Would we hear things differently if we always kept our eyes closed? The answer is yes! The McGurk Effect is a classic illustration of how the spoken sounds we hear are influenced by whether or not we can see the speaker’s lips.

Click here for a great online example of the McGurk Effect. In this online example, we see a person saying (making lip movements for) “GA GA”, but in reality, we are hearing “BA BA”. When these sounds and lip movements are combined, most adults think that they are hearing “DA DA”.

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A University College London study has found that you are more likely to perform well if you do not think too hard and instead trust your instincts. The paper, published online in the journal Current Biology, shows that, in some cases, instinctive snap decisions are more reliable than decisions taken using higher-level cognitive processes.

Participants, who were asked to pick the odd one out on a screen covered in over 650 identical symbols, including one rotated version of the same symbol, actually performed better when they were given no time at all to linger on the symbols and so were forced to rely entirely on their subconscious. Click through for more.

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Are conscious and nonconscious processes supported by overlapping brain regions? In a recent study, Slotnick and Schacter investigated whether activity, related to visual memory, in early visual regions (BA17 and BA18) is reflective of nonconscious processing. The results of their study suggest that early visual regions (BA17, BA18) are associated with nonconcsious memory, while late visual regions (BA19, BA37) are associated with conscious memory. Click through for abstract. Hubmed.

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The more clear a stimulus is, the more distracting it can be. Or so you might think. In a recent Science publiation Tsushima et al. report that weak stimuli that are irrelevant to the task being performed—have
a greater impact than strong, easily noticeable distractors.

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In what way does money change the way people think and act? According to a new study reported in Science, adding monetary motivation and reminders made people act more self-sufficient.

Interestingly, being reminded of the money did not even have to be done consciously. Priming had the same effect on self-sufficient behaviour versus requests for help from others.

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A new article is out describing how we use our senses to fill out the blanks when we are only provided with input from one modality. Talking in a phone is a good example. Here, we are only provided with the auditory input. In a new study, it seems that knowing the face of who you’re talking to helps recognizing the people you are talking to.

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Women tend to be influenced by their ovulation status when they pick their clothes. “Near ovulation, women dress to impress, and the closer women come to ovulation, the more attention they appear to pay to their appearance,” said Martie Haselton, the study’s lead author and a UCLA associate professor of communication studies and psychology. “They tend to put on skirts instead of pants, show more skin and generally dress more fashionably.”
You can get the PDF version of the article here.

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For those of you who have not yet read it, the May 2006 issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences featured an important article by Stanislas Dehaene, and prominent colleagues, called “Conscious, preconscious, and subliminal processing: a testable taxonomy”. The article is available here (PDF). Basically, the approach uses the neuronal workspace hypothesis to distinguish between different forms of mental processing.

This article is now the most read article in TICS.

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The way the brain stores new, conscious information such as a first kiss or a childhood home is strongly linked to the way the human brain stores unconscious information, researchers at Yale report this month in an article featured on the cover of Neuron.

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A new experiment has shed more light on the multi-decade debate about how the brain knows where limbs are without looking at them.

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How does the brain respond to threatening input when we do not become aware of it? In a study by Liddell et al. it was demonstrated that subliminal fear reactions work through regions in the brainstem, pulvinar and amygdala, as well as regions related to orienting responses such as fronto-temporal cortices.

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Freud redux? A study from 2004 in Science looked into how we suppress unwanted memories. In this study, Anderson and colleagues found a nice relationship between the amount of activation in the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus and the magnitude of ‘forgetting’.

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Doctors in an Illinois hospital are trying a musical therapy experiment to see if harp music can help calm a racing, erratic heartbeat.

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Jay Ingram reports in The Star about some evidence that subliminal ads work.

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Is synaesthesia only a conscious phenomenon, or does it reflect processing even at unconscious levels also? A recent study finds that unconscious synaesthetic priming can occur.

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John H. Mace

University of New Haven, CT, USA

Abstract

Involuntary autobiographical memories occur frequently in daily life and are usually triggered by cues in one’s environment. This study investigated the possibility that priming plays a role in the production of involuntary memories.

In Study 1, participants recorded their involuntary memories in a diary for 14 days and then completed a questionnaire assessing their cognitive activity during the recording period. Participants indicating frequent thought about significant others on the questionnaire showed significantly more involuntary memories related to such individuals than a control group. In

Studies 2 and 3, participants recorded their involuntary memories in diaries for 14 days and were primed with recall sessions in the laboratory during that period (recalling episodes from high school, Study 1, the past year, or ages 13–16, Studies 2 & 3).

The results of both studies showed significant priming effects in the involuntary memories of participants for all of the periods primed. The possibility that priming plays a significant role in the daily production of involuntary memories is discussed.

Memory

Issue: Volume 13, Number 8 / November 2005

Pages: 874 – 884

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