The influence of clause order,congruency, and probability on the processing of conditionals

Conditional information can be equally asserted in the forms if p, then q (e.g., “if I am ill, I will miss work tomorrow”) and q, if p (e.g., “I will miss work tomorrow, if I am ill”). While this type of clause order manipulation has previously been found to have no influence on the ultimate conclusions participants draw from conditional rules, we used self-paced reading to examine how it affects the real time incremental processing of everyday conditional statements. Experiment 1 revealed that clause order interacts with presuppositional congruency as readers hypothetically represent counterfactual statements. When if p, then q counterfactuals contained a presupposition that was incongruent with prior context, these statements took longer to read than when the presupposition was congruent, but for q, if p conditionals there was no such congruency effect. Experiment 2 revealed that reading times were influenced by the subjective probability of an indicative conditional regardless of clause order, with a penalty observed for low-probability statements relative to high-probability statements in both conditional clause orders. These data reveal a dissociation whereby clause order mediates the effect of suppositional congruency on reading times, but does not mediate the effect of subjective probability.     

权力概念垂直空间隐喻表征激活的条件

本研究通过三个实验考察权力概念垂直空间隐喻表征激活的条件。实验1发现,在权力判断任务中,具有直接权力关系的相关词对和间接权力关系的无关词对都可以激活隐喻表征。实验2使用相关判断任务,只有相关词对激活了隐喻表征。这说明对词汇进行语义加工并理解权力关系是激活隐喻表征的重要条件。实验3引入水平方向干扰,并将被试的注意转移到干扰信息上,结果仍然出现了隐喻一致性效应,表明垂直空间线索不是隐喻表征激活的必要条件。     

Context influences holistic processing of nonface objects in the composite task

We explored whether holistic-like effects can be observed for nonface objects in novices as a result of the task context. We measured contextually induced congruency effects for novel objects (Greebles) in a sequential matching selective attention task (composite task). When format at study was blocked, congruency effects were observed for study-misaligned, but not study-aligned, conditions (Experiment 1). However, congruency effects were observed in all conditions when study formats were randomized (Experiment 2), revealing that the presence of certain trial types (study-misaligned) in an experiment can induce congruency effects. In a dual task, a congruency effect for Greebles was induced in trials in which a face was first encoded, but only when it was aligned (Experiment 3). Thus, congruency effects can be induced by context that operates at the scale of the entire experiment or within a single trial. Implications for using the composite task to measure holistic processing are discussed.     

Flexible adjustments of visual selectivity in a Flanker task

Congruency effects observed in stimulus-response compatibility paradigms are affected by proportion congruency (PC), that is, the ratio of congruent trials in a block-wise context. The PC effect may reflect the operation of visual selectivity. We used a flanker task to investigate the nature of the relationship between the congruency effect and PC in a given block, as well as the preservation of visual selectivity. In Experiment 1, we observed a linear relationship between the congruency effect and PC across five PC groups in a training session; in post training (with PC constant), the congruency effect was equivalent across the five groups. In Experiment 2, congruency effects varied with PC in phases within a block. These suggest that visual selectivity, acquired in a training session, is not sustained in post training where it rapidly adjusts to a new PC context. Characteristics of visual selectivity derived from these findings are discussed.     

When controversial leaders with charisma are effective: the influence of terror on the need for vision and impact of mixed attitudinal messages

We investigated the idea that a charismatic leader with a controversial message is most likely to persuade people in times of terror, because in those times people have a high need for vision, and vision is what a charismatic leader provides. In addition, we argued that the leader's message should contain a pro‐attitudinal position as well, as this makes the counter‐attitudinal message more palatable. In line with our hypotheses, we found in Experiment 1 that thinking about terrorism increases people's need for vision. Experiment 2 revealed that only when people have a high need for vision they will be influenced by a controversial charismatic leader. Experiment 3 showed that existential threats also directly increase the influence of a controversial charismatic leader. Further, this was especially so when the charismatic leader was both attractive and communicated his message in a charismatic way. Finally, Experiment 4 revealed that after thinking about their own death or about terrorist attacks, people were most likely to be persuaded by a controversial charismatic leader whose counter‐attitudinal message also contained pro‐attitudinal statements. Together, this research suggests that in times of terror people's need for vision increases, which opens them up to a counter‐attitudinal message of a charismatic leader as long as this message also includes some pro‐attitudinal statements. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The interplay of bottom-up and top-down mechanisms in visual guidance during object naming

An ongoing issue in visual cognition concerns the roles played by low- and high-level information in guiding visual attention, with current research remaining inconclusive about the interaction between the two. In this study, we bring fresh evidence into this long-standing debate by investigating visual saliency and contextual congruency during object naming (Experiment 1), a task in which visual processing interacts with language processing. We then compare the results of this experiment to data of a memorization task using the same stimuli (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, we find that both saliency and congruency influence visual and naming responses and interact with linguistic factors. In particular, incongruent objects are fixated later and less often than congruent ones. However, saliency is a significant predictor of object naming, with salient objects being named earlier in a trial. Furthermore, the saliency and congruency of a named object interact with the lexical frequency of the associated word and mediate the time-course of fixations at naming. In Experiment 2, we find a similar overall pattern in the eye-movement responses, but only the congruency of the target is a significant predictor, with incongruent targets fixated less often than congruent targets. Crucially, this finding contrasts with claims in the literature that incongruent objects are more informative than congruent objects by deviating from scene context and hence need a longer processing. Overall, this study suggests that different sources of information are interactively used to guide visual attention on the targets to be named and raises new questions for existing theories of visual attention.     

Effects of Practice upon the Metabolic Cost of Mental Work

Two experiments with isopods, Armadillidium vulgare, were reported. In Experiment I, two groups of five Ss each learned to run a T maze to escape light and heat. Both original learning (OL), and relearning (RL) the next day, were to a criterion 9/10 correct. Between OL and RL one group was immobilized (I), and the other group was given the opportunity for activity (A). The I treatment resulted in greater savings on RL than did the A treatment, and it was thus concluded that A is a retroaction treatment. Experiment II was like I except that all Ss were extinguished immediately following OL, and then given either A or I until RL. In this experiment, the A treatment led to no savings, but the I treatment produced negative savings (more trials on RL relative to OL). It was concluded that the A treatment had retroactively interfered with extinction, and this result was discussed as analogous to differential spontaneous recovery in favor of the A group. It was concluded that Liberman's (4, 5) theory (that spontaneous recovery is due to the forgetting of extinction) is supported by the result of Experiment II.     

Consequences of socially sharing emotions: testing the emotion-response congruency hypothesis

We test the emotion-response congruency hypothesis, which predicts that the consequences of socially sharing one's negative emotions depend on the congruency between the shared emotion and the response that is obtained from the interaction partner. Experiment 1a shows that the response that people prefer is dependent on the specific emotion shared. Experiment 1b, however, reveals that the responses that interaction partners provide do not differ across emotions. Yet, and crucially, Experiment 2 shows that the outcomes of sharing are affected by the congruency between the response that people receive and the emotion they share, thus supporting the emotion-response congruency hypothesis. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Quantum Mechanics and "Song of Myself": Getting a Grip on Reality

Most recent writing linking science and literature has concerned itself with challenges to the epistemological status of scientific knowledge in an attempt to demonstrate its contingency, arguing in the more radical efforts that the structures of science are no more than useful fictions. This essay also includes an epistemological comparison between science and literature, but instead of making grand or meta–statements about the nature of knowing generally in the two fields, mine is a much narrower aim. My exploration entails two tasks. First, I provide a close–up look at a particular type of experiment, called the delayed–choice experiment, which clearly reveals the strangeness of the quantum world. In connection with this experiment, I discuss wave functions—mathematical expressions used by physicists to describe quantum behavior and predict the outcome of experiments involving quanta. Second, I look at Walt Whitman's “Song of Myself” focusing on the meaning of the “self” in the poem. My aim is to treat the object of study in each field as a “text” and to assert and demonstrate a parallel in the strategies of thought and response between physicists (“readers”) pondering the meaning and status of a wave function and poem readers pondering the meaning and status of the poem's self. In Whitman's “Song” we find an attempt to understand complex aspects of human experience that are said to transcend ordinary reality, an effort for which I believe there are parallels in the attempts of modern physicists to understand complex, nonintuitive aspects of the subatomic world. While not making the kind of broad claims eschewed above, I do suggest that this focused study has interesting implications since both the wave function and the poem's self force their respective sets of “readers” to confront questions of ultimacy—to consider, that is, epistemological and ontological issues of more than passing interest to students of science as well as those of metaphysics and theology.     

Target-flanker discriminability affects conflict size but not sustained suppression

On successive trials, repetitions of irrelevant information often tend to reduce congruency effects as compared to alternations of irrelevant information. The preferred explanation for this congruency modulation is the sustained-suppression hypothesis, suggesting that suppression of the irrelevant information on a given trial perseveres into the subsequent trial. However, in contrast to the generality of this idea, this modulation is only stable when the irrelevant information contains spatial features, which coincided in the existing research with large conflict sizes and response conflicts. In two arrow flanker experiments, we investigated whether the congruency modulation depends on the size of the conflict, by manipulating the saliency of the target (Experiment 1) and the flankers (Experiment 2). Although these manipulations affected the size of the conflict caused by the flankers, neither experiment showed an influence of conflict size on the reduction of the congruency effect for repetitions as compared to alternation of the irrelevant flankers. We conclude that sustained-suppression is not a consequence of large conflicts, at least if sustained-suppression causes the congruency modulation.     

Risk taking as motivation for volunteering for a hazardous experiment

Army male enlisted personnel were tested in two experiments to assess the psychological correlates of volunteering for a hazardous combat simulation, (Experiment 1) and a riskless, psychological experiment (Experiment 2). Subjects were given a biographical and personal habit questionnaire, the IPAT Anxiety Scale, Rotter's Locus of Control Scale, and Torrance and Ziller's life experience inventory. Results from Experiment 1 indicated that volunteers were significantly less anxious, and more willing to take risks than were nonvolunteers. Noncommissioned officers, smokers, laterborn children, and children of lower socioeconomic class parents were significantly overrepresented among the volunteers for this hazardous experiment. In Experiment 2, which solicited volunteers for a routine, nonhazardous experiment, the only variable to discriminate the volunteers from the nonvolunteers was mothers' education level. Results are in agreement with findings, using college students, that volunteer samples differ significantly from nonvolunteer samples, and that the characteristics that discriminate these two groups vary as a function of situational factors.     

The effect ofsome andall on reaction time for semantic decisions

Two experiments tested a model proposed by Meyer (1970) to account for the times required to verify semantic-memory statements quantified byall orsome. Each S was presented with bothall andsome statements in a mixed list, and the discriminability of false statements of the two quantifier types was controlled. In Experiment I positive subset statements ("horses are animals") were verified more quickly when quantified byall rather thansome; the reverse ordering occurred for negative subset statements ("horses are not animals"). Sentences with pseudowords in subject or predicate position took longer to reject than false real-word sentences. These findings contradict :Meyer's theoretical predictions and suggest that his earlier results were artifactual. Experiment II replicated the faster verification of positive subset statements quantified byall. This result was further shown to be predictable from the frequency with which Ss gave the predicate as a completion ofAll/Some S are _. The production frequency of predicates which form subset statements was lower when the quantifier wassome rather thanall. However, holding predicate production frequency constant, sentences with different quantifiers were verified equally quickly.     

Perceiving Whether or Not the World Affords Stepping Onto and Over: A Developmental Study

Abstract

Children's perception of the critical (upper) limit of their stepping affordances, was tested at 6, 8, and 10 years of age for stepping onto (SON_max in Experiment I) and over (SOV_max in Experiment II) obstacles. Warren's (1984) proposition (similarity hypothesis) that adults perceive SON_max to be .88 of leg length (L) because the geometry of adults' legs is invariant over varying height was extended to varying height due to growth. Because the geometry of children's legs is both invariant over growth between 6 and 10 years and identical to adults, we predicted that children should both accurately perceive their critical limit and perceive it to be .88L. Experiment I confirmed these predictions and Experiment II demonstrated that children differentiate between the two stepping affordances. The similarity hypothesis is further supported by the fact that age does not interact with either observers' mean accuracy over conditions or variability within observers. This stable performance is interpreted to mean that children are continually adapted to these affordances and not continually retuning them in response to growth. The need for “action” studies to complement “perception” studies of affordances is discussed in terms of the possibility that the biodynamic effects of growth variations, such as the distribution of body mass, may affect perception only or principally when perception and action are dynamically linked in goal-directed behavior.     

Frege's Puzzle is About Identity After All

Many philosophers have argued or taken for granted that Frege's puzzle has little or nothing to do with identity statements. I show that this is wrong, arguing that the puzzle can only be motivated relative to a thinker's beliefs about the identity or distinctness of the relevant object. The result is important, as it suggests that the puzzle can be solved, not by a semantic theory of names or referring expressions as such, but simply by a theory of identity statements. To show this, I sketch a framework for developing solutions of this sort. I also consider how this result could be implemented by two influential solutions to Frege's puzzle, Perry's referential‐reflexivism and Fine's semantic relationism.     

Co-speech iconic gestures and visuo-spatial working memory

Three experiments tested the role of verbal versus visuo-spatial working memory in the comprehension of co-speech iconic gestures. In Experiment 1, participants viewed congruent discourse primes in which the speaker's gestures matched the information conveyed by his speech, and incongruent ones in which the semantic content of the speaker's gestures diverged from that in his speech. Discourse primes were followed by picture probes that participants judged as being either related or unrelated to the preceding clip. Performance on this picture probe classification task was faster and more accurate after congruent than incongruent discourse primes. The effect of discourse congruency on response times was linearly related to measures of visuo-spatial, but not verbal, working memory capacity, as participants with greater visuo-spatial WM capacity benefited more from congruent gestures. In Experiments 2 and 3, participants performed the same picture probe classification task under conditions of high and low loads on concurrent visuo-spatial (Experiment 2) and verbal (Experiment 3) memory tasks. Effects of discourse congruency and verbal WM load were additive, while effects of discourse congruency and visuo-spatial WM load were interactive. Results suggest that congruent co-speech gestures facilitate multi-modal language comprehension, and indicate an important role for visuo-spatial WM in these speech–gesture integration processes.     

Congruency sequence effect without feature integration and contingency learning

The magnitude of congruency effects, such as the flanker-compatibility effects, has been found to vary as a function of the congruency of the previous trial. Some studies have suggested that this congruency sequence effect is attributable to stimulus and/or response priming, and/or contingency learning, whereas other studies have suggested that the control process triggered by conflict modulates the congruency effect. The present study examined whether sequential modulation can occur without stimulus and response repetitions and contingency learning. Participants were asked to perform two color flanker-compatibility tasks alternately in a trial-by-trial manner, with four fingers of one hand in Experiment 1 and with the index and middle fingers of two hands in Experiment 2, to avoid stimulus and response repetitions and contingency learning. A significant congruency sequence effect was obtained between the congruencies of the two tasks in Experiment 1 but not in Experiment 2. These results provide evidence for the idea that the sequential modulation is, at least in part, an outcome of the top-down control process triggered by conflict, which is specific to response mode.     

The effect of noun animacy on the processing of unambiguous sentences: Evidence from French relative clauses

It has previously been shown that moving images are remembered better than static ones. In two experiments, we investigated the basis for this dynamic superiority effect. Participants studied scenes presented as a single static image, a sequence of still images, or a moving video clip, and 3 days later completed a recognition test in which familiar and novel scenes were presented in all three formats. We found a marked congruency effect: For a given study format, accuracy was highest when test items were shown in the same format. Neither the dynamic superiority effect nor the study–test congruency effect was affected by encoding (Experiment 1) or retrieval (Experiment 2) manipulations, suggesting that these effects are relatively impervious to strategic control. The results demonstrate that the spatio-temporal properties of complex, realistic scenes are preserved in long-term memory.     

Aggression in dyadic interaction

It is shown that the notions of aggressive behavior as ‘intentional emission of noxious stimulation’ (Buss, 1961, 1963, 1966, 1971) and that of ‘injuriating goal response’ (Dollard, Doob, Miller, Mower and Sears, 1939) are identical. The usefulness of these theories to predict S's reaction to the reception of a given noxious stimulation is questioned. It is suggested that S's reactions to noxious stimulation may or may not be aggressive, depending on whether the noxious stimulation S receives is interpreted as being a behavior justified by the nom in the situation, or as reflecting an aggressive intent of O. It is hypothesized that the norms established in the situation depend on (i) victim's perception of the noxious stimulation received as being instrumental for O's goal attainment, (ii) victim's perception of the value of O's goal, and (iii) the value of victim's own goal. The establishment of norms regulating the exchange of noxious stimulation between Ss is operationalized in two experiments. Aggression, defined as an infringement of these norms, is measured. In Experiment I, participate 56 female students, and in Experiment 2, 80 male students. Subject is alternately victim (he performs a sensorimotor task and receives an electric shock) and aggressor (he shocks the other S). In Experiment I it is found that Ss counteraggress faster and more frequently if they interpret the shock received from the partner as an infringement of the norm. In Experiment 2, Ss do not counteraggress more frequently, but they do counteraggress faster and evaluate O more negatively. It is concluded that the results clearly contradict current positions and favor the authors' cognitive reformulation of the determinants of aggressive behavior.     

Interlinguistic conflict: Word–word Stroop with first and second language colour words

The congruency (or Stroop) effect is a standard observation of slower and less accurate colour identification to incongruent trials (e.g. “red” in green) relative to congruent trials (e.g. “red” in red). This effect has been observed in a word–word variant of the task, when both the distracter (e.g. “red”) and target (e.g. “green”) are colour words. The Stroop task has also been used to study the congruency effect between two languages in bilinguals. The typical finding is that the congruency effect for L1 words is larger than that for L2 words. For the first time, the present report aims to extend this finding to a word–word variant of the bilingual Stroop task. In two experiments, French monolinguals performed a bilingual word–word Stroop task in which target word language, language match, and congruency between the distracter and target were manipulated. The critical manipulation across two experiments concerned the target language. In Experiment 1, target language was manipulated between groups, with either French (L1) or English (L2) target colour words. In Experiment 2, target words from both languages were intermixed. In both experiments, the congruency effect was larger when the distracter and target were from the same language (language match) than when they were from different languages (language mismatch). Our findings suggested that this congruency effect mostly depends on the language match between the distracter and target, rather than on a target language. It also did not seem to matter whether the language-mismatching distracter was or was not a potential response alternative. Semantic activation of languages in bilinguals and its implications on target identification are discussed.