Ambiguous figures: living versus nonliving objects

Eleven series of figures were studied, each series ranging from one extreme interpretation via five ambiguous intermediates to a second extreme interpretation. Triplets consisting of an ambiguous exemplar in the middle flanked on the left and right by its two extreme interpretations were presented to large groups of subjects. The initial aim was to establish the levels of perceptual ambiguity of each exemplar in a series, and normative data on the ambiguous figures are provided for future reference and use. However, several biases were encountered and these were examined in more detail. In experiment 1 the subject's task was to compare the middle figure with the flankers and draw an arrow from the middle figure towards the flanking extreme they judged the most similar. Here, an overall preference for the left extreme was found. Therefore the instructions were reversed in experiment 2; flankers had to be compared with the middle figure. The preference for the left extreme remained for figures of living objects, but for nonliving objects the preference switched to the right extreme. To do away with any effect of the arrows, in experiment 3 subjects were divided into two groups each receiving different instructions and were asked to circle one of the extremes. However, the pattern of biases remained the same. The bias found with figures of living objects may be explained on the basis of top-down processes. For nonliving figures, an hypothesis based on bottom-up processes like neural fatigue was considered but rejected.     

Center-of-inattention: Position biases in decision-making

This paper examines centrality of physical position as a cue that leads to systematic biases in people’s decisions to retain or eliminate a participant from a group. Termed the “center-stage” effect, we argue that people use their belief that “important people sit in the middle” as a schematic cue that they substitute for individuating performance information for individuals who occupy central positions when the goal is to eliminate all but one of the group members. This leads to the errors of those in center-positions being overlooked: or making them the “centers-of-inattention.” Study 1 examines people’s lay beliefs regarding positions using two stylized placement tasks (a group interview and classroom seating scenarios). These suggest that people believe that more attention is paid to those in the center than those on the extremes. Study 2 tests the center-stage effect using observational data from a real television show, The Weakest Link. Results show that players assigned at random to central positions are more likely to win the game than those in extreme positions. Study 3, a laboratory experiment manipulating attention paid to the game shows that observers overlook the errors of players in the center to a greater extent than the errors of players in extreme positions. Study 4 replicates the game in the laboratory with direct process measures to show that players playing the game make the same error. Study 5 shows that in a stylized group interview setting, participants who believe that “important people sit in the middle” find the performance of candidates in the extreme position easier to recall than the performance of those in the central position, and are more likely to choose them. Study 6 shows that the “center-stage” effects are weaker when the end-game rule allows for two (vs one) contestants to be retained. Overall results converge to show that the use of the “center-stage” heuristic substitutes for the effortful processing of individuating information, leading to a biased (favorable) assessment of people in the center. Implications for decision-making are discussed.     

Ambiguous games: Evidence for strategic ambiguity aversion

The problem of ambiguity in games is discussed, and a class of ambiguous games is identified. A total of 195 participants played strategic-form games of various sizes with unidentified co-players. In each case, they first chose between a known-risk game involving a co-player indifferent between strategies and an equivalent ambiguous game involving one of several co-player types, each with a different dominant strategy, and then they chose a strategy for the preferred game. Half the players knew that the ambiguous co-player types were equally likely, and half did not. Half expected the outcomes to be known immediately, and half expected a week's delay. Known-risk games were generally preferred, confirming a significant strategic ambiguity aversion effect. In the delay conditions, players who knew that the ambiguous co-player types were equally likely were significantly less ambiguity averse than those who did not. Decision confidence was significantly higher in 2 × 2 than in larger games.     

Self-Deceptive Coping: Adaptive Only in Ambiguous Contexts

ABSTRACT Two experiments investigated claims for the efficacy of self-deceptive coping (e.g., Sackeim, 1983, 1988). In Study I the performance of self-deceivers on solvable anagrams was found to he remarkably poor relative to that of non-self-deceivers after both groups were exposed to unsolvable problems. The starkly unambiguous failure experience may have precluded self-deception. Therefore, in Study 2 participants were exposed to unsolvable problems either with or without an excuse. Self-deceivers who encountered failure with an excuse subsequently performed much better on the solvable tasks than those without an excuse. These findings suggest that the use of self-deception following threat is constrained by the availability of contextual ambiguity (e.g., excuses). The effect of the excuse was not related to participants' mood or attributions for performance.     

A bird is a bird is a bird: Making reference within and without superordinate categories

Adults with localized cerebral insult often err in their use of a word to refer to an object or an idea. It is important to assess, then, the patients' appreciation of what a word can refer to, and the way in which they may violate the borders around a referential field. Nonfluent aphasics, fluent aphasics, and nonaphasic patients with insult to the right hemisphere were asked to provide names of items which could be referred to by familiar superordinate terms like “bird.” The principal results revealed that the nonfluent aphasics are anchored to the central portions of a superordinate's referential field (naming items like “robin” and “sparrow,” for instance). While fluent aphasics often violate the borders around a referential field (e.g., providing “beaver” in response to “birds”), it was nevertheless possible to characterize some limits to their choice of a superordinate's referents. These findings were independent both of the absolute number of responses provided and the frequency of occurrence of the response. Further, the patients with insult to the left hemisphere produce few consecutive items whose referents hold attributes in common. When these clusters are produced by aphasics, they consist primarily of subordinates whose referents exhibit many overlapping features (e.g., “bald eagle, black eagle, golden eagle” in response to “bird”). The right-hemisphere-damaged subjects, in contrast, produce many clusters of related items. These consist of less central, basic object level words whose referents hold less obvious features in common (e.g., “albatross, crane, gull” in response to “bird”). Aphasics, then, may be limited in their ability to analyze referents for critical features. Taken together, these data contribute to a more precise characterization of the nonfluent aphasics' and the fluent aphasics' referential deficits, and lend support specifically to the notion that neither group of aphasics relies on definition-like features to determine what a word can refer to.     

Ambiguous games: evidence for strategic ambiguity aversion

The problem of ambiguity in games is discussed, and a class of ambiguous games is identified. A total of 195 participants played strategic-form games of various sizes with unidentified co-players. In each case, they first chose between a known-risk game involving a co-player indifferent between strategies and an equivalent ambiguous game involving one of several co-player types, each with a different dominant strategy, and then they chose a strategy for the preferred game. Half the players knew that the ambiguous co-player types were equally likely, and half did not. Half expected the outcomes to be known immediately, and half expected a week's delay. Known-risk games were generally preferred, confirming a significant strategic ambiguity aversion effect. In the delay conditions, players who knew that the ambiguous co-player types were equally likely were significantly less ambiguity averse than those who did not. Decision confidence was significantly higher in 2 × 2 than in larger games.     

Self-serving biases: The role of perspective-taking

This research explores the role of perspective taking in self-serving biases. Assisted by a confederate, 80 subjects performed an impression-formation task and were given either success or failure bogus feedback. One week later, half of the subjects watched their performance on videotape and provided causal attributions (‘observers’). The other half simply gave causal attributions (‘actors’). Thus, the experiment employed a modified version of the actor/observer paradigm with one group of subjects taking the perspective of observers (‘observers’) and one group of subjects keeping their original perspective (‘actors’). The aim of this study was to test whether the change of perspective would increase dispositional causal attributions both in success and failure conditions. Results showed that subjects gave greater causal weight to internal factors (ability, effort) and less causal weight to external factors (task characteristics, collaboration with the partner) in the success than in the failure condition. Moreover, in a direct comparison task, subjects attributed a greater percentage of responsibility to themselves than to their partner in the success than in the failure condition. However, the type of perspective produced no significant effects, but showed an attenuation of self-serving biases for observers as compared to actors. A motivational explanation of the results is proposed.     

Decision-making under uncertainty: biases and Bayesians

Animals (including humans) often face circumstances in which the best choice of action is not certain. Environmental cues may be ambiguous, and choices may be risky. This paper reviews the theoretical side of decision-making under uncertainty, particularly with regard to unknown risk (ambiguity). We use simple models to show that, irrespective of pay-offs, whether it is optimal to bias probability estimates depends upon how those estimates have been generated. In particular, if estimates have been calculated in a Bayesian framework with a sensible prior, it is best to use unbiased estimates. We review the extent of evidence for and against viewing animals (including humans) as Bayesian decision-makers. We pay particular attention to the Ellsberg Paradox, a classic result from experimental economics, in which human subjects appear to deviate from optimal decision-making by demonstrating an apparent aversion to ambiguity in a choice between two options with equal expected rewards. The paradox initially seems to be an example where decision-making estimates are biased relative to the Bayesian optimum. We discuss the extent to which the Bayesian paradigm might be applied to the evolution of decision-makers and how the Ellsberg Paradox may, with a deeper understanding, be resolved.     

Attentional and interpretative biases in appearance concern: An investigation of biases in appearance-related information processing

The present study examined associations between high levels of appearance concern and information processing biases in interpretation and attention. An opportunity sample (N = 79) categorised ambiguous stimuli as related or unrelated to appearance. Participants then responded to the same stimuli in a modified visual dot-probe task assessing attentional bias. Participant responses were assessed in relation to level of appearance concern. The results indicated a valence specific bias towards interpretation of ambiguous stimuli as negative and appearance-related in individuals with higher levels of concern. There was also evidence of attentional bias towards information perceived as appearance-related in participants with higher levels of appearance concern. The study findings suggest that association between appearance-orientated information processing biases and level of appearance concern; this association may lead to mutually reinforcing bias and concern.     

Rightward biases in free-viewing visual bisection tasks: implications for leftward responses biases on similar tasks

Neurologically normal individuals exhibit strong leftward response biases during free-viewing perceptual judgments of brightness, quantity, and size. When participants view two mirror-reversed objects and they are forced to choose which object appears darker, more numerous, or larger, the stimulus with the relevant feature on the left side is chosen 60-75% of the time. This effect could be influenced by inaccurate judgments of the true centre-point of the objects being compared. In order to test this possibility, 10 participants completed three visual bisection tasks on stimuli known to elicit strong leftward response biases. Participants were monitored using a remote eye-tracking device and instructed to stare at the subjective midpoint of objects presented on a computer screen. Although it was predicted that bisection errors would deviate to the left of centre (as is the case in the line bisection literature), the opposite effect was found. Significant rightward bisection errors were evident on two of the three tasks, and the leftward biases seen during forced-choice tasks could be the result of misjudgments to the right of centre on these same tasks.     

Ambiguous figures: role of context and critical features

Context and attention to critical features as factors in determining the perceptual organization of ambiguous figures were investigated in the present two studies. In the first study, a fixation point directed attention to a critical or to a neutral feature of an ambiguous figure. Placement of the fixation point on different features of an ambiguous figure did not affect the figure-ground organization of the figure, but it did influence the speed of the identification response. In the second study, presentation of an ambiguous figure was preceded by a biased figure or by features of the figure. Results indicated that the interpretation of the ambiguous figure was overwhelmingly influenced by the advanced presentation of a biased drawing but only slightly influenced by the advanced presentation of a critical feature. These findings support analysis-by-synthesis (Neisser, 1967) as an explanation of the perception of ambiguous figures over other contemporary attention theories.     

Ambiguous pronoun resolution: contrasting the first-mention and subject-preference accounts

A visual-world eye-tracking experiment investigated the influence of order of mention and grammatical role on resolution of ambiguous pronouns in Finnish. According to the first-mention account, general cognitive structure-building processes make the first-mentioned noun phrase the preferred antecedent of an ambiguous pronoun. According to the subject-preference account, the preferred antecedent is the grammatical subject of the preceding clause or sentence. Participants listened to sentences in either subject-verb-object or object-verb-subject order; each was followed by a sentence containing an ambiguous pronoun that referred to either the subject or the object. Participants' eye movements were monitored while they looked at pictures representing the two possible antecedents of each pronoun. Analyses of the fixations on the pictures showed that listeners used both order-of-mention and grammatical-role information to resolve ambiguous pronouns.     

Ambiguous comparative judgment: Fuzzy set model and data analysis

Abstract:  This paper proposed two types of fuzzy set models for ambiguous comparative judgments, which did not always hold transitivity and comparability properties. The first type of model was a fuzzy theoretical extension of the additive difference model for preference that was used to explain ambiguous preference strength. The second was a fuzzy logic model for explaining ambiguous preference in which preference strength was bounded, such as a probability measure. In both models, multi-attribute weighting parameters and all attribute values were assumed to be asymmetric fuzzy L-R numbers. For each model, a method of parameter estimation using fuzzy regression analysis was proposed. Numerical examples were also provided for comparison. Finally, the theoretical and practical implications of the proposed models were discussed.     

Ambivalent Sexism and Applicant Evaluations: Effects on Ambiguous Applicants

The purpose of the current research was to evaluate how gender stereotypes and sexist attitudes affect responses to hypothetical job applicants. In Study 1 (N?=?93) undergraduate and graduate students in the Southwestern USA evaluated a male, female, or gender-ambiguous resume. They also completed the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI; Glick and Fiske 1996). Hypotheses were tested using ANOVA. Results suggested that participants who expressed more hostile sexist attitudes evaluated the gender-ambiguous applicant more negatively than a male or female applicant. In Study 2 (N?=?117), graduate and undergraduate participants were asked to indicate the gender of the ambiguous applicant. Those who scored high on hostile sexism, and perceived a gender-ambiguous applicant to be male, provided the most favorable evaluations.     

Self and other obedience estimates: biases and moderators

The authors conducted 2 studies regarding behavior perceptions of "self" and "typical other" in hypothetical replications of S. Milgram's (1963) obedience experiment. In Study 1, participants' knowledge about Milgram's actual results was manipulated. Regardless of knowledge, results demonstrated several specific social and perceptual biases (e.g., the self-other bias; J. D. Brown, 1986), in addition to several general, fundamental lessons of social psychology (e.g., the perseverance of lay dispositionism). Study 2 was designed to explore the possibility that participants' own academic interests and worldview could influence the biases explicated in Study 1. The authors assessed perceptions of both criminal-justice majors and non-criminal-justice majors regarding their perceptions of behaviors of self and typical other. The criminal-justice students' self-other obedience estimates were significantly higher than those of the non-criminal-justice students. Further, the self-other discrepancy for criminal-justice students was significantly smaller than the difference reported by non-criminal-justice majors, suggesting that the criminal-justice students demonstrated the self-other bias significantly less than non-criminal-justice students in this context. The findings indicate that specific social-perceptual biases may have been moderated by career interest and worldview.