Development and validation of a retrospective self-report measure of childhood neglect.

Background: Several measures are available to assess childhood physical and sexual abuse, but few measures focus specifically on neglect and little psychometric research on measures exists. This paper aims to fill a gap in the field by describing a new instrument to measure childhood neglect retrospectively and providing information about construct, predictive, and discriminant validity using adults with documented histories of childhood neglect.

Methods: Data are from a large prospective, longitudinal study of abused and neglected children and matched controls followed up and assessed in adulthood.

Prior conscious experience enhances conscious perception but does not affect response priming☆.

Recent research shows that prior experience and expectations strongly enhance a visual stimulus' access to conscious awareness. However, whether such advance knowledge also influences this stimulus' indirect impact on behavior is poorly understood. The resolution of this question has the potential of providing strong tests between current models of conscious perception because these diverge on whether a factor that affects conscious access by a stimulus necessarily also affects the strength of this stimulus' representation and hence, its indirect impact on behavior.

Towards a resolution of the attentional-capture debate.

The relative contributions of stimulus-driven and goal-directed control of attention have been extensively studied by investigating which irrelevant stimuli capture attention. Although much of this research has focused on color-singleton distractors, the circumstances under which these capture attention remain controversial. In search for a target with a unique known color (known-singleton search), whether singletons in an irrelevant color can be successfully ignored is a hotly debated issue.

The role of conscious perception in attentional capture and object-file updating.

A mental process that is independent of conscious perception should run equally well with or without it. Previous investigations of unconscious processing have seldom included this comparison: They typically demonstrated only processing without conscious perception. In the research reported here, we showed that attentional capture is largely independent of conscious perception and that updating the episodic information stored about an object is entirely contingent on conscious perception.

The same-location cost is unrelated to attentional settings: an object-updating account.

What mechanisms allow us to ignore salient yet irrelevant visual information has been a matter of intense debate. According to the contingent-capture hypothesis, such information is filtered out, whereas according to the salience-based account, it captures attention automatically. Several recent studies have reported a same-location cost that appears to fit neither of these accounts.

Perceptual objects capture attention.

A recent study has demonstrated that the mere organization of some elements in the visual field into an object attracts attention automatically [Kimchi, R., Yeshurun, Y., & Cohen-Savransky, A.

Priming of Pop-out provides reliable measures of target activation and distractor inhibition in selective attention.

Recent research has demonstrated a striking role for intertrial priming in visual search. When searching for a discrepant target, repetition of the target feature speeds search, an effect known as Priming of Pop-out (PoP). In two experiments involving color singletons, we identified two independent components of PoP, target activation and distractor inhibition.

Effects of search mode and intertrial priming on singleton search.

There is no consensus as to what information guides search for a singleton target. Does the most salient display element capture attention, regardless of the observer's attentional set? Do observers adopt a default salience-based search mode? Does knowledge of the target's defining featural property (when available) affect search? Finally, can intertrial contingencies account for the disparate results in the literature? We investigated search for a shape singleton when (1) the target and nontarget shapes switched unpredictably from trial to trial, (2) the target feature remained fixed, and (3) the target was a singleton on only one third of the trials. We examined overall reaction times, search slopes, errors, and the magnitude of the slowing caused by a cross-dimensional singleton distractor.

Effects of top-down guidance and singleton priming on visual search.

Recent literature suggests that observers can use advance knowledge of the target feature to guide their search but fail to do so whenever the target is reliably a singleton. Instead, they engage in singleton-detection mode--that is, they search for the most salient object. In the present study, we aimed to test the notion of a default salience-based search mode.