Preference can be more powerful than detection of oddity as a test of discriminability

Subjects presented with sets of three samples, two of distilled water and one of tap water, were significantly more consistent in choosing the tap water as preferable than they were in identifying it as the odd sample in the set. The result is opposite to the prediction of high-threshold models of sensory discrimination, which say that if a difference is not noticed, preferences will be random, whereas if a difference is noticed, preferences may still be in either direction. The result can be quantitatively explained by a model advanced by Frijters to explain an analogous anomaly found with the triangle test used in the food industry. Applying his model to the observed proportions yields essentially equivalent estimates of sensory difference (d′ = 1.5, approximately) from the two tasks, and a direction of preference almost unanimously in favor of the tap water that was used. Since the model predicts that the proportion of subjects choosing the odd item will depart further from chance in the preference task than in the oddity task, the former has greater power to reject the null hypothesis of no sensory difference if one exists and if preference is overwhelmingly in one direction.     

Preference gives more consistent judgments than oddity only if the task can be modeled as forced choice

Earlier data showed that subjects presented with two samples of distilled water and one of tap water were significantly more consistent in choosing the tap water as preferred than in identifying it as the odd sample in the set. The results were sometimes interpreted as demonstrating greater sensitivity for hedonic judgments than for oddity judgments. They are now shown to be explained by the statistical properties of the decision rules followed in different judgment tasks. In a new expriment, oddity and preference judgments were obtained in a replication of the original task with extra conditions. In two of the new conditions, the decision structure of a preference task was the same as that for the oddity task; in these conditions, performance was no better than with explicit oddity responses. The Thurstone-Ura model of triangle judgments proposed by Frijters predicts the results as an outcome of the greater statistical power of three-alternative forced choice tests compared with triangular tests. An excellent fit to all the data is given by a model wherein all subjects have the samed′ for the difference between the water types but 25% of them prefer distilled water to tap water.     

Visuospatial reaching preferences of common marmosets (Callithrix jacchus): an assessment of individual biases across a variety of tasks

Using multiple measures of hand preference, the authors investigated lateralization at an individual level in 21 common marmosets. Despite showing group biases for sensory and communication functions, these same marmosets did not show a group bias in direction of lateralized hand use. Hand preferences were recorded on four novel reaching tasks requiring different levels of visual guidance and postural control. As found for simple food holding (with the same subjects), they displayed strong individual hand preferences but no group bias indicative of handedness. The strength of hand preference was influenced by task demands: stronger preferences were expressed when subjects adopted a suspended posture, and when "successful" versus "unsuccessful" foraging strategies were compared. Comparisons between visuospatial reaching and simple food holding preferences also revealed that half of the subjects displayed a division of function between the hands/hemispheres; subjects displayed opposing preferences in simple and visuospatial reaching, which would be beneficial for the performance of coordinated bimanual tasks. Given the apparent absence of a selective advantage for handedness, the authors suggest that hand preferences may reflect hemispheric dominance of other cognitive domains (i.e., temperament).     

Preference for oddity: uniqueness heuristic or hierarchical choice process?

Traditional economic theories assume decision makers in multialternative choice tasks "assign" a value to each option and then express rational preferences. Here, I report an apparent violation of such rationality in gray jays (Perisoreus canadensis). I tested the jays' preference in a quaternary choice task where three options were the same color and the fourth option was a different color. All options offered an identical food reward and so the strictly rational expectation was that subjects would choose the odd-colored option in 25% of choices. In clear disagreement, every subject chose the odd option more frequently than expected. I speculate as to how this surprising preference for oddity might have been ecologically rational: by using a unique-choice heuristic, the jays might have been able to bypass a deliberative phase of the decision process and devote more attention to scanning for predators. Alternatively, it is conceivable that the jays did not prefer oddity per se. Instead, they might have used a hierarchical process, assigning options to color categories and then choosing between categories. If so, their behavior matches expectation after all (on average, subjects chose the odd option 50% of the time). It should be straightforward to test these competing hypotheses. The current results can be viewed as a new example of how simple mechanisms sometimes produce economically puzzling yet ecologically rational decision making.     

颜色偏好研究进展

颜色偏好是人在心理上所喜爱或偏好的颜色。人们对抽象颜色、具体物色都会表现出偏好;性格、性别、年龄、文化等因素会影响颜色偏好。以往研究者在研究内容、研究材料、研究条件尚存不足,这正是今后研究的方向。     

Eye‐tracking Social Preferences

We hypothesize that if people are motivated by a particular social preference, then choosing in accordance with this preference will lead to an identifiable pattern of eye movements. We track eye movements while subjects make choices in simple three‐person distribution experiments. We characterize each choice in terms of three different types of social preferences: efficiency, maxi‐min, and envy. For the characterization, we use either the choice data or the eye movement data. The evidence indicates that distributional choices are broadly consistent with the choice rule implied by eye movements. In other words, what subjects appear to be interested in when you look at their choices corresponds to what they appear to be interested in when you look at their eye movements. This correspondence lends credibility to the behavioral relevance of social preferences models. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

PURE TIME PREFERENCE

Pure time preference is a preference for something to come at one point in time rather than another merely because of when it occurs in time. In opposition to Sidgwick, Ramsey, Rawls, and Parfit we argue that it is not always irrational to be guided by pure time preferences. We argue that even if the mere difference of location in time is not a rational ground for a preference, time may nevertheless be a normatively neutral ground for a preference, and this makes it plausible to claim that the preference is rationally permitted.     

Player–Spectator Discrepancies on Risk Preference during Decision Making

Risk preference during decision making depends not only on the potential risk and profits but also on the roles taken in the current task. Those who perform tasks are more risk-seeking than those who only watch. Given the prominent effect of experiencing the task, the player–spectator discrepancies are supposed to arise in the experiencing phase instead of the choosing phase. In the present study, the authors separated the experiencing role and the choosing role through a stylus maze task in which participants first performed in pairs—one as the player and the other as the spectator—and then chose from two rewarding options for themselves or their partners. The findings show that the experience as players induced a risk-seeking tendency in decision making, which suggests that it was the experiencing role, rather than the choosing role, that caused the difference of risk preference, at least for financially motivated groups and under similar task conditions.     

The cutaneous rabbit revisited

In the cutaneous rabbit effect (CRE), a tactile event (so-called attractee tap) is mislocalized toward an adjacent attractor tap. The effect depends on the time interval between the taps. The authors delivered sequences of taps to the forearm and asked participants to report the location of one of the taps. The authors replicated the original CRE findings and observed a smaller but significant mislocalization when the attractor tap preceded the attractee tap. These results are consistent with the CRE arising from spatiotemporal interactions between the sensory codes for each individual tap. In subsequent experiments, the authors showed that the CRE was not affected by either gaze direction or concurrent auditory temporal information. The authors propose a model that explains the CRE by the spatiotemporal dynamics of an early, unimodal, sensory map.     

The role of animacy in European Portuguese relative clause attachment: evidence from production and comprehension tasks

This work presents an analysis of the role of animacy in attachment preferences of relative clauses to complex noun phrases in European Portuguese (EP). The study of how the human parser solves this kind of syntactic ambiguities has been focus of extensive research. However, what is known about EP is both limited and puzzling. Additionally, as recent studies have stressed the importance of extra-syntactic variables in this process, two experiments were carried out to assess EP attachment preferences considering four animacy conditions: Study 1 used a sentence-completion-task, and Study 2 a self-paced reading task. Both studies indicate a significant preference for high attachment in EP. Furthermore, they showed that this preference was modulated by the animacy of the host NP: if the first host was inanimate and the second one was animate, the parser's preference changed to low attachment preference. These findings shed light on previous results regarding EP and strengthen the idea that, even in early stages of processing, the parser seems to be sensitive to extra-syntactic information.     

Action preferences and the anticipation of action outcomes

Skilled performers of time-constrained motor actions acquire information about the action preferences of their opponents in an effort to better anticipate the outcome of that opponent's actions. However, there is reason to doubt that knowledge of an opponent's action preferences would unequivocally influence anticipatory responses in a positive way. It is possible that overt information about an opponent's actions could distract skilled performers from using the advance kinematic information they would usually rely on to anticipate actions, particularly when the opponent performs an ‘unexpected’ action that is not in accordance with his or her previous behaviour. The aim of this study was to examine how the ability to anticipate the outcome of an opponent's actions can be influenced by exposure to the action preferences of that opponent. Two groups of skilled handball goalkeepers anticipated the direction of penalty throws performed by opponents before and after a training intervention that provided situational probability information in the form of action preferences (AP). During the training phase participants in an AP-training group anticipated the action outcomes of two throwers who had a strong preference to throw in one particular direction, whilst participants in a NP-training group viewed players who threw equally to all directions. Exposure to opponents who did have an action preference during the training phase resulted in improved anticipatory performance if the opponent continued to bias their throws towards their preferred direction, but decreased performance if the opponent did not. These findings highlight that skilled observers use information about action preferences to enhance their anticipatory ability, but that doing so can be disadvantageous when the outcomes are no longer consistent with their generated expectations.     

Interactions between conditioned and unconditioned flavor preferences

Five experiments investigated how rats' conditioned preferences or aversions for aqueous odors paired with sucrose or salt are affected by their unconditioned response to those tastes. Rats preferred an odor paired with 30% sucrose over an odor paired with 5% sucrose when both were presented in 5% sucrose, but they showed no preference or, if thirsty, showed the reverse preference, when the odors were presented in 30% sucrose. These changes in conditioned preference corresponded to changes in the rats' unconditioned preference for the accompanying sucrose solution. Rats' conditioned aversions for odors paired with salt showed a similar dependence on their reaction to the accompanying salt solution. The results were interpreted as showing that conditioned and unconditioned flavor preferences combine additively, as if mediated by the same sensory representation.     

Visibility versus accountability in pooling local motion signals into global motion direction

The human observer is surprisingly inaccurate in discriminating proportions between two spatially overlapping sets of randomly distributed elements moving in opposite directions. It was shown that observers took into account an equivalent of 74?% of all moving elements when the task was to estimate their relative number, but only an equivalent of 21?% of the same elements when the task was to discriminate between opposite directions. It was concluded that, in the motion direction discrimination task, a large proportion of the signal from all of the elements was inaccessible to the observers, whereas the majority of the signal was accessible in a numerosity task. This type of perceptual limitation belongs to the attentional blindness category, where a strong sensory signal cannot be noticed when processing is diverted by parallel events. In addition, we found no evidence for the common-fate principle, as the ability to discriminate numerical proportions remained the same, irrespective of whether all estimated elements were moving coherently in one direction or unpredictably in opposite directions.     

Freedom of Preference: A Defense of Compatiblism

Harry G. Frankfurt has presented a case of a counterfactual intervener CI with knowledge and power to control an agent so he will do A. He concludes that if the agent prefers to do A and there is no intervention by CI, the agent has acted of his own free will and is morally responsible for doing A, though he lacked an alternative possibility. I consider the consequences for freedom and moral responsibility of CI having a complete plan P for all actions of an agent, Lucky, who luckily has preferences that accord with P, and I extend the argument to all citizens of a land, Luckyland, who are like Lucky. I argue the citizens of Luckyland have free will but lack moral responsibility because of the connection between moral responsibility, reactive attitudes and future action. Furthermore, the presence of CI and his plan P may allow free will but is incompatible with freedom of preference. Preference concerns alternatives excluded by CI. I argue that a special higher order preference for the preference structure, a power preference, ends the regress of higher order preference and explains the first order preference. Causal determinism is compatible with freedom of preference explained by a power preference when a power preference would also explain an alternative preference. The remoteness argument for incompatibility fails because of a lack of transitivity causal explanation. The power preference is the self-explained source of freedom of preference. That basic freedom may be limited by government knowledge of our preferences, even if, like Lucky, our preferences do not provoke intervention and we conform of our own free will.     

颜色偏好的性别差异研究进展

颜色偏好是人在心理上所喜爱或偏好的颜色,性别是影响颜色偏好的重要因素之一。本文区分一般人群和特殊人群,结合不同的心理发展阶段,评述对抽象颜色和具体物色的偏好的性别差异研究进展,具体比较了打猎者-采摘者理论、视锥-对立对比成分理论、性别图式理论以及生态效价理论等,并且讨论分析了以往研究者在内容和理论解释等方面存在的不足。未来研究者应采用多元化的方法,深入探索颜色偏好性别差异的机制,期望整合得到解释力更强的理论观点。     

跨期决策中的维度差异偏好：眼动证据

在跨期决策研究领域,虽然基于维度的跨期模型得到了一些源自结果检验和过程检验的证据支持,但此类模型所假设的维度间差异比较的心理过程尚缺乏直接的过程证据。本研究通过两个眼动实验,系统考察了相关眼动指标对维度差异偏好的预测效应。结果发现,根据基于维度的权衡模型可有效拟合出个体在跨期决策中的维度差异偏好,并且反应时、眼跳注视熵和静态注视熵等指标均与维度差异偏好负相关,而基于维度的注意分配与维度差异判断正相关。这些研究发现支持了本研究所提出的跨期眼动模型的相关假设,证实了维度差异偏好与跨期决策的认知加工过程之间的联系,为基于维度的跨期模型提供了更直接的过程证据,并为今后跨期决策的眼动模型发展指明了新方向。     

An analysis of behavioral plasticity in male Caenorhabditis elegans.

Caenorhabditis elegans is a simple soil-dwelling nematode which has two sexes, hermaphrodite and male. The male C. elegans is differentiated from the hermaphrodite by the presence of 14 sensory structures in the tail. In this study, we compared the behavioral responses of males and hermaphrodites to head-touch and to tap. We hypothesized that the anatomical difference in sensory structures might result in behavioral differences in the reversal response to vibratory stimulation (a tap to the side of the holding dish). In the response to increasing intensities of tap, both sexes showed an increase in response magnitude, with the males showing larger responses than hermaphrodites. In addition, the male was shown to be capable of simple nonassociative learning: it demonstrated habituation and recovery from habituation in a similar manner as the hermaphrodite. Tail-touch-induced inhibition of the reversal response appeared to be similar in males and hermaphrodites. The evidence suggests that the touch withdrawal circuit in hermaphrodites is also present in the male C. elegans, and that the subtle differences in response to tap seen in males may result from the additional sensory receptors of the copulatory bursa of the tail. It seems clear from these studies that these structures do not play a key role in the male worm's response to tap.     

Interpreting visual preferences in the visual paired-comparison task

Performance on the visual paired-comparison (VPC) task has typically been interpreted with E. Sokolov's (1963) comparator model of the orienting response; novelty preferences are interpreted as evidence of retention, whereas null preferences are interpreted as evidence of forgetting. Here the authors capitalized on the verbal nature of human adults to clarify the interpretation of visual preferences in VPC performance. In 2 experiments, adults were tested on either the VPC task or a forced-choice recognition task after delays of 3 min to 12 months. In Experiment 1, adults tested on the VPC task exhibited novelty preferences after short delays, null preferences after intermediate delays, and familiarity preferences after long delays. In Experiment 2, adults tested on the forced-choice recognition task exhibited high levels of accuracy irrespective of delay, but the latency with which they recognized the stimuli increased systematically over the retention interval. These data are inconsistent with a simple Sokolovian interpretation of VPC performance and instead suggest that memory may be expressed as a novelty preference, null preference, or familiarity preference depending on the accessibility of the representation.     

The effect of “irrelevant” variables on decision making: Criterion shifts in preferential choice?

In decision research, it is widely assumed that decision makers have subjective experiences which indicate definitively, albeit with random fluctuations, whether or not one alternative is preferable to another. Further, it is assumed that subjects' choices reflect this underlying preference order. It follows from this position, as a logical consequence rather than an empirical observation, that if a manipulation affects people's choices, it does so by changing the way people subjectively experience the alternatives (presumably via people's encoding or combination of attribute information). In psychophysics, an analogous theoretical position has been relinquished. Specifically, it is no longer believed that observers in a detection experiment have subjective experiences which indicate definitively, albeit with error, whether a signal has been perceived. Rather, according to signal detection theory, the observer's sensory experience can be portrayed as a quantifiable sensation that must be converted into an overt report of “signal present” or “signal absent” by comparing the sensation with a criterion. In this paper, we describe two models of preferential choice, the lexicographic criterion model and a probabilistic criterion model, that replace the notion of definitive preference with an analogue of signal detection theory. In the models, the decision maker is represented as having quantifiable inclinations, rather than definitive preferences, that must be converted into an overt choice by comparing the inclinations with a criterion. By attributing the effects of experimental manipulations to shifts in the criterion, rather than to changes in people's inclinations, the model offers a testable alternative to the proposition that altered choices imply altered preferences.