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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
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September 2016 - August 2021
September 2015 - August 2016
June 2014 - August 2014
Publications
Publications (73)
The use and teaching of experimentation in psychology ought to accompany a discussion of what is within and what is beyond the reach of the method. I address this question by outlining the necessary restrictions that are prerequisite for conducting an experiment. The restrictions include establishing a fixed goal, the fulfillment of which represent...
Action is widely characterized as possessing a teleological dimension. The dominant way of describing goal-directed action and agency is in terms of exploitation, i.e., pursuing pre-specified goals using existing strategies. Recent theoretical developments emphasize the place of exploration, i.e., discovering new goals or acquiring new strategies....
This book offers an analysis of experimental psychology that is embedded in a general understanding of human behavior. It provides methodological self-awareness for researchers who study and use the experimental method in psychology. The book critically reviews key research areas (e.g., rule-breaking, sense of agency, free choice, task switching, t...
The appeal and popularity of “building blocks”, i.e., simple and dissociable elements of behavior and experience, persists in psychological research. We begin our assessment of this research strategy with an historical review of structuralism (as espoused by E. B. Titchener) and behaviorism (espoused by J. B. Watson and B. F. Skinner), two movement...
The experimental method is the cornerstone of psychology as a science. So we are told—over the past century in various disguises—by various experts and deep believers in the promise that psychology will one day become a “real” science. The label method is supposed to add credibility to what psychologists do, and the constant parallels made with the...
When we set aside the question of replicability of empirical findings, there are still disagreements over the meaning of research findings. The question of meaning is of central importance both in justifying a given line of research and in making inferences from the findings. Nonetheless, questions of meaning are raised far less frequently than que...
The present volume puts together a diverse set of viewpoints, all of which are addressing fundamental concerns in psychological science. Each chapter on its own provides a pathway into thinking about experimental psychology, its promises and strengths, and its limits and potential risks. We read about the historical roots of—and early debates regar...
The present chapter begins by examining the idea of tools for mind-wandering (MW). This idea helps remove the boundary between the mind and the tools and techniques that enable or facilitate mental tasks. The idea is then applied to research methods that examine MW, arguing that the currently dominant methods have severely limited the view of MW, r...
Cultural differences—as well as similarities—have been found in explicit color-emotion associations between Chinese and Western populations. However, implicit associations in a cross-cultural context remain an understudied topic, despite their sensitivity to more implicit knowledge. Moreover, they can be used to study color systems—that is, emotion...
Cultural differences—as well as similarities—have been found in explicit color-emotion associations between Chinese and Western populations. However, implicit associations in a cross-cultural context remain an understudied topic, despite their sensitivity to more implicit knowledge. Moreover, they can be used to study color systems—that is, emotion...
How should we understand imagination within the broader framework of general psychology? Turning to Luca Tateo’s (2020) recent book, A theory of imagining, knowing, and understanding, I begin with asking what imagination is. The question leads to seeing the interplay between imagination, perception, and conceptual organization. Identifying the affe...
Four experiments are reported that investigate the relationship between action-outcome learning and the ability to ignore distractors. Each participant performed 600 acquisition trials, followed by 200 test trials. In the acquisition phase, participants were presented with a fixed action-outcome contingency (e.g., Key #1 ➔ green distractors), while...
Numerous investigators have tested contentions that angry faces capture early attention more completely than happy faces do in the context of other faces. However, syntheses of studies on early event‐related potentials related to the anger superiority hypothesis have yet to be conducted, particularly in relation to the N200 posterior‐contralateral...
In their target article, Zagaria et al. (Integrative Psychological & Behavioral Science, 2020) highlight the fragmented state of mainstream Psychology. Their diagnosis begins with an analysis of how core psychological terms are treated in introductory textbooks. To remedy the state of affairs, they propose using evolutionary psychology to unify Psy...
In contrast to the experimental methods of studying visual memory, Oblak has used a less constrained method of investigation. The comparison between the conventional experimental methods and the present phenomenological method should be done, not in terms of a single difference, but in terms of three separable distinctions. Disentangling the three...
This chapter outlines a critique of experimental psychology, based on Jan Smedslund’s work on the epistemic status of common-sense psychology. The critique is fleshed out with several examples from experimental research on cognitive control, cheating, self-reference bias, and sense of agency. Claims about discovery of surprising or general findings...
Recent evidence from event‐related potentials (ERPs) has identified N2 posterior contralateral (pc) amplitudes as a neural marker of early attention allocation. The N2pc has been used to evaluate attention biases (ABs) in samples with anxiety‐based problems, but its utility has yet to be considered among persons with chronic pain, another group the...
![n-validity effects (n-invalid reaction time [RT] minus n-valid RT; in...](publication/321370890/figure/fig2/AS:960137212739606@1605925958232/n-validity-effects-n-invalid-reaction-time-RT-minus-n-valid-RT-in-ms-on-the-abscissa_Q320.jpg)
![n-validity effects (n-invalid reaction time [RT] minus n-valid RT; in...](publication/321370890/figure/fig4/AS:960137212743701@1605925958453/n-validity-effects-n-invalid-reaction-time-RT-minus-n-valid-RT-in-ms-on-the-abscissa_Q320.jpg)
We tested the nature of validity sequence effects. During visual search for targets, target-preceding peripheral cues at target position (valid condition) facilitate search relative to cues away from the target (invalid condition). This validity effect (i.e., advantage in valid compared to invalid conditions) is observed for cues that are not predi...
Experimental psychology tends to lose contact with the broader context of human concerns. This loss of contact is not accidental. It is an outcome of a rhetoric that preserves the status of the discipline as a natural science concerned with laws and universal regularities. What can connect the work of experimenters to a broader context is in the sp...
This final chapter reviews the methods of critique in to experimental research. The critique emphasizes the presence of active subjects (researchers and participants) and the hierarchy of goals that motivate their actions. The reliance on naïve and uninterested participants, who are treated as means to scientific ends, resembles the mode of partici...
Rules serve multiple functions. They help us understand actions by relying on known categories of rule-governed action; they help us coordinate our actions with others who share the same rules. The concept of honest participant is introduced as something we implicitly hold in many of our interactions. Deviation from the concept of honest participan...
Actions and goals can be described in terms of relatively superordinate (abstract, long-term) or relatively subordinate concepts (concrete, short-term). Although we often see subordinate action concepts (hand-waving) as the expression of relatively more superordinate concepts (saying hello), the relation between the two is, in principle, contingent...
Researchers use the term “mind wandering” (MW) when referring to covert disengagement from task performance. Characterizing MW in terms of an antagonistic relation to task sustains the impression that MW consists of a single set of processes, associated with a common set of principles, causes, and consequences. On one hand, the idea that MW refers...
The chapter begins with an overview of some of the principles and assumptions involved in causal understanding, in general, and sense of agency, in particular. Methods for assessing sense of agency are then reviewed, with particular reference to how they can influence the target of investigation. Several lines of experimental research are reviewed,...
Three dimensions of experience are outlined. Experiences can vary in self-reference, valuation, and presence. Variation along these dimensions results partly from external factors and partly from our own thoughts and descriptions. Implications are drawn with respect to the subjective and objective domains, the nature of illusions, and description a...
There have been recent attempts by experimental psychologists to explicate the nature of an experimental task. This chapter reviews three such attempts, according to which a task is (1) a goal-directed schema, (2) a rule-based organization of stimulus–response events that shield the actors’ attention against distractors, and (3) a depersonalized go...
This chapter addresses experimental research on “free-choice” responses. A free-choice response, in this approach, is operationally defined as the arbitrary selection of one response from multiple alternatives, contrasted with a “forced-choice” response, which is defined as the selection of one correct response given unambiguous rules and stimuli....
The conversation begins with a reflection on the 1968 student rebellion in Copenhagen University, and its implications for Psychology in Denmark and internationally. Against this historical background, Jens Mammen’s own theoretical works and his approach to teaching are discussed. Also included, are reflections on scientific progress, the current a...
Voluntary action control is accomplished through anticipating that action’s perceptual outcomes. Some evidence suggests that this is only true when responses are intention-based rather than stimulus-based and that this difference is evidence of different response modes. More recently, however, it has been shown that response-outcome retrieval effec...
The concepts want, hope , and exploration cannot be organized in relation to a single type of motive (e.g., motive for food). They require, in addition, the motive for acquiring and maintaining a stable scheme that enables reward-directed activity. Facing unpredictability, the animal has to seek not only reward, but also a new equilibrated state wi...
We investigated the influence of conceptual processing on visual attention from the standpoint of Theory of Event Coding (TEC). The theory makes two predictions: first, an important factor in determining the influence of event 1 on processing event 2 is whether features of event 1 are bound into a unified representation (i.e., selection or retrieva...
Spatial metaphors contribute to our capacity for abstract thought. Consistent with this idea, it has been shown that processing semantic information (related to valence, power, etc.) can bias performance in a spatial task. Advancing this line of work, the present study examined whether spatial metaphors have a role in thinking about other people. P...
While the objectivist view of perception provides us with a commonsensical starting point, it quickly gives rise to unsolvable puzzles. The enactivist view, on the other hand, starts by challenging common sense, but it does not lead to the same unsolvable puzzles of the objectivist line of thought. Enactivism does not deny perceptual illusions or i...
The conceptual fragmentation of Psychology has evoked a variety of responses. Some
have argued that the fragmentation should be embraced as a by-product of the diversity in
psychological topics, questions, and methods (e.g., Green, 2015). Others have argued that the
fragmentation can be overcome by adopting a different mode of investigation (e.g.,...
Supplementing physiological measures with first-person data involves several benefits and challenges. The collection and analysis of the two types of data might not be optimal within the same procedural framework. Therefore, the synthesis of the two remains problematic.
We plan our actions in order to fulfil certain sensory goals. It is generally believed, therefore, that anticipation of sensory action-outcomes plays an essential role in action selection. In this study, we examined the role of action selection, prior to action execution, in the guidance of visual attention. The experiments began with an initial ac...
Action selection is thought to involve selection of the action’s sensory outcomes. This notion is supported when encountering a distractor that resembles a learned response–outcome biases response selection. Some evidence, however, suggests that a larger contribution of stimulus-based response selection leaves little role for outcome-based selectio...
The effect of a salient visual feature in orienting spatial attention was examined as a function of the learned association between the visual feature and the observer's action. During an initial acquisition phase, participants learned that two keypress actions consistently produced red and green visual cues. Next, in a test phase, participants' ac...
Concepts with implicit spatial meaning (e.g., "hat", "boots") can bias visual attention in space. This result is typically found in experiments with a single visual target per trial, which can appear at one of two locations (e.g., above vs. below). Furthermore, the interaction is typically found in the form of speeded responses to targets appearing...
Complete dataset from Experiments 1 and 2.
The entire dataset from Experiments 1 and 2 reported in this article are available to download from the following link: http://goo.gl/iR23wx.
(XLSX)
Phenomenology attempts to ground knowledge in an understanding of subjectivity. Although the phenomenological method can serve as a source of new insights and important critique of the conventional modes of understanding, the method’s effectiveness in the context of justification remains problematic.
Interacting with other people is a ubiquitous part of daily life. A complex set of processes enable our successful interactions with others. The present research was conducted to investigate how the processing of visual stimuli may be affected by the presence and the hand posture of a co-actor. Experiments conducted with participants acting alone h...
We examined the prioritization of a salient feature immediately after an observer performs an action. Previous work suggests that sensory salience is reduced for a feature that results from the observer's own action (i.e., self-caused) compared to a feature that is independent of the observer's action (i.e., externally caused). Similar to how diffi...
Over the past decade, evidence has accumulated that performance in attention, perception, and memory related tasks are influenced by the distance between the hands and the stimuli (i.e., placing the observer’s
hands near or far from the stimuli). To account for existing findings, it has recently been proposed that processing of stimuli near the han...
Magnocellular and parvocellular visual pathways are thought to be differentially employed on the basis of hand proximity to stimuli. Consequently, visual biases associated with the increased relative contributions of each are observed. We extend this to joint tasks showing that the presence of another’s hands also influences visual pathway biases....
A growing body of evidence demonstrates that human vision operates differently in the space near and on the
hands; for example, early findings in this literature reported that rapid onsets are detected faster near the hands,
and that objects are searched more thoroughly. These and many other effects were attributed to enhanced
attention via the rec...
Expecting a particular stimulus can facilitate processing of that stimulus over others, but what is the fate of other stimuli that are known to co-occur with the expected stimulus? This study examined the impact of learned association on feature-based attention. The findings show that the effectiveness of an uninformative color transient in orienti...
Research on the impact of action video game playing has revealed performance advantages on a wide range of perceptual and cognitive tasks. It is not known, however, if playing such games confers similar advantages in sensorimotor learning. To address this issue, the present study used a manual motion-tracking task that allowed for a sensitive measu...
Placing the hands near visual stimuli produces differences in visual processing compared to when the stimuli are far from the hands. One account for these differences hypotheses that hand-proximity increases the contribution of the magnocellular (M) pathway, while reducing the contribution of the parvocellular (P) pathway (e.g., Chan et. al., 2013)...
Over the past five years, several studies have shown that visual and attentional processing is altered near the observers' hands. One explanation for these effects suggests that placing the hands near visual stimuli increases the contribution of the magnocellular (M) pathway and decreases the contribution of the parvocellular (P) pathway (Gozli, We...
Concepts with implicit spatial meaning (e.g., "hat", "shoes", "attic", basement") can bias visual processing along the vertical spatial domain. While some studies show directional words interfere with visual processing at congruent locations, due to occupying the same spatial code (Estes, Verges, & Barsalou, 2008), other studies show that direction...
Performing an action can reduce sensitivity to the sensory outcomes associated with the action. One explanation of this sensory attenuation effect, the preactivation account, proposes that action performance raises the activity of the internal representation of the actions sensory outcome, and that this heightened activity influences how incoming s...
Symbolic cues, such as arrows or words, can affect the way we allocate attention in the visual field. In this project, we asked whether awareness of arrows and words would modulate this effect. In two experiments, we used object substitution masking to conceal arrows or words and measured their effect on the processing of spatial information. In th...
Our spatial perception is not always veridical. Indeed, systematic distortions in localization have been found to result from orienting of attention. Distorted localization is inferred from tasks wherein the subject reports the location of centrally presented parallel (vernier) line stimuli. Particularly, prior to the presentation of the lines, a s...
Growing evidence suggests that visual information is processed differently in the near-hand space, relative to the space far from the hands. To account for the existing literature, we recently proposed that the costs and benefits of hand proximity may be due to differential contributions of the action-oriented magnocellular (M) and the perception-o...
Recent evidence suggests that visual working memory (VWM) load reduces performance accuracy on a concurrent visual recognition task, particularly for objects presented in the left hemifield. It has also been shown that high VWM load causes suppression of activity in the right temporoparietal junction (TPJ). Given the resemblance of VWM load effects...
Concepts of positive and negative valence are metaphorically structured in space (e.g., happy is up, sad is down). In fact, coupling a conceptual task (e.g., evaluating words as positive or negative) with a visuospatial task (e.g., identifying stimuli above or below fixation) often gives rise to metaphorical congruency effects. For instance, after...
Concepts of positive and negative valence are metaphorically structured in space (e.g., happy is up, sad is down). In fact, coupling a conceptual task (e.g., evaluating words as positive or negative) with a visuospatial task (e.g., identifying stimuli above or below fixation) often gives rise to metaphorical congruency effects. For instance, after...
Object-substitution masking (OSM) is thought to reflect a failure of object individuation. That is, a briefly presented target surrounded by four dots is perceptually fused with the four-dot mask when the mask is visible after the target has disappeared, thereby obscuring the visibility of the target. If OSM depends on the inability to temporally s...
The ideomotor theory of action posits that the cognitive representation of an action includes the learned perceptual effects of the action. Support for this theory has come from studies demonstrating how perceptual features that match the outcome of a response can facilitate selection of that response. We investigated another, complementary implica...
Processing concepts with implicit spatial meaning or metaphorical spatial association has been shown to engage visuospatial mechanisms, causing either facilitation or interference with concurrent visual processing at locations compatible with the concepts. It is, however, unclear when interference or facilitation should be expected. It is possible...
The present study investigated the mechanisms responsible for the differences between visual processing for stimuli near and far from the hands. The idea that objects near the hands are immediate candidates for action led us to hypothesize that vision near the hands would be biased toward the action-oriented magnocellular (M) visual pathway that su...
Recently, Emrich, Burianová, and Ferber (2011) reported that high visual working memory (VWM) load can induce a neglect-like disadvantage in object recognition, confined to the viewer’s left hemifield. The authors suggested that inhibition of the right temporoparietal junction (TPJ) which results from high VWM load causes interference with selectin...
A central proposal of embodied cognition is that perceptual features constitute an essential part of the conceptual representation. Indeed, experimental studies of everyday metaphors such as ‘happy is up’ and ‘sad is down’ have revealed how processing concepts can generate spatial biases toward locations compatible with the concepts’ meaning. An im...
A salient distractor can have a twofold effect on concurrent visual processes; it can both reduce the processing efficiency of the relevant target (e.g., increasing response time) and distort the spatial representation of the display (e.g., misperception of a target location). Previous work has shown that knowledge of the key feature of visual targ...
The present study investigated the mechanisms responsible for the difference between visual processing of stimuli near and far from the observer's hands. The idea that objects near the hands are immediate candidates for action led us to hypothesize that vision near the hands would be biased toward the action-oriented magnocellular visual pathway th...
Our representation of the peripersonal space is tied to our representation of our bodies. This representation appears to be flexible and it can be updated to include the space in which tools work, particularly when the tool is actively used. One indicator of this update is the increased efficiency with which sensory events near the tool are process...
The onset of new motion has been shown to be a very robust cause of attentional capture, generating a processing advantage for the location of motion onset regardless of the observer's concurrent goal. The present study, motivated by the common-coding account of action and perception, examined whether the effect of motion onset on visual attention...
Background / Purpose:
It has been suggested that processing concepts with either prototypical spatial information (e.g. hat vs shoes) or metaphoric-spatial associations (e.g. god vs devil) engage visual-attentional mechanisms, orienting attention toward regions of the visual field congruent with concept meaning. Interestingly, both facilitatory (...
Effective communication and collaboration of symbolic and quantitative knowledge requires the digitization of mathematical
expressions. The multi-dimensionality of mathematical notation creates a challenge for mathematical software editors. There
are two different approaches for handling the multi-dimensionality of mathematical notation: either usi...
Questions
Question (1)
I am looking for sources for a basic taxonomy of Social Perception. Having a background in visual perception, I'm inclined to seek a taxonomy analogous to perceptual dimensions (color, shape, motion, duration, intensity, etc.). How do psychologists classify social perception in terms of the types of social features or properties one can potentially perceive?
Projects
Project (1)
The goal of this project is to examine the necessary features of the experimental method, and the consequences of those features. The underlying question is: What is the scope of experimental psychology, and what are its limitations?