Attention and expectation in human predictive learning: The role of uncertainty

Three localized, visual pattern stimuli were trained as predictive signals of auditory outcomes. One signal partially predicted an aversive noise in Experiment 1 and a neutral tone in Experiment 2, whereas the other signals consistently predicted either the occurrence or absence of the noise. The expectation of the noise was measured during each signal presentation, and only participants for whom this expectation demonstrated contingency knowledge showed differential attention to the signals. Importantly, when attention was measured by visual fixations, the contingency-aware group attended more to the partially predictive signal than to the consistent predictors in both experiments. This profile of visual attention supports the Pearce and Hall (1980) Pearce, J. M. and Hall, G. 1980. A model for Pavlovian learning: Variations in the effectiveness of conditioned but not unconditioned stimuli. Psychological Review, 87: 532–552. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] theory of the role of attention in associative learning.     

编码后奖赏影响基于议程的学习：奖赏预期和结果的作用

基于ABR模型考察奖赏预期和奖赏结果对不同难度词对记忆与元记忆的影响。结果发现：(1)限时学习条件下,奖赏结果促进不同难度词对记忆成绩和学习判断,奖赏预期仅提高简单词对的记忆成绩。(2)自定步调学习条件下,定时学习判断时奖赏结果仅影响学习判断;奖赏预期促进高难度词对的学习时间分配,从而提高记忆成绩和学习判断。(3)在自定步调学习时,奖赏预期超越难度成为影响学习时间分配的因素。以上结果表明,个体会综合奖赏预期、奖赏结果和难度构建学习议程,足够大的奖赏预期会超越难度成为议程构建的主导因素。但奖赏预期和奖赏结果对记忆成绩、学习时间分配和学习判断的影响受学习条件调节。     

The role of expectation and probabilistic learning in auditory boundary perception: a model comparison

Grouping and boundary perception are central to many aspects of sensory processing in cognition. We present a comparative study of recently published computational models of boundary perception in music. In doing so, we make three contributions. First, we hypothesise a relationship between expectation and grouping in auditory perception, and introduce a novel information-theoretic model of perceptual segmentation to test the hypothesis. Although we apply the model to musical melody, it is applicable in principle to sequential grouping in other areas of cognition. Second, we address a methodological consideration in the analysis of ambiguous stimuli that produce different percepts between individuals. We propose and demonstrate a solution to this problem, based on clustering of participants prior to analysis. Third, we conduct the first comparative analysis of probabilistic-learning and rule-based models of perceptual grouping in music. In spite of having only unsupervised exposure to music, the model performs comparably to rule-based models based on expert musical knowledge, supporting a role for probabilistic learning in perceptual segmentation of music.     

Altruistic behavior and cooperation: The role of intrinsic expectation when reputational information is incomplete

Altruistic behavior is known to be conditional on the level of altruism of others. However, people often have no information, or incomplete information, about the altruistic reputation of others, for example when the reputation was obtained in a different social or economic context. As a consequence, they have to estimate the other's altruistic intentions. Using an economic game, we showed that without reputational information people have intrinsic expectations about the altruistic behavior of others, which largely explained their own altruistic behavior. This implies that when no information is available, intrinsic expectations can be as powerful a driver of altruistic behavior as actual knowledge about other people's reputation. Two strategies appeared to co-exist in our study population: participants who expected others to be altruistic and acted even more altruistically themselves, while other participants had low expected altruism scores and acted even less altruistically than they expected others to do. We also found evidence that generosity in economic games translates into benefits for other social contexts: a reputation of financial generosity increased the attractiveness of partners in a social cooperative game. This result implies that in situations with incomplete information, the fitness effects of indirect reciprocity are cumulative across different social contexts.     

Attention and expectation in human predictive learning: the role of uncertainty

Three localized, visual pattern stimuli were trained as predictive signals of auditory outcomes. One signal partially predicted an aversive noise in Experiment 1 and a neutral tone in Experiment 2, whereas the other signals consistently predicted either the occurrence or absence of the noise. The expectation of the noise was measured during each signal presentation, and only participants for whom this expectation demonstrated contingency knowledge showed differential attention to the signals. Importantly, when attention was measured by visual fixations, the contingency-aware group attended more to the partially predictive signal than to the consistent predictors in both experiments. This profile of visual attention supports the Pearce and Hall (1980) theory of the role of attention in associative learning.     

Impact of responsibility for a misfortune on schadenfreude and sympathy: further evidence

The authors tested the hypothesis that the more individuals are responsible for their own misfortune, the more schadenfreude (i.e., pleasure derived from another's misfortune) and less sympathy the misfortune evokes in others. The results support the hypothesis, thereby providing further evidence for the role responsibility plays in emotional reactions to the misfortunes of others.     

Examining Ethicality Judgements of Theft Behavior: The Role of Moral Relativism

Purpose

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether situational factors predict ethicality judgments of theft behavior, and whether the effect of situational factors is moderated by moral relativism.

Design/Methodology/Approach

Data were obtained across two laboratory experiments using undergraduate business students attending a Canadian university (n = 372). Student participants viewed a videotaped vignette of an employee informed that he had been caught stealing sales commission. In the vignettes, we manipulated two situational factors: whether or not (a) the theft has monetary consequences for the organization, and (b) similar theft is commonplace within the organization.

Findings

In Experiment 1, both situational factors interacted with moral relativism in the prediction of ratings of unethical conduct. In Experiment 2, using a within-participant research design, we achieved an interaction between the organizational consequences manipulation and moral relativism, although we obtained a considerably stronger effect size for the interaction compared to the first experiment.

Implications

We discuss implications of our findings and suggest avenues for future research. In particular, we consider the possibility that managers may not share a common frame-of-reference when considering the ethicality of theft. This could affect whether and the extent to which theft behavior is reprimanded.

Originality/Value

Our study contributes to research on employee theft, and also adds incrementally to our understanding of how both situational factors and moral relativism jointly influence perceptions of theft behavior.

     

Super-learning of Causal Judgements

In three experiments, participants learned which of a variety of foods were capable of causing an allergic reaction in a hypothetical patient during training in which a compound of a treatment and a target food cue was paired with the reaction. In Experiment 1 the causal ratings of the target cue were increased if the treatment cue was pretrained as a preventative cause of the reaction. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that the magnitude of this superlearning is unaffected by the order of compound and treatment cue training. The final study also showed that forward super-learning is not induced solely by simple exposure to the treatment cue prior to compound training but, rather, depends upon training the treatment cue as a preventative cause, whereas retrospective super-learning may be due merely to exposure of the treatment cue. These results are problematic for contingency-based accounts of causal induction but accord with modified and extended associative theories.     

The Reliability And Consistency Of Complex Personality Judgements

Two separate tasks were used to investigate the ability of subjects to make reliable and consistent judgments of similarities among personalities. Ten social categories for which each subject specified persons known to him- self were used as concepts. Test-retest reliabilities were obtained for an 8 point similarity-dissimilarity scale and inconsistency was measured by the intransitive relations appearing in a triadic judgment test. Reliabilities and consistencies were judged sufficiently adequate for use of these types of judgments in a multidimensional scaling approach t o individual differences in social perception.     

Judgements of relative direction: The effect of task instructions on spatial recall

One of the most widely used tasks in the spatial memory literature is the judgement of relative direction (JRD) test. The present investigation examined the hypothesis that standard JRD task demands bias spatial recall. In two experiments, participants' recall of small-scale layouts as measured by standard JRD tests (in which the relationship between objects was employed to establish imagined orientations within the learned scene) was compared with recall as measured by novel JRD tasks. The novel tasks emphasized either the internal front/back and left/right axes of individual objects (Experiment 1) or extrinsic spatial cues (Experiment 2). Spatial recall was found to reflect the reference cues emphasized by the JRD task in Experiment 1 and by the novel task in Experiment 2. The finding that directional judgements tended to reflect a frame of reference aligned with the set of cues emphasized by task demands suggests that the nature of the task employed to test knowledge can have an effect on spatial recall.     

Primacy Effect in Credibility Judgements: The Vulnerability of Verbal Cues to Biased Interpretations

We explored the vulnerability of credibility judgements of written accounts (mediated by their richness in details) to primacy effect. Specifically, we examined whether the order by which two texts were presented affected their credibility judgements. In Experiment 1, participants read two life stories of the same narrator, one rich and the other poor in details, while their presentation order was manipulated. Results showed that participants tended to believe the narrator more when the rich story preceded the poor story than when the presentation order was reversed. In Experiment 2, the richness‐order was manipulated within a single story, and its results revealed that, although participants read stories of equal length, they perceived a story that began in a rich manner as richer than a story that began in a poor manner. Together, results point to the vulnerability of the ‘richness in detail’ indicator to judgemental biases. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

员工授权期望的效应及其理论机制

以往对领导授权行为的研究大都以领导为中心, 探讨领导授权行为的有效性。随着追随理论的兴起, 越来越多的研究强调从员工视角探讨领导有效性。期望在组织管理中扮演重要角色, 员工授权期望是指员工形成的有关组织中的领导在权力授予方面应尽职责与义务的规范性认知。在系统梳理员工授权期望概念与测量的基础上, 分别从角色设定理论、领导分类理论、期望落差理论梳理了员工授权期望的作用效果与研究结论, 最后从基于内隐领导理论的变量测量、相关理论的机制探讨、追随理论的模型扩展、期望管理的前因探索等方面提出了未来研究的展望。     

The Effect of Text Coherence and Modality on Metamemory Judgements

This study examined the effects of text coherence and modality on the metamemory judgements of Ease of Learning (EOL) and Judgement of Learning (JOL), and on the object-level measure of recall. Previous work found that sentence material set in a coherent, ordered text context was not judged as more memorable than that presented in a context of sentences in a disordered sequence, even though an ordered sequence helped recall (Shaddock & Carroll, 1997). The current study modified Shaddock and Carroll's design by changing the texts used from expository to narrative text. The metamemory judgements and recall were now found to be significantly more sensitive to material learned in an ordered sequence than to material learned in a disordered sequence. Also, JOLs and recall were more sensitive to material that was originally learned in an auditory mode (spoken presentation) than in a visual mode (verbal presentation). The results are discussed in terms of a cue-utilisation approach to metamemory judgements.     

Predictive Feeling of Knowing Judgements and Postdictive Confidence Judgements in Eyewitness Memory and General Knowledge

Recent accounts of feeling of knowing (FOK) judgements assume that they arise from an assessment of cue familiarity, whilst retrospective confidence judgements arise from an assessment of the retrieval process. An experiment was conducted to extend this laboratory work to the area of eyewitness memory, in order to examine whether subjects are able to make accurate feeling of knowing judgements and retrospective confidence judgements for eyewitness memory (EM), in contrast to general knowledge (GK). For confidence judgements there was a reliable within-subject assessment of confidence for both GK and EM, but reliable between-subjects confidence—accuracy correlations for general knowledge only. For FOK a different pattern emerged, with no evidence of FOK accuracy for eyewitness memory at all. The theoretical implications of this pattern are discussed.