awareness, rule type, and test type. As the difficulty level increased in terms of L1-L2 congruency or item type, the importance of awareness in meeting the learning demands also increased.
Dynamic distortion of the visual field has been shown to affect perceptual judgment of visual dimensions such as size, length, and distance. Here, we report four experiments demonstrating that the different aspects of a triangle differently influence judgments of distance. Specifically, when the base of the triangle faces the centre of the display, participants consistently underestimate and overestimate the distance of a small dot from the unmarked centre of the display relative to conditions in which the vertex of the triangle faces the centre. When the dot is close to the figure, the distance of the dot to the centre is underestimated. Conversely, when the dot is close to the figure, the distance to the centre is overestimated. The effect is replicated when the internal distances are equalized and when ellipses are used instead of triangles. These results support a ripple model of spatial distortion in which local curvature acts to attract or repel objects. In conclusion, we suggest some implications of our findings for theories of perceptual organization.