Foundations of Arrogance: A Broad Survey and Framework for Research.

We consider the topic of arrogance from a cross-disciplinary viewpoint. To stimulate further research, we suggest three types of arrogance (individual, comparative, and antagonistic) and six components contributing to them, each logically related to the next. The components progress from imperfect knowledge and abilities to an unrealistic assessment of them, an unwarranted attitude of superiority over other people, and related derisive behavior. Although each component presumably is present to some degree when the next one operates, causality might flow between components in either direction. The classification of components of arrogance should reduce miscommunication among researchers, as the relevant concepts and mechanisms span cognitive, motivational, social, and clinical domains and literatures. Arrogance is an important concept warranting further study for both theoretical and practical reasons, in both psychopathology and normal social interaction. Everyone seems to have qualities of arrogance to some degree, and we consider the importance of arrogance on a spectrum. We contend that humankind can benefit from a better understanding of the cognitive limitations and motivational biases that, operating together, appear to contribute to arrogance. We bring together information and questions that might lead to an invigorating increase in the rate and quality of cross-disciplinary research on arrogance.

The effects of divided attention and of stimulus repetition on item-item binding in verbal working memory.

An unresolved issue regarding working memory (WM) processes relates to whether domain-general attentional resources are required to form and store bound representations. Recent evidence suggests that visual WM performance during tasks that require binding of face-scene pairs is disrupted by concurrent divided attention to a greater degree than when needing to remember only faces or scenes (Peterson & Naveh-Benjamin, 2017). These findings contrast with associative long-term memory (LTM) studies, which have found no differential impact of divided attention on associative relative to item memory (Naveh-Benjamin, Guez, & Marom, 2003). In the current study, a verbal WM change detection paradigm, incorporating methods typical of LTM paradigms as well, was leveraged to examine memory for items and item-item bindings, for unrelated word pairs sampled with and without replacement across trials within distinct experimental blocks. In Experiment 1, WM performance was measured under within-domain verbal interference. In Experiment 2, a cross-domain auditory interference task was used to parametrically vary concurrent load. Whereas the results of Experiment 1 revealed that within-domain interference was sufficient to elicit a binding deficit by disrupting verbal rehearsal, in Experiment 2, parametric variation of a cross-domain interference task revealed a divided attention-related binding deficit that increased in magnitude with increased task difficulty. In both experiments, an item-item binding deficit was observed, in comparison with item memory, regardless of whether word pairs were sampled with or without replacement. These findings reveal a dissociable influence of within-domain and cross-domain interference tasks on item-item binding processes in verbal WM. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Further studies on the role of attention and stimulus repetition in item-item binding processes in visual working memory.

A fundamental question for human memory research relates to the role of attention during the binding of distinct components into an integrated representation. A number of important differences exist between the working memory and episodic memory literature in terms of methodological implementation and empirical outcomes. For instance, episodic memory studies indicate that, although divided attention reduces performance, the magnitude of this reduction is similar regardless of whether distinct item components or the associative binding between these components is tested (e.g., Naveh-Benjamin, Guez, & Marom, 2003). In contrast, recent examinations of working memory indicate that reductions in performance under divided attention are larger during tests of item-item binding compared with item tests (Peterson & Naveh-Benjamin, 2017). The current study used methods typical of both episodic and working memory paradigms to further examine the role of attention in item-item binding in visual working memory. Faces and scenes used to create face-scene pairs were either sampled with replacement (i.e., repeated across trials as is typical in working memory experiments) or without replacement (i.e., nonrepeated across trials as is typical in episodic memory experiments) to examine visual working memory performance under parametric variation of concurrent load. Results from Experiment 1 (no load, articulatory suppression) and Experiment 2 (articulatory suppression, backward counting by two) revealed greater reductions in item-item binding relative to single item performance under divided attention regardless of whether item components were repeated or not repeated across trials of each experiment. These results provide further evidence that visual working memory binding requires attention. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).