Contagion via Magical Thinking and via Mere Proximity.

People show an irrational dislike for objects that were once contaminated or had come into contact with an undesirable person, even if they are currently indistinguishable from other similar objects. To date, such negative contagion within the magical thinking literature has been shown only with inanimate objects. We addressed a boundary condition to see if it also extended to animate targets (dogs and children) while teasing out mere-proximity effects that would predict a similar contagion in the case of children. We used two different types of contagion, one based on proximity and one based on self-information. We found that magical thinking did extend to dogs but not to children when not confounded by mere-proximity effects. Also, contagion was less strong in the case of animate targets, but pity was not related to either this reduction or to the disappearance of the effect with children.

Matching Speaking to Singing Voices and the Influence of Content.

OBJECTIVES AND HYPOTHESIS: We tested whether speaking voices of unfamiliar people could be matched to their singing voices, and, if so, whether the content of the utterances would influence this matching performance. Our hypothesis was that enough acoustic features would remain the same between speaking and singing voices such that their identification as belonging to the same or different individuals would be possible even upon a single hearing. We also hypothesized that the contents of the utterances would influence this identification process such that voices uttering words would be easier to match than those uttering vowels. STUDY DESIGN: We used a within-participant design with blocked stimuli that were counterbalanced using a Latin square design. In one block, mode (speaking vs singing) was manipulated while content was held constant; in another block, content (word vs syllable) was manipulated while mode was held constant, and in the control block, both mode and content were held constant. METHOD: Participants indicated whether the voices in any given pair of utterances belonged to the same person or to different people. RESULTS: Cross-mode matching was above chance level, although mode-congruent performance was better. Further, only speaking voices were easier to match when uttering words. CONCLUSIONS: We can identify speaking and singing voices as the same or different even on just a single hearing. However, content interacts with mode such that words benefit matching of speaking voices but not of singing voices. Results are discussed within an attentional framework.

Flexibility of temporal order in musical and linguistic recognition.

In Experiments 1-3 participants heard pairs of audio clips, each corresponding to half of a phrase (linguistic or musical), in a forward direction or a backward direction, where the second half came first. They judged whether the second clip was from a familiar source or from the same source as the first clip. In both tasks participants were faster and more accurate when the clips were from the same source and faster with linguistic stimuli. Longer temporal distances impaired performance, although greater flexibility was shown with linguistic materials. In Experiment 4, single extended clips were played in temporal or scrambled order. Judgments of familiarity were slower with scrambled song melodies than with instrumental melodies, and processing of music was disrupted more than that of language when temporal order was violated. These results suggest that semantic meaning enhances processing of temporal order information and modulates access.

Feeling-of-knowing for songs and instrumental music.

We explored the differences between metamemory judgments for titles as well as for melodies of instrumental music and those for songs with lyrics. Participants were given melody or title cues and asked to provide the corresponding titles or melodies or feeling of knowing (FOK) ratings. FOK ratings were higher but less accurate for titles with melody cues than vice versa, but only in instrumental music, replicating previous findings. In a series of seven experiments, we ruled out style, instrumentation, and strategy differences as explanations for this asymmetry. A mediating role of lyrics between the title and the melody in songs was also ruled out. What emerged as the main explanation was the degree of familiarity with the musical pieces, which was manipulated either episodically or semantically, and within this context, lyrics appeared to serve as an additional source of familiarity. Results are discussed using the Interactive Theory of how FOK judgments are made.

Feeling of knowing for names in response to faces.

Participants were asked to recall the names when shown photographs of faces in both a semantic task (Experiment 1) and an episodic task (Experiments 2 and 3). When recall failed, feeling of knowing (FOK) ratings were solicited. In addition, participants reported on the strategies that they used to make their ratings, whether they could recall other pieces of information (the target-accessibility strategy, e.g., Koriat, A. (1993). How do we know that? The accessibility model of the feeling of knowing. Psychological Review, 100, 609-639) or whether the faces simply looked familiar (the cue-familiarity strategy, e.g., Schwartz, B. L., & Metcalfe, J. (1992). Cue familiarity but not target accessibility enhances feeling of knowing ratings. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 18, 1074-1083). In all experiments, FOK ratings were fairly accurate in that participants were successful in predicting their performance on a subsequent recognition test. More importantly, participants reported using the cue-familiarity strategy more often, although they gave higher FOK ratings when they reported using the target-accessibility strategy. The FOK ratings that were given using the two strategies were equally accurate.