ISSN : 1226-9654
When two adjacent dots alternate rapidly a dot appears moving back and forth instead of two dots' flashes stationary. This phenomenon, given apparent motion, has played a crucial role both in the establishment of the Gestalt Psychology and in the understanding of motion perception. In this review, major findings over the last 100 year regarding apparent motion is summarized, including the history of apparent motion study. It is emphasized that the percept of apparent motion highly varies according to spatiotemporal characteristics and figural forms of stimuli so that it is difficult to account for it in a single theoretical framework. It is discussed how apparent motion paradigm could be utilized for the future studies of motion perception.
Visual Working Memory (VWM) has been known to short-term retain 3-4 item-worth object information for around 10 seconds, and is considered important for understanding higher cognitive functions in human. The present study reviews conceptual definitions of VWM and its major properties, and introduces behavioral testing paradigms in recent VWM studies. The study also overviews topics requiring further experimental testing by VWM researchers as well as introducing the controversial debates on the model of VWM represenation.
The present study examined the development of sentence processing by investigating 4-5-year-old Korean-learning children's and Korean-speaking adults' online and offline parsing pattern of sentences comparable to those used in previous English studies, using visual-world eye tracking paradigm. The results showed that unlike adults, Korean children were more likely to consider a post-positional phrase as a verb goal argument than a noun modifier, making interpretation errors similar to those observed in English-learning children. This was interesting given that verbs appear at the end of sentences in Korean, opposite of English sentences, ruling out the possibility that the interpretation errors observed among English children were due to children' dependency on verb information. The current results suggest that the development of language processing may follow a universal path, independent of the input language characteristics.
Several studies employing oddball paradigm indicated that people are very sensitive to emotionally negative events. However, it cannot be excluded that the negativity bias reported in those studies might be due to the frequency of the target stimulus rather than emotional valence. To elucidate the effect of valence and the effect of probability of target stimuli in oddball paradigm, we manipulated the probability of negative and those of neutral IAPS pictures as follows: 25% vs. 75%, 50% vs. 50%, and 75% vs. 25%. ERP results showed that P3 (250-400ms), an attention-related component, showed the probability effect, i.e. higher amplitudes in response to stimuli of 25% and 50% probability than in response to stimuli of 75% probability at parietal sites. On the contrary, later LPP (600-1200ms), an attention- and emotion-related component, showed valence effect, i.e. higher amplitudes in response to negative stimuli than neutral stimuli at centro-parietal sites. Also, LPP at some centro-parietal sites showed probability effect, i.e. higher amplitude in response to negative stimuli of 25% and 50% probability than those of 75% probability. But both P3 and LPP showed no probability effect in response to neutral stimuli. The probability effect on P3 as well as valence effect and probability effect on LPP suggest that attentional bias effect and emotional bias effect could be distinguishable on some ERP components.
We investigated whether emotional valence has an effect on visual attentional scope in global/local processing task. We presented hierarchical stimuli with different number of elements and different inter-element distances at local scale. The global/local compatibility effect relied on the sparsity of local stimuli (Experiment 1). Low sparsity stimuli (high density) elicited global precedence, and high sparsity (low density) stimuli elicited local precedence. Global and local precedence of global/local compatibility effect also relied on a leading emotional valence (Experiment 2). The global precedence effect was found for positive and neutral target, and the local precedence effect was found for negative target. These results suggest that the visual attentional scope is influenced by emotional valence. In other words, positive emotion broadened the scope of attention, and negative emotion narrowed the scope of attention.
This study was conducted to examine the relationship among variables including child/adult ADHD symptom sub-scales, depression, self-esteem, and interpersonal problems, in adults with ADHD tendency. In research 1, 813 university students were subjected to several tests including childhood-recall ADHD symptom scale, Conners' Adult ADHD Rating Scale (CAARS-K), Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), Self-Esteem Scale (SES), and Korean Inventory of Interpersonal Problem (KIIP). Using the data collected, we conducted hierarchical multiple-regression analyses to examine relative contributions among variables, and also conducted path analyses and structural equation modeling in order to construct and test the fitness of the theoretical model regarding the relationship among variables. As a resul of path analysis, it was shown that the inattention scale indirectly explained depression via the mediating effect of the self-esteem. In addition, the results of a structural equation modeling analysis have shown that the hyperactivity scale directly explained the externaled problems of KIIP without such mediating effects, while the adult inattention scale indrectly explaned internaled problems of KIIP via the mediating effects of depression and self-esteem. In research 2, in order to examine the pattern of relations among variables with respect to ADHD sub-cluster, we conducted a K-means cluster analysis using sub-scales of KIIP, resulting in two sub-groups (internalization/externalization). The results of structural equation modeling analyses for each group have shown that in the internalization sub-group, ADHD symptoms explained internalized problems of KIIP via the mediating effects of the self-esteem and depression, whereas in the externalization sub-group, ADHD symptom directly explained externalized problems of KIIP. Taken together, it was suggested differential treatments should be applied according to the characteristics of a ADHD sub-type. Finally, limitations of the present study and directions for further research were discussed.
In two experiments, this research examined the positivity effect in the emotional memory of Korean older and younger adults. To understand its mechanisms, this research examined age differences in the various encoding conditions and the retrieval condition. Experiment 1 manipulated three (control vs. emotion-focused vs. cognition-focused) encoding conditions during which a series of pictures with positive, negative, and neutral emotional content were presented. In the control condition and cognition-focused condition, older adults recalled a similar number of positive and negative images, whereas younger adults recalled more negative images than positive images. On the contrary, in the emotion-focused condition, older adults as well as younger adults recalled more positive images than negative images. These results suggest that a positivity effect was related to constrains of encoding tasks, particularly those that focus participants on emotional content. Experiment 2 investigated the impact of repeated retrieval on the positivity effect. After viewing a picture slide show, older and younger participants were asked to recall the pictures immediately and the recall test was given again 20 minutes later. The results of immediate recall test were almost the same to those of control condition of experiment 1. In the repeated recall test, older adults recalled marginally more positive images than negative images, whereas younger adults recalled more negative images than positive images. Thus, older adults seem to do more elaborative processing when retrieving positive information than when retrieving negative information. The pattern of this research's results, especially the absence of positivity effect in the control condition, was discussed in relation to the differences of socio-cultural contexts and emotion regulation patterns between Korean and Western cultures.