Exchange with the University of Exeter

Alicia Leiva has returned from a three months visit to the Department of Psychology at the University of Exeter (UK) where she had the priviledge to work with action control expert Prof. Frederick Verbruggen.

Alicia experienced first-hand research in one of UK's top Psychology departments with a long and solid tradition of international-level research, internationl researchers recruited from all over the world, and advanced laboratory facilities. A chance for her to be introduced to a range of new techniques such as TMS, and to run two original experiments on attention and action reorienting that we have just submitted to publication (Leiva, Parmentier, Elchlepp, Andrés, & Verbruggen, submitted).

We are very grateful to Prof. Verbruggen and all his team for offering Alicia such an amazing training opportunity!

This research visit was sponsored by the FPU program (AP2010-0021) from the Ministry of Education awarded to Alicia Leiva.

Post-doctoral contract from the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness awarded to Toñi Pacheco

Toñi has been awarded one of only 7 psychology post-doctoral awards nation-wide

A great success for the group's first application since its creation in 2013.

The final results of the national competition for the post-doctoral contracts awarded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness have come out. After evaluation of Toñi's CV and scientific quality of the Neuropsychology and Cognition group, Toñi was awarded a very sought after 2-year post-doctoral position to carry on her work with Fabrice Parmentier on attention and emotion.

You are a young and talented researcher interested in applying for one of the Ministry's post-doctoral contracts to work in our group? Contact us!

The 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for psychological research

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2014 has been awarded to John O'Keefe, May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser "for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain". The research explains how the brain maps our spatial environment. A summary can be read found on Nobezprize.org.

Better understanding the integration of verbal and spatial information in working memory

Past work indicates that attended visual verbal stimuli are automatically encoded together with their spatial location but not vice versa. A new study by Elsley and Parmentier confirms this observation and demonstrates that the automatic binding of the "where" to the "what" remains stable during at least 15 seconds (the longest interval used in the study).

Schematic illustration of trial types in the Verbal Task (VT) and the Spatial Task (ST), with corresponding correct responses. Participants were presented with an array of consonants in distinct locations. In the verbal task participants were instructed to remember the consonants. In the spatial task, they remembered the locations. Following a visual mask and a retention interval of variable duration, they were asked to judge a probe consonant and press a "yes" key if the probe represented one of the to-be-remembered consonants (verbal task) or locations (spatial task), and to press the "no" key otherwise.

Error data (% incorrect) for intact and recombined probes as a function of retention interval in the verbal task (panel A) and spatial task (panel B). Error bars represent one standard error of the mean. The results show that probes made of a consonant presented in its original location (intact probe) were better remembered than probes made of a consonants and locations that formed part of the array but not paired (recombined probes). This binding effect was stable across all retention intervals. It was however absent in the spatial task (where participants attended the locations only).

Reference: Elsley, J. V., & Parmentier, F. B. R. (in press). The asymmetry and temporal dynamics of incidental letter-location bindings in working memory. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.

Contrasting effects of changing rhythm and content on auditory distraction in immediate memory

A study by Parmentier and Beaman demonstrates that changing content but not changing rhythm renders irrelevant speech disruptive of verbal serial memory. The study will feature in a Special Issue on Working Memory in the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology.

Reference: Parmentier, F. B. R., & Beaman, C. P. (in press). Contrasting effects of changing rhythm and content on auditory distraction in immediate memory. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology

Abstract: Across five experiments, the temporal regularity and content of an irrelevant speech stream were varied and their effects on a serial recall task examined. Variations of the content, but not the rhythm, of the irrelevant speech stimuli reliably disrupted serial recall performance in all experiments. Bayesian analyses supported the null hypothesis over the hypothesis that irregular rhythms would disrupt memory to a greater extent than regular rhythms. Pooling the data in a combined analysis revealed that regular presentation of the irrelevant speech was significantly more disruptive to serial recall than irregular presentation. These results are consistent with the idea that auditory distraction is sensitive to both intra-item and inter-item relations and challenge an orienting-based account of auditory distraction.