Publications

Hundreds of studies have examined the “sadder-but-wiser” hypothesis—that sad people make wiser decisions—and most find support for it. But virtually no tests of the hypothesis examined financial decisions, which are some of the most frequent and consequential decisions people make. To address this gap, the present experiments examined the effects of sadness on intertemporal financial choices of the form $X now versus $(X+Y) later—typical of the choices people make when considering whether to spend now or save to spend more later. Studies of intertemporal choices typically reveal extreme impatience. That is, people choose earlier rewards over significantly larger, later rewards, often leading to regret. Would sadness reverse the typical impatience pattern in choices—by increasing wisdom and decreasing impatience—per the sadder-but-wiser hypothesis? Three experiments tested the hypothesis, inducing sadness in randomly assigned participants and then offering participants an intertemporal financial choice unrelated to the source of sadness. Each experiment found that sadness dramatically increased impatience: Relative to the median neutral-mood participant, the median sad-mood participant was willing to accept 35% to 79% less money today to avoid waiting for a payoff. Sadness increased impatience even though the emotion was normatively irrelevant to the choice. In sum, sadder is not wiser when it comes to making tradeoffs between time and money.

Fractional Fourier transform (FRFT) is a generalization of the Fourier transform, rediscovered many times over the past hundred years. In this paper, we provide an overview of recent contributions pertaining to the FRFT. Specifically, the paper is geared toward signal processing practitioners by emphasizing the practical digital realizations and applications of the FRFT. It discusses three major topics. First, the manuscripts relates the FRFT to other mathematical transforms. Second, it discusses various approaches for practical realizations of the FRFT. Third, we overview the practical applications of the FRFT. From these discussions, we can clearly state the FRFT is closely related to other mathematical transforms, such as time-frequency and linear canonical transforms. Nevertheless, we still feel that major contributions are expected in the field of the its digital realizations and applications, especially, since many digital realizations of the FRFT still lack properties of the continuous FRFT. Overall, the FRFT is a valuable signal processing tool. Its practical applications are expected to grow significantly in years to come, given that the FRFT offers many advantages over the traditional Fourier analysis.

Is visual attention required for visual consciousness? In the past decade, many have claimed that awareness can arise in the absence of attention. This claim is largely based on the notion that natural scene (or �gist�) perception occurs without attention. Against this, we first show that when observers perform a variety of demanding, sustained attention tasks, inattentional blindness occurs for natural scenes. In addition, scene perception is impaired under dual-task conditions, but only when using sufficiently demanding tasks. This suggests that previous studies claiming to have demonstrated scene perception without attention failed to fully engage attention and that natural scene perception does indeed require attention. Thus, natural scene perception is not a �preattentive� process and cannot be used to support the idea of awareness without attention.