Immune response and intergroup bias: Vaccine-induced increases in cytokine activity are associated with worse evaluations of resume for Latina job applicant.

Situational factors can increase people's vulnerability to intergroup bias, including prejudicial attitudes, negative stereotyping, and discrimination. We proposed that increases in inflammatory activity that coincide with acute illness may represent a hitherto unstudied situational factor that increases intergroup bias. The current study experimentally manipulated increases in inflammatory activity by administering the seasonal influenza vaccine or a saline placebo.

An extension of the shifted Wald model of human response times: Capturing the time dynamic properties of human cognition : Trial-varying Wald model.

Despite the ubiquitous nature of evidence accumulation models in cognitive and experimental psychology, there has been a comparatively limited uptake of such techniques in the applied literature. While quantifying latent cognitive processing properties has significant potential for applied domains such as adaptive work systems, accumulator models often fall short in practical applications. Two primary reasons for these shortcomings are the complexities and time needed for the application of cognitive models, and the failure of current models to capture systematic trial-to-trial variability in parameters.

Chinese holistic processing: Evidence from cognitive mental architecture using Systems Factorial Technology.

Previous research has presented conflicting evidence regarding whether Chinese characters are processed holistically. In past work, we applied Systems Factorial Technology (SFT) and discovered that native Chinese speakers exhibited limited capacity when processing characters and words. To pinpoint the source of this limitation, our current research delved further into the mental architecture involved in processing Chinese characters and English words, taking into consideration information from each component.

Visual word processing efficiency for Chinese characters and English words.

The Word Superiority Effect (WSE) refers to the phenomenon where a single letter is recognized more accurately when presented within a word, compared to when it is presented alone or in a random string. However, previous research has produced conflicting findings regarding whether this effect also occurs in the processing of Chinese characters. The current study employed the capacity coefficient, a measure derived from the Systems Factorial Technology framework, to investigate processing efficiency and test for the superiority effect in Chinese characters and English words.

Human Performance in Competitive and Collaborative Human-Machine Teams.

In the modern world, many important tasks have become too complex for a single unaided individual to manage. Teams conduct some safety-critical tasks to improve task performance and minimize the risk of error. These teams have traditionally consisted of human operators, yet, nowadays, artificial intelligence and machine systems are incorporated into team environments to improve performance and capacity.

Predictions of task using neural modeling.

Introduction: A well-designed brain-computer interface (BCI) can make accurate and reliable predictions of a user's state through the passive assessment of their brain activity; in turn, BCI can inform an adaptive system (such as artificial intelligence, or AI) to intelligently and optimally aid the user to maximize the human-machine team (HMT) performance. Various groupings of spectro-temporal neural features have shown to predict the same underlying cognitive state (e.g.

Derivation and Demonstration of a New Metric for Multitasking Performance.

Objective: We proposed and demonstrate a theory-driven, quantitative, individual-level estimate of the degree to which cognitive processes are degraded or enhanced when multiple tasks are simultaneously completed.

Background: To evaluate multitasking, we used a performance-based cognitive model to predict efficient performance. The model controls for single-task performance at the individual level and does not depend on parametric assumptions, such as normality, which do not apply to many performance evaluations.

Exaggerated prevalence effect with the explicit prevalence information: The description-experience gap in visual search.

Despite the increasing focus on target prevalence in visual search research, few papers have thoroughly examined the effect of how target prevalence is communicated. Findings in the judgment and decision-making literature have demonstrated that people behave differently depending on whether probabilistic information is made explicit or learned through experience, hence there is potential for a similar difference when communicating prevalence in visual search. Our current research examined how visual search changes depending on whether the target prevalence information was explicitly given to observers or they learned the prevalence through experience with additional manipulations of target reward and salience.

Temporal organization of color and shape processing during visual search.

The mechanisms guiding visual attention are of great interest within cognitive and perceptual psychology. Many researchers have proposed models of these mechanisms, which serve to both formalize their theories and to guide further empirical investigations. The assumption that a number of basic features are processed in parallel early in the attentional process is common among most models of visual attention and visual search.

An Integrated Working Memory Model for Time-Based Resource-Sharing.

The time-based resource-sharing (TBRS) model envisions working memory as a rapidly switching, serial, attentional refreshing mechanism. Executive attention trades its time between rebuilding decaying memory traces and processing extraneous activity. To thoroughly investigate the implications of the TBRS theory, we integrated TBRS within the ACT-R cognitive architecture, which allowed us to test the TBRS model against both participant accuracy and response time data in a dual task environment.

Establishing reference scales for scene naturalness and openness : Naturalness and openness scales.

A key question in the field of scene perception is what information people use when making decisions about images of scenes. A significant body of evidence has indicated the importance of global properties of a scene image. Ideally, well-controlled, real-world images would be used to examine the influence of these properties on perception.

Analyzing thresholds and efficiency with hierarchical Bayesian logistic regression.

Ideal observer analysis is a fundamental tool used widely in vision science for analyzing the efficiency with which a cognitive or perceptual system uses available information. The performance of an ideal observer provides a formal measure of the amount of information in a given experiment. The ratio of human to ideal performance is then used to compute efficiency, a construct that can be directly compared across experimental conditions while controlling for the differences due to the stimuli and/or task specific demands.

Set size slope still does not distinguish parallel from serial search.

Much of the evidence for theories in visual search (including Hulleman & Olivers' [H&O's]) comes from inferences made using changes in mean RT as a function of the number of items in a display. We have known for more than 40 years that these inferences are based on flawed reasoning and obscured by model mimicry. Here we describe a method that avoids these problems.

Unsupervised parsing of gaze data with a beta-process vector auto-regressive hidden Markov model.

The first stage of analyzing eye-tracking data is commonly to code the data into sequences of fixations and saccades. This process is usually automated using simple, predetermined rules for classifying ranges of the time series into events, such as "if the dispersion of gaze samples is lower than a particular threshold, then code as a fixation; otherwise code as a saccade." More recent approaches incorporate additional eye-movement categories in automated parsing algorithms by using time-varying, data-driven thresholds.

Bayesian analyses of cognitive architecture.

The question of cognitive architecture-how cognitive processes are temporally organized-has arisen in many areas of psychology. This question has proved difficult to answer, with many proposed solutions turning out to be spurious. Systems factorial technology (Townsend & Nozawa, 1995) provided the first rigorous empirical and analytical method of identifying cognitive architecture, using the survivor interaction contrast (SIC) to determine when people are using multiple sources of information in parallel or in series.

The perceptual processing of fused multi-spectral imagery.

Multi-spectral imagery can enhance decision-making by supplying multiple complementary sources of information. However, overloading an observer with information can deter decision-making. Hence, it is critical to assess multi-spectral image displays using human performance.

Statistical analyses of the resilience function.

The extent to which distracting information influences decisions can be informative about the nature of the underlying cognitive and perceptual processes. In a recent paper, a response time-based measure for quantifying the degree of interference (or facilitation) from distracting information termed resilience was introduced. Despite using a statistical measure, the analysis was limited to qualitative comparisons between different model predictions.

Working memory capacity and redundant information processing efficiency.

Working memory capacity (WMC) is typically measured by the amount of task-relevant information an individual can keep in mind while resisting distraction or interference from task-irrelevant information. The current research investigated the extent to which differences in WMC were associated with performance on a novel redundant memory probes (RMP) task that systematically varied the amount of to-be-remembered (targets) and to-be-ignored (distractor) information. The RMP task was designed to both facilitate and inhibit working memory search processes, as evidenced by differences in accuracy, response time, and Linear Ballistic Accumulator (LBA) model estimates of information processing efficiency.

Can two dots form a Gestalt? Measuring emergent features with the capacity coefficient.

While there is widespread agreement among vision researchers on the importance of some local aspects of visual stimuli, such as hue and intensity, there is no general consensus on a full set of basic sources of information used in perceptual tasks or how they are processed. Gestalt theories place particular value on emergent features, which are based on the higher-order relationships among elements of a stimulus rather than local properties. Thus, arbitrating between different accounts of features is an important step in arbitrating between local and Gestalt theories of perception in general.

Working memory's workload capacity.

We examined the role of dual-task interference in working memory using a novel dual two-back task that requires a redundant-target response (i.e., a response that neither the auditory nor the visual stimulus occurred two back versus a response that one or both occurred two back) on every trial.

Dyslexia and configural perception of character sequences.

Developmental dyslexia is a complex and heterogeneous disorder characterized by unexpected difficulty in learning to read. Although it is considered to be biologically based, the degree of variation has made the nature and locus of dyslexia difficult to ascertain. Hypotheses regarding the cause have ranged from low-level perceptual deficits to higher order cognitive deficits, such as phonological processing and visual-spatial attention.

Faster than the speed of rejection: Object identification processes during visual search for multiple targets.

When engaged in a visual search for two targets, participants are slower and less accurate in their responses, relative to their performance when searching for singular targets. Previous work on this "dual-target cost" has primarily focused on the breakdown of attentional guidance when looking for two items. Here, we investigated how object identification processes are affected by dual-target search.

Assessing the speed--accuracy trade-off effect on the capacity of information processing.

The ability to trade accuracy for speed is fundamental to human decision making. The speed-accuracy trade-off (SAT) effect has received decades of study, and is well understood in relatively simple decisions: collecting more evidence before making a decision allows one to be more accurate but also slower. The SAT in more complex paradigms has been given less attention, largely due to limits in the models and statistics that can be applied to such tasks.