Autistics are presumed to be characterized by cognitive impairment, and their cognitive strengths (e.g., in Block Design performance) are frequently interpreted as low-level by-products of high-level deficits, not as direct manifestations of intelligence. Recent attempts to identify the neuroanatomical and neurofunctional signature of autism have been positioned on this universal, but untested, assumption. We therefore assessed a broad sample of 38 autistic children on the preeminent test of fluid intelligence, Raven's Progressive Matrices. Their scores were, on average, 30 percentile points, and in some cases more than 70 percentile points, higher than their scores on the Wechsler scales of intelligence. Typically developing control children showed no such discrepancy, and a similar contrast was observed when a sample of autistic adults was compared with a sample of nonautistic adults. We conclude that intelligence has been underestimated in autistics.

Elevated levels of testosterone have repeatedly been associated with antisocial behavior, but the psychobiological mechanisms underlying this effect are unknown. However, testosterone is evidently capable of altering the processing of facial threat, and facial signals of fear and anger serve sociality through their higher-level empathy-provoking and socially corrective properties. We investigated the hypothesis that testosterone predisposes people to antisocial behavior by reducing conscious recognition of facial threat. In a within-subjects design, testosterone (0.5 mg) or placebo was administered to 16 female volunteers. Afterward, a task with morphed stimuli indexed their sensitivity for consciously recognizing the facial expressions of threat (disgust, fear, and anger) and nonthreat (surprise, sadness, and happiness). Testosterone induced a significant reduction in the conscious recognition of facial threat overall. Separate analyses for the three categories of threat faces indicated that this effect was reliable for angry facial expressions exclusively. This testosterone-induced impairment in the conscious detection of the socially corrective facial signal of anger may predispose individuals to antisocial behavior.

Other people's incidental feelings can influence one's decision in a strategic manner. In a sequential game in which proposers moved first by dividing a given pot of cash (keeping 50% or 75% of the pot) and receivers responded by choosing the size of the pot (from $0 to $1), proposers were more likely to make an unfair offer (i.e., to keep 75% of the pot) if they were told that receivers had watched a funny sitcom, rather than a movie clip portraying anger, in an unrelated study prior to the game playing. However, when proposers were told that receivers knew proposers had this affective information, the effect dissipated. In other words, a proposer expects a happy receiver to be more accommodating or cooperative than an angry receiver as long as the happy receiver does not realize that the proposer may be trying to benefit from the receiver's current incidental feelings.

Is there a specific neurocognitive system underlying the subjective sense of having a unitary continuous self across time? If so, it should be possible to isolate functions involved in the sense of self from those supporting mental activities that the self is currently engaged in. We report a study of real-time noninvasive recordings of the brain's electrical activity (event-related potentials, ERPs). We found a common neural signature that is associated with self-referential processing regardless of whether subjects are retrieving general knowledge (noetic awareness) or reexperiencing past episodes (autonoetic awareness). These ERP data are consistent with models of autobiographical memory that postulate a single locus of control over explicit memory for various kinds of self-related information. The temporal properties and scalp distribution of this novel self-reference ERP effect also suggest that it may be a neurophysiological correlate of self-related activation in medial prefrontal and parietal neocortical circuits identified in functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments.

Although anticipated postdecisional regret is a significant contributor to people's decision-making processes, the accuracy of people's regret forecasts has yet to be assessed systematically. Here we report two studies to fill this lacuna. In Study 1, we found that subjects who made reasonably high offers overpredicted the regret that they experienced after they unexpectedly failed at a negotiation. In Study 2, we found that subjects overpredicted the rejoicing and marginally underpredicted the regret that they experienced when they received higher marks than they had expected for their course work. Systematic affective misprediction implies that people making decisions should discount the regret and rejoicing that they anticipate will be associated with potential outcomes arising from those decisions.

The Generation Effect in Monkeys
Nate Kornell and Herbert S. Terrace (View AbstractClose Abstract)

How well one retains new information depends on how actively it is processed during learning. Active attempts to retrieve information from memory result in more learning than passive observation of the same information (the generation effect). Here, we present evidence for the generation effect in monkeys. Subjects were trained to respond to five-item lists of photographs in a particular order. On some lists, they could request "hints" to guide their behavior; on others, they had to generate the correct order from memory. Training with hints resulted in high levels of initial performance, but accuracy dropped precipitously when the hints were removed on the criterion test. Training without hints led to relatively poor initial performance, but accuracy increased steadily and remained high on the criterion test.

Disgust is a basic emotion characterized by revulsion and rejection, yet it is relatively unexamined in the literature on prejudice. In the present investigation, interpersonal-disgust sensitivity (e.g., not wanting to wear clean used clothes or to sit on a warm seat vacated by a stranger) in particular predicted negative attitudes toward immigrants, foreigners, and socially deviant groups, even after controlling for concerns with contracting disease. The mechanisms underlying the link between interpersonal disgust and attitudes toward immigrants were explored using a path model. As predicted, the effect of interpersonal-disgust sensitivity on group attitudes was indirect, mediated by ideological orientations (social dominance orientation, right-wing authoritarianism) and dehumanizing perceptions of the out-group. The effects of social dominance orientation on group attitudes were both direct and indirect, via dehumanization. These results establish a link between disgust sensitivity and prejudice that is not accounted for by fear of infection, but rather is mediated by ideological orientations and dehumanizing group representations. Implications for understanding and reducing prejudice are discussed.

Evidence suggests that focus of attention and cognitive load may each affect emotional processing and that individual differences in anxiety moderate such effects. We examined (a) fear-potentiated startle (FPS) under threat-focused (TF), low-load/alternative-set (LL/AS), and high-load/alternative-set (HL/AS) conditions and (b) the moderating effect of trait anxiety on FPS across these conditions. As predicted, redirecting attentional focus away from threat cues and increasing cognitive load reduced FPS. However, the moderating effects of anxiety were specific to the LL/AS condition. Whereas FPS was comparable for high-anxiety and low-anxiety subjects in the TF and HL/AS conditions, FPS was significantly greater for high-anxiety than for low-anxiety subjects in the LL/AS condition. These results suggest that affective processing requires attentional resources and that exaggerated threat processing in anxious individuals relates to direction of attention rather than emotional reactivity per se.

Although the cross-race effect (CRE) is a well-established phenomenon, both perceptual-expertise and social-categorization models have been proposed to explain the effect. The two studies reported here investigated the extent to which categorizing other people as in-group versus out-group members is sufficient to elicit a pattern of face recognition analogous to that of the CRE, even when perceptual expertise with the stimuli is held constant. In Study 1, targets were categorized as members of real-life in-groups and out-groups (based on university affiliation), whereas in Study 2, targets were categorized into experimentally created minimal groups. In both studies, recognition performance was better for targets categorized as in-group members, despite the fact that perceptual expertise was equivalent for in-group and out-group faces. These results suggest that social-cognitive mechanisms of in-group and out-group categorization are sufficient to elicit performance differences for in-group and out-group face recognition.

Three experiments assessed the influence of the Ebbinghaus illusion on size judgments that preceded verbal, grasp, or touch responses. Prior studies have found reduced effects of the illusion for the grip-scaling component of grasping, and these findings are commonly interpreted as evidence that different visual systems are employed for perceptual judgment and visually guided action. In the current experiments, the magnitude of the illusion was reduced by comparable amounts for grasping and for judgments that preceded grasping (Experiment 1). A similar effect was obtained prior to reaching to touch the targets (Experiment 2). The effect on verbal responses was apparent even when participants were simply instructed that a target touch task would follow the verbal task. After participants had completed a grasping task, the reduction in the magnitude of the illusion remained for a subsequent verbal-response judgment task (Experiment 3). Overall, the studies demonstrate strong connections between action planning and perception.

Cognitive training programs can have significant benefits. However, their efficacy is often reduced for individuals of advanced age or lower cognitive ability. Using older adult subjects, we examined the role of self-initiation of cognitive control in a training program that targets recollection memory. Relative time spent on an open-ended, intentional encoding task that requires the self-initiation of cognitive control was highly predictive of improvement in the training task, and fully accounted for individual differences related to age and crystallized intelligence. Analyzing training programs from the perspective of cognitive theory may help clarify how these programs have their effects and suggest ways to optimize such programs for the individuals who need them most.

The present research explored the effect of selective remembering and the resulting "silences" on memory. In particular, we examined whether unmentioned information is more likely to be forgotten by a listener if related information is recollected by the speaker than if related information is not recollected by the speaker. In a modification of the retrieval-induced forgetting paradigm, pairs of individuals studied material, but in the practice phase, only one member of each pair selectively recalled it, while the other listened. Experiment 1 employed paired associates, and Experiment 2 used stories. Experiment 3 involved not controlled practice, but free-flowing conversation. In each case, results from a final memory test established not only within-individual retrieval-induced forgetting, but also socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting. The results demonstrate that listening to a speaker remember selectively can induce forgetting of related information in the listener.

One of the most distinctive characteristics of humans is the capacity to learn from what other people tell them. Often new information is provided about an entity that is not present, requiring incorporation of that information into one's mental representation of the absent object. Here we present evidence regarding the emergence of this vital ability. Nineteen- and 22-month-old infants first learned a name for a toy and later were told that the toy had undergone a change in state (it had become wet) while out of view. The 22-month-olds (but not the 19-month-olds) subsequently identified the toy solely on the basis of the property that they were told about but had never seen. Thus, before the end of their 2nd year, infants can use verbal information to update their representation of an absent object. This developmental advance inaugurates a uniquely human and immensely powerful form of learning about the world.

Human infants appear to be capable of the rudimentary mathematical operations of addition, subtraction, and ordering. To determine whether infants are capable of extracting ratios, we presented 6-month-old infants with multiple examples of a single ratio. After repeated presentations of this ratio, the infants were presented with new examples of a new ratio, as well as new examples of the previously habituated ratio. Infants were able to successfully discriminate two ratios that differed by a factor of 2, but failed to detect the difference between two numerical ratios that differed by a factor of 1.5. We conclude that infants can extract a common ratio across test scenes and use this information while examining new displays. The results support an approximate magnitude-estimation system, which has also been found in animals and human adults.

In all languages studied to date, distinct prosodic contours characterize different intention categories of infant-directed (ID) speech. This vocal behavior likely exists universally as a species-typical trait, but little research has examined whether listeners can accurately recognize intentions in ID speech using only vocal cues, without access to semantic information. We recorded native-English-speaking mothers producing four intention categories of utterances (prohibition, approval, comfort, and attention) as both ID and adult-directed (AD) speech, and we then presented the utterances to Shuar adults (South American hunter-horticulturalists). Shuar subjects were able to reliably distinguish ID from AD speech and were able to reliably recognize the intention categories in both types of speech, although performance was significantly better with ID speech. This is the first demonstration that adult listeners in an indigenous, nonindustrialized, and nonliterate culture can accurately infer intentions from both ID speech and AD speech in a language they do not speak.