Ask a busy person: attentional myopia and helping

According to an oft‐quoted piece of folk wisdom, if one wants something accomplished, the best person to ask is a busy person. We tested a version of this proposition in two studies. Study 1 exposed participants to a helping request in which cues promoting the relevant behavior were made more salient than those inhibiting it. Study 2 featured a request in which inhibiting cues were made more salient than cues promoting the behavior. In both studies, participants who were “busied” by high cognitive load showed more influence of the dominant behavioral pressure than did participants under minimal load. The results suggest that busy people can respond more to a helping appeal, but only when cues facilitating helping are more salient than those discouraging it.     

Behavioral training for myopia: generalization of effects

The present study assessed generalization of training effects using a video computer system (VCS) as a training medium for modifying acuity. Eighteen myopic volunteers were matched according to pre-training acuity and assigned to either fading and feedback training group or a practice only control. Subjects were pre- and post-tested on three measures: the Snellen Letter Chart, a Behavioral Acuity Test and a performance test with the VCS. Compared to controls, trained subjects displayed significant improvements in acuity on the Behavioral Acuity Test. These results suggest that training effects generalize to untrained stimuli. Implications for the clinical implementation of behavioral training procedures for modifying myopia are discussed.     

Cultural myopia: The need for a corrective lens

The Office for Civil Rights on May 25, 1970, issued a Memorandum to school districts designed to prohibit discrimination against national origin minority children which results from a failure school districts to the recognize the differing linguistic characteristics and cultural identify of such children in the planning and operation of education programs. Specifically, the Memorandum prohibits the assignment of children to classes for the mentally retarded on the basis of criteria which essentially measure or evaluate English language skkills. A task group was appointed by the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare to develop educational policy to implement this antidiscrimination provision.This task group recommended that additional policies be developed by the Office for Civil Rights to notify adequately school districts and members of the general public of the types of discriminatory practices that might be occuring and to set forth model procedures which school districts could follow in an effort to eliminate discriminatory practices which might currently exist. This paper discusses those procedures recommended by the committee.     

Cultural myopia: The need for a corrective lens

The Office for Civil Rights on May 25, 1970, issued a Memorandum to school districts designed to prohibit discrimination against national origin minority children which results from a failure school districts to the recognize the differing linguistic characteristics and cultural identify of such children in the planning and operation of education programs. Specifically, the Memorandum prohibits the assignment of children to classes for the mentally retarded on the basis of criteria which essentially measure or evaluate English language skkills. A task group was appointed by the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare to develop educational policy to implement this antidiscrimination provision.

This task group recommended that additional policies be developed by the Office for Civil Rights to notify adequately school districts and members of the general public of the types of discriminatory practices that might be occuring and to set forth model procedures which school districts could follow in an effort to eliminate discriminatory practices which might currently exist. This paper discusses those procedures recommended by the committee.     

Learning myopia: an adaptive recency effect in category learning

Recency effects (REs) have been well established in memory and probability learning paradigms but have received little attention in category earning research. Extant categorization models predict REs to be unaffected by learning, whereas a functional interpretation of REs, suggested by results in other domains, predicts that people are able to learn sequential dependencies and incorporate this information into their responses. These contrasting predictions were tested in 2 experiments involving a classification task in which outcome sequences were autocorrelated. Experiment 1 showed that reliance on recent outcomes adapts to the structure of the task, in contrast to models' predictions. Experiment 2 provided constraints on how sequential information is learned and suggested possible extensions to current models to account for this learning.     

Alcohol myopia. Its prized and dangerous effects

This article explains how alcohol makes social responses more extreme, enhances important self-evaluations, and relieves anxiety and depression, effects that underlie both the social destructiveness of alcohol and the reinforcing effects that make it an addictive substance. The theories are based on alcohol's impairment of perception and thought--the myopia it causes--rather than on the ability of alcohol's pharmacology to directly cause specific reactions or on expectations associated with alcohol's use. Three conclusions are offered (a) Alcohol makes social behaviors more extreme by blocking a form of response conflict. (b) The same process can inflate self-evaluations. (c) Alcohol myopia, in combination with distracting activity, can reliably reduce anxiety and depression in all drinkers by making it difficult to allocate attention to the thoughts that provoke these states. These theories are discussed in terms of their significance for the prevention and treatment of alcohol abuse.     

Metacognitive myopia and the overutilization of misleading advice

Previous research on advice taking has explained the failure to exploit collective wisdom in terms of the egocentric underweighting of advice provided by independent others. The present research is concerned with an opposite and more radical source of irrational advice taking, namely, the failure to critically assess the validity of advice due to metacognitive myopia. Participants could use the advice of one or two experts when estimating health risks. They read sketches of the study samples that experts had drawn to estimate conditional probabilities (e.g., of HIV‐given drug addiction). Whether samples were valid or seriously biased, subsequent judgments were strongly affected by any advice (Experiment 1). Uncritical reliance on any advice persisted when participants were sensitized to the contrast of valid and invalid advice in a repeated measures design (Experiment 2), when participants themselves believed advice not to be valid (Experiment 3), and even after full debriefing about invalid advice (Experiment 4). Lay advice exerted a similar influence as expert advice (Experiment 5). Although these provocative results are independent of numeracy and consensus (Experiment 6), they highlight the impact of metacognitive myopia as an impediment of social rationality.     

Behavioral training for myopia: long term maintenance of improved acuity

Two female myopic students participated in a behavioral training program designed to improve uncorrected visual acuity. Following a 3-day baseline, each subject underwent 12 days of training involving stimulus fading and feedback. Acuity measures were taken daily during baseline and training phases and weekly for more than 2 months following the termination of training. Both subjects showed improved acuity as a function of the training program and this improvement was maintained throughout the follow-up period. The results are discussed with respect to the growing body of research evaluating behavioral training for myopia.     

The two faces of alcohol myopia: attentional mediation of psychological stress

Two studies provided evidence that alcohol's relationship to psychological stress is indirect and is mediated by the allocation of attention. Study 1 found that, as the attentional demands of a distracting activity increased, so did alcohol's reduction of anxiety. Study 2 replicated this effect and found that a highly demanding activity could reduce anxiety even without alcohol. This study further implicated the role of attention in anxiety reduction by demonstrating a relationship between changes in anxiety and response latency to a secondary monitoring task. Finally, in both experiments, intoxicated subjects who did not perform any activity showed an increase in anxiety. From these data, we argue that alcohol affects psychological stress, to an important degree, through its ability, in conjunction with ongoing activity, to affect the amount of attention paid to stressful thoughts.     

论智力对专长获得的非决定性

个体获得某领域杰出能力(专长)并非由其智力简单决定.一方面,智力测验无法预测个体未来成就以及"SOC、智力、专长三角关系理论"的提出,似乎表明智力与专长获得无关;另一方面,"特质联合体中介理论"和"模块能力与综合能力中介理论"则说明智力与专长间存在复杂中介机制.专长的获得是多种因素综合作用的结果,在个体一生发展的历程中,智力对专长获得并不具有显著的决定性.     

Determining the Place of Religion: Native American Traditions and the WWW

Examples of Native American websites reveal great differences in those created by Native and non-Native people. Most often of central concern for non-Indian people is Native American ‘spirituality’. In contrast, Native people rarely discuss religion as a topic distinct from political, economic or material concerns. This disparity highlights the contentious nature of ‘religion’ between Indigenous and Immigrant cultural contexts. It also reveals some features of the relationships between the cultural phenomenon of ‘whiteness’ and religion.     

Improving Group Judgment Accuracy: Information Sharing and Determining the Best Member

Most approaches to improving the quality of group decisions have focused on structuring the group interaction so as to minimize the negative features present in freely interacting groups. The recent finding that groups often can perform at least as well as their best member on judgment tasks suggests the possibility that group effectiveness could be improved by building on the positive features of group interaction rather than by restricting it. In the present study interacting groups were encouraged to discuss each item of a quantitative judgment task before determining what their group′s estimate would be. Two different instructional interventions were implemented and contrasted to a control condition. Both interventions consisted of giving common sense advice about what the groups should do as they discussed each item. Findings indicate that simply telling groups to either: (a) share task-relevant information, or (b) try to determine the most accurate member led to significantly better group performance. These results suggest two distinct ways in which groups can be as accurate as their best member, even when performing tasks with undemonstrable solutions. Implications of these two approaches for improving group accuracy are discussed.     

Determining spatial span: The role of movement time and articulation rate

In studies of verbal memory span individual differences in speech rate have been found to predict the number of items that can be recalled in order. This is thought to happen because overt speech rate is related to the rate of internal verbal rehearsal. For spatial span there may also be an internal rehearsal system linked to overt responding, and if there is a strong analogy to be drawn between the verbal and spatial domains, then movement time between spatial targets should predict the number of spatial locations that can be recalled. In the first study reported, none of the six measures of movement time did predict spatial span, but, as expected, speech rate predicted verbal span. In addition, speech rate predicted spatial span. In a second study the use of articulatory suppression during span presentation showed that verbal span dropped, but was still predicted by speech rate. Spatial span was again predicted by the time it took to say digits rather than the time it took to make movements to spatial targets. There would not seem to be any simple analogy between the limitations on verbal span and those on spatial span. In addition, the relationship between speech rate and sequential memory performance may be more complex than previous studies have suggested.     

Factors Determining National Stereotypes

Summary

In order to test various explanations of the fact that perceived competence appears to correlate positively with altruism, Ss were given false feedback as to their competence on a “visual creativity” test and then asked to help with a second task, writing creative color names. Three groups of Ss who were told they were competent were given reduced cost, increased happiness, and increased responsibility as reasons for helping; the other three groups were given no explanations, but were told that their competence was high, or low, or given no information. The three explanation groups helped more than the other three groups, and the reduced cost group helped more than the other five. The three dependent measures of helping (percentage of helpful Ss, duration of help, and magnitude of help) proved differentially sensitive to treatment and sex differences. Only the latter two measures showed greater helping in the reduced cost group; only the magnitude measure showed significantly greater helping for males than females.     

Determining the environment: a modal logic for closed interaction

The aim of the work is to provide a language to reason about Closed Interactions, i.e. all those situations in which the outcomes of an interaction can be determined by the agents themselves and in which the environment cannot interfere with they are able to determine. We will see that two different interpretations can be given of this restriction, both stemming from Pauly Representation Theorem. We will identify such restrictions and axiomatize their logic. We will apply the formal tools to reason about games and their regulation.