Distinguishing between emotion and nonemotion: Judgments about experience

The conceptual distinction between emotion and nonemotion subjective states was investigated in a series of three studies. Three questions were addressed. First, is there high agreement among people in identifying labels for subjective states as either emotion or nonemotion? Second, in judgments of the similarity of subjective states is the emotion-nonemotion distinction more or less salient than other properties of experience? Third, what criteria are used to distinguish conceptually between emotion and nonemotion states? Results indicated that, for many feeling states, there is no substantial agreement as to whether the state should be considered emotion or nonemotion, that the affective dimension of experience is not as salient as are other specific properties of experience (physiological arousal, activity level, valence), and that, in general, people express their individual judgment of emotion-nonemotion on the basis of some nonspecific combination of physiological arousal and character of cognitive state.     

Judgments about the duration of brief stimuli

Visual duration discrimination data for durations between 70 and 1,020 msec are presented. A model for duration discrimination proposed by Allan, Kristofferson, and Wiens (1972) is elaborated, and the data are discussed in terms of the model. The data axe in agreement with the basic assumptions of the model. Differences between our data and duration discrimination data presented by others are discussed.     

Judgements about the relation between force and trajectory variables in verbally described ballistic projectile motion

How accurate are explicit judgements about familiar forms of object motion, and how are they made? Participants judged the relations between force exerted in kicking a soccer ball and variables that define the trajectory of the ball: launch angle, maximum height attained, and maximum distance reached. Judgements tended to conform to a simple heuristic that judged force tends to increase as maximum height and maximum distance increase, with launch angle not being influential. Support was also found for the converse prediction, that judged maximum height and distance tend to increase as the amount of force described in the kick increases. The observed judgemental tendencies did not resemble the objective relations, in which force is a function of interactions between the trajectory variables. This adds to a body of research indicating that practical knowledge based on experiences of actions on objects is not available to the processes that generate judgements in higher cognition and that such judgements are generated by simple rules that do not capture the objective interactions between the physical variables.     

Visual impressions of interactions between objects when the causal object does not move

Stimuli were presented that consisted of a stationary row of black-bordered white rectangles. As observers watched, each rectangle in turn from left to right changed from white to black. The final rectangle did not change colour but moved off from left to right. The sequential colour change suggested motion from left to right, and observers reliably reported a visual impression that this illusory motion kicked or bumped the last rectangle, thereby making it move. The impression was stronger when the sequential colour change was faster, but was not significantly affected by the number of the rectangles in the row (ranging from 2 to 8). These results support the conclusion that neither contact nor motion of a causal object is necessary for a visual impression of causality to occur.     

Judgments of men's and women's feelings during hypothetical social interactions

We studied college students' perceptions of how good/bad and how powerful/powerless men and women feel during hypothetical social interactions. Stimuli were constructed by combining each of 16 behaviors that fell into four categories (negative, low power, sexual, and help) with each of four dyads (male-male, male-female, female-male, female-female). Subjects made judgments about the likelihood of each behavior occurring, and about how actors and recipients felt when engaging in each of 16 behaviors. Three themes pervaded the results. First, subjects perceived men to feel more powerful than women whether behaving as actors or recipients—especially during interactions with women. Second, subjects perceived behaviors to be more likely, and actors and recipients to feel better and more powerful when the interaction pattern was consistent with gender role norms. Third, subjects perceived recipients' affective responses as being more polarized in opposite-sex than in same-sex dyads. Results from this research show that subjects' perceptions about feelings are largely consistent with the literature on social interaction and sex role stereotypes, and are similar for male and female subjects. In addition, our results provide a rich set of hypotheses concerning whether perceptions of feelings reflect actual feelings and are related to interaction participants' actual behavior.     

Cognitive representations of functional interactions with objects

Two studies addressed people’s knowledge about the movements underlying functional interactions with objects, when the interactions were described by simple verbal labels expressing environmental goals. In Experiment 1, subjects rated each action with respect to six dimensions: which portion of the limb moved, distance moved, forcefulness, effectors involved, size of the contact surface, and resemblance to grasp. Ratings were systematic and fell on two distinct underlying factors related to limb movement and effector (usually the hand) configuration. In Experiment 2, subjects sorted a subset of the actions by similarity of movement. Clustering and multidimensional scaling solutions indicated that the six initial dimensions contributed to similarity judgments, along with additional parameters. The results support the existence of cognitively accessible, but still relatively specific, representations of functional actions, with potential implications for motor and memory performance.     

Conventionality in family conversations about everyday objects

Children's developing understanding that words have conventional meanings and objects have conventional functions emerges in parent-child activity and conversation. Drawing on family conversations in everyday settings, the chapter explores an apparent paradox between a global analysis of conventionality as stable shared knowledge and a local notion of conventions as flexibly negotiated in activity.     

Knowledge about hand shaping and knowledge about objects

Our two experiments investigated associations between cognitive representations of objects and hand-shape categories. Hand configurations were partitioned according to prehensility and the size of the contacting surface, resulting in the classes: pinch, poke, palm, and clench. Experiment 1 elicited object names in response to configuration-name cues, provided ratings of the relevance of each configuration to a set of objects, and probed for the functions determining such relevance. Cueing with a configuration class elicited an associated object category with substantial intersubject agreement, and vice versa. Both the object categories and the functions associated with the four hand-configuration classes differed substantially, although the same object could be associated to some extent with multiple configurations, given variations in function. Experiment 2 elicited the names of hand-configuration classes in response to unfamiliar forms, which varied systematically in depth and the size of the projecting picture-plane surface. The modal response, response time, and degree of intersubject agreement were directly related to these variables. These structural variables, however, did not adequately predict shaping responses to real objects, as ascertained from Experiment 1. The results have implications for cognitive representation of motor categories and hand shaping in response to objects.     

Judgments of relative time-to-contact of more than two approaching objects: Toward a method

Observers reported which of as many as eight computer-generated approaching objects would “hit” them first. Accuracy was above chance probability except when two-object displays contained pictorial relative size information that contradicted relative time-to-contact (TTC) information. Mean d’ and response time was greater, but mean efficiency (Barlow, 1978) was smaller with eight objects than with two. Performance was less effective when global expansion contradicted TTC information than when local expansion contradicted TTC. Results suggest that observers can judge relative TTC with as many as eight objects when certain sources of information are consistent with TTC and that observers rely on information other than, or in conjunction with, optical TTC. Also, the sources of visual information that affect performance may vary with set size, and identification (but not detection) judgments may be constrained by limited-capacity processing.     

Young infants' expectations about hidden objects

Infants aged 3-5 months (mean of approximately 4 months) were given a novel anticipatory looking task to test object permanence understanding. They were trained to expect an experimenter to retrieve an object from behind a transparent screen upon hearing a cue ("Doors up, here comes the hand"). The experimenter then hid the object behind one of two opaque screens and after either 2 or 8s gave the "doors up" cue. Infants looked to the correct location after the two-second delay, but not after the eight-second delay. This indicates a brief memory that the object is present behind the occluder. The study provides converging evidence that infants grasp object permanence by a young age. The novel anticipatory looking paradigm helps rule out counter-explanations applied to violation-of-expectation tasks.     

Compression of environmental representations following interactions with objects

Previous work reveals that interacting with all objects in an environment can compress spatial memory for the entire group of objects. To assess the scope and magnitude of this effect, we tested whether interacting with a subset of objects compresses spatial memory for all objects in an environment. Participants inspected objects in one or two unmarked regions of space, then recalled the distances between pairs of objects from memory. One group of participants picked up objects in both regions, a second group picked up objects in one region and passively viewed objects in the other region, and a third group passively viewed objects in both regions. When participants manually interacted with objects, they recalled shorter object-pair distances throughout the environment. The magnitude of this effect was the same, regardless of whether participants interacted with all objects in the environment or just a subset of them. Together, these findings suggest that interacting with objects can compress environmental representations in memory, even when observers interact with a relatively small subset of objects.     

Consistency effects between objects in scenes

How does context influence the perception of objects in scenes? Objects appear in a given setting with surrounding objects. Do objects in scenes exert contextual influences on each other? Do these influences interact with background consistency? In three experiments, we investigated the role of object-to-object context on object and scene perception. Objects (Experiments 1 and 3) and backgrounds (Experiment 2) were reported more accurately when the objects and their settings were consistent than when they were inconsistent, regardless of the number of foreground objects. In Experiment 3, related objects (from the same setting) were reported more accurately than were unrelated objects (from different settings), independently of consistency with the background. Consistent with an interactive model of scene processing, both object-to-object context and object-background context affect object perception.     

Developments in young infants' reasoning about occluded objects

Eight experiments were conducted to examine 3- and 3.5-month-old infants' responses to occlusion events. The results revealed two developments, one in infants' knowledge of when objects should and should not be occluded and the other in infants' ability to posit additional objects to make sense of events that would otherwise violate their occlusion knowledge. The first development is that, beginning at about 3 months of age, infants expect an object to become temporarily visible when passing behind an occluder with an opening extending from its lower edge. The second development is that, beginning at about 3.5 months of age, infants generate a two-object explanation when shown a violation in which an object fails to become visible when passing behind an occluder with an opening in its lower edge. Unless given information contradicting such an explanation, infants infer that two identical objects are involved in the event, one traveling to the left and one to the right of the opening. These and related findings provide the basis for a model of young infants' responses to occlusion events; alternative models are also discussed.     

Knowing about the sensory properties of objects

Verification of object-property relationships, such as those involved in knowing that a canary is yellow, was examined in two studies. In the first study it was found that two variables, the dominance and the typicality of the property to an object, separately influenced verification speed. Moreover, the effectiveness of high over low dominant relationship was greater for atypical than for typical property relationships. The second study examined the two variables in a priming study. Participants were faster in verifying high compared to low typical relationships when primed by a property name; and faster with high compared to low dominant relationships when primed by the object name. This was taken as evidence for the asymmetric accessibility of object and property information. Taken together these findings indicate that the use and comprehension of property information is more complex than has hitherto been acknowledged and suggests that property statements might be verified much of the time by comparing a stored value to a prototypic standard.