The anchor effects on the judgment of loudness using reaction time as an index of loudness

The present study was designed to investigate anchor effects on loudness judgments, using reaction time (RT) as an index of loudness. In Experiment 1, anchor effects were reexamined using verbal categories. Two kinds of anchor stimuli, 60- and 90-dB SPL 1,000-Hz pure tones, and four kinds of series stimuli, 60-, 70-, 80-, and 90-dB tones, were used. In this experiment, clear anchor effects were found just the same as in our previous experiment. Experiment 2 was conducted using RT as an index of loudness with stimulus conditions similar to those in Experiment 1. The same anchor effects could be seen in this experiment too. As RT is quite free from the limitations inevitably accompanying the verbal responses, it may be concluded that the anchor effects reflect the shift in perception.     

Processing objectives as a determinant of the relationship between recall and judgment

One aspect of person perception research that has been problematic for many theories is that there is often little correspondence between judgments that are made of a person and specific facts that can be recalled about that person. A model is presented that suggests this type of low correspondence is to be expected whenever evaluations of the person are spontaneously formed at the time relevant information is acquired. However, a relatively strong correspondence between the judgments that are made and the facts that can be recalled is expected when such evaluations are not spontaneously made at the time of information acquisition. The present paper reports several phenomena that are consistent with the model presented including: a much higher correspondence between recall and judgment under comprehension set than impression set conditions, judgment primacy effects for impression set subjects but judgment recency effects for comprehension set subjects, and a strong relationship between judgments and spew recall order for comprehension sets subjects but not impression set subjects. The implications of these and other phenomena are discussed in terms of how mental representations of another person are formed, and how the nature of such representations may systematically differ as a function of initial processing objectives.     

Correspondences among pupillary dilation response,subjective salience of sounds,and loudness

A pupillary dilation response is known to be evoked by salient deviant or contrast auditory stimuli, but so far a direct link between it and subjective salience has been lacking. In two experiments, participants listened to various environmental sounds while their pupillary responses were recorded. In separate sessions, participants performed subjective pairwise-comparison tasks on the sounds with respect to their salience, loudness, vigorousness, preference, beauty, annoyance, and hardness. The pairwise-comparison data were converted to ratings on the Thurstone scale. The results showed a close link between subjective judgments of salience and loudness. The pupil dilated in response to the sound presentations, regardless of sound type. Most importantly, this pupillary dilation response to an auditory stimulus positively correlated with the subjective salience, as well as the loudness, of the sounds (Exp. 1). When the loudnesses of the sounds were identical, the pupil responses to each sound were similar and were not correlated with the subjective judgments of salience or loudness (Exp. 2). This finding was further confirmed by analyses based on individual stimulus pairs and participants. In Experiment 3, when salience and loudness were manipulated by systematically changing the sound pressure level and acoustic characteristics, the pupillary dilation response reflected the changes in both manipulated factors. A regression analysis showed a nearly perfect linear correlation between the pupillary dilation response and loudness. The overall results suggest that the pupillary dilation response reflects the subjective salience of sounds, which is defined, or is heavily influenced, by loudness.     

Cognitive parallels between moral judgment and modal judgment

A central question in the study of moral psychology is how immediate intuition interacts with more thoughtful deliberation in the generation of moral judgments. The present study sheds additional light on this question by comparing adults’ judgments of moral permissibility with their judgments of physical possibility—a form of judgment that also involves the coordination of intuition and deliberation (Shtulman, Cognitive Development 24:293–309, 2009). Participants (N = 146) were asked to judge the permissibility of 16 extraordinary actions (e.g., Is it ever morally permissible for an 80-year-old woman to have sex with a 20-year-old man?) and the possibility of 16 extraordinary events (e.g., Will it ever be physically possible for humans to bring an extinct species back to life?). Their tendency to judge the extraordinary events as possible was predictive of their tendency to judge the extraordinary actions as permissible, even when controlling for disgust sensitivity. Moreover, participants’ justification and response latency patterns were correlated across domains. Taken together, these findings suggest that modal judgment and moral judgment may be linked by a common inference strategy, with some individuals focusing on why actions/events that do not occur cannot occur, and others focusing on how those same actions/events could occur.     

The relationship between auditory discrimination and oral production of Spanish sounds in children and adults

The purpose of this study was to investigate the question of age in relation to second-language learning. Specific variables investigated were the auditory discrimination and oral production of Spanish sounds. Two test were constructed: (1) The auditory discrimination test used minimal pairs of Spanish sounds, and (2) the oral production test used words that differed in only one sound. Both tests were given individually to a group of randomly chosen English monolingual speakers. A group of children (1 st-graders) and a group of adults (12th-graders) were tested to determine if both tests taken together would show one group to have a higher foreign language aptitude than the other group. While it was hypothesized that children would perform better than adults, the multivariate analysis of variance indicated that, with both tests taken together, adults were superior in auditory discrimination and oral production, supporting the idea that adults because of their cognitive advantage and maturity are more efficient and successful in these two aspects of foreign-language learning. Children did not exhibit the facility that early-foreign-language-learning advocates have postulated.This article is based on a dissertation submitted by Alba A. Rosenman to the Department of Secondary, Higher, and Foundations of Education, Ball State University. The research was supported in part by a Graduate Student Research Grant from Ball State University. I am grateful to Dr. Larry Henriksen for his help in the statistical design and analysis of the data and to Dr. Herbert Stahlke for phonetic analysis.     

A linear relation between loudness and decibels

A total of 37 uninitiated observers made repeated numerical magnitude judgments of the loudness of a sequence of octave band noises spaced at 1-dB intervals, from 0 to 5 dB above a standard of about 80 dB(A), which was called 10. The observers were not instructed to use numbers as ratios. When the median responses are plotted linearly against decibels, they are fitted by straight lines. Each extra decibel adds an average of 1 unit of loudness, range for individual observers 10 through .25 units. This is consistent with the view that the subjectively equal stimulus spacing for the loudness of noise is linear in decibels, and that the observers use numbers linearly in judging the loudness.     

Continuous monitoring of human contingency judgment across trials

Recent evidence suggests that people are sensitive to the degree of contingency between their actions and ensuing outcomes, but little is known about the way in which such contingency judgments develop as more and more information about the contingency is provided. Three experiments examined this issue in the context of a video game. In Experiment 1, it was found that contingency judgments follow growth functions: When the contingency was positive, judgments increased toward a positive asymptote, and when the contingency was negative, judgments decreased toward a negative asymptote. When the contingency was zero, judgments themselves remained close to zero but were biased by the overall frequency with which the outcome occurred. In Experiment 2, it was shown that the growth function was not the result of the anchoring of early judgments at the zero point. The bias in judgments when the contingency is zero was investigated in Experiment 3. The results are discussed in terms of rule-based analyses and contemporary theories of conditioning.     

Electrophysiological difference between the representations of causal judgment and associative judgment in semantic memory

Causally related concepts like “virus” and “epidemic” and general associatively related concepts like “ring” and “emerald” are represented and accessed separately. The Evoked Response Potential (ERP) procedure was used to examine the representations of causal judgment and associative judgment in semantic memory. Participants were required to remember a task cue (causal or associative) presented at the beginning of each trial, and assess whether the relationship between subsequently presented words matched the initial task cue. The ERP data showed that an N400 effect (250–450 ms) was more negative for unrelated words than for all related words. Furthermore, the N400 effect elicited by causal relations was more positive than for associative relations in causal cue condition, whereas no significant difference was found in the associative cue condition. The centrally distributed late ERP component (650–750 ms) elicited by the causal cue condition was more positive than for the associative cue condition. These results suggested that the processing of causal judgment and associative judgment in semantic memory recruited different degrees of attentional and executive resources.     

The relationship between moral decision making and patterns of consolidation and transition in moral judgment development

Following models that describe intraindividual correlates of stage transitions (S. S. Snyder & D. H. Feldman, 1984), this study assessed the relation between a measure of consolidation and transition in moral judgment development and the utility of moral concepts in sociomoral decision making. The study extends previous research in suggesting that individuals use moral concepts differently as they cycle through periods of consolidation and transition. With multiple cross-sectional and longitudinal samples, findings indicate that participants' reliance on a Kohlbergian moral framework as measured by the Defining Issues Test is highest during periods of consolidation and lowest during transitions. As participants move into periods of consolidation, the utility of moral stage information increases. Thus, this study indicates that the consolidation and transition model can be used to help identify individuals who are more or less likely to use Kohlberg's moral stages in their moral decision making.     

Effects of expectations on loudness and loudness difference

To determine how expectations affect loudness and loudness difference, in two experiments we induced some subjects to expect loud sounds (condition L), some to expect soft sounds (condition S), and others to have no particular expectations (control). In Experiment 1, all subjects estimated the loudnesses of the same set of three moderately loud 1-kHz tones. Estimates were greatest for subjects in condition S and smallest for subjects in condition L. Control subjects’ estimates were intermediate but closer to those of condition S subjects. In Experiment 2, subjects estimated the difference in loudness for pairs of moderately loud 1-kHz tones. Again, estimates were smallest for condition L subjects; estimates were greatest for control subjects, and condition S subjects’ estimates were closer to control estimates than to condition L estimates. This pattern of results is explainable by a combination of (1) Parducci’s (1995) range-frequency theory and (2) a gain control mechanism in the auditory system under top-down governance (Schneider, Parker, & Murphy, 2011).     

Describing and testing a moderator of the moral judgment and action relationship

The relationship between moral judgment development and action for Ss who differ in the degree to which justice-based moral judgments influence moral decision making was investigated. First, a method for quantifying Ss' use of justice-based moral judgments in moral decision making (the utilizer variable) is described. Second, 5 moral judgment and action studies are reanalyzed to assess the moderating effect of the utilizer variable information. Results indicate that the relationship between moral judgment scores and action intensifies as utilization increases. Moreover, the utilizer effect appears uniform across different age and educational levels and behavioral domains. These findings support the validity of the utilizer variable and are consistent with recent multiprocess models of moral action that suggest that moral judgements are a necessary, but insufficient, factor in the production of moral action.     

Matching functions between loudness and ten other continua1

Cross-modality matches have been made between loudness and ten other perceptual continua. The matching functions are all power functions. When the exponent values of the matching functions are divided by the exponent values previously determined for the various continua, the quotients predict values for the loudness exponent. A tentative consensus suggests that the loudness exponent may be about 0.64.     

Moderating effects of harasser status and target gender on the relationship between unwanted sexual attention and overall job satisfaction

Despite a vast body of literature evidencing the negative effects of workplace sexual harassment it remains unclear whether sexual harassment experienced by the target is worse when the harasser is a supervisor, rather than a coworker. With a scenario‐based experimental study we examined whether targets harassed by their supervisor would experience greater decreases in overall job satisfaction than those targeted by a coworker. Results suggested that harasser status moderated the effects of sexual harassment on overall job satisfaction but only for female targets. Further, the effect of supervisor harassment on job satisfaction was mediated by interpersonal justice perceptions.     

Personality and the slope of loudness function

The slope of the loudness function in direct magnitude estimation was studied at two frequencies in two groups of naive subjects. In the first group a limited scale was used and in the second group, an open ended scale. In all conditions the slope of the loudness function was found to be significantly positively correlated with test anxiety scores.     

Causal judgment from contingency information: Relation between subjective reports and individual tendencies in judgment

In two experiments, participants made causal judgments from contingency information for problems with different objective contingencies. After the judgment task, the participants reported how their judgments had changed following each type of contingency information. Some reported idiosyncratic tendencies--in other words, tendencies contrary to those expected under associative-learning and normative rule induction models of contingency judgment. These idiosyncratic reports tended to be better predictors of the judgments of those who made them than did the models. The results are consistent with the view that causal judgment from contingency information is made, at least in part, by deliberative use of acquired and sometimes idiosyncratic notions of evidential value, the outcomes of which tend, in aggregate, to be highly correlated with the outcomes of normative procedures.     

A dissociation between causal judgment and outcome recall

It has been suggested that causal learning in humans is similar to Pavlovian conditioning in animals. According to this view, judgments of cause reflect the degree to which an association exists between the cause and the effect. Inferential accounts, by contrast, suggest that causal judgments are reasoning based rather than associative in nature. We used a direct measure of associative strength, identification of the outcome with which a cause was paired (cued recall), to see whether associative strength translated directly into causal ratings. Causal compounds AB+ and CD+ were intermixed with A+ and C- training. Cued-recall performance was better for cue B than for cue D; thus, associative strength was inherited by cue B from the strongly associated cue A (augmentation). However, the reverse was observed on the causal judgment measure: Cue B was judged to be less causal than D (cue competition). These results support an inferential over an associative account of causal judgments.