Duration discrimination in crossmodal sequences

Four duration-discrimination experiments were carried out to compare crossmodal and unimodal timing conditions. For all experiments, participants were presented with two sequences, each consisting of 1 or 4 time intervals (marked by 2 or 5 signals), and asked to indicate whether the interval(s) of the second sequence was (were) shorter or longer than the interval(s) of the first. Markers in the first and second sequences were, respectively, tones and flashes (experiment 1), flashes and tones (experiment 2), both flashes (experiment 3), and both tones (experiment 4). In all modality conditions, except when using only tones (experiment 4), increasing the number of repetitions of the variable interval reduced duration-discrimination thresholds, independently of whether the fixed interval was presented first or second within the sequence pair. Moreover, judgments about sequence timing were best for tones-tones sequence pairs, worst for flashes-flashes sequence pairs, and intermediate for crossmodal (flashes-tones or tones-flashes) sequences. Finally, presenting a fixed interval in the first sequence resulted in better discrimination than presenting a variable interval in the first sequence. Implications for theories of timing are discussed.

Personnes âgées et perception des risques en matière de conduite automobile: les conducteurs âgés manifestent-ils encore de l'optimisme comparatif?

People frequently expresscomparative optimism; that is, they believe they are less likely than average to experience negative events. The aim of the present study is, first, to observe whether people of more than 65 years are still optimists when they evaluate driving-related risks; and second, to test the assumption that older drivers show less optimism when they compare themselves with average-age drivers than when they compare themselves with same-age drivers. Our results reveal that drivers of more than 65 years do, indeed, express comparative optimism, but, contrary to our expectation, only in a limited number of cases does the age of the comparison target appear to have an effect. These results are particularly discussed in terms of self-image enhancement.

Bidirectional interference between timing and concurrent memory processing in children

This study investigated the nature of resources involved in duration processing in 5- and 8-year-olds. The children were asked to reproduce the duration of a visual or auditory stimulus. They performed this task either alone or concurrently with an executive task (Experiment 1) or with a digit or visuospatial memory task (Experiment 2). The results showed that duration reproduction was systematically shorter in the dual-task condition than in the single-task one. Furthermore, timing an auditory stimulus decreased the proportion of accurate responses in the executive and digit memory tasks but not in the visuospatial memory task, whereas timing a visual stimulus decreased the proportion of accurate responses in the executive and visuospatial memory tasks but not in the digit memory task, at least to a lesser extent in the older children. This pattern of interference suggests that duration reproduction in children requires both the central executive and the slave memory system associated with the modality of the temporal stimulus.

Sense of Time in Children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

Parents of children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) frequently report that their children have a poor sense of time. Several studies looking at the perception of time mentioned a form of temporal myopia. The present study investigates the sense of time in children with ADHD. Twenty-two French-speaking Swiss children with ADHD and 22 controls between the ages of 6 and 13 years were tested using a conventional time knowledge questionnaire and two Piagetian time conservation tasks. Parents were asked to complete the “It’s about time” questionnaire. Better performance was observed in matched control group children than in children with ADHD on a conventional time knowledge questionnaire. For children under 10 years of age, the two Piagetian time conservation tasks were able to differentiate children with and without ADHD. Parents of ADHD children reported more frequently that their children had time-related difficulties in daily activities. This study suggests that children with ADHD take longer to develop several time-related abilities.

La Valeur Sociale des Explications Causales en Contexte Educatif

Deux études réalisées à partir des paradigmes d’autoprésentation et d’identification ont été conduites auprès d’élèves de CE2 (3rd grade) et leurs enseignants. Dans les deux études, les élèves (N = 1162) devaient répondre à un questionnaire d’internalité évoquant des renforcements scolaires selon trois consignes d’autoprésentation: Spontanée, pro-normative et contre-normative. Dans l’Etude 2, les enseignants (N = 32) devaient répondre au même questionnaire d’internalité en imaginant les réponses que donnerait un élève idéal versus un élève non idéal. Les résultats montrent que si, pour les élèves et les enseignants, les énoncés internes sont valorisés en matière d’explication des renforcements scolaires (réussite et échec), ceux qui en appellent aux efforts comportementaux (effort/manque d’effort) sont plus valorisés que les autres types d’explications internes (habileté) et externes (tâche et chance).

On Being a Child of an Ill Parent

Cancer in a parent has a devastating effect on the psychological well-being of the children. In this comparative study, we examined the hypothesis that children who have a parent suffering from cancer experience greater difficulty in terms of psychological adaptation than children with a parent suffering from another chronic pathology. A group of 52 children of parents with cancer was compared with a group of 50 children whose parents were suffering from another chronic disease (respiratory insufficiency, diabetes) (mean age = 12.3 ± 2.8 years, 46 boys, 56 girls). All the children took part in a Rorschach Comprehensive System examination. Results showed that the children who had a parent suffering from cancer exhibited a higher number of signs of anxiety and depressive affects as well as reduced self-esteem. These difficulties were more pronounced in the case of girls and when it was the mother who was suffering from cancer. These results confirm the data reported in the literature in a large sample and using an indirect performance-based evaluation method. They emphasize the need to develop specific interventions which take account of the gender of the child and the ill parent.

Influence of 2D and 3D view on performance and time estimation in minimal invasive surgery

This study aimed to evaluate the impact of two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) images on time performance and time estimation during a surgical motor task. A total of 60 subjects without any surgical experience (nurses) and 20 expert surgeons performed a fine surgical task with a new laparoscopic technology (da Vinci robotic system). The 80 subjects were divided into two groups, one using 3D view option and the other using 2D view option. We measured time performance and asked subjects to verbally estimate their time performance. Our results showed faster performance in 3D than in 2D view for novice subjects while the performance in 2D and 3D was similar in the expert group. We obtained a significant interaction between time performance and time evaluation: in 2D condition, all subjects accurately estimated their time performance while they overestimated it in the 3D condition. Our results emphasise the role of 3D in improving performance and the contradictory feeling about time evaluation in 2D and 3D. This finding is discussed in regard with the retrospective paradigm and suggests that 2D and 3D images are differently processed and memorised.

The time-emotion paradox

The present manuscript discusses the time-emotion paradox in time psychology: although humans are able to accurately estimate time as if they possess a specific mechanism that allows them to measure time (i.e. an internal clock), their representations of time are easily distorted by the context. Indeed, our sense of time depends on intrinsic context, such as the emotional state, and on extrinsic context, such as the rhythm of others' activity. Existing studies on the relationships between emotion and time suggest that these contextual variations in subjective time do not result from the incorrect functioning of the internal clock but rather from the excellent ability of the internal clock to adapt to events in one's environment. Finally, the fact that we live and move in time and that everything, every act, takes more or less time has often been neglected. Thus, there is no unique, homogeneous time but instead multiple experiences of time. Our subjective temporal distortions directly reflect the way our brain and body adapt to these multiple time scales.

Minding time in an amodal representational space

How long did it take you to read this sentence? Chances are your response is a ball park estimate and its value depends on how fast you have scanned the text, how prepared you have been for this question, perhaps your mood or how much attention you have paid to these words. Time perception is here addressed in three sections. The first section summarizes theoretical difficulties in time perception research, specifically those pertaining to the representation of time and temporal processing. The second section reviews non-exhaustively temporal effects in multisensory perception. Sensory modalities interact in temporal judgement tasks, suggesting that (i) at some level of sensory analysis, the temporal properties across senses can be integrated in building a time percept and (ii) the representational format across senses is compatible for establishing such a percept. In the last section, a two-step analysis of temporal properties is sketched out. In the first step, it is proposed that temporal properties are automatically encoded at early stages of sensory analysis, thus providing the raw material for the building of a time percept; in the second step, time representations become available to perception through attentional gating of the raw temporal representations and via re-encoding into abstract representations.

Using Common Psychological Terms to Describe Other People

According to the lexical approach to personality, psychological adjectives used in everyday language (e.g., “extraverted”) are a valid basis for describing the psychological properties that can be measured using personality inventories. In the present contribution, both the foundations and the consequences of this approach are subjected to a critical analysis, which comes to the conclusion that it is based on a mistaken conception of psychological terms and a questionable assumption as to the purpose of personality inventories. A fresh method is therefore put forward, defending a polysemous approach to psychological terms, partly inspired by Wittgenstein's second philosophy (1953). This approach stresses the fact that every adjective encompasses different meanings (i.e., no adjective can be summed up by a single essential meaning); and one of these meanings may become dominant, to the detriment of the others, according to the forms of life (i.e., social and linguistic practices) in which people are objectively involved. The need to link the definition of adjectives to peoples' concrete forms of life paves the way for a new and radically different program of research from that constructed within the framework of the lexical hypothesis.

The Interplay of Appraisals, Specific Coping Styles, and Depressive Symptoms Among Young Male and Female Gamblers

The present study assessed gambling appraisals and specific coping styles among 400 young male (n = 230) and female (n = 170) gamblers. Of particular interest was to determine whether gender variations in stress-related responses are associated with the degree of gambling pathology, depressive symptoms, and attitude to seeking treatment. Results showed that greater appraisals of threat, illusions of control, and negative outcome expectancies were associated with higher levels of gambling pathology, particularly among males. Further, among women, gambling propensity was associated with reduced social support seeking, whereas for men gambling pathology was primarily accounted for by increased use of wishful thinking. These coping strategies, combined with other internally oriented emotion-focused strategies, mediated the relation between gambling and depressive symptoms. Not surprisingly, more positive attitudes to treatment seeking were reported by those with a greater propensity to use problem-solving and support seeking coping efforts. The utility of assessing specific components that comprise a gambler’s stress-response is discussed.

La Duperie Volontaire d’un Test d’Associations Implicites (IAT) d’Estime de Soi

The Implicit Association Test (IAT, Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998 ) provides indirect measurements, which are supposed to prevent voluntary control of answers by subjects. However, a systematic review of the empirical tests offers divergent results. This paper studies if it is possible to deliberately deceive a self-esteem IAT depending on whether subjects are given information on the strategy to be used or not and according to their acquaintance with the test. Results show that almost all subjects are able to control their answers to the IAT if they are provided an efficient strategy; only a part of naïve subjects succeed in it. These results are discussed in reference to the use of the IAT in basic and applied research.

Effects of past Transgressions in an Induced Hypocrisy Paradigm

Hypocrisy can be considered as a dissonance state expressed as a combination of two factors: commitment (advocating a pronormative position) and mindfulness (being aware of past transgressions). Such inconsistency between what people advocate and their past behaviors is usually reduced by modifying behaviors or behavioral intentions in line with normative advocacy. The aim of this study is to examine the conditions under which this set of behaviors (apparent hypocrisy) can occur. Specifically, the salience of the transgressions was manipulated: participants were led to recall 1 or 4 transgressions varying in severity (serious vs harmless). As expected, recalling 4 transgressions led to greater behavioral change than recalling only 1 transgression. Surprisingly, recalling 4 harmless transgressions induced greater behavioral change than recalling 4 serious transgressions.

More is still not better: testing the perturbation model of temporal reference memory across different modalities and tasks

The ability of the perturbation model (Jones & Wearden, 2003) to account for reference memory function in a visual temporal generalization task and auditory and visual reproduction tasks was examined. In all tasks the number of presentations of the standard was manipulated (1, 3, or 5), and its effect on performance was compared. In visual temporal generalization the number of presentations of the standard did not affect the number of times the standard was correctly identified, nor did it affect the overall temporal generalization gradient. In auditory reproduction there was no effect of the number of times the standard was presented on mean reproductions. In visual reproduction mean reproductions were shorter when the standard was only presented once; however, this effect was reduced when a visual cue was provided before the first presentation of the standard. Whilst the results of all experiments are best accounted for by the perturbation model there appears to be some attentional benefit to multiple presentations of the standard in visual reproduction.

Knowing Which Day of the Week it is: Temporal Structure and Dynamics of Memory

The complementary role of static and dynamic information used when one needs to be located in time was studied. Static information refers to temporal knowledge about days of the week, and dynamic information reflects a sense of time, taking into account the present, the near past, and the future. Each day of an actual 7-day wk., 699 women and 620 men were asked to provide a “right” or “wrong” response to a statement such as “Today is T.,” where X was the name of one of the seven days of the week. Analysis suggested use of a structured temporal representation of the week: the weekend, a landmark, had an anchoring role. Also the dynamics of the content of working memory were indicated. The active “temporal window” participants hold in mind seems directed more towards the future than the past. Results are discussed within the more general context of time management.