Persistence and accommodation in short‐term priming and other perceptual paradigms: temporal segregation through synaptic depression

Perceptual input changes constantly in an unpredictable fashion, often changing before our somewhat sluggish perceptual systems have adequately processed this input. This can give rise to source confusion—how do we know whether a given perceptual activation is due to the current input, or a previous input that had yet to be completely processed? We propose that activity‐dependent neural accommodation naturally limits this source confusion by suppressing items once they have been identified. We review behavioral paradigms from different literatures that measure the correlates of persistence and accommodation. Of the various accommodative mechanisms, we focus on synaptic depression, deriving a rate‐coded expression that can be used to produce accommodating dynamics in any neural network with real valued activation. We implement this expression in a hierarchical model of perception termed, “a neural mechanism for responding optimally with unknown sources of evidence” (nROUSE). This model can be viewed as a more detailed version of the more abstract ROUSE model of Huber, Shiffrin, Lyle, and Ruys (2001), which produces accommodated levels of feature evidence through an optimal calculation. We apply nROUSE to three short‐term priming experiments that manipulated prime duration.     

Toward a complete decision model of item and source recognition

In a recognition memory test, subjects may be asked to decide whether a test item is old or new (item recognition) or to decide among alternative sources from which it might have been drawn for study (source recognition). Confidence-rating-based receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves for these superficially similar tasks are quite different, leading to the inference of correspondingly different decision processes. A complete account of source and item recognition will require a single model that can be fit to the entire data set. We postulated a detection-theoretic decision space whose dimensions, in the style of Banks (2000), are item strength and the relative strengths of the two sources. A model that assumes decision boundaries of constant likelihood ratios, source guessing for unrecognized items, and nonoptimal allocation of attention can account for data from three canonical data sets without assuming any processes specifically devoted to recollection. Observed and predicted ROCs for one of these data sets are given in the article, and ROCs for the other two may be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society’s Archive of Norms, Stimuli, and Data, www.psychonomic.org/archive.     

An ecological study of the reliability of clinical judgment in executive appraisal

This research was a study of the reliability of clinical judgment findings (multitrait) across three different information sources (psychometric tests, structured interview, and psychometric tests and interview). Subjects (N = 74) were middle and senior executives of Western Canadian technical companies; clinicians (N = 3) were trained and experienced industrial psychologists. The study investigated the similarity of clinical evaluation of personological characteristics (based on an 18-factor multitrait paradigm) across the three different information sources. Subjects were independently rated by a single clinician on 18 criterion factors in each of the three information source categories. Test information source categories required the administration of approximately 12 hrs of standardized psychological assessment questionnaires to each of the 74 subjects. Interview source category involved a 1.5-hr structured interview per subject. Combined condition pooled both test and interview conditions. Generalizability of the findings was maximized by the undertaking of the experiment in a natural situation thus increasing ecological validity. Statistical treatments used were designed to assess the similarity of a clinician's evaluation of a subject based on the different category of information available about that client. Convergence (intrarater reliability) indexes range from a high of .64 to a low of .05. Results indicate a varying degree of convergence of multitrait clinical ratings dependent on clinician and trait being rated. Results are discussed in terms of implications for practitioners involved in executive personnel selection.     

A planner agent that tries its best in presence of nondeterminism

In many nondeterministic planning domains, an agent whose goal is to achieve φ may not succeed in finding a policy that can guarantee that all paths from the initial state lead to a final state where φ holds (strong solution). Nevertheless, if the agent is trying its best to achieve φ, it cannot give up. Instead, it may be inclined to accept weaker guarantees, such as having a path leading to φ from any intermediate state reached by the policy (strong-cyclic solution), or even less, such as having at least one path leading to φ from the initial state (weak solution). But the agent should choose among such different options based on their availability in each situation. Although the specification of this type of goal has been addressed before, in this paper we show how a planner based on the branching time temporal logic α-ctl can be used to plan for intuitive and useful goals of the form “try your best to achieve φ”.     

Engaging the consumer: The science and art of the value creation process

Regulatory engagement theory [Higgins, E. T. (2006). Value from hedonic experience and engagement. Psychological Review, 113, 439–460.] proposes that value is a motivational force of attraction to or repulsion from something, and that strength of engagement contributes to value intensity independent of hedonic and other sources of value direction. This paper reviews different sources of engagement strength, including dealing with challenges by opposing interfering forces and overcoming personal resistance, preparing for something that is likely to happen, and using “fit” or “proper” means of goal pursuit. We present evidence that each of these sources of engagement strength can intensify the value of something, and we show how stronger engagement can not only make something positive more positive but also make something negative more negative. We also discuss how these effects of stronger engagement on the value of something else are independent of actors' own personal experiences during goal pursuit. We then broaden regulatory engagement theory by describing the nature of these personal experiences from different sources of engagement strength—distinct positive experiences (e.g., feeling “pleasure” vs. feeling “right”) and distinct negative experiences (e.g., feeling “tension” vs. feeling “defiance”)—and consider the science and art of combining them with engagement strength for maximal persuasion and influence.     

What’s the object of object working memory in infancy? Unraveling ‘what’ and ‘how many’

Infants have a bandwidth-limited object working memory (WM) that can both individuate and identify objects in a scene, (answering ‘how many?’ or ‘what?’, respectively). Studies of infants’ WM for objects have typically looked for limits on either ‘how many’ or ‘what’, yielding different estimates of infant capacity. Infants can keep track of about three individuals (regardless of identity), but appear to be much more limited in the number of specific identities they can recall. Why are the limits on ‘how many’ and ‘what’ different? Are the limits entirely separate, do they interact, or are they simply two different aspects of the same underlying limit?We sought to unravel these limits in a series of experiments which tested 9- and 12-month-olds’ WM for object identities under varying degrees of difficulty. In a violation-of-expectation looking-time task, we hid objects one at a time behind separate screens, and then probed infants’ WM for the shape identity of the penultimate object in the sequence. We manipulated the difficulty of the task by varying both the number of objects in hiding locations and the number of means by which infants could detect a shape change to the probed object. We found that 9-month-olds’ WM for identities was limited by the number of hiding locations: when the probed object was one of two objects hidden (one in each of two locations), 9-month-olds succeeded, and they did so even though they were given only one means to detect the change. However, when the probed object was one of three objects hidden (one in each of three locations), they failed, even when they were given two means to detect the shape change. Twelve-month-olds, by contrast, succeeded at the most difficult task level.Results show that WM for ‘how many’ and for ‘what’ are not entirely separate. Individuated objects are tracked relatively cheaply. Maintaining bindings between indexed objects and identifying featural information incurs a greater attentional/memory cost. This cost reduces with development. We conclude that infant WM supports a small number of featureless object representations that index the current locations of objects. These can have featural information bound to them, but only at substantial cost.     

Responding to indirect speech acts

Indirect speech acts, like the request Do you know the time?, have both a literal meaning, here “I ask you whether you know the time,” and an indirect meaning “I request you to tell me the time.” In this paper I outline a model of how listeners understand such speech acts and plan responses to them. The main proposals are these. The literal meaning of indirect speech acts can be intended to be taken seriously (along with the indirect meaning) or merely pro forma. In the first case listeners are expected to respond to both meanings, as in Yes, I do—it's six, but in the second case only to the indirect meaning, as in It's six. There are at least six sources of information listeners use in judging whether the literal meaning was intended seriously or pro forma, as well as whether there was intended to be any indirect meaning. These proposals were supported in five experiments in which ordinary requests for information were made by telephone of 950 local merchants.     

Coverage-Reliability, Epistemic Dependence, and the Problem of Rumor-Based Belief

Rumors, for better or worse, are an important element of public discourse. The present paper focuses on rumors as an epistemic phenomenon rather than as a social or political problem. In particular, it investigates the relation between the mode of transmission and the reliability, if any, of rumors as a source of knowledge. It does so by comparing rumor with two forms of epistemic dependence that have recently received attention in the philosophical literature: our dependence on the testimony of others, and our dependence on what has been called the ‘coverage-reliability’ of our social environment (Goldberg 2010). According to the latter, an environment is ‘coverage-reliable’ if, across a wide range of beliefs and given certain conditions, it supports the following conditional: If ~p were true I would have heard about it by now. However, in information-deprived social environments with little coverage-reliability, rumors may transmit information that could not otherwise be had. This suggests that a trade-off exists between levels of trust in the coverage-reliability of official sources and (warranted) trust in rumor as a source of information.     

Minimodularity and the perception of layout

In natural vision, information overspecifies the relative distances between objects and their layout in three dimensions. Directed perception applies (Cutting, 1986), rather than direct or indirect perception, because any single source of information (or cue) might be adequate to reveal relative depth (or local depth order), but many are present and useful to observers. Such overspecification presents the theoretical problem of how perceivers use this multiplicity of information to arrive at a unitary appreciation of distance between objects in the environment. This article examines three models of directed perception: selection, in which only one source of information is used; addition, in which all sources are used in simple combination; and multiplication, in which interactions among sources can occur. To monocular spatial information, using all combinations of the presence or absence of relative size, height in the projection plane, occlusion, and motion parallax. Visual stimuli were computer generated and consisted of three untextured parallel planes arranged in depth. Three tasks were used: one of magnitude estimation of exocentric distance within a stimulus, one of dissimilarity judgment in how a pair of stimuli revealed depth, and one of choice judgment within a pair as to which one revealed depth best. Grouped and individual results of the one direct and two indirect scaling tasks suggest that perceivers use these sources of information in an additive fashion. That is, one source (or cue) is generally substitutable for another, and the more sources that are present, the more depth is revealed. This pattern of results suggests independent use of information by four separate, functional subsystems within the visual system, here called minimodules. Evidence for and advantages of minimodularity are discussed.     

When credibility attacks: The reverse impact of source credibility on persuasion

Recent research on the self-validation hypothesis suggests that source credibility identified after message processing can influence the confidence people have in their own thoughts generated in response to persuasive messages (Briñol, Petty, & Tormala, 2004). The present research explored the implications of this effect for the possibility that high credibility sources can be associated with more or less persuasion than low credibility sources. In two experiments, it is demonstrated that when people generate primarily positive thoughts in response to a message (e.g., because the message contains strong arguments) and then learn of the source, high source credibility leads to more favorable attitudes than does low source credibility. When people have primarily negative thoughts in response to a message (e.g., because it contains weak arguments), however, this effect is reversed—that is, high source credibility leads to less favorable attitudes than does low source credibility.     

Effects of training and display content on Level 2 driving automation interface usability

IntroductionLevel 2 driving automation features, such as adaptive cruise control (ACC) combined with lane centering, primarily communicate their operating statuses through the instrument cluster. It remains unclear how interface-specific training and display content influence the ability to understand Level 2 activity in production vehicles.MethodsEighty participants viewed videos recorded from the driver’s point of view in a variety of driving scenarios with Level 2 activity displayed in the instrument cluster of a 2017 Mercedes-Benz E-Class. Half viewed one of two instrument cluster layouts (simple or complex), and half received an orientation to the interface before the experiment. After each video, they were asked about the scenario they had just seen. We then examined what information in the displays participants used to identify Level 2 activity and the usability of the displays.ResultsTraining improved recognition accuracy of when lane centering was temporarily inactive and understanding of why it was inactive. Neither training nor display content affected the ability to recognize when ACC had adjusted the vehicle’s speed or detected a vehicle ahead, or when ACC initially did not detect a lead vehicle and understanding of why it had not detected it. Both factors influenced which sources of information participants used to determine Level 2 activity. Recognition accuracy of system activity improved when participants used valid sources of information. Training, but not display content, improved lane centering usability, but not ACC usability.DiscussionBasic training improves detection of notifications that potentially require further driver action, but not of those that display persistent status information. Training does not result in full understanding of all system notifications or functional limitations, which reinforces the need for intuitive, salient communication about system behavior and its limitations.     

Representation of subjective preferences under ambiguity

The objective of this paper is to show how potentially incomplete preferences of a decision maker (DM) on acts can be modelled formally in a subjective ambiguity perspective. We identify acts as functions from a state space Ω to bounded support (finitely additive) probabilities over a set X of prizes. Then, we characterize preferences over equibounded acts a which have a numerical representation by the family of functionals , where u is a cardinal utility on X (representing the risk attitude of the DM) and Π is a unique pointwise closed convex set of probabilities on all events in Ω (representing the ambiguity perceived by the DM). To this end, in addition to the usual independence and continuity assumptions, we add completeness and dominance for preferences restricted to constant acts; moreover, we consider two other properties (subjective monotonicity and coherence) related with the preferences of a DM who is not able, owing to his partial knowledge, to evaluate any event in Ω.     

Whole-Hearted Motivation and Relevant Alternatives: A Problem for the Contrastivist Account of Moral Reasons

Recently, Walter Sinott-Armstrong and Justin Snedegar have argued for a general contrastivist theory of reasons. According to the contrastivist account of reasons, all reasons claims should be understood as a relation with an additional place for a contrast class. For example, rather than X being a reason for A to P simpliciter, the contrastivist claims that X is a reason for A to P out of {P,Q,R…}. The main goal of this paper is to argue that the contrastivist account of reasons will be ill-fitted for accommodating certain features of moral reasons. In brief, the reason why the contrastivist analysis fails is that it cannot adequately allow for cases of morally correct whole-hearted action—cases where consideration of any alternate course of action would be misguided. But, if all consideration of alternate courses of action is misguided, then it is hard to see how one can set the relevant contrast class that is essential to the contrastivist view—any contrast class will seem out of place. In addition, I address some of the arguments that have been given in favor of the contrastivist account of reasons and argue that there are at least two ways that the non-contrastivist can respond to these arguments.     

Subgames within Large Games and the Heuristic of Imitation

We study repeated normal form games where the number of players is large. We argue that it is interesting to look at such games as being divided into subgames, each of which we call a neighbourhood. The structure of such a game is given by a graph G whose nodes are players and edges denote visibility. The neighbourhoods are maximal cliques in G. The game proceeds in rounds where in each round the players of every clique X of G play a strategic form game among each other. A player at a node v strategises based on what she can observe, i.e., the strategies and the outcomes in the previous round of the players at vertices adjacent to v. Based on this, the player may switch strategies in the same neighbourhood, or migrate to another neighbourhood. We are interested in addressing questions regarding the eventual stability of such games. We incrementally impose constraints on the ‘types’ of the players. First, we look at players who are unconstrained in their strategising abilities, in that, players who may use unbounded memory. We then consider the case of memoryless players. We show that in both these cases the eventual stability of the game can be characterised in terms of potentials. We then introduce a simple modal logic in which the types of the players can be specified. We show that when the players play according to these specified types, it can be effectively decided whether the game stabilises. Finally, we look at the important heuristic of imitation. Simple imitative strategies can be specified in the logic introduced by us. We show that in a population of optimisers and imitators, we can decide how ‘worse-off’ the imitators are by playing imitative strategies rather than optimal ones.     

See me,hear me: Using film in health-care classes

This essay argues that film deserves a place within the medical humanities curriculum and demonstrates effective strategies for employing it within medical ethics and humanities classrooms. Part One of the article emphasizes how and why medical ethics teachers can utilize documentary and fictional films, such as “Thomas Szasz and the Myth of Mental Illness,” “The Deadly Deception,”Whose Life Is It Anyway? and “Voices From the Front” in their courses. Such films encourage students to move beyond abstract debates and confront the human pain inherent in all ethical dilemmas. Part Two focuses on documentary and fiction film in the medical humanities classroom. In this section, the author details how to incorporates films, such asThe Doctor, The Waterdance andHospital, into the humanities classroom, juxtaposing them with various literary works, such asOther Women's Children, Borrowed Time, andCeremony. Part Three of the essay presents a detailed discussion ofThe Elephant Man andFrankenstein, illustrating how visual and literary texts compliment each other within the humanities classroom. Overall, the author demonstrates how films function as engaging and complex visual texts providing unique insights in the particularities of American health care and, as such, can become valuable components within medical ethics and humanities classrooms.     

Do overall dimension ratings from assessment centres show external construct-related validity?

ABSTRACT

There have been repeated calls for an external construct validation approach to advance our understanding of the construct-related validity of assessment centre dimension ratings beyond existing internal construct-related validity findings. Following an external construct validation approach, we examined whether linking assessment centre overall dimension ratings to ratings of the same dimensions that stem from sources external to the assessment centre provides evidence for construct-related validity of assessment centre ratings. We used data from one laboratory assessment centre sample and two field samples. External ratings of the same dimensions stemmed from assessees, assessees’ supervisors, and customers. Results converged across all three samples and showed that different dimension-same source correlations within the assessment centres were larger than same dimension-different source correlations. Moreover, confirmatory factor analyses revealed source factors but no dimension factors in the latent factor structure of overall dimension ratings from the assessment centre and from external sources. Hence, consistent results across the three samples provide no support that assessment centre overall dimension ratings and ratings of the same dimensions from other sources can be attributed to dimension factors. This questions arguments that assessment centre overall dimension ratings should have construct-related validity.     

Fungible Weights in Multiple Regression

Every set of alternate weights (i.e., nonleast squares weights) in a multiple regression analysis with three or more predictors is associated with an infinite class of weights. All members of a given class can be deemed fungiblebecause they yield identical SSE (sum of squared errors) and R ² values. Equations for generating fungible weights are reviewed and an example is given that illustrates how fungible weights can be profitably used to evaluate parameter sensitivity in multiple regression. The author wishes to thank Drs. Robyn Dawes, William Grove, Markus Keel, Leslie Yonce, Joe Rausch, the editor, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.     

Boxing Helena and Corseting Eunice: Sexual Rhetoric in Cosmopolitan and Playboy Magazines

This paper analyzes the sexual rhetorics of Cosmopolitan and Playboy magazines to consider how sexuality is constructed in similar ways by sources directed to men and women. We use Goffman's classifications of gender in advertisements to compare how each magazine uses its pictures to provide cues to readers about sexuality and sexual relationships and to trace changes within each magazine over time. We conclude that both magazines converge on a single construction of sexuality for women. Playboy addresses men and Cosmopolitan addresses women, yet the visual rhetorics of both magazines reflect the male gaze and promote the idea that women should primarily concern themselves with attracting and sexually satisfying men.     

A perception-based cognitive map of the pedestrian perceived quality of service on urban sidewalks

A better understanding of what walking entails is important in sustainable transportation planning. Recent research has shown that perceptions have a higher power to explain the quality of service (QoS) than objective measures have; the latter being typically used in the pedestrian level of service methodologies. Despite the existing research on perceptions and QoS in other transportation fields, very little information has been found in the literature that can explain a clear cognitive structure that defines the pedestrian QoS. In this research, we propose a cognitive map to make it possible to understand and explain pedestrian sidewalk QoS of a given infrastructure when walking, based on perceptions. We gathered the perceptions of 1056 pedestrians on-site, regarding the attributes (indicators) identified in the literature review in 30 locations in Bogotá, Colombia. Based on an Exploratory Factor Analysis, we developed a conceptual model through Structural Equation Modeling. We found that seven latent variables (LVs) (i.e., Sidewalk characteristics, Externalities, Surrounding, Discomfort, Bike hassles, Protection, and Amenities) interrelate to each other, forming a pedestrian cognitive map. QoS is directly explained by how pedestrians perceive the LVs sidewalk characteristics and surrounding and indirectly by the rest of LVs. The cognitive map shows three LVs related to the interaction between pedestrians and other transportation modes (i.e., externalities, discomfort, and bike hassles) that impact the perceived QoS negatively, and four LVs related to the interaction between pedestrians and different elements of the sidewalk (i.e., sidewalk characteristics, surrounding, amenities, and protection) that impact the perceived QoS positively. To understand pedestrian perceptions when walking and the path that these perceptions follow to develop a QoS perception provides an accurate tool by which to improve the QoS from the useŕs perspective, generating a new opportunity to provide better pedestrian facilities.