Incremental Contribution in Step-Level Public Goods Games with Asymmetric Players

We consider public good games with asymmetric players in which players are assigned different endowments and must then decide privately how much to contribute to the group′s benefit. Each member receives a fixed reward-regardless of the magnitude of his/her contribution-if the sum of contributions is equal to or larger than an exogenously determined provision threshold and zero otherwise. The results show that (1) heterogeneous groups are less successful in providing public goods than homogeneous groups; (2) group members contribute the same proportion of their endowment regardless of its magnitude; (3) the distribution of endowments and the provision threshold interact; and (4) some subjects adhere to an equity principle, others maximize expected utility, and yet others do not subscribe to either of these two models.     

The Role of Subsidies in Coordination Games with Interconnected Risk

Can subsidies promote Pareto‐optimum coordination? We found that partially subsidizing the cooperative actions for two out of six players in a laboratory coordination game usually produced better coordination and higher total social welfare with both deterministic and stochastic payoffs. Not only were the subsidized players more likely to cooperate (choose the Pareto‐optimum action), but the unsubsidized players increased their expectations on how likely others would cooperate, and they cooperated more frequently themselves. After removal of the subsidy, high levels of coordination continued in most groups with stochastic payoffs but declined in deterministic ones. This carry‐over disparity between the deterministic and stochastic settings was consistent with the economic theories that agents were more likely to keep the status quo option under uncertainty than without uncertainty. Hence, players with stochastic payoffs were more likely to keep the high coordination level (status quo) brought by the subsidy in the previous subsidy session. A post‐game survey also indicated that with stochastic payoffs, players focused on risk reduction. Temporary subsidies promoted lasting coordination because even after subsidy was removed, players still assumed that others players would prefer reduced risks from cooperation. With deterministic payoffs, however, the subsidy might crowd out other rationales for coordination, with many players indicating that the subsidy was the only reason for anyone to cooperate. Hence, the coordination level dropped when the subsidy was removed. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Aspiration-Based and Reciprocity-Based Rules in Learning Dynamics for Symmetric Normal-Form Games

Psychologically based rules are important in human behavior and have the potential of explaining equilibrium selection and separatrix crossings to a payoff dominant equilibrium in coordination games. We show how a rule learning theory can easily accommodate behavioral rules such as aspiration-based experimentation and reciprocity-based cooperation and how to test for the significance of additional rules. We confront this enhanced rule learning model with experimental data on games with multiple equilibria and separatrix-crossing behavior. Maximum likelihood results do not support aspiration-based experimentation or anticipated reciprocity as significant explanatory factors, but do support a small propensity for non-aspiration-based experimentation by random belief and non-reciprocity-based cooperation.     

Determining Factors in Choice of Arcade Games and their Consequences upon Young Male Players

Two experiments, one conducted with male university students and the other with male high school and junior high school students, investigated (a) determinants of preferences for driving-type games widely available in public game arcades, and (b) the effects of extended play upon mood and motivation to continue playing. Four games were investigated: these were Death Race and Demolition Derby , which simulate violent, antisocial driving behavior; and Night Driver and Le Mans , which simulate skilled prosocial driving behavior. Preference for arcade games simulating aggressive behavior was found to be independent of personality and mood. However, preferences were closely related to the performers' c]apabilities. Players who exhibited higher levels of skill preferred the more skilldemanding games and those who showed less skill preferred aggression games, suggesting the operation of competency motivation in that the players preferred games appropriate to their level of skill. Subjects reported that the games were exciting, but extended play produced discomfort or an increase in negatively toned moods (fatigue, anxiety, and depression) and a decrease in positively toned moods (social affection, surgency, skepticism, concentration and vigor). However, these effects were not found to be a function of the anti- or prosocial content in the specific games studied and may well be effects accompanying activities that are subjectively fatiguing.     

暴力游戏中射杀动作和血腥成分对玩家和观看者攻击倾向的影响

通过实验考察游戏中的射杀动作成分和血腥成分对玩家和观看者攻击性行为和攻击性认知的影响。被试为72名男性大学生, 选用第三人称45度角的射击类游戏, 将游戏中的射杀动作成分和血腥成分进行分离, 采用竞争反应时任务范式考察攻击性行为, 采用EAST内隐认知范式考察内隐攻击性认知, 结果表明: (1) 玩家比观看者表现出更强的攻击性, 玩家表现出的攻击性行为和攻击性认知均显著强于观看者; (2) 视频游戏中的射杀动作成分导致观看者有更高的游戏卷入, 血腥成分对被试的攻击性影响强于射杀动作成分, 并使被试倾向于将攻击性进行他人归因。     

Preferences for Individual Video Games as a Function of Their Emotional Effects on Players

Video games vary in terms of the emotional states they elicit from players. These differences in emotional reactions, in turn, help account for differential preferences of individual games. The three independent dimensions of pleasure-displeasure, arousal-nonarousal, and dominance-submissiveness were used to assess emotional impacts of individual games. In addition, a preference measure was constructed to evaluate attraction toward, versus avoidance of, specific games. In Study One, a group of subjects provided data on emotional responses to 22 common arcade video games and a different group rated their preferences for the same games. The emotional impact of video games was highly unpleasant, moderately arousing, and moderately dominance-inducing; thus, the predominant emotional response to these games was aggression, anger, or hostility. I n Study Two, subjects visiting a video game arcade were recruited and assigned to play two games each and to report their reactions to each game immediately after playing the game. Results showed that greater feelings of pleasure, and separately of arousal, while playing video games resulted in higher preferences for the games and that greater dominance (significant only for males) also led to higher preferences. It may be beneficial, therefore, to experiment with more arousing and more dominance-inducing game designs which are not necessarily unpleasant or which definitely yield high pleasure.     

Representativeness in the Market for Bets on National Football League Games

In laboratory experiments the representativeness heuristic has been shown to affect participants' judgments. Finding representativeness in a real-world economic market would indicate that even decision makers who are highly experienced and motivated use the heuristic, and would, in addition, violate the efficient market hypotheses, i.e. the theory that market prices fully reflect all available information. Testing for representativeness in the market for bets on National Football Leagues games avoids complications that make tests of representativeness in a stock market difficult to interpret. Evidence for representativeness in the NFL betting market is found in a data set from an earlier study which failed to test for representativeness, and in the 1976– 9 market. Representativeness does not appear to exist in the contemporary market, however, perhaps because with the advent of the personal computer the market depends less on purely human judgment.     

Games with Zero-knowledge Signaling

We observe that in certain two-player repeated games of incomplete information, where information may be incomplete on both sides, it is possible for an informed player to signal his status as an informed player to the other without revealing any information about the choice of chance. The key to obtaining such a class of games is to relax the assumption that the players’ moves are observable. We show that in such cases players can achieve a kind of signaling that is “zero-knowledge”, in the sense that the other player becomes convinced that her opponent is informed without ever learning the choice of chance. Moreover, such “zero-knowledge signaling” has all of the statistical properties associated with zero-knowledge proofs in intereactive protocols. In particular, under the general assumption that moves are unobservable, such signaling leads to a class of equilibria in repeated games that are separatingin regard to the status of player 1–informed or uninformed–but only for player 2; any other player in a network, being unable to observe the moves of player 2, remains uncertain as to the status of player 1. Special Issue Formal Epistemology II. Edited by Branden Fitelson     

Self-Control in Professional Soccer Players

This study aimed to investigate the concept of self-control in association with engagement in daily activities of professional soccer players and its relationship with soccer performance. Findings indicated that self-control scores of male professional soccer players (N = 639), representing the first squad of every club playing in the (Norwegian) Premier and Second League, were associated with their lifestyle and practice time. A small, positive relationship between self-control and soccer performance was found. In terms of expert performance, a possible explanation of our findings is that self-control helps individuals stay on track on their pathways to excellence.     

Symmetric Contingency Logic with Unlimitedly Many Modalities

Journal of Philosophical Logic - The completeness of the axiomatization of contingency logic over symmetric frames has been thought of as a nontrivial job, the unimodal case of which cannot be...     

Music Sight-Reading Skill in Flute Players

This article reports an investigation of factors related to music sight-reading skill. Flute players (N = 30) performed six tasks: (a) sight-reading standard music, (b) sight-reading random music, (c) recall of music notation, (d) recall of letters, (e) eye-performance span, and (f) choice reaction time for playing individual notes. Sight-reading ability was significantly correlated with eye-performance span (.85), and music recall (.80), but not with letter recall (-.39), thus replicating results of previous work with pianists. Sight-reading skill was correlated with choice reaction time to notes (- .54), and there was a significant partial correlation between sight-reading skill and eye-performance span, with music-reading ability controlled. These results are consistent with the idea that increased skill involves both the speed-up of individual processing stages, and an increase in the degree to which these stages operate in parallel.     

Learning Continuous Probability Distributions with Symmetric Diffusion Networks

In this article we present symmetric diffusion networks, a family of networks that instantiate the principles of continuous, stochastic, adaptive and interactive propagation of information. Using methods of Markovion diffusion theory, we formalize the activation dynamics of these networks and then show that they can be trained to reproduce entire multivariate probability distributions on their outputs using the contrastive Hebbion learning rule (CHL). We show that CHL performs gradient descent on an error function that captures differences between desired and obtained continuous multivariate probability distributions. This allows the learning algorithm to go beyond expected values of output units and to approximate complete probability distributions on continuous multivariate activation spaces. We argue that learning continuous distributions is an important task underlying a variety of real-life situations that were beyond the scope of previous connectionist networks. Deterministic networks, like back propagation, cannot learn this task because they are limited to learning average values of independent output units. Previous stochastic connectionist networks could learn probability distributions but they were limited to discrete variables. Simulations show that symmetric diffusion networks can be trained with the CHL rule to approximate discrete and continuous probability distributions of various types.     

Multisensory integration in children with Developmental Coordination Disorder

This study examines how multisensory stimuli affect the performance of children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) on a choice reaction time (CRT) task. Ten children with DCD, identified using the Movement Assessment Battery for Children-2, aged 7–10 years (4F, M = 8 y 3 m, SD = 17 m) and 10 typically developing peers (TDC) (5F, M = 8 y 4 m, SD = 17 m) reached to unimodal (auditory (AO), visual (VO)) and bimodal (audiovisual (AV)) stimuli at one of three target locations. A multisensory (AV) stimulus reduced RTs for both groups (p < 0.001, η² = 0.36). While the children with DCD had a longer RT in all conditions, the AV stimulus produced RTs in children with DCD (494 ms) that were equivalent to those produced by the TDC to the VO stimulus (493 ms). Movement Time (DCD = 486 ms; TDC = 434 ms) and Path Length (DCD = 25.6 cm; TDC = 24.2 cm) were longer in children with DCD compared to TDC as expected (p < 0.05). Only the TDC benefited from the AV information for movement control, as deceleration time of the dominant hand was seen to decrease when moving to an AV stimulus (p < 0.05). Overall, data shows children with DCD do benefit from a bimodal stimulus to plan their movement, but do not for movement control. Further research is required to understand if this is a result of impaired multisensory integration.     

Ethical Challenges of Personal Disclosure in Gaining Entry with Religious Congregations

This is a story about learning how to navigate my social identities as a non‐religious gay man attempting to conduct data‐based consultation with a religious congregation. Beyond my own growth in knowing myself better, this story speaks to the larger ethical challenge of how we build trust in community relationships, and in particular how much of our personal selves we need to disclose in the process of an individual or group deciding to work with us. Individuals and groups make decisions to work with us based on who they perceive us to be; thus, what is our ethical obligation to disclose aspects of who we are to promote full informed consent? To illustrate this ethical challenge of personal disclosure, I tell the story of discussions I had with three different religious leaders and a congregational committee about potentially working together. Throughout these stories, I reflect on my own messy process of growth as a window into the more general question of how we navigate our identities and values as community psychologists in the work we do with communities.     

Games fathers and mothers play with their infants

Both fathers and mothers successfully engaged their infants one to six months of age in interactive games in a laboratory play situation. Both parents played almost one game per minute with their infants. Mother played more conventional limb movement games and more distal, visual, attention maintaining games while fathers played more proximal, arousing, idiosyncratic limb movement games with their infants. Interactive games with parents even during the first six months of infancy provide differential experiences for the infant. These games may have developmental significance in selectively facilitating the acquisition of social and cognitive skills.     

Coordination process in counting

Counting is an important activity because it gives rise to a whole range of arithmetic activities. Counting objects requires subjects to point at each object and to say the corresponding number‐word. Furthermore, to determine the correct cardinal of a set, the two activities of pointing and saying must be synchronized. This perfect correspondence between the two activities is achieved by a coordination process. Using Camos et al.'s (2001) paradigm, the present study tested the hypothesis that this coordination process will induce its own cognitive cost and that this cost would decrease with age. Eight‐year‐old children and adults were asked to say the numberline from 1 to 23, from 61 to 83, and from 111 to 133. They also pointed at objects in arrays that did or did not include distracters. Finally, they counted objects in arrays with or without distracters using the numberline starting at 1, then at 61, and then at 111. In children, as in adults, the simultaneous increase in the attentional demand of the pointing (due to the distracters) and the saying (for the numberline starting at 61 or 111) affected counting performance. However, it never made coordination more difficult. The coordination process in counting thus has a negligible cost. Moreover, an unexpected facilitation effect was observed. Indeed, when the attentional demand of saying was high, the simultaneous production of pointing increased the performance in saying the numberline. In other words, a verbal activity was facilitated by a concurrent motor activity. The negligible cost of coordination and the facilitation effect were both explained by an early compilation of counting as defined in ACT‐R (Anderson, 1983, 1993).