No abstract

Previous findings reveal that older adults favor positive over negative stimuli in both memory and attention (for a review, see Mather & Carstensen, 2005). This study used eye tracking to investigate the role of cognitive control in older adults' selective visual attention. Younger and older adults viewed emotional-neutral and emotional-emotional pairs of faces and pictures while their gaze patterns were recorded under full or divided attention conditions. Replicating previous eye-tracking findings, older adults allocated less of their visual attention to negative stimuli in negative-neutral stimulus pairings in the full attention condition than younger adults did. However, as predicted by a cognitive-control-based account of the positivity effect in older adults' information processing tendencies (Mather & Knight, 2005), older adults' tendency to avoid negative stimuli was reversed in the divided attention condition. Compared with younger adults, older adults' limited attentional resources were more likely to be drawn to negative stimuli when they were distracted. These findings indicate that emotional goals can have unintended consequences when cognitive control mechanisms are not fully available.

How can a suspect's guilt or innocence be reliably tested? The validity of the polygraph, which measures changes in physiological arousal during a "guilty knowledge" test, is controversial (e.g., T. R. Bashore & P. E. Rapp, 1993; T. P. Cross & L. Saxe, 1992; D. T. Lykken, 1998; J. P. Rosenfeld, 1995; R. Steinbrook, 1992). One alternative to the polygraph examines event-related potentials recorded during a memory interference task (L. A. Farwell & E. Donchin, 1991). The present study extended this paradigm to determine whether response times (RTs) can accurately identify participants possessing specific guilty knowledge. Results from Experiment 1 showed that RT alone can reliably discriminate "guilty" from "innocent" participants. Experiments 2a and 2b indicated that an RT-based paradigm is more resistant to strategic manipulation than previously suggested (Farwell & Donchin, 1991). This RT-based paradigm may be a viable alternative to the polygraph for detecting guilty knowledge.

The phonological-loop model provides a prominent theoretical description of verbal working memory. According to it, serial recall accuracy should be inversely related to the articulatory duration and phonological similarity of verbal items in memorized sequences. Initial tests of these predictions by A. D. Baddeley and colleagues (e.g., A. D. Baddeley, N. Thomson, & M. Buchanan, 1975) appeared to support the phonological-loop model, but subsequent researchers have obtained conflicting data that putatively disconfirm its assumptions. Such conflicts may have stemmed from less than ideal measurements of articulatory duration and phonological similarity. This article discusses these concerns and proposes new theoretically principled methods for measuring articulatory duration and phonological similarity. Two experiments that used these methods in the context of a verbal serial recall task are reported. The results of these experiments confirm and extend the predictions of the phonological-loop model while disarming previous criticisms of it.