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Abstract: Several decades after Michotte’s work was published, it continues to inspire current research in perception, cognition, and beyond. In this special issue we pay tribute to this heritage with a collection of empirical and theoretical papers on amodal completion and the perception of causality, two areas of research within which Michotte’s work and ideas have had a lasting influence. As a background to better understand the remaining papers, we briefly sketch Michotte’s life and work and the scope (in breadth and in depth) of his impact. We then review Michotte’s seminal contributions to the areas covered in this special issue, some of the major research discoveries and themes in the intervening decades, and the major open questions and challenges we are still facing. We also include a sneak preview of the papers in this special issue, noting how they relate to Michotte’s work and to each other. This review shows both how much influence Michotte has had on contemporary perception and cognition research, and how much important work remains to be done. We hope that the papers in this special issue will serve both to celebrate Michotte’s heritage in this respect, and to inspire other investigators to continue the projects he began. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Reward has repeatedly been shown to influence cognitive control. More precisely, performance contingent reward is known to increase preparatory, proactive control. In comparison, performance non -contingent reward, that is, reward that is not dependent on a pre-specified performance criterion but is given unconditional for any response, even errors, is a rather understudied topic. Recently, Fröber and Dreisbach (2014) compared performance contingent and non-contingent reward in a single experiment. They found that non-contingent reward seems to modulate cognitive control in an oppositional way than contingent reward, namely by reducing proactive control. In the present paper, the authors further investigate this dissociation in two experiments with a reward manipulation that facilitated adaptations to changes in reward availability: reward – with performance contingency varying between subjects – was manipulated not trial-by-trial but in mini-blocks of 20 consecutive trials in an AX-Continuous Performance Task. Performance contingent reward significantly increased proactive control. The repeated experience of non-contingent reward even for errors did not result in increased error rates, but instead was indicative of stable compliance with task rules over time and with less reliance on proactive control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Every day we read about or watch events in the world and can easily understand or remember how long they last. What aspects of an event are retained in memory? And how do we extract temporal information from our memory representations? These issues are central to human cognition, as they underlie a fundamental aspect of our mental life, namely our representation of time. This paper reviews previous language studies and reports a visual learning study indicating that properties of the events encoded in memory shape the representation of their duration. The evidence indicates that for a given event, the extent to which its associated properties or sub-components differ from one another modulates our representation of its duration. These properties include the similarity between sub-events and the similarity between the situational contexts in which an event occurs. We suggest that the diversity of representations that we associate with events in memory plays an important role in remembering and estimating the duration of experienced or described events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: A little more than 40years ago, J. R. Simon and colleagues introduced what is now called the Simon task, which yielded a correspondence effect known as the Simon effect. In this paper, I set Simon''s contribution in the context of research on stimulus-response compatibility. The novel contribution of the Simon task is described, along with foundational findings using the task that Simon and colleagues reported. I acknowledge the significance of Simon''s (1990) review chapter in generating my own interests in the Simon task and describe four selected lines of research from my lab that have been a result of those interests. The article concludes with a brief tribute to Simon and his contribution to experimental psychology. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In the Simon task, stimuli are presented laterally and typically a non-spatial stimulus dimension demands a lateralized choice response. Responses are faster when the task-irrelevant stimulus location and the response location correspond than when they do not correspond. The present paper explores the impact of the Simon task on cognitive electrophysiological research as well as the insights gained from event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in the attempt to uncover the hidden mechanisms underlying the Simon effect. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper considers a family of inductive problems where reasoners must identify familiar categories or features on the basis of limited information. Problems of this kind are encountered, for example, when word learners acquire novel labels for pre-existing concepts. We develop a probabilistic model of identification and evaluate it in three experiments. Our first two experiments explore problems where a single category or feature must be identified, and our third experiment explores cases where participants must combine several pieces of information in order to simultaneously identify a category and a feature. Humans readily solve all of these problems, and we show that our model accounts for human inferences better than several alternative approaches. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper examines the automatic processing of the numerical magnitude of two-digit Arabic numbers using a Stroop-like task in school-aged children. Second, third, and fourth graders performed physical size judgments on pairs of two-digit numbers varying on both physical and numerical dimensions. To investigate the importance of synchrony between the speed of processing of the numerical magnitude and the physical dimensions on the size congruity effect (SCE), we used masked priming: numerical magnitude was subliminally primed in half of the trials, while neutral priming was used in the other half. The results indicate a SCE in physical judgments, providing the evidence of automatic access to the magnitude of two-digit numbers in children. This effect was modulated by the priming type, as a SCE only appeared when the numerical magnitude was primed. This suggests that young children needed a relative synchronization of numerical and physical dimensions to access the magnitude of two-digit numbers automatically. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The difficulty that observers experience when trying to identify a raised line drawing by touch is still largely unexplained. In this article, we show that observers who are unable to haptically identify a raised line drawing are suddenly able to do so after they have sketched on paper what they have in their mind. We conducted three experiments: first of all we show that this effect is robust; in the second experiment, we show that identification-after-sketching is caused by visual inspection of the sketch, and not caused by feedback in general; and in the third we show that sketches which were identified by the observers who produced them, were also identified by completely naive viewers. These experiments demonstrate that during raised line drawing identification the mental capacities required to interpret the stimulus seem to be inadequate: although enough pictorial information was present to produce a sketch which could even be identified by naive viewers, the stimulus could not be identified by haptic and mental processing alone. Furthermore, we investigated whether increasing the haptic perceptual field by using two hands instead of one hand had an influence on identification performance. We did indeed find that using two hands significantly increased identification. We use both results to discuss the underlying mechanisms of haptic raised line drawing identification. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In this study, we are interested in the following two questions: (1) how does perceived roughness correlate with physical roughness, and (2) how do visually and haptically perceived roughness compare? We used 96 samples of everyday materials, such as wood, paper, glass, sandpaper, ceramics, foams, textiles, etc. The samples were characterized by various different physical roughness measures, all determined from accurately measured roughness profiles. These measures consisted of spectral densities measured at different spatial scales and industrial roughness standards (R a , R q and R z ). In separate haptic and visual conditions, 12 naïve subjects were instructed to order the 96 samples according to perceived roughness. The rank orders of both conditions were correlated with the various physical roughness measures. With most physical roughness measures, haptic and visual correspondence with the physical ordering was about equal. With others, haptic correspondence was slightly better. It turned out that different subjects ordered the samples using different criteria; for some subjects the correlation was better with roughness measures that were based on higher spatial frequencies, while others seemed to be paying more attention to the lower spatial frequencies. Also, physical roughness was not found to be the same as perceived roughness. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The term “executive functions” refers to a range of cognitive processes, their common feature being the coordination of information processing and action control. Cortico-subcortical circuits which connect the prefrontal cortex (PFC), the basal ganglia and the cerebellum via the thalamus are believed to serve as neuroanatomical substrates of executive processing. This paper focuses on information processing related to executive functions by the PFC and related subcortical regions. Findings are mainly derived from neuropsychological investigations of brain-damaged patients but also from imaging studies in healthy subjects. There is evidence for subtle differences between these regions with respect to the cognitive mechanisms contributing to inhibition of habitual responses, task management/multitasking and set shifting, although the data base is sparse so far. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this theoretical paper, we review findings from a series of recent behavioral and functional neuroimaging studies of working memory and executive control which provide evidence for the following theses: 1. Working memory in humans is represented by two brain systems which differ from each other with respect to their functional-neuroanatomical organization and probably also with respect to their evolutionary origin. 2. One of these brain systems relies on prefronto-parietal and prefronto-temporal cortical networks that presumably also mediate attentional selection by the top–down modulation of domain-specific sensory association areas towards behaviorally relevant information. 3. The other system is implemented by mainly left-hemispheric premotor and parietal brain regions which to a greater part also underlie language functions and which may also be involved in the retrieval and maintenance of verbal goal representations during advance preparation for task switches. 4. Context-sensitive behavioral adaptation is supported by a complementary mechanism for the detection of conflicts and for the triggering of cognitive control processes that relies on parts of the medial frontal cortex. Based on these empirical results reported in the literature we propose a neurocognitive model of executive control according to which the human ability to flexibly adapt to changing behavioral requirements, i.e. executive control, depends on dynamic and context-sensitive interactions between these brain systems. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]