Dataset Information

How In-Group Bias Influences Source Memory for Words Learned From In-Group and Out-Group Speakers.

ABSTRACT: Individuals rapidly extract information about others' social identity, including whether or not they belong to their in-group. Group membership status has been shown to affect how attentively people encode information conveyed by those others. These findings are highly relevant for the field of psycholinguistics where there exists an open debate on how words are represented in the mental lexicon and how abstract or context-specific these representations are. Here, we used a novel word learning paradigm to test our proposal that the group membership status of speakers also affects how speaker-specific representations of novel words are. Participants learned new words from speakers who either attended their own university (in-group speakers) or did not (out-group speakers) and performed a task to measure their individual in-group bias. Then, their source memory of the new words was tested in a recognition test to probe the speaker-specific content of the novel lexical representations and assess how it related to individual in-group biases. We found that speaker group membership and participants' in-group bias affected participants' decision biases. The stronger the in-group bias, the more cautious participants were in their decisions. This was particularly applied to in-group related decisions. These findings indicate that social biases can influence recognition threshold. Taking a broader scope, defining how information is represented is a topic of great overlap between the fields of memory and psycholinguistics. Nevertheless, researchers from these fields tend to stay within the theoretical and methodological borders of their own field, missing the chance to deepen their understanding of phenomena that are of common interest. Here, we show how methodologies developed in the memory field can be implemented in language research to shed light on an important theoretical issue that relates to the composition of lexical representations.

SUBMITTER: Iacozza S

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6751324 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Publications

How In-Group Bias Influences Source Memory for Words Learned From In-Group and Out-Group Speakers.

Iacozza Sara S Meyer Antje S AS Lev-Ari Shiri S

Frontiers in human neuroscience 20190912

Individuals rapidly extract information about others' social identity, including whether or not they belong to their in-group. Group membership status has been shown to affect how attentively people encode information conveyed by those others. These findings are highly relevant for the field of psycholinguistics where there exists an open debate on how words are represented in the mental lexicon and how abstract or context-specific these representations are. Here, we used a novel word learning p ...[more]

PMID: 31572148

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Project description:Social impairments are a hallmark feature of schizophrenia and are a key predictor of functional disability. Deficits in social information processing likely underlie social impairment; however, this relationship is understudied. We previously demonstrated that patients with schizophrenia fail to habituate to neutral faces, providing evidence for an alteration in basic social information processing. It remains unknown whether patients with schizophrenia also show deficits in processing of more complex social information. Out-group bias provides an excellent opportunity to test complex social information processing because the bias requires basic face processing skills, the ability to discriminate between groups, as well as the ability to categorize oneself into a salient social group.Study participants were 23 patients with schizophrenia and 21 controls. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, habituation of response to 120 s of repeated presentations of faces was assessed in participants who viewed either same-gender faces or opposite-gender faces. The interaction between face gender (same/opposite) and group was examined in three key regions: amygdala, hippocampus, and visual cortex. Social impairment was measured using the PANSS and correlations between social impairment and out-group effect (main effect of face type) were performed in patients.Patients with schizophrenia had aberrant neural responses to opposite-gender faces (interaction, p<.05 corrected). Healthy controls showed an immediate heightened response to opposite-gender faces relative to same-gender faces; but in patients this effect was substantially delayed (~70s). In patients with schizophrenia, the out-group bias was significantly correlated with social impairment. Patients with no social impairment showed a heightened neural response to opposite-gender faces after 30s, whereas patients with mild-moderate social impairment failed to ever show a heightened response.Alterations in neural responses during out-group processing predicted degree of social impairment in patients with schizophrenia; thus, neural responses to opposite-gender faces may provide a novel measure for studies of treatment response and disease outcome.

Dataset Information

How In-Group Bias Influences Source Memory for Words Learned From In-Group and Out-Group Speakers.

Publications

How In-Group Bias Influences Source Memory for Words Learned From In-Group and Out-Group Speakers.

Similar Datasets

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