Questions versus statements: Challenging an assumption about semantic illusions

In previous semantic-illusion research the tacit assumption has been that questions and statements-to-be-verified of similar semantic content lead to a similar proportion of semantic illusions. This assumption was made despite the fact that questions are thought to have different processing demands from those of statements. This paper presents empirical evidence that questions tend to lead to more semantic illusions than do statements-to-be-verified. Two experiments were carried out to provide a direct comparison between the semantic-illusion rates for statements and for questions. In Experiment 1, open-ended questions led to significantly more semantic illusions than did true/false statements. Experiment 2 replicated this effect using multiple-choice response options in the question condition. It is concluded that the syntactic form of a sentence affects the way in which semantic information is processed, and the implications of the findings are discussed.     

Susceptibility to semantic illusions: An individual-differences perspective

When askedHow many animals of each kind did Moses take on the ark?, people frequently respond “two” even though they know it was Noah, not Moses, who took animals on the ark. We replicate previous research by showing that susceptibility to semantic illusions is influenced by the semantic relatedness of both the impostor word and the surrounding context. However, we also show that the two text manipulations make independent contributions to semantic illusions, and we propose two individual-differences mechanisms that might underlie these two effects. We propose that the ability to resist the lure of a semantically related impostor word is related to the individual’s skill at accessing and reasoning about knowledge from long-term memory. And we propose that the ability to resist the lure of the surrounding sentential context is related to the individual’s capacity to simultaneously process and store information in working memory.     

Consequence analysis: Its effects on verbal statements about an environmental project

Typically, citizens lack relevant information concerning possible consequences of proposed environmental projects. Despite federal requirements for citizen participation in decisions about proposed roadway projects, no systematic procedures exist for educating citizens as to the possible consequences of such projects. The effects of a consequence analysis procedure on community residents' verbal statements about the favorability of a proposed roadway project were assessed. The consequence analysis procedure involved asking residents to rate the desirability and magnitude of each of 48 possible consequences of the proposed roadway project. Following the intervention, overall ratings of favorability of the project changed for nine of ten residents. Community residents' ratings of the quality of participants' justifications of their position on the roadway issue provided evidence of generalization to this collateral behavior.     

Questions about questions: New views on an old prejudice

The belief that good analysts do not ask, and do not answer, questions is a still-living strange recommendation, transmitted throughout psychoanalytic generations. The authors have extensively reviewed electronic databases and technical texts. They found that interrogative acts are largely omitted from technical considerations, generating a prejudice that does not consider questions as proper psychoanalytic tools, and they discuss possible foundations for this belief. The authors believe that the few authors that have touched on this issue have done so in a non-systematic and frequently incomplete form. Linguistic philosophy presents questions as speech acts : actions that are able to alter the equilibrium of dialogical discourses. This view permits psychoanalysts to understand the potentiality of questions to introduce psychic change because they can, simultaneously, interfere in the self, in the other and in the intersubjective relationship. An internal state of curiosity is described as a component of the mind of the analyst. Based on the argument of the ubiquity of the state of curiosity of the analyst, the authors carried out a set of technical propositions, regarding, on the one hand, when questions are not to be introduced (for instance, in the presence of free associations) and, on the other hand, when they would be useful as expanding factors of the preconscious-conscious system. Considering psychoanalyses as experiences of curiosity, they emphasize that both the internal state of curiosity of the analyst, and the eventual verbal questions put to the patient are potentially positive factors for psychic change. The authors present several clinical vignettes.     

The detection of semantic illusions: Task-specific effects for similarity and position of distorted terms

The effect of task demands on the detection of semantic illusions was investigated. In Exp. 1, subjects were given a detection task with different instructions for accuracy. Less illusions occurred under instructions that stressed accuracy, indicating strategic control of detection rates. In Exp. 2, sentences with dissimilar distorted terms resulted in shorter latencies than sentences with similar distorted terms in a detection task, but in longer response times in a question-answering task. In Exp. 3, the similarity effect was found to vary with the position of the distorted term in combination with task demands. In a verification task, the similarity effect did not differ for the beginning or the end of sentences. In a question-answering task, a significant similarity effect was observed only for distorted terms at the beginning of sentences. We argue that the results indicate minimal depth of semantic processing with respect to different task requirements. Implications for different theoretical accounts of semantic illusions are discussed.     

The Moses, mega-Moses, and Armstrong illusions: integrating language comprehension and semantic memory

This study develops a new theory of the Moses illusion, observed in responses to general knowledge questions such as, "How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark?" People often respond "two" rather than "zero" despite knowing that Noah, not Moses, launched the Ark. Our theory predicted two additional types of conceptual error demonstrated here: the Armstrong and mega-Moses illusions. The Armstrong illusion involved questions resembling, "What was the famous line uttered by Louis Armstrong when he first set foot on the moon?" People usually comprehend such questions as valid, despite knowing that Louis Armstrong was a jazz musician who never visited the moon. This Armstrong illusion was not due to misperceiving the critical words (Louis Armstrong), and occurred as frequently as the Moses illusion (with critical words embedded in identical sentential contexts), but less frequently than the mega-Moses illusion caused when Moses and Armstrong factors were combined.     

Decision processes in verifying category membership statements: Implications for models of semantic memory

Current models of semantic memory assume that natural categories are well-defined. Specific predictions of two such models, the Smith, Shoben, and Rips (1974a) two-stage feature comparison model and the Glass and Holyoak (1974/75) ordered search model, were tested and disconfirmed in Experiment I. We propose an alternative model postulating fuzzy categories represented as sets of characteristic properties. This model, combined with a Bayesian decision process, accounts for the results of three additional experiments, as well as for the major findings in the semantic memory literature. We argue that people verify category membership statements by assessing similarity relations between concepts rather than by using information which logically specifies the truth value of the sentence. Our data also imply that natural categories are fuzzy rather than well-defined.     

Positive illusions about the self: short-term benefits and long-term costs

Two studies addressed parallel questions about the correlates and consequences of self-enhancement bias. Study 1 was conducted in a laboratory context and examined self-enhancing evaluations of performance in a group-interaction task. Study 2 assessed students' illusory beliefs about their academic ability when they first entered college and then followed them longitudinally to test claims about the long-term benefits of positive illusions. Both studies showed that self-enhancement bias was related to narcissism, ego involvement, self-serving attributions, and positive affect. Study 2 found that self-enhancement was associated with decreasing levels of self-esteem and well-being as well as with increasing disengagement from the academic context. Self-enhancement did not predict higher academic performance or higher graduate rates. Thus, the findings suggest that self-enhancing beliefs may be adaptive in the short term but not in the long term.     

Challenges to the four-channel model of flow: Primary assumption of flow support the moderate challenging control channel

Flow theory postulates that the psychological state of flow emerging when one engages in activities where skill level and challenge are both high, results in ‘optimal’ subjective experiences relative to other psychological states, and is intrinsically motivated. The experience sampling method was used on a sample of college students to compare daily activities associated with flow (high skill, high challenge) to the psychological state of control (high skill, moderate challenge) in relation to the subjective experiences of enjoyment, happiness, intrinsic motivation, and cognitive involvement. Contrary to flow theory, enjoyment, happiness, and intrinsic motivation were characteristic of activities associated with being in ‘control,’ as opposed to flow. Flow activities were associated with being cognitively involved in the task at hand. We believe such theoretically important findings have been masked when using the original four-channel model of flow, but are clarified with use of the revised experience fluctuation model.     

First possession: An assumption guiding inferences about who owns what

How do we determine who owns what? This article reports evidence indicating that we typically assume that the first person who possesses an object is its owner. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants read cartoons in which two children each take a turn playing with a toy. Participants selected the character who first possessed the toy when judging who owned it, but not when judging which character liked it more. In Experiment 3, participants read stories based on the Pierson v. Post (1805) property law case. In line with the appellate court’s ruling in that case, participants selected the character who first captured and possessed an animal as its owner over another character who had pursued it earlier. Together, these findings provide evidence for an assumption that specifically guides our reasoning about ownership and that may lead everyday intuitions about property to be generally consistent with property law.     

Geometric-optical illusions: an update on the output of publications

The count of publications on geometric-optical illusions and the bibliography of extant books on the topic are brought up to date. The number of publications now exceeds 1100 and the number of books is 35.     

Connectivity among semantic associates: an fMRI study of semantic priming

Semantic priming refers to a reduction in the reaction time to identify or make a judgment about a stimulus that has been immediately preceded by a semantically related word or picture and is thought to result from a partial overlap in the semantic associates of the two words. A semantic priming lexical decision task using spoken words was presented in event-related fMRI and behavioral paradigms. Word pairs varied in terms of semantic relatedness and the connectivity between associates. Thirteen right-handed subjects underwent fMRI imaging and 10 additional subjects were tested in a behavioral version of the semantic priming task. It was hypothesized priming would be greatest, reaction time fastest, and cortical activation reduced the most for related word pairs of high connectivity, followed by related word pairs of low connectivity, and then by unrelated word pairs. Behavioral and fMRI results confirmed these predictions. fMRI activity located primarily in bilateral posterior superior and middle temporal regions showed modulation by connectivity and relatedness. The results suggest that these regions are involved in semantic processing.     

Clinical utility of self-disclosure for adults who stutter: Apologetic versus informative statements

PurposeThe purpose of the present study was to explore the clinical utility of self-disclosure, particularly, whether disclosing in an informative manner would result in more positive observer ratings of the speaker who stutters than either disclosing in an apologetic manner or choosing not to self-disclose at all.MethodObservers (N = 338) were randomly assigned to view one of six possible videos (i.e., adult male informative self-disclosure, adult male apologetic self-disclosure, adult male no self-disclosure, adult female informative self-disclosure, adult female apologetic self-disclosure, adult female no self-disclosure). Observers completed a survey assessing their perceptions of the speaker they viewed immediately after watching the video.ResultsResults suggest that self-disclosing in an informative manner leads to significantly more positive observer ratings than choosing not to self-disclose. In contrast, use of an apologetic statement, for the most part, does not yield significantly more positive ratings than choosing not to self-disclose.ConclusionClinicians should recommend their clients self-disclose in an informative manner to facilitate more positive observer perceptions.     

Contour: A hypermedia environment for teaching about subjective contours and other visual illusions

Contour is an interactive HyperCard stack for the Apple Macintosh computer, which presents users with a wealth of information (text, graphics, sound, and animation) concerning the history, theory, and methodology used in the research of a class of visual illusions calledsubjective contour illusions. The stack is divided into six sections (Introduction, Findings, Index, References, Map, and File Creator), which allow users to access differing types of information in several ways. As users navigate through the stack, they are presented with multimedia information that they can trace through author, theory, or type of illusion. The stack allows users to make notes to themselves on the information presented, to execute a literature search of the most relevant articles in the subjective contour literature, and to save them in text file for printing in a word processing program. The study of subjective contour illusions can be viewed as a microcosm of issues in the field of visual perception.     

What we know about what we have never heard: evidence from perceptual illusions

Are speakers equipped with preferences concerning grammatical structures that are absent in their language? We examine this question by investigating the sensitivity of English speakers to the sonority of onset clusters. Linguistic research suggests that certain onset clusters are universally preferred (e.g., bd>lb). We demonstrate that such preferences modulate the perception of unattested onsets by English speakers: Monosyllabic auditory nonwords with onsets that are universally dispreferred (e.g., lbif) are more likely to be classified as disyllabic and misperceived as identical to their disyllabic counterparts (e.g., lebif) compared to onsets that are relatively preferred across languages (e.g., bdif). Consequently, dispreferred onsets benefit from priming by their epenthetic counterpart (e.g., lebif-lbif) as much as they benefit from identity priming (e.g., lbif-lbif). A similar pattern of misperception (e.g., lbif-->lebif) was observed among speakers of Russian, where clusters of this type occur. But unlike English speakers, Russian speakers perceived these clusters accurately on most trials, suggesting that the perceptual illusions of English speakers are partly due to their linguistic experience, rather than phonetic confusion alone. Further evidence against a purely phonetic explanation for our results is offered by the capacity of English speakers to perceive such onsets accurately under conditions that encourage precise phonetic encoding. The perceptual illusions of English speakers are also irreducible to several statistical properties of the English lexicon. The systematic misperception of universally dispreferred onsets might reflect their ill-formedness in the grammars of all speakers, irrespective of linguistic experience. Such universal grammatical preferences implicate constraints on language learning.     

Taking on semantic commitments, II: Collective versus distributive readings

In earlier work, Frazier and Rayner (1990) provided evidence for a processing principle termed the Minimal Semantic Commitment (MSC)hypothesis. In the present study, we used the MSC hypothesis as a starting point in addressing the issue of when to treat mental representations as vague versus determinate and ambiguous. Given ambiguous representations, the MSC hypothesis predicts that the processor will commit to one interpretation (the grammatical ambiguity hypothesis). On the other hand, given a single underspecified representation, the MSC hypothesis predicts that the processor will await disambiguating information before fully committing to an interpretation (the vagueness hypothesis). In an experiment designed to evaluate these hypotheses with respect to the representation of distributivity, participants' eye movements were recorded as they read sentences containing distributive or collective predicates that were either disambiguated by a preceding adverb or left locally ambiguous by delaying the disambiguating adverb until the end of the predicate. The results suggested that a semantic commitment is made in locally indeterminate cases as evidenced by a significant interaction of ambiguity and distributivity in first pass times, total times, and regressions. If the difficulty of distributives simply reflected the difficulty of postulating a distributive operator when evidence warranting it is encountered, then no interaction would be expected. Hence we argue that the distributive/collective distinction is treated as a matter of ambiguity rather than as one of vagueness. In the absence of evidence for a distributive reading, the processor commits itself to a collective reading sometime during the processing of the predicate (before the disambiguation in our late disambiguation examples). The findings are discussed in relation to recent linguistic work on the representation of distributivity.     

The elusive nature of self-measurement: the self-construal scale versus the twenty statements test

In the present study, the authors compared 2 frequently used measures to operationalize the construct of the self, namely, the Self-Construal Scale (SCS; T. M. Singelis, 1994) and the Twenty Statements Test (TST; M. Kuhn & T. S. McPartland, 1954), in a sample of 324 male and female undergraduate psychology students of diverse ethnocultural backgrounds. Results demonstrated low intercorrelations between the 2 measures, suggesting that the qualitative and quantitative measures did not evaluate the same construct. A factor analysis of the SCS scale revealed 3 constructs-an independent construct, an interdependent construct, and a power distance or hierarchy construct. Implications for future research included the need for ongoing work in identifying and measuring the constructs of the self.     

The effect of working memory load on semantic illusions: What the phonological loop and central executive have to contribute

When asked how many animals of each kind Moses took on the Ark, most people respond with “two” despite the substituted name (Moses for Noah) in the question. Possible explanations for semantic illusions appear to be related to processing limitations such as those of working memory. Indeed, individual working memory capacity has an impact upon how sentences containing substitutions are processed. This experiment examined further the role of working memory in the occurrence of semantic illusions using a dual-task working memory load approach. Participants verified statements while engaging in either articulatory suppression or random number generation. Secondary task type had a significant effect on semantic illusion rate, but only when comparing the control condition to the two dual-task conditions. Furthermore, secondary task performance in the random number generation condition declined, suggesting a tradeoff between tasks. Response time analyses also showed a different pattern of processing across the conditions. The findings suggest that the phonological loop plays a role in representing semantic illusion sentences coherently and in monitoring for details, while the role of the central executive is to assist gist-processing of sentences. This usually efficient strategy leads to error in the case of semantic illusions.     

Mixing measures: testing an assumption of the attention network test

The human attention system has been subdivided into three networks that appear to be functionally and anatomically independent: alerting, orienting, and executive control. The Attention Network Test (ANT) is a quick and easy tool that measures the efficiency of these three networks by averaging reaction time and accuracy scores across several different cue and flanker conditions. Using ANOVAs and correlation procedures, we found that (a) intranetwork correlations were surprisingly low, and (b) Cue X Flanker interactions were found within alerting, orienting, and executive control measures. Taken together, these findings highlight the interaction between the three networks and the potential difficulty in accurately measuring them with this task.