Old dogs,new tricks – Rethinking country‐image studies

In international marketing, countries are often conceptualised as image constructs that have an influence on product image formation. Destination image and country of origin image are held to account for bias in consumer perceptions towards products because of the country from which they originate. Studies in these areas are typically underpinned by attitude‐based Likert or semantic differential scale methods, analysed using structural equation models. This paper achieves two key outcomes. Firstly, it adds to the small but growing body of literature that looks at the impact of tourism on post‐tour, export product evaluations. Secondly, it compares this traditional attitude‐based approach to country‐image studies with an alternative associative network theory approach, operationalised with a free‐choice, pick‐any survey method, which is popular within the branding literature. We compare the two methods by applying each to the same set of respondents to establish if the two methods are complementary, and find they produce different outcomes that could have critical implications for how country‐image studies are conceptualised and executed. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Ensemble perception of size in 4–5‐year‐old children

Groups of objects are nearly everywhere we look. Adults can perceive and understand the ‘gist’ of multiple objects at once, engaging ensemble‐coding mechanisms that summarize a group's overall appearance. Are these group‐perception mechanisms in place early in childhood? Here, we provide the first evidence that 4–5‐year‐old children use ensemble coding to perceive the average size of a group of objects. Children viewed a pair of trees, with each containing a group of differently sized oranges. We found that, in order to determine which tree had the larger oranges overall, children integrated the sizes of multiple oranges into ensemble representations. This pooling occurred rapidly, and it occurred despite conflicting information from numerosity, continuous extent, density, and contrast. An ideal observer analysis showed that although children's integration mechanisms are sensitive, they are not yet as efficient as adults’. Overall, our results provide a new insight into the way children see and understand the environment, and they illustrate the fundamental nature of ensemble coding in visual perception.