Orientation specificity and spatial updating of memories for layouts

This article examines the degree to which knowledge about the body's orientation affects transformations in spatial memory and whether memories are accessed with a preferred orientation. Participants learned large paths from a single viewpoint and were later asked to make judgments of relative directions from imagined positions on the path. Experiments 1 and 2 contribute to the emerging consensus that memories for large layouts are orientation specific, suggesting that prior findings to the contrary may not have fully accounted for latencies. Experiments 2 and 3 show that knowledge of one's orientation can create a preferred direction in spatial memory that is different from the learned orientation. Results further suggest that spatial updating may not be as automatic as previously thought.     

Feeling the green? Value orientation as a moderator of emotional response to green electricity

Framing effects on emotional responses in a green electricity choice are investigated in a survey of a random sample of 655 Swedish residents. The results show that overall more positive and less negative emotions are experienced for a promotion frame (“choosing green electricity and paying more”) than for a prevention frame (“not choosing green electricity and paying less”). Value orientation is shown to moderate the framing effect in that for the promotion frame, individuals with a self‐transcendence value orientation show the most positive and least negative emotion, whereas for the prevention frame, individuals with a self‐enhancement value orientation show the most positive and least negative emotion. Emotional responses are further shown to mediate the relationship between value orientation and intention to purchase eco‐labeled electricity.     

Diversity in goal orientation, team reflexivity, and team performance

Although recent research highlights the role of team member goal orientation in team functioning, research has neglected the effects of diversity in goal orientation. In a laboratory study with groups working on a problem-solving task, we show that diversity in learning and performance orientation are related to decreased group performance. Moreover, we find that the effect of diversity in learning orientation is mediated by group information elaboration and the effect of diversity in performance orientation by group efficiency. In addition, we demonstrate that team reflexivity can counteract the negative effects of diversity in goal orientation. These results suggest that models of goal orientation in groups should incorporate the effects of diversity in goal orientation.     

Stress scolaire des collégiens et des lycéens : effet de l’appréhension de l’orientation et de la pression de la note

The aim of this study was to test the predictive effect of two variables related to meritocratic ideology and possibly associated with academic stress: academic orientation related worries and apprehension of school evaluation. Differential effects of these variables on stress were also investigated regarding gender and school (middle-high and high schools). Six hundred and nine secondary students completed a questionnaire. Results show that emotional worries regarding academic orientation and apprehension of school evaluation are significant predictors of academic stress. Results reveal differential effects for middle-high school and high school students. In practice, grading and methods used to this aim should be carefully considered as well as the support offered regarding orientation project of middle-high school students especially.     

Choice of conflict-handling strategy: a matter of context

In this study, a follow-up to Callanan and Perri (2006), the authors investigated whether individuals are inclined to choose a conflict-handling approach based on their primary orientation as given by a standardized instrument, or whether they choose a style different from their primary orientation. The authors also assessed whether individuals are inclined to choose the appropriate or "optimal" strategy as based on contextual factors embodied in the conflict situation. Participants in the study were 184 graduate and undergraduate students from two universities located in the United States. Results show that when individuals are presented with conflict scenarios based on real-life events, they can and do choose conflict-handling strategies that are different from their presumed dominant strategy. Further, results show that individuals are generally able to read contextual factors and social cues to select the most "situationally appropriate" conflict-handling response. This study presents implications for future research and discusses issues related to the management of interpersonal and intragroup conflict.     

Mastery approach and performance approach: the differential prediction of organizational citizenship behavior and workplace deviance,beyond HEXACO personality

Goal orientation has become one of the most studied motivational constructs in the psychology literature. However, in organizational contexts, the research focus to date has largely centered on the relationship between goal orientation and task performance—neglecting the valuable contribution of non-task work behaviors, such as workplace deviance and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) to organization functioning. In this paper, we addressed this gap in the literature by investigating the differential prediction of performance approach and mastery approach goal orientation on workplace deviance and OCB, beyond personality correlates. We hypothesize that performance approach orientation is positively associated with workplace deviance and mastery approach orientation is positively associated with OCB. A sample of employed participants (n = 114) provided self-reports of goal orientation, workplace deviance, OCB and personality. Additionally, participants nominated a well-acquainted peer to provide peer-reports of their personalities. When controlling for personality, performance approach orientation positively predicted workplace deviance whereas mastery approach orientation positively predicted organizational citizenship behavior. This study is the first to our knowledge to explore the relationships between goal orientation and non-task work behaviors and to show that goal orientation adds to the understanding of workplace deviance and OCB, beyond personality. Practical implications and directions for future research are discussed.     

Three-quarter views are subjectively good because object orientation is uncertain

Because the objects that surround us are three-dimensional, their appearance and our visual perception of them change depending on an object’s orientation relative to a viewpoint. One of the most remarkable effects of object orientation is that viewers prefer three-quarter views over others, such as front and back, but the exact source of this preference has not been firmly established. We show that object orientation perception of the threequarter view is relatively imprecise and that this impreciseness is related to preference for this view. Human vision is largely insensitive to variations among different three-quarter views (e.g., 45° vs. 50°); therefore, the three-quarter view is perceived as if it corresponds to a wide range of orientations. In other words, it functions as the typical representation of the object.     

How Regulatory Orientation and Feelings of Gratitude Shape Online Review Helpfulness

Online review helpfulness ratings are an important indicator of the impact of online reviews. Often times, helpfulness is explained in terms of observable qualities of online reviews that predict helpfulness ratings. This research proposes that focusing on the psychological processes that underlie helpfulness voting informs a better understanding of what shapes review helpfulness ratings. Specifically, because goal orientation influences information processing, consumers’ regulatory orientation interacts with review valence to determine review helpfulness. When review valence and regulatory orientation match, consumers are more likely to express helpfulness through voting. The findings show that this effect occurs at least in part because matching review valence and regulatory orientation instills feelings of gratitude towards the reviewer. As a consequence, consumers are more likely to reward the reviewer with a helpfulness vote to express their feeling of gratitude through actions. However, when reviewers actively state expectations of reciprocal behavior by readers, gratitude is reduced and so is the likelihood that a review receives a helpfulness vote. Evidence from five studies using review data and online experiments show support for these effects.     

Common spatial organization of number and emotional expression: a mental magnitude line

Converging behavioral and neural evidence suggests that numerical representations are mentally organized in left-to-right orientation. Here we show that this format of spatial organization extends to emotional expression. In Experiment 1, right-side responses became increasingly faster as number (represented by Arabic numerals) or happiness (depicted in facial stimuli) increased, for judgments completely unrelated to magnitude. Additional experiments suggest that magnitude (i.e., more/less relations), not valence (i.e., positive/negative), underlies left-to-right orientation of emotional expression (Experiment 2), and that this orientation accommodates to the context-relevant emotion (e.g., happier faces are more rightward when judged on happiness, but more leftward when judged on angriness; Experiment 3). These findings show that people automatically extract magnitude from a variety of stimuli, representing such information in common left-to-right format, perhaps reflecting a mental magnitude line. We suggest that number is but one dimension in a hyper-general representational system uniting disparate dimensions of magnitude and likely subserved by common neural mechanisms in posterior parietal cortex.     

Insights Into the Long-Term Effects of Parents' Careers on Reported Parent-Offspring Closeness

This study examined the effects of career-family orientation, hours worked per week, and salary level on parent-offspring closeness as perceived by offspring. Results show that how close offspring felt toward their parents was directly related to their parents' family-versus-career orientation.     

The influence of visual symmetry on the encoding of objects

Two experiments examined how symmetry affects the visual encoding of simple flat objects (lamellae). Experiment 1 showed that subjects encode a lamella's shape as both a facsimile and its enantiomorph. In Experiment 2 the errors made when responding to symmetrical and asymmetrical stimuli showed that there were three factors affecting the reproduction of a symmetrical stimulus. These are, in order of decreasing influence, (i) the orientation of the axis of symmetry, (ii) the presence of overall symmetry (irrespective of orientation), and (iii) identity of the orientation of the elements of the response in relation to those of the stimulus. They also show that symmetry is likely to be reproduced even where the reproduction is not of the same shape as the original stimulus. The relevance of these results to representation of objects is discussed.     

Focus on the essential: all great apes know when others are being attentive

When begging for food, all great ape species are sensitive to a human’s attention. However, studies investigating which cues are relevant for chimpanzees to assess the attentional state of others have produced highly inconsistent results. Some have suggested chimpanzees differentiate attention based on the status of the face or even the eyes, while others have indicated that body posture alone is the relevant cue. Kaminski et al. (Anim Cogn 7:216–223, 2004) compared the behaviour of chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans while begging for food from a human experimenter who systematically varied his face and body orientation. Their results indicated that both factors, face and body orientation, affect apes’ begging behaviour. The authors claimed that while body orientation provides information about the experimenter’s general disposition to offer food, the visibility of the face provides information about the human’s attentional state. In the current study, we tested this hypothesis with all four great apes species. However, unlike Kaminski et al. (Anim Cogn 7:216–223, 2004), the experimenter was able to hand over food regardless of body orientation. The results show that as soon as the offering of the food was no longer restricted, the orientation of the face became the key factor. Therefore, we present the first evidence that all great ape species are able to assess the attentional state of a recipient based on the orientation of the face.     

Tracking and anticipation of invisible spatial transformations by 4- to 8-month-old infants

The ability of 4- to 8-month-old infants to track and anticipate the final orientation of an object following different invisible spatial transformations was tested. A violation-of-expectation method was used to assess infants' reaction to possible and impossible outcomes of an object's orientation after it translated or rotated behind an occluder. Results of a first experiment show that at all ages infants tend to look significantly longer at an impossible orientation outcome following invisible transformations. These results suggest that from 4 months of age, infants have the ability to detect orientation-specific information about an object undergoing linear or curvilinear invisible spatial transformations. A second experiment controlling for perceptual cues that infants might have used in the first experiment to track the object orientation replicates the results with a new sample of 4- and 6-month-old infants. Finally, a control experiment involving no motion yielded negative results, providing further support that infants as young as 4 months old use motion information to mentally track invisible spatial transformations. The results obtained in the rotation condition of both experiments are tentatively interpreted as providing first evidence of some rudiments of mental rotation in infancy.     

Blaming for a better future: future orientation and associated intolerance of personal uncertainty lead to harsher reactions toward innocent victims

People are often encouraged to focus on the future and strive for long-term goals. This noted, the authors argue that this future orientation is associated with intolerance of personal uncertainty, as people usually cannot be certain that their efforts will pay off. To be able to tolerate personal uncertainty, people adhere strongly to the belief in a just world, paradoxically resulting in harsher reactions toward innocent victims. In three experiments, the authors show that a future orientation indeed leads to more negative evaluations of an innocent victim (Study 1), enhances intolerance of personal uncertainty (Study 2), and that experiencing personal uncertainty leads to more negative evaluations of a victim (Study 3). So, while a future orientation enables people to strive for long-term goals, it also leads them to be harsher toward innocent victims. One underlying mechanism causing these reactions is intolerance of personal uncertainty, associated with a future orientation.     

Relationship satisfaction and dating experience: factors affecting future time orientation in relationships with the opposite sex

This study was conducted to examine the effects of relationship satisfaction and dating experience on future time orientation in relationships with the opposite sex. Data from a sample of 226 undergraduate students from Middle East Technical University indicated that individuals who were highly satisfied in their relationships with the opposite sex tended to seek temporary relationships more and tended to be less future focused in their relationships than those who were less satisfied. Results also indicated that present dating experience did not show any significant effect on future time orientation; however, previous dating experience did show an effect in the interaction with relationship satisfaction and different factors of future time orientation. Implications of these results are discussed.     

The discrimination of structure in vectorgraphs: Local and global effects

Many recent electrophysiological studies have demonstrated specificity for orientation and position tuning in single units of the visual system. Psychophysical investigations have produced complementary evidence for orientation and position coding in vision which is usually interpreted in terms of the underlying neuronal properties. To date, no studies have endeavored to relate such “local” receptive field response profiles to more “global” or field-specific aspects of the input signal. In a series of experiments, we have investigated orientation/position sensitivity as a function of general orientation and position rules governing line element, or “vectorgraph,” displays. We have discovered with such vectorgraph images that individual element acuities are determined by the field structures present. These results show that there are specific “top-down” components even to basic orientation/position coding in the visual system     

The beholder's share in the perception of orientation of 2-D shapes

A considerable amount of research demonstrates that people perceive cardinal orientations (horizontal and vertical) more accurately than other orientations; this is termed the oblique effect. We investigated the interaction of this effect with the degree of elongation of the stimulus. Our stimuli were ellipses with a wide range of aspect ratios, varying from a circle (aspect ratio = 1) to a line (aspect ratio = 123.5). The task was to set a probe line in the same orientation as the long axis of the ellipse. In our first experiment, we determined that performance is degraded as the aspect ratio decreases; furthermore, the bias and response variability are linearly related to a transformation of aspect ratio (roundness). We found significant individual differences; the results show high within-subjects correlations and low between-subjects correlations. In our second experiment, we had observers judge the orientation of circles randomly mixed in with ellipses of low aspect ratio. The observers demonstrated intrinsic preferences and generated reproducible distributions of orientation settings with idiosyncratic profiles. These distributions predict the influence on the response to ellipses with an aspect ratio higher than one and can be considered as the beholder's share in the perception of shape orientation.     

Change detection is easier at texture border bars when they are parallel to the border: evidence for V1 mechanisms of bottom-up salience

A vertical bar is salient among horizontal ones by orientation contrast, and, traditionally, bottom up salience is viewed as caused only by feature contrast. Recently, it has been proposed that the primary visual cortex (V1) creates a bottom-up salience map in its outputs, which depends on direct inputs and on contextual inputs by intra-cortical interactions (Li Zhaoping, 2002 Trends in Cognitive Sciences 6 9-16). Since the interactions include iso-feature (eg iso-orientation) suppression, responsible for salience by feature contrast, and collinear facilitation, the V1 proposal predicts that collinear grouping contributes to salience additionally. Accordingly, in orientation textures, texture bars are more salient near texture borders owing to orientation contrast, and are even more salient when they are additionally parallel to the border by collinear grouping. We show that colour changes in texture bars are more detectable when the bars are parallel to the texture border. Since changes are more detectable at salient locations, our finding supports V1 mechanisms for bottom-up salience.     

Palm boards are not action measures: An alternative to the two-systems theory of geographical slant perception

Whereas most reports of the perception of outdoor hills demonstrate dramatic overestimation, estimates made by adjusting a palm board are much closer to the true hill orientation. We test the dominant hypothesis that palm board accuracy is related to the need for motor action to be accurately guided and conclude instead that the perceptual experience of palm-board orientation is biased and variable due to poorly calibrated proprioception of wrist flexion. Experiments 1 and 3 show that wrist-flexion palm boards grossly underestimate the orientations of near, reachable surfaces whereas gesturing with a free hand is fairly accurate. Experiment 2 shows that palm board estimates are much lower than free hand estimates for an outdoor hill as well. Experiments 4 shows that wrist flexion is biased and noisy compared to elbow flexion, while Experiment 5 shows that small changes in palm board height produce large changes in palm board estimates. Together, these studies suggest that palm boards are biased and insensitive measures. The existing literature arguing that there are two systems in the perception of geographical slant is re-evaluated, and a new theoretical framework is proposed in which a single exaggerated representation of ground-surface orientation guides both action and perception.     

Effect of orientation and of shape similarity on perceptual grouping

A method in which as were asked to partition a pattern into two regions was used to investigate the perceptual grouping produced by changes in the orientation and shape of two-line figures. The results show that the judged similarity of the figures fails to predict the degree to which the figures form distinct perceptual groups. Grouping was most strongly influenced by differences in the orientation of the lines composing the figures. Crossing of lines making up the figures also affected grouping, but was less decisive than line orientation.