of the utility of this procedure as an alternative to traditional stimulus-stimulus pairing procedures for conditioning neutral stimuli as reinforcers.

per-formance, information on the form of the stimulus does not. Third, expectancy may lead to improvements in latency without a reduction in accuracy. Fourth, there appears to be little ability to lower the criterion at two positions that are

research are shown to result from requesting information that was never directly heeded, thus forcing subjects to infer rather than remember their mental processes. After a long period of time during which stimulus-response relations were at the focus of attention, research in psychology is now seeking

Schultz, Wolfram. Predictive reward signal of dopamine neurons. is called rewards, which elicit and reinforce approach behav-J. Neurophysiol. 80: 1–27, 1998. The effects of lesions, receptor ior. The functions of rewards were developed further during blocking, electrical self-stimulation, and drugs of abuse suggest the evolution of higher mammals to support more sophistithat midbrain dopamine systems are involved in processing reward cated forms of individual and social behavior. Thus biologiinformation and learning approach behavior. Most dopamine neucal and cognitive needs define the nature of rewards, and rons show phasic activations after primary liquid and food rewards and conditioned, reward-predicting visual and auditory stimuli. the availability of rewards determines some of the basic They show biphasic, activation-depression responses after stimuli parameters of the subject’s life conditions. that resemble reward-predicting stimuli or are novel or particularly Rewards come in various physical forms, are highly variable salient. However, only few phasic activations follow aversive stim-in time and depend on the particular environment of the subject. uli. Thus dopamine neurons label environmental stimuli with appe- Despite their importance, rewards do not influence the brain titive value, predict and detect rewards and signal alerting and motivating events. By failing to discriminate between different

The literature on interference in the Stroop Color-Word Task, covering over 50 years and some 400 studies, is organized and reviewed. In so doing, a set ofl 8 reliable empirical findings is isolated that must be captured by any successful theory of the Stroop effect. Existing theoretical positions are summarized and evaluated in view of this critical evidence and the 2 major candidate theories--relative speed of processing and automaticity of reading--are found to be wanting. It is concluded that recent theories placing the explanatory weight on parallel processing of the irrelevant and the relevant dimensions are likely to be more successful than are earlier theories attempting to locate a single bottleneck in attention. In 1935, J. R. Stroop published his landmark article on attention and interference, an article more influential now than it was then. Why has the Stroop task continued to fascinate us? Perhaps the task is seen as tapping into the primitive operations of cognition, offering clues to the fundamental process of attention. Perhaps the robustness of the phenomenon provides a special challenge to decipher. Together these are powerful attractions

This article presents a theory in which automatization is construed as the acquisition of a domain-specific knowledge base, formed of separate representations, instances, of each exposure to the task. Processing is considered automatic if it relies on retrieval of stored instances, which will occur only after practice in a consistent environment. Practice is important because it increases the amount retrieved and the speed of retrieval; consistency is important because it ensures that the retrieved instances will be useful. The theory accounts quantitatively for the power-function speed-up and predicts a power-function reduction in the standard deviation that is constrained to have the same exponent as the power function for the speed-up. The theory accounts for qualitative properties as well, explaining how some may disappear and others appear with practice. More generally, it provides an alternative to the modal view of automaticity, arguing that novice performance is limited by a lack of knowledge rather than a scarcity of resources. The focus on learning avoids many problems with the modal view that stem from its focus on resource limitations. Automaticity is an important phenomenon in everyday men-tal life. Most of us recognize that we perform routine activities quickly and effortlessly, with little thought and conscious aware-ness--in short, automatically (James, 1890). As a result, we of-ten perform those activities on "automatic pilot " and turn our minds to other things. For example, we can drive to dinner while conversing in depth with a visiting scholar, or we can make coffee while planning dessert. However, these benefits may be offset by costs. The automatic pilot can lead us astray, caus-ing errors and sometimes catastrophes (Reason & Myceilska, 1982). If the conversation is deep enough, we may find ourselves and the scholar arriving at the office rather than the restaurant, or we may discover that we aren't sure whether we put two or three scoops of coffee into the pot. Automaticity is also an important phenomenon in skill acqui-sition (e.g., Bryan & Harter, 1899). Skills are thought to consist largely of collections of automatic processes and procedures

ABSTRACT: Affect is considered by most contempo-rary theories to be postcognitive, that is, to occur only after considerable cognitive operations have been ac-complished. Yet a number of experimental results on preferences, attitudes, impression formation, and de-_ cision making, as well as some clinical phenomena, suggest that affective judgments may be fairly inde-pendent of, and precede in time, the sorts of percep-tual and cognitive operations commonly assumed to be the basis of these affective judgments. Affective re-actions to stimuli are often the very first reactions of the organism, and for lower organisms they are the dominant reactions. Affective reactions can occur without extensive perceptual and cognitive encoding, are made with greater confidence than cognitive judg-

An implicit association test (IAT) measures differential association of 2 target concepts with an attribute. The 2 concepts appear in a 2-choice task (e.g., flower vs. insect names), and the attribute in a 2nd task (e.g., pleasant vs. unpleasant words for an evaluation attribute). When instructions oblige highly associated categories (e.g., flower + pleasant) to share a response key, performance is faster than when less associated categories (e.g., insect + pleasant) share a key. This performance difference implicitly measures differential association of the 2 concepts with the attribute. In 3 experiments, the IAT was sensitive to (a) near-universal evaluative differences (e.g., flower vs. insect), (b) expected individual differences in evaluative associations (Japanese + pleasant vs. Korean + pleasant for Japanese vs. Korean subjects), and (c) consciously disavowed evaluative differences (Black + pleasant vs. White + pleasant for self-described unprejudiced White subjects). Consider a thought experiment. You are shown a series of male and female faces, to which you are to respond as rapidly as possible by saying "hel lo " if the face is male and "goodbye" if it is female. For a second task, you are shown a series of male and female names, to which you are to respond rapidly

The two-process theory of detection, search, and attention presented by Schneider and Shiffrin is tested and extended in a series of experiments. The studies demonstrate the qualitative difference between two modes of information processing: automatic detection and controlled search. They trace the course of the learning of automatic detection, of categories, and of automaticattention responses. They show the dependence of automatic detection on attending responses and demonstrate how such responses interrupt controlled processing and interfere with the focusing of attention. The learning of categories is shown to improve controlled search performance. A general framework for human information processing is proposed; the framework emphasizes the roles of automatic and controlled processing. The theory is compared to and contrasted with extant models of search and attention.

Recent studies of eye movements in reading and other information processing tasks, such as music reading, typing, visual search, and scene perception, are reviewed. The major emphasis of the review is on reading as a specific example of cognitive processing. Basic topics discussed with respect to reading are (a) the characteristics of eye movements, (b) the perceptual span, (c) integration of information across saccades, (d) eye movement control, and (e) individual differences (including dyslexia). Similar topics are discussed with respect to the other tasks examined. The basic theme of the review is that eye movement data reflect moment-to-moment cognitive processes in the various tasks examined. Theoretical and practical considerations concerning the use of eye movement data are also discussed. Many studies using eye movements to investigate cognitive processes have appeared over the past 20 years. In an earlier review, I (Rayner, 1978b) argued that since the mid-1970s we have been in a third era of eye movement research and that the success of research in the current era would depend on the ingenuity of researchers in designing interesting and informative