Is there an internal association of numbers to hands? The task set influences the nature of the SNARC effect

The SNARC effect refers to the association of smaller numbers with the left and of larger numbers with the right side of extracorporal space (Dehaene, Bossini, & Giraux, 1993). We tested the assumption that, in addition to these associations, numbers are also related to participants' hands. We report two experiments with vertically arranged buttons in which the nature of the SNARC effect depended on whether the task set was button or hand related: In the first case, a vertical location-related SNARC effect occurred, whereas in the second a hand-related SNARC effect was found. Our third experiment confirmed that space-related number representations dominate the SNARC effect when the buttons are arranged horizontally. We concluded that both effector- and space-related number representations can influence and modify the SNARC effect.     

Is there a magnitude effect in tipping?

The present study examined nearly 1,000 tips recorded for two taxicabs, two hair salons, and two restaurants. In each of the six cases, amount of tip increased linearly as a function of the amount of the bill. Contrary to standard microeconomic theory, there was a magnitude effect in that as the amount of the bill increased, the percent tip tended to decrease. The present results extend the findings of Chapman and Winquist (1998), obtained using hypothetical scenarios, to real-world tipping behavior. Chapman and Winquist argued that a magnitude effect in tipping reflects the shape of the utility function for money. We suggest, however, that the magnitude effect may be the mathematical consequence of replotting the fundamental relationship between tip and bill amounts in terms of percent tip, given that the observed linear relation between tip and bill amounts has a positive intercept. We suggest further that the positive intercept arises because a tip represents a judgment as to what constitutes a fair or equitable wage, and part of what constitutes a fair wage is independent of the amount of the bill, reflecting compensation for simply being there when needed. The present account implies that different explanations may be needed for magnitude effects observed in different domains.     

Is there an effect of handedness on the position of the egocentric reference?

Forty normal subjects (20 left-handed; 20 right-handed) were submitted to a proprioceptive straight ahead pointing task while blindfolded to study the effect of the hand used and of the hand preference on the estimation of the subjective sagittal middle. Results showed that left-handed and right-handed subjects both deviated to the left of the objective sagittal middle and presented an effect of the hand used and of the starting point affecting their straight ahead performance in a similar way. In all subjects whatever their manual preference, using the left hand and starting 30 degrees to left induced a tendency to deviate to the same side, whereas using the right hand and starting 30 degrees to right induced a tendency to place the subjective middle to the right of the objective middle. These results are interpreted with regard to the hypothesis of a cortical control of the position of the egocentric reference.     

Is the picture bizarreness effect a generation effect?

Bizarre stimuli usually facilitate recall compared to common stimuli. This investigation explored the so-called bizarreness effect in free recall by using 80 simple line drawings of common objects (common vs bizarre). 64 subjects participated with 16 subjects in each group. Half of the subjects received learning instructions and the other half rated the bizarreness of each drawing. Moreover, drawings were presented either alone or with the name of the object under mixed-list encoding conditions. After the free recall task, subjects had to make metamemory judgments about how many items of each format they had seen and recalled. The key result was that a superiority of bizarre pictures over common ones was found in all conditions although performance was better when the pictures were presented alone than with their corresponding label. Subsequent metamemory judgments, however, showed that subjects underestimated the number of bizarre items actually recalled.     

Group vs individual equity judgments: Is there a polarization effect?

Two-hundred male undergraduates, individually and in groups of five, divided a fixed reward between two performers with unequal inputs under conditions in which they either expected or did not expect future interaction with recipients. Individuals who anticipated future interaction with recipients divided the reward equally, while groups divided the reward equitably. When interaction was not expected, individuals divided the reward equitably by discriminating between recipients, while groups made more extreme discriminations (the group polarization effect). Experiencing group discussions made individuals more confident in the fairness of their subsequent allocations. The results are discussed in terms of the social and informational influences of groups on allocation decisions.     

Working memory in multilingual children: Is there a bilingual effect?

This research investigates whether early childhood bilingualism affects working memory performance in 6- to 8-year-olds, followed over a longitudinal period of 3 years. The study tests the hypothesis that bilinguals might exhibit more efficient working memory abilities than monolinguals, potentially via the opportunity a bilingual environment provides to train cognitive control by combating interference and intrusions from the non-target language. A total of 44 bilingual and monolingual children, matched on age, sex, and socioeconomic status, completed assessments of working memory (simple span and complex span tasks), fluid intelligence, and language (vocabulary and syntax). The data showed that the monolinguals performed significantly better on the language measures across the years, whereas no language group effect emerged on the working memory and fluid intelligence tasks after verbal abilities were considered. The study suggests that the need to manage several language systems in the bilingual mind has an impact on children's language skills while having little effects on the development of working memory.     

Is the allure of self-esteem a mirage after all?

Comments on the original article "Do people's self-views matter? Self-concept and self-esteem in everyday life," by W. B. Swann, Jr., C. Chang-Schneider, and K. L. McClarty. Swann et al argued that people's self-views, and their global self-esteem in particular, yield a suite of behavioral effects that are beneficial to the individual and to society at large. The Swann et al article is the latest link in a debate on the causal utility of self-esteem. Specifically, the article is a reply to a report published by the American Psychological Society Task Force on Self-Esteem (Baumeister, Campbell, Krueger, & Vohs, 2003). As members of that task force, the current authors wish to express their broad agreement with Swann et al. At the same time, in the comment presented here, they clarify pockets of disagreement.     

Is there a profession of engineering?

This article examines three common arguments for the claim that engineering is not a profession: 1) that engineering lacks an ideal internal to its practice; 2) that engineering’s ideal, whether internal or not, is merely technical; and 3) that engineering lacks the social arrangements characteristic of a true profession. All three arguments are shown to rely on one or another definition of profession, each of which is inadequate. An alternative to these definition is offered. It has at least two advantages. On the one hand, it emphasizes the importance of professional community, the role of occupation in defining profession, the centrality of a moral ideal, and the necessity for morally binding standards (beyond ordinary morality). On the other hand, the alternative definition is in part independent both of moral theory and sociology. This article concludes by considering what light the alternative definition can throw on the professional status of engineers serving the Nazis.     

Is there a logic of incoherence?

What should we do when we discover that our assessment of probabilities is incoherent? I explore the hypothesis that there is a logic of incoherence—a set of universally valid rules that specify how incoherent probability assessments are to be repaired. I examine a pair of candidate‐rules of incoherence logic that have been employed in philosophical reconstructions of scientific arguments. Despite their intuitive plausibility, both rules turn out to be invalid. There are presently no viable candidate‐rules for an incoherence logic on the table. Other ways of dealing with incoherence are surveyed, and found either to be unsatisfactory or to rely on a logic of incoherence in the end. The resolution of these antagonistic conclusions is left to future researchers.     

Is there life after enactment? The idea of a patient's proper work

All talking therapies profit from a patient's deliberate work in treatment, for a number of reasons, each of which deserves separate study and reflection. This is as true for psychoanalysis as for other psychotherapies. But in psychoanalysis the idea of a patient's deliberate work is paradoxical and problematic, bringing special overt and covert benefits, but also risking countertransference hazards like those associated with the notion of therapeutic alliance. Many analysts today use the implicit idea of a patient's proper, deliberate work as a contrast in defining an enactment, and the idea of this proper work serves both parties as an image of aspiration when they are trying to climb out of an enactment. As always in these matters, that sort of usefulness carries the hazard of unrealistic and unpsychoanalytic expectations.     

Is there a spillover effect of a right turn on red permission for bicyclists?

A number of countries allow bicyclists to perform a right turn on red (RTOR) at some specific intersections to promote cycling by reducing the required physical effort and trip time. Implementation of a rule that allows a RTOR for bicyclists at some intersections could lead not only to local effects at those intersections where the rule actually applies, but also to supralocal effects. Using an experimental survey approach, this study explores whether a so-called ‘spillover effect’ of the rule can be expected. This effect would imply that allowing bicyclists to turn right on red at some intersections causes them to also turn right on red more often at intersections where RTOR for bicyclists is not allowed.The answers from 768 respondents indicate that respondents with a high awareness of the existence of a RTOR rule for bicyclists (experimental group) turn right on red significantly more often at intersections where RTOR for bicyclists is not permitted than respondents with a low awareness of the rule (control group). This indicates that implementation of the RTOR rule for bicyclists can indeed lead to an increase in red light running at other intersections. This might lead to safety issues at intersections where RTOR for bicyclists is not permitted, since road authorities could have decided not to allow RTOR for bicyclists at these intersections for safety reasons.The study also finds that men, young people and people who generally perform more risky cycling behaviours have a higher tendency to perform non-permitted RTOR. These findings are in line with existing literature.     

Is there a nonverbal period of development?

That the infant lives in a nonverbal sensorimotor world is widely believed. Yet this notion is being challenged by research, in a range of fields, that depicts the young infant as actively attuned to aural speech from birth and able to process and use its sounds and meanings well before the end of the first year. Following a selective review of the research on infant speech processing between birth and age twelve months, three questions are identified that highlight the theoretical and clinical implications of this research for psychoanalytic conceptualizations of infancy, the nature of language, and clinical process. The research, it is concluded, identifies the operation of linguistic and conceptual processes in early life, processes that may intersect with the experiential and emotional processes with which psychoanalysis is already concerned. Moreover, this research raises questions about the view that the nature of infancy is essentially nonverbal.     

Is there really an omission effect?

The omission effect, first described by Spranca and colleagues (Spranca, Minsk, & Baron, 1991), has since been extensively studied and repeatedly confirmed (Cushman, Murray, Gordon-McKeon, Wharton, & Greene, 2012). All else being equal, most people judge it to be morally worse to actively bring about a negative event than to passively allow that event to happen. In this paper, we provide new experimental data that challenges previous studies of the omission effect both methodologically and philosophically. We argue that previous studies have failed to control for the equivalence of rules that are violated by actions and omissions. Once equivalent norms are introduced, our results show that the omission effect is eliminated, even if the negative outcome of the behavior is foreseen and intended by the agent. We show that the omission effect does not constitute a basic, moral disposition but occurs exclusively in complex moral situations. Building on these empirical results, we cast doubt onto two influential explanations of the omission effect, the Causal Relevance Hypothesis and the Overgeneralization Hypothesis, and provide a novel explanation of the phenomenon. Furthermore, we discuss various ramifications of the interplay between our understanding of omissions and legal systems.     

Semantic interference in the picture-word interference task: Is there a pre-lexical,conceptual contribution to the effect?

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - Picture naming takes longer in the presence of a semantic-categorically related distractor word compared to an unrelated distractor word. This semantic...     

Is inhibition of return a reflexive effect?

The inhibition of return (IOR) phenomenon is routinely considered an effect of reflexive attention because the paradigm used to generate IOR employs peripheral cues that are uninformative as to where a target will appear. Because the cues are spatially unreliable it is thought that there is no reason for attention to be committed volitionally to them, and hence, the IOR effect is considered reflexive. What has been generally overlooked, however, is that the cues provide reliable temporal information as to when a target will occur. This predictive information is used by participants to prepare volitionally for when a target is likely to appear. We investigated whether the IOR effect is a product of the volitional application of attention to peripheral cues for the use of their temporal information. To test this idea we rendered the temporal information provided by peripheral cues unreliable. While this eliminated participants using the cues volitionally, it did not abolish the IOR phenomenon. These data demonstrate two new findings. First, the IOR effect is fundamentally a reflexive phenomenon. Second, when peripheral cues are not used volitionally, the IOR effect is attenuated. Together, the present findings indicate that the IOR effect can be modulated by volitional (top-down) processes but it is not the product of them. We argue that an intimate link between fronto-parietal regions and the superior colliculus provide a functional neural mechanism for this volitional effect to impact IOR.     

Is there a position bias in the learning of influence structures?

An experiment was conducted to determine the nature of position biases in the cognitive representation of hierarchical social structures. A position in such a structure reflects the relative influence of its occupants. Using DeSoto's technique, 24 Dutch and 24 French Ss learned either a completely ordered or incompletely ordered structure. No significant differences were found between countries. The completely ordered structure was found easier to learn than the incomplete ones. According to the results of previous studies (Van Kreveld and Zajonc, 1966; Poitou, 1970) the learning curves for completely and incompletely ordered structures were expected to be respectively curvilinear and monotonic. The results did not support this expectation.     

Is spoken duration a sufficient explanation of the word length effect?

The word length effect is one of the cornerstones of trace decay plus rehearsal models (TDR) of memory. Words of long spoken duration take longer to rehearse than words of short spoken duration and as such suffer more decay and are thus less well recalled. The current experiment manipulates both syllable length and spoken duration within words of fixed syllable length in an aim to test the assumptions of the TDR model. Our procedures produced robust effects of both syllable length and spoken duration in four measures of the time it takes to pronounce the different types of words. Serial recall for the same materials produced robust syllable effects, but no duration effects.     

Is there a dilemma for the truthmaker non-maximalist?

Mark Jago has presented a dilemma for truthmaker non-maximalism—the thesis that some but not all truths require truthmakers. The dilemma arises because some truths that do not require truthmakers by the non-maximalist’s lights (e.g., that Santa Claus does not exist) are necessitated by truths that do (e.g., that Barack Obama knows that Santa Claus does not exist). According to Jago, the non-maximalist can supply a truthmaker for such a truth only by conceding the primary motivation for the view: that it allows one to avoid positing strange ‘negative’ entities without adopting a non-standard account of the necessary features of ordinary things. In this paper, I sketch out and defend two plausible non-maximalist proposals that evade Jago’s dilemma.