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Color Psychology

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à 1666, E glish scie
is
Sir àsaac New
o discovered
ha
whe pure whi
e ligh
passes
hrough
a prism, i
separa
es i
o all of
he visible colors. New
o also fou d
ha
each color is made up
of a si gle wavele g
h a d ca o
be separa
ed a y fur
her i
o o
her colors.

Fur
her experime
s demo s
ra
ed
ha
ligh
could be combi ed
o form o
her colors. For
example, red ligh
mixed wi
h yellow ligh
crea
es a ora ge color. A color resul
i g from a mix
of
wo o
her colors is k ow as a  . Some colors, such as yellow a d purple, ca cel each
o
her ou
whe mixed a d resul
i a whi
e ligh
. These compe
i g colors are k ow as
 
 .

c



 c


While percep
io s of color are somewha
subjec
ive,
here are some color effec
s
ha
have
u iversal mea i g. Colors i
he red area of
he color spec
rum are k ow as  
 a d
i clude red, ora ge a d yellow. These warm colors evoke emo
io s ra gi g from feeli gs of
warm
h a d comfor

o feeli gs of a ger a d hos
ili
y.

Colors o
he blue side of
he spec
rum are k ow as 

 a d i clude blue, purple a d
gree . These colors are of
e described as calm, bu
ca also call
o mi d feeli gs of sad ess or
i differe ce.

c



Several a cie
cul
ures, i cludi g
he Egyp
ia s a d Chi ese, prac
iced  , or
usi g colors
o heal. Chromo
herapy is some
imes referred
o as ligh

herapy or colourology a d
is s
ill used
oday as a holis
ic or al
er a
ive
rea
me
.
à
his
rea
me


p ^ was used
o s
imula
e
he body a d mi d a d
o i crease circula
io .

p u

 was
hough

o s
imula
e
he erves a d purify
he body.

p Π was used
o heal
he lu gs a d
o i crease e ergy levels.

p 
 was believed
o soo
he ill esses a d
rea
pai .

p  shades were
hough

o allevia
e ski problems.

Most psychologists view color therapy with skepticism and point out that the supposed effects of color
have been exaggerated. Colors also have different meanings in different cultures. Research has
demonstrated in many cases that the mood-altering effects of color may only be temporary. A blue
room may initially cause feelings of calm, but the effect dissipates after a short period of time.

c


A very impor
a
aspec
of our visual experie ce is color. The previous sec
io o color
described
he color se si g mecha isms of
he eye a d brai . Ye

he ervous impulses of
he
color cha el do 
o ly go
o
he brai . Some pulses
ravel
o
he pi
ui
arya d pi eal gla ds

hrough
he hypo
halamusà
is logical
o assume
ha
wha
we see, especially color, ca affec

he
sys
ems of
he body. Psychologis
s a d physiologis
s belive
his
o be
rue a d are i ves
iga
i g
exac
ly wha
each color ca do
o our bodies.

^


 Red has bee show
o i crease blood pressure a d s
imula
e
he adre al
gla ds. The s
imula
io of
he adre als gla ds helps us become s
ro g a d i creases our s
ami a.
Pi k, a ligh
er shade of red, helps muscles relax.



 While red has prove
o be a color of vi
ali
y a d ambi
io i
has bee
show
o be associa
ed wi
h a ger. Some
imes red ca be useful i dispelli g ega
ive
hough
s,
bu
i
ca also make o e irri
able. Pi k has
he opposi
e effec
of red. Pi k i duces feeli gs of
calm, pro
ec
io , warm
h a d ur
ure. This color ca be used
o lesse irri
a
io a d aggressio
as i
is co ec
ed wi
h feeli gs of love. Red is some
imes associa
ed wi
h sexuali
y, whereas pi k
is associa
ed wi
h u selfish love.

Π


 Ora ge has prove
o be a s
imulus of
he sexual orga s. Also, i
ca be
be efi
ial
o
he diges
ive sys
em a d ca s
re g
he
he immu e sys
em.



 Ora ge has show
o have o ly posi
ive affec
s o your emo
io al s
a
e.
This color relieves feeli gs of self-pi
y, lack of self-wor
h a d u willi g ess
o forgive. Ora ge
ope s your emo
io s a d is a
errific a
idepressa
.

u




 Yellow has prove
o s
imula
e
he brai . This s
imula
io ca make you
more aler
a d decisive. This color makes muscles more e erge
ic a d ac
iva
es
he lymph
sys
em.



 Similarly
o Ora ge, Yellow is a happy a d uplif
i g color. à
ca also be
associa
ed wi
h i
ellec
ual
hi ki g discer me
, memory, clear
hi ki g, decisio -maki g a d
good judgme
. Also aidi g orga iza
io , u ders
a di g of differe
poi
s of view. Yellow
builds self-co fide ce a d e courages op
imism. However, a dull yellow ca bri g o feeli gs of
fear.

!


 Gree is said
o be good for you hear
. O a physical a d emo
io al, gree
helps your hear
bri g you physical equilibrium a d relaxa
io . Gree relaxes our muscles a d
helps us brea
he deeper a d slower.



 Gree crea
es feeli gs of comfor
, lazi ess, relaxa
io , calm ess. à
helps
us bala ce a d soo
he our emo
io s. Some a

ribu
e
his
o i
s co ec
io wi
h a
ure a d our
a
ural feeli gs of affilia
io wi
h
he a
ural world whe experie ci g
he color gree . Ye
,
darker a d grayer gree s ca have
he opposi
e effec
. These olive gree colors remi d us of
decay a d dea
h a d ca ac
ually have a de
rime
al effec
o physical a d emo
io al heal
h.
No
e
ha
sicke ed car
oo charac
ers always
ur ed gree .





 à co
ras

o red, blue proves
o lower blood pressure. Blue ca be li ked

o
he
hroa
a d
hyroid gla d. Blue also has a very cooli g a d soo
hi g affec
, of
e maki g us
calmer. Deep blue s
imula
es
he pi
ui
ary gla d, which
he regula
es our sleep pa

er s. This
deeper blue also has proved
o help
he skele
al s
ruc
ure i keepi g bo e marrow heal
hy.


 We usually associa
e
he color blue wi
h
he igh
a d
hus we feel
relaxed a d calmed. Ligh
er blues make us feel qui
e a d away from
he rush of
he day. These
colors ca be useful i elimi a
i g i som ia. Like yellow, blue i spires me
al co
rol, clari
y
a d crea
ivi
y. However,
oo much dark blue ca be depressi g.





 Viole
has show
o allevia
e co di
io s such as su bur due
o i
s
purifyi g a d a
isep
ic effec
. This color also suppresses hu ger a d bala ces
he bodys
me
abolism. à digo, a ligh
er purple, has bee used by doc
ors i Texas as a a es
hesia i mi or
opera
io s because i
s arco
ic <"A soo
hi g or umbi g age
.">quali
ies



 Purples have bee used i
he care of me
al of ervous disorders because

hey have show
o help bala ce
he mi d a d
ra sform obsessio s a d fears. à digo is of
e
associa
ed wi
h
he righ
side of
he brai  s
imula
i g i
ui
io a d imagi a
io . Viole
is
associa
ed wi
h bri gi g peace a d comba
i g shock a d fear. Viole
has a clea si g effec
wi
h
emo
io al dis
urba ces. Also,
his color is rela
ed
o se si
ivi
y
o beau
y, high ideals a d
s
imula
es crea
ivi
y, spiri
uali
y a d compassio . Psychic power a d pro
ec
io has also bee
associa
ed wi
h viole
.

 


 Brow is
he color of
he ear
h a d ul
ima
ely home. This color bri gs
feeli gs of s
abili
y a d securi
y. Some
imes brow ca also be associa
ed wi
h wi
hholdi g
emo
io a d re
rea
i g from
he world.


"


 While comfor
i g a d pro
ec
ive, black is mys
erious a d associa
ed wi
h
sile ce a d some
imes dea
h. Black is passive a d ca preve
us from growi g a d cha gi g.




 Whi
e is
he color of ul
ima
e puri
y. This color bri gs feeli gs of peace
a d comfor
while i
dispels shock a d despair. Whi
e ca be used
o give yourself a feeli g of
freedom a d u clu

ered ope ess. Too much whi
e ca give feeli gs of separa
io a d ca be
cold a d isola
io .
!


 Gray is
he color of i depe de ce a d self-relia ce, al
hough usually

hough
of as a ega
ive color. à
ca be
he color of evasio a d o -commi
me
(si ce i
is
ei
her black or whi
e.) Gray i dica
es separa
io , lack of i volveme
a d ul
ima
ely
lo eli ess.

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Cogn Psychol. 2010 Aug 19;: 20728080

Perception of randomness: On the time of streaks.

Yanlong Sun, Hongbin Wang

ë


  
       ë

People tend to think that streaks in random sequential events are rare and remarkable. When they
actually encounter streaks, they tend to consider the underlying process as non-random. The present
paper examines the time of pattern occurrences in sequences of Bernoulli trials, and shows that among
all patterns of the same length, a streak is the most delayed pattern for its first occurrence. It is argued
that when time is of essence, how often a pattern is to occur (mean time, or, frequency) and when a
pattern is to first occur (waiting time) are different questions and bear different psychological relevance.
The waiting time statistics may provide a quantitative measure to the psychological distance when
people are expecting a probabilistic event, and such measure is consistent with both of the
representativeness and availability heuristics in people's perception of randomness. We discuss some of
the recent empirical findings and suggest that people's judgment and generation of random sequences
may be guided by their actual experiences of the waiting time statistics.

Cogn Psychol. 2010 Jul 21;: 20650449

Believing what you're told: Young children's trust in unexpected testimony about the physical world.

Vikram K Jaswal

  
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How do children resolve conflicts between a self-generated belief and what they are told? Four studies
investigated the circumstances under which toddlers would trust testimony that conflicted with their
expectations about the physical world. Thirty-month-olds believed testimony that conflicted with a
naive bias (Study 1), and they also repeatedly trusted testimony that conflicted with an event they had
just seen (Study 2)-even when they had an incentive to ignore the testimony (Study 3). Children
responded more skeptically if they could see that the testimony was wrong as it was being delivered
(Study 3), or if they had the opportunity to accumulate evidence confirming their initial belief before
hearing someone contradict it (Study 4). Together, these studies demonstrate that toddlers have a
robust bias to trust even surprising testimony, but this trust can be influenced by how much confidence
they have in their initial belief.

Cogn Psychol. 2010 Jul 15;: 20638053

Effects of generic language on category content and structure.

Susan A Gelman, Elizabeth A Ware, Felicia Kleinberg

  
  ë


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We hypothesized that generic noun phrases ("Bears climb trees") would provide important input to
children's developing concepts. In three experiments, four-year-olds and adults learned a series of facts
about a novel animal category, in one of three wording conditions: generic (e.g.,"Zarpies hate ice
cream"), specific-label (e.g.,"This zarpie hates ice cream"), or no-label (e.g.,"This hates ice cream").
Participants completed a battery of tasks assessing the extent to which they linked the category to the
properties expressed, and the extent to which they treated the category as constituting an essentialized
kind. As predicted, for adults, generics training resulted in tighter category-property links and more
category essentialism than both the specific-label and no-label training. Children also showed effects of
generic wording, though the effects were weaker and required more extensive input. We discuss the
implications for language-thought relations, and for the acquisition of essentialized categories.

Cogn Psychol. 2010 Jul 2;: 20599192

Learning to cooperate without awareness in multiplayer minimal social situations.

Andrew M Colman, Briony D Pulford, David Omtzigt, Ali Al-Nowaihi

 
  ë


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Experimental and Monte Carlo methods were used to test theoretical predictions about adaptive
learning of cooperative responses without awareness in minimal social situations-games in which the
payoffs to players depend not on their own actions but exclusively on the actions of other group
members. In Experiment 1, learning occurred slowly over 200 rounds in a dyadic minimal social situation
but not in multiplayer groups. In Experiments 2-4, learning occurred rarely in multiplayer groups, even
when players were informed that they were interacting strategically and were allowed to communicate
with one another but were not aware of the game's payoff structure. Monte Carlo simulation suggested
that players approach minimal social situations using a noisy version of the win-stay, lose-shift decision
rule, deviating from the deterministic rule less frequently after rewarding than unrewarding rounds.

Cogn Psychol. 2010 Jun 25;: 20580350

What makes distributed practice effective?

Aaron S Benjamin, Jonathan Tullis

  
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The advantages provided to memory by the distribution of multiple practice or study opportunities are
among the most powerful effects in memory research. In this paper, we critically review the class of
theories that presume contextual or encoding variability as the sole basis for the advantages of
distributed practice, and recommend an alternative approach based on the idea that some study events
remind learners of other study events. Encoding variability theory encounters serious challenges in two
important phenomena that we review here: superadditivity and nonmonotonicity. The bottleneck in
such theories lies in the assumption that mnemonic benefits arise from the increasing independence,
rather than interdependence, of study opportunities. The reminding model accounts for many basic
results in the literature on distributed practice, readily handles data that are problematic for encoding
variability theories, including superadditivity and nonmonotonicity, and provides a unified theoretical
framework for understanding the effects of repetition and the effects of associative relationships on
memory.

Cogn Psychol. 2010 Jun 21;: 20573342

Word segmentation with universal prosodic cues.

Ansgar D Endress, Marc D Hauser

  
    (ë

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When listening to speech from one's native language, words seem to be well separated from one
another, like beads on a string. When listening to a foreign language, in contrast, words seem almost
impossible to extract, as if there was only one bead on the same string. This contrast reveals that there
are language-specific cues to segmentation. The puzzle, however, is that infants must be endowed with
a language-independent mechanism for segmentation, as they ultimately solve the segmentation
problem for any native language. Here, we approach the acquisition problem by asking whether there
are language-independent cues to segmentation that might be available to even adult learners who
have already acquired a native language. We show that adult learners recognize words in connected
speech when only prosodic cues to word-boundaries are given from languages unfamiliar to the
participants. In both artificial and natural speech, adult English speakers, with no prior exposure to the
test languages, readily recognized words in natural languages with critically different prosodic patterns,
including French, Turkish and Hungarian. We suggest that, even though languages differ in their sound
structures, they carry universal prosodic characteristics. Further, these language-invariant prosodic cues
provide a universally accessible mechanism for finding words in connected speech. These cues may
enable infants to start acquiring words in any language even before they are fine-tuned to the sound
structure of their native language.

Cogn Psychol. 2010 Jun 4;: 20570252

A modular geometric mechanism for reorientation in children.

Sang Ah Lee, Elizabeth S Spelke

  (ë

ë
( 

Although disoriented young children reorient themselves in relation to the shape of the surrounding
surface layout, cognitive accounts of this ability vary. The present paper tests three theories of
reorientation: a snapshot theory based on visual image-matching computations, an adaptive
combination theory proposing that diverse environmental cues to orientation are weighted according to
their experienced reliability, and a modular theory centering on encapsulated computations of the
shape of the extended surface layout. Seven experiments test these theories by manipulating four
properties of objects placed within a cylindrical space: their size, motion, dimensionality, and distance
from the space's borders. Their findings support the modular theory and suggest that disoriented search
behavior centers on two processes: a reorientation process based on the geometry of the 3D surface
layout, and a beacon-guidance process based on the local features of objects and surface markings.

Cogn Psychol. 2010 May 27;: 20553763

Seeing is believing: Trustworthiness as a dynamic belief.

Luke J Chang, Bradley B Doll, Mascha van 't Wout, Michael J Frank, Alan G Sanfey

  
  ë



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Recent efforts to understand the mechanisms underlying human cooperation have focused on the
notion of trust, with research illustrating that both initial impressions and previous interactions impact
the amount of trust people place in a partner. Less is known, however, about how these two types of
information interact in iterated exchanges. The present study examined how implicit initial
trustworthiness information interacts with experienced trustworthiness in a repeated Trust Game.
Consistent with our hypotheses, these two factors reliably influence behavior both independently and
synergistically, in terms of how much money players were willing to entrust to their partner and also in
their post-game subjective ratings of trustworthiness. To further understand this interaction, we used
Reinforcement Learning models to test several distinct processing hypotheses. These results suggest
that trustworthiness is a belief about probability of reciprocation based initially on implicit judgments,
and then dynamically updated based on experiences. This study provides a novel quantitative
framework to conceptualize the notion of trustworthiness.

Cogn Psychol. 2010 May 27;: 20553762

Infants' causal representations of state change events.

Paul Muentener, Susan Carey

  
  7

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Five experiments extended studies of infants' causal representations of Michottian launching events to
8-month-olds' causal representations of physical state changes. Infants were habituated to events in
which a potential causal agent moved behind a screen, after which a box partially visible on the other
side of the screen underwent some change (motion or state change). After habituation the screen was
removed, and infants observed full events in which the potential agent either did or did not contact the
box (contact vs. gap events). Infants were credited with causal representations of the events if their
attention was drawn both to gap events in which the effect nonetheless occurred and to events with
contact in which the effect did not happen. The experiments varied the nature of the effect (motion vs.
state change) and the nature of the possible causal agent (train, hand, novel intentional agent). Both the
nature of the effect and the nature of the possible agent influenced the likelihood of causal attribution.
The events involving motion of the patient replicated previous studies of infants' representations of
Michottian launching events: the toy train was taken as the source of the boxes motion. In contrast,
infants attributed the cause of the box's physical state change to a hand and novel self-moving entity
with eyes, but not to a toy train. These data address early developing causal schemata, and bring new
information to bear on theories of the origin of human causal cognition.

Cogn Psychol. 2010 May 24;: 20510406

Beyond single syllables: Large-scale modeling of reading aloud with the Connectionist Dual Process
(CDP++) model.

Conrad Perry, Johannes C Ziegler, Marco Zorzi

2 
/

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Most words in English have more than one syllable, yet the most influential computational models of
reading aloud are restricted to processing monosyllabic words. Here, we present CDP++, a new version
of the Connectionist Dual Process model (Perry, Ziegler,& Zorzi, 2007). CDP++ is able to simulate the
reading aloud of mono- and disyllabic words and nonwords, and learns to assign stress in exactly the
same way as it learns to associate graphemes with phonemes. CDP++ is able to simulate the
monosyllabic benchmark effects its predecessor could, and therefore shows full backwards compatibility.
CDP++ also accounts for a number of novel effects specific to disyllabic words, including the effects of
stress regularity and syllable number. In terms of database performance, CDP++ accounts for over 49%
of the reaction time variance on items selected from the English Lexicon Project, a very large database
of several thousand of words. With its lexicon of over 32,000 words, CDP++ is therefore a notable
example of the successful scaling-up of a connectionist model to a size that more realistically
approximates the human lexical system.

Cogn Psychol. 2010 Apr 28;: 20434141

Redundancy and reduction: Speakers manage syntactic information density.

T Florian Jaeger
  
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A principle of efficient language production based on information theoretic considerations is proposed:

Uniform Information Density predicts that language production is affected by a preference to distribute
information uniformly across the linguistic signal. This prediction is tested against data from syntactic
reduction. A single multilevel logit model analysis of naturally distributed data from a corpus of
spontaneous speech is used to assess the effect of information density on complementizer that-
mentioning, while simultaneously evaluating the predictions of several influential alternative accounts:
availability, ambiguity avoidance, and dependency processing accounts. Information density emerges as
an important predictor of speakers' preferences during production. As information is defined in terms of
probabilities, it follows that production is probability-sensitive, in that speakers' preferences are
affected by the contextual probability of syntactic structures. The merits of a corpus-based approach to
the study of language production are discussed as well.

Cogn Psychol. 2010 Mar 5;: 20206924

Adaptive memory: Ancestral priorities and the mnemonic value of survival processing.

James S Nairne, Josefa N S Pandeirada

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Evolutionary psychologists often propose that humans carry around "stone-age" brains, along with a
toolkit of cognitive adaptations designed originally to solve hunter-gatherer problems. This perspective
predicts that optimal cognitive performance might sometimes be induced by ancestrally-based
problems, those present in ancestral environments, rather than by adaptive problems faced more
commonly in modern environments. This prediction was examined in four experiments using the
survival processing paradigm, in which retention is tested after participants process information in terms
of its relevance to fitness-based scenarios. In each of the experiments, participants remembered
information better after processing its relevance in an ancestral environment (the grasslands),
compared to a modern urban environment (a city), despite the fact that all scenarios described similar
fitness-relevant problems. These data suggest that our memory systems may be tuned to ancestral
priorities.

Cogn Psychol. 2010 Feb 26;: 20189553

Cognitive systems struggling for word order.

Alan Langus, Marina Nespor

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We argue that the grammatical diversity observed among the world's languages emerges from the
struggle between individual cognitive systems trying to impose their preferred structure on human
language. We investigate the cognitive bases of the two most common word orders in the world's
languages: SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) and SVO. Evidence from language change, grammaticalization,
stability of order, and theoretical arguments, indicates a syntactic preference for SVO. The reason for
the prominence of SOV languages is not as clear. In two gesture-production experiments and one
gesture comprehension experiment, we show that SOV emerges as the preferred constituent
configuration in participants whose native languages (Italian and Turkish) have different word orders.
We propose that improvised communication does not rely on the computational system of grammar.
The results of a fourth experiment, where participants comprehended strings of prosodically flat words
in their native language, shows that the computational system of grammar prefers the orthogonal Verb-
Object orders.

Cogn Psychol. 2010 Feb 26;: 20189552

Blue car, red car: Developing efficiency in online interpretation of adjective-noun phrases.

Anne Fernald, Kirsten Thorpe, Virginia A Marchman

  
  
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Two experiments investigated the development of fluency in interpreting adjective-noun phrases in 30-
and 36-month-old English-learning children. Using online processing measures, children's gaze patterns
were monitored as they heard the familiar adjective-noun phrases (e.g. blue car) in visual contexts
where the adjective was either informative (e.g. blue car paired with red car or red house) or
uninformative (e.g. blue car paired with blue house). Thirty-six-month-olds processed adjective-noun
phrases incrementally as adults do, orienting more quickly to the target picture on informative-adjective
trials than on control trials. Thirty-month-olds did not make incremental use of informative adjectives,
and experienced disruption on trials when the two potential referents were identical in kind. In the
younger children, difficulty in integrating prenominal adjectives with the subsequent noun was
associated with slower processing speed across conditions. These findings provide evidence that skill in
putting color word knowledge to use in real-time language processing emerges gradually over the third
year.

Cogn Psychol. 2010 Feb 15;: 20159653

Is early word-form processing stress-full? How natural variability supports recognition.

Heather Bortfeld, James L Morgan

  
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In a series of studies, we examined how mothers naturally stress words across multiple mentions in
speech to their infants and how this marking influences infants' recognition of words in fluent speech.
We first collected samples of mothers' infant-directed speech using a technique that induced multiple
repetitions of target words. Acoustic analyses revealed that mothers systematically alternated between
emphatic and nonemphatic stress when talking to their infants. Using the headturn preference
procedure, we then tested 7.5-month-old infants on their ability to detect familiarized bisyllabic words
in fluent speech. Stress of target words (emphatic and nonemphatic) was systematically varied across
familiarization and recognition phases of four experiments. Results indicated that, although infants
generally prefer listening to words produced with emphatic stress, recognition was enhanced when the
degree of emphatic stress at familiarization matched the degree of emphatic stress at recognition.

Cogn Psychol. 2010 Feb 13;: 20156620

Testing an associative account of semantic satiation.

Xing Tian, David E Huber

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How is the meaning of a word retrieved without interference from recently viewed words? The ROUSE
theory of priming assumes a discounting process to reduce source confusion between subsequently
presented words. As applied to semantic satiation, this theory predicted a loss of association between
the lexical item and meaning. Four experiments tested this explanation in a speeded category-matching
task. All experiments used lists of 20 trials that presented a cue word for 1s followed by a target word.
Randomly mixed across the list, 10 trials used cues drawn from the same category whereas the other 10
trials used cues from 10 other categories. In Experiments 1a and 1b, the cues were repeated category
labels (FRUIT-APPLE) and responses gradually slowed for the repeated category. In Experiment 2, the
cues were nonrepeated exemplars (PEAR-APPLE) and responses remained faster for the repeated
category. In Experiment 3, the cues were repeated exemplars in a word matching task (APPLE-APPLE)
and responses again remained faster for the repeated category.

Cogn Psychol. 2010 Feb 4;: 20138261

Beyond the mental number line: A neural network model of number-space interactions.
Mi Chen, Tom Verguts

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It is commonly assumed that there is an interaction between the representations of number and space
(e.g., Dehaene, Bossini,& Giraux, 1993; Walsh, 2003), typically ascribed to a mental number line. The
exact nature of this interaction has remained elusive, however. Here we propose that spatial aspects are
not inherent to number representations, but that instead spatial and numerical representations are
separate. However, cultural factors establish ties between them. By extending earlier models (Gevers,
Verguts, Reynvoet, Caessens,& Fias, 2006; Verguts, Fias,& Stevens, 2005) based on this hypothesis, the
authors present computer simulations showing that a model incorporating this idea can account for
data from a series of studies. These results suggest that number-space interactions are emergent
properties resulting from the interaction between different brain areas.

Cogn Psychol. 2010 Jan 9;: 20064637

Bayesian hypothesis testing for psychologists: A tutorial on the Savage-Dickey method.

Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, Tom Lodewyckx, Himanshu Kuriyal, Raoul Grasman

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In the field of cognitive psychology, the p-value hypothesis test has established a stranglehold on
statistical reporting. This is unfortunate, as the p-value provides at best a rough estimate of the
evidence that the data provide for the presence of an experimental effect. An alternative and arguably
more appropriate measure of evidence is conveyed by a Bayesian hypothesis test, which prefers the
model with the highest average likelihood. One of the main problems with this Bayesian hypothesis test,
however, is that it often requires relatively sophisticated numerical methods for its computation. Here
we draw attention to the Savage-Dickey density ratio method, a method that can be used to compute
the result of a Bayesian hypothesis test for nested models and under certain plausible restrictions on the
parameter priors. Practical examples demonstrate the method's validity, generality, and flexibility.

Cogn Psychol. 2010 May ;60 (3):127-57 19962693

Individual differences, aging, and IM in two-choice tasks.

Roger Ratcliff, Anjali Thapar, Gail McKoon

  
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The effects of aging and IM on performance were examined in three two-choice tasks: numerosity
discrimination, recognition memory, and lexical decision. The experimental data, accuracy, correct and
error response times, and response time distributions, were well explained by Ratcliff's (1978) diffusion
model. The components of processing identified by the model were compared across levels of IM
(ranging from 83 to 146) and age (college students, 60-74, and 75-90 year olds). Declines in performance
with age were not significantly different for low compared to high IM subjects. IM but not age had large
effects on the quality of the evidence that was obtained from a stimulus or memory, that is, the
evidence upon which decisions were based. Applying the model to individual subjects, the components
of processing identified by the model for individuals correlated across tasks. In addition, the model's
predictions and the data were examined for the "worst performance rule", the finding that age and IM
have larger effects on slower responses than faster responses.

Cogn Psychol. 2009 Oct 29;: 19879560

A rational analysis of the effects of memory biases on serial reproduction.

Jing Xu, Thomas L Griffiths

  
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Many human interactions involve pieces of information being passed from one person to another,
raising the question of how this process of information transmission is affected by the cognitive
capacities of the agents involved. Bartlett (1932) explored the influence of memory biases on the "serial
reproduction" of information, in which one person's reconstruction of a stimulus from memory becomes
the stimulus seen by the next person. These experiments were done using relatively uncontrolled stimuli,
but suggested that serial reproduction could transform information in a way that reflected the biases
inherent in memory. We formally analyze serial reproduction using a Bayesian model of reconstruction
from memory, giving a general result characterizing the effect of memory biases on information
transmission. We then test the predictions of this account in four experiments using simple one-
dimensional stimuli. Our results provide theoretical and empirical justification for the idea that serial
reproduction reflects memory biases.

http://lib.bioinfo.pl/pmid/journal/Cogn%20Psychol