The formation of novel social category conjunctions in working memory: A possible role for the episodic buffer?

Recent research (e.g., Hutter, Crisp, Humphreys, Waters, &; Moffit; Siebler) has confirmed that combining novel social categories involves two stages (e.g., Hampton; Hastie, Schroeder, &; Weber). Furthermore, it is also evident that following stage 1 (constituent additivity), the second stage in these models involves cognitively effortful complex reasoning. However, while current theory and research has addressed how category conjunctions are initially represented to some degree, it is not clear precisely where we first combine or bind existing social constituent categories. For example, how and where do we compose and temporarily store a coherent representation of an individual who shares membership of “female” and “blacksmith” categories? In this article, we consider how the revised multi-component model of working memory (Baddeley) can assist in resolving the representational limitations in the extant two-stage theoretical models. This is a new approach to understanding how novel conjunctions form new bound “composite” representations.     

Resolving conflicting social categories: the role of age-related executive ability

We investigated the effect of age-related decline in executive ability on the application of emergent features to incongruent social category conjunctions (e.g., male midwife). When forming an impression of an incongruent conjunction, older adults used more emergent attributes (attributes associated exclusively with the category conjunction and not the constituents), relative to younger adults. Moreover, this relationship was mediated by a reduction in inhibitory ability (measured using a Stroop task) and processing speed (measured using a Digit Symbol Substitution Test, DSST). These findings are consistent with the notion that executive ability is pivotal in understanding social functioning in older adults. We discuss the implications of these findings for the continuing development of models outlining the processes and stages involved in perceiving social category conjunctions.     

The composition of category conjunctions

In three experiments, the authors investigated the impression formation process resulting from the perception of familiar or unfamiliar social category combinations. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to generate attributes associated with either a familiar or unfamiliar social category conjunction. Compared to familiar combinations, the authors found that when the conjunction was unfamiliar, participants formed their impression less from the individual constituent categories and relatively more from novel emergent attributes. In Experiment 2, the authors replicated this effect using alternative experimental materials. In Experiment 3, the effect generalized to additional (orthogonally combined) gender and occupation categories. The implications of these findings for understanding the processes involved in the conjunction of social categories, and the formation of new stereotypes, are discussed.     

Conceptual combination: Conjunction and negation of natural concepts

The operation of negation on combinations of natural categories was examined in two experiments. In the first, category membership ratings of lists of items were obtained for pairs of concepts considered individually and in two logical combinations: conjunctions (e.g., “Tools which are also Weapons”) and negated conjunctions—forms of those conjunctions in which the modifier noun category was negated (“Tools which arenot Weapons”). For conjunctions, results supported earlier findings of overextension and the geometric averaging of constituent membership values (Hampton, 1988b). Previous findings of concept dominance and noncommutativity within conjunctions were also replicated, both for typicality ratings and for probability of class membership. For negated conjunctions, the pattern of dominance was similar but interacted with order within the conjunction. Negated conjunctions were also overextended. The second experiment explored how the attributes of negated conjunctions were derived from those of the two component concepts. Frequency of generation of attributes expressed positively (has wheels) or negatively (has no wheels) followed rated frequency in the negated category. The distinctiveness of an attribute to distinguish the complement from the head-noun class was associated with the generation of attributes, particularly when there was relatively high overlap between the two categories.     

Inheritance of attributes in natural concept conjunctions

Attributes defining pairs of concepts (e.g., SPORTS-GAMES) and their conjunctions (e.g., SPORTS THAT ARE ALSO GAMES) were generated and rated for their importance for defining each concept and conjunction. The results support a model in which a composite prototype for the conjunction is formed as the union of the constituent attribute sets, subject to two constraints: (1) attributes must have a sufficiently high average importance across the two concepts, and (2) necessity and impossibility of attributes is always inherited. In regression analyses, those concepts identified by Hampton (1985b) as being dominant in determining item typicality in conjunctions were again dominant in determining attribute importance and also had greater numbers of important attributes. There was limited evidence of noncompositionality for familiar concept conjunctions. Finally, degree of conflict between the attributes of one concept and those of the other had an independent effect on attribute importance for conjunctions.     

社会分类的特性,维度及心理效应

社会分类是个体基于共享相似性将人群分为不同类别的一种主观心理过程, 具有自动化,灵活性和潜在模糊性等特性.社会分类的维度既包括性别,年龄和种族等自然线索, 也包括语言,职业和社会身份等重要社会线索.在社会分类过程中, 不同维度往往具有相对重要性, 表现为优势维度效应; 不同维度相互之间也会发生作用, 产生交叉分类效应, 研究者从不同的视角对这种交叉分类效应进行了解释.未来研究应该采用多样化的方法和技术从分类主体,分类目标,分类情境以及社会文化因素等多角度探讨社会分类的心理加工机制, 构建更具整合性的社会分类理论模型.     

Learning efficient visual search for stimuli containing diagnostic spatial configurations and color-shape conjunctions

Visual search is often slow and difficult for complex stimuli such as feature conjunctions. Search efficiency, however, can improve with training. Search for stimuli that can be identified by the spatial configuration of two elements (e.g., the relative position of two colored shapes) improves dramatically within a few hundred trials of practice. Several recent imaging studies have identified neural correlates of this learning, but it remains unclear what stimulus properties participants learn to use to search efficiently. Influential models, such as reverse hierarchy theory, propose two major possibilities: learning to use information contained in low-level image statistics (e.g., single features at particular retinotopic locations) or in high-level characteristics (e.g., feature conjunctions) of the task-relevant stimuli. In a series of experiments, we tested these two hypotheses, which make different predictions about the effect of various stimulus manipulations after training. We find relatively small effects of manipulating low-level properties of the stimuli (e.g., changing their retinotopic location) and some conjunctive properties (e.g., color-position), whereas the effects of manipulating other conjunctive properties (e.g., color-shape) are larger. Overall, the findings suggest conjunction learning involving such stimuli might be an emergent phenomenon that reflects multiple different learning processes, each of which capitalizes on different types of information contained in the stimuli. We also show that both targets and distractors are learned, and that reversing learned target and distractor identities impairs performance. This suggests that participants do not merely learn to discriminate target and distractor stimuli, they also learn stimulus identity mappings that contribute to performance improvements.     

Fallacies in probability judgments for conjunctions and disjunctions of everyday events

The conjunction fallacy occurs when people judge a conjunction B‐and‐A as more probable than a constituent B, contrary to probability theory's ‘conjunction rule’ that a conjunction cannot be more probable than either constituent. Many studies have demonstrated this fallacy in people's reasoning about various experimental materials. Gigerenzer objects that from a ‘frequentist’ standpoint probability theory is not valid for these materials, and so failure to follow the conjunction rule is not a fallacy. This paper describes three experiments showing that the conjunction fallacy occurs as consistently for conjunctions where frequentist probability theory is valid (conjunctions of everyday weather events) as for other conjunctions. These experiments also demonstrate a reliable correlation between the occurrence of the conjunction fallacy and the disjunction fallacy (which arises when a disjunction B‐or‐A is judged less probable than a constituent B). This supports a probability theory + random variation account of probabilistic reasoning. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Normative Social Role Concepts in Early Childhood

The current studies (N = 255, children ages 4–5 and adults) explore patterns of age‐related continuity and change in conceptual representations of social role categories (e.g., “scientist”). In Study 1, young children's judgments of category membership were shaped by both category labels and category‐normative traits, and the two were dissociable, indicating that even young children's conceptual representations for some social categories have a “dual character.” In Study 2, when labels and traits were contrasted, adults and children based their category‐based induction decisions on category‐normative traits rather than labels. Study 3 confirmed that children reason based on category‐normative traits because they view them as an obligatory part of category membership. In contrast, adults in this study viewed the category‐normative traits as informative on their own (not only as a cue to obligations). Implications for continuity and change in representations of social role categories will be discussed.     

Noncategorical approaches to feature prediction with uncertain categories

In four experiments, we investigated how people make feature predictions about objects whose category membership is uncertain. Artificial visual categories were presented and remained in view while a novel instance with a known feature, but uncertain category membership was presented. All four experiments showed that feature predictions about the test instance were most often based on feature correlations (referred to as feature conjunction reasoning). Experiment 1 showed that feature conjunction reasoning was generally preferred to category-based induction in a feature prediction task. Experiment 2 showed that people used all available exemplars to make feature conjunction predictions. Experiments 3 and 4 showed that the preference for predictions based on feature conjunction persisted even when category-level information was made more salient and inferences involving a larger number of categories were required. Little evidence of reasoning based on the consideration of multiple categories (e.g., Anderson, (Psychological Review, 98:409–429, 1991)) or the single, most probable category (e.g., Murphy & Ross, (Cognitive Psychology, 27:148–193, 1994)) was found.     

Does accuracy matter? A review of the consequences of accurate personality impressions as a function of context and content

What are the implications of seeing others as they see themselves? That is, does viewing others accurately have consequences, positive or negative, to relationship evaluations (e.g., liking)? To address this, the current article provides a comprehensive review of the personality accuracy literature and discusses related work from the self-verification and empathic accuracy domains. We specifically explore whether the consequences of accurate perceptions could be influenced by two key categories of moderators: the context of the impression (e.g., high vs. low stakes) and content of the impression (e.g., desirability of traits). Lastly, we discuss future directions to aid our understanding of this question.     

Speeded induction under uncertainty: The influence of multiple categories and feature conjunctions

When people are uncertain about the category membership of an item (e.g., Is it a dog or a dingo?), research shows that they tend to rely only on the dominant or most likely category when making inductions (e.g., How likely is it to befriend me?). An exception has been reported using speeded induction judgments where participants appeared to use information from multiple categories to make inductions (Verde, Murphy, &; Ross, 2005). In two speeded induction studies, we found that participants tended to rely on the frequency with which features co-occurred when making feature predictions, independently of category membership. This pattern held whether categories were considered implicitly (Experiment 1) or explicitly (Experiment 2) prior to feature induction. The results converge with other recent work suggesting that people often rely on feature conjunction information, rather than category boundaries, when making inductions under uncertainty.     

品牌印象研究述评

品牌印象是消费者基于对品牌信息的感知和体验而在头脑中留下的品牌部分或整体信息。品牌印象形成涉及到类别信息加工和个别化信息加工两方面,其认知加工模式还存在争议。品牌印象实证研究主要存在以品牌主观形象为核心的品牌印象研究和以品牌拟人化特征为焦点的品牌印象研究两条线路。在分析比较的基础上,我们认为无论是品牌形象研究线路还是品牌人格研究线路,探讨的都是品牌的客观特性在消费者头脑中留下的主观印象,其本质都是对消费者品牌印象的研究。品牌印象是品牌与消费者的关系基础。品牌建设的任务就是在深刻把握消费者品牌印象形成机制的基础上,通过调节和控制消费者对品牌的认知、联想、态度、信任和忠诚来积累品牌资产。     

Group impressions as dynamic configurations: the tensor product model of group impression formation and change

Group impressions are dynamic configurations. The tensor product model (TPM), a connectionist model of memory and learning, is used to describe the process of group impression formation and change, emphasizing the structured and contextualized nature of group impressions and the dynamic evolution of group impressions over time. TPM is first shown to be consistent with algebraic models of social judgment (the weighted averaging model; N. Anderson, 1981) and exemplar-based social category learning (the context model; E. R. Smith & M. A. Zárate, 1992), providing a theoretical reduction of the algebraic models to the present connectionist framework. TPM is then shown to describe a common process that underlies both formation and change of group impressions despite the often-made assumption that they constitute different psychological processes. In particular, various time-dependent properties of both group impression formation (e.g., time variability, response dependency, and order effects in impression judgments) and change (e.g., stereotype change and group accentuation) are explained, demonstrating a hidden unity beneath the diverse array of empirical findings. Implications of the model for conceptualizing stereotype formation and change are discussed.     

Visual feature integration and focused attention: Response competition from multiple distractor features

Predictions from Treisman’s feature integration theory of attention were tested in a variant of the response-competition paradigm. Subjects made choice responses to particular color-shape conjunctions (e.g., a purple cross vs. a green circle) while withholding their responses to the opposite conjunctions (i.e., a purple circle vs. a green cross). The results showed that compatibility effects were based on both distractor color and shape. For unattended distractors in preknown irrelevant positions, compatibility effects were equivalent for conjunctive distractors (e.g., a purple cross and a blue triangle) and for disjunctive distractors (e.g., a purple triangle and a blue cross). Manipulation of attention to the distractor positions resulted in larger compatibility effects from conjoined features. These results accord with Treisman’s claim that correct conjunction information is unavailable under conditions of inattention, and they provide new information on response-competition effects from multiple features.     

The role of comparison in the extension of novel adjectives

Previous reseach has documented that basic-level object categories provide an initial foundation for mapping adjectives to object properties. Children ranging from 21 months to 3 years can successfully extend a novel adjective (e.g., transparent) to other objects sharing a salient property if the objects are all members of the same basic-level category; if the objects are members of different basic-level categories, they fail to extend adjectives systematically (R. S. Klibanoff & S. R. Waxman, 2000a; S. R. Waxman & D. B. Markow, 1998). The present study proposed that the process of comparison is instrumental in children's ability to move beyond this foundation. To promote comparison, 2 target objects were introduced to 3-year-olds. In Experiment 1, the targets had contrastive properties (e.g., 1 transparent and 1 opaque object); in Experiment 2, the targets had consistent properties (e.g., 2 transparent objects). The results of both experiments illustrate that comparison--a general psychological process--operates in conjunction with naming to support the extension of novel adjectives to properties of objects from diverse basic-level categories.     

The Influence of Language Form and Conventional Wording on Judgments of Illness

Prior research indicates that category labels influence category judgments, but little is known regarding the effects for familiar categories with significant social consequences. The present studies address this issue by examining the effect of linguistic form on judgments of illnesses. Both mental and physical illnesses were presented in each of three linguistic forms: noun, adjective, and possessive phrase. In Study 1, participants were asked to judge the permanence of a set of novel illnesses that differed in wording (e.g., “He is a baxtermic”; “He is baxtermic”; “He has baxtermia”). In Studies 2 and 3, participants were asked to judge which forms of wording were most familiar for actual mental illnesses (e.g., schizophrenia) and physical illnesses (e.g., diabetes). In Study 4, participants were asked to judge the permanence of a set of familiar illnesses that differed in wording. The results indicated that for novel illnesses, nouns (“is a”) imply greatest permanence and possessive nouns (“has”) imply least permanence. However, for familiar illnesses, permanence judgments are also influenced by how frequently each form appears in ordinary language use. Mental illnesses are more often expressed with relatively permanent forms (“is” and “is a”) , whereas physical illnesses are more often expressed with relatively transient forms (“has”). The results demonstrate the importance of both linguistic form and conventional wording patterns on how categories are interpreted.     

Domain differences in the structure of artifactual and natural categories

In three experiments, different methodologies, measures, and items were employed to address the question of whether, and to what extent, membership in a semantic category is all or none (i.e., absolute) or a matter of degree (i.e., graded). Resemblance theory claims that categorization is based on similarity, and because similarity is graded, category membership may also be graded. Psychological essentialism asserts that categorization is based on the presumption of the category essence. Because artifactual (e.g., FURNITURE) and natural (e.g., FRUIT) categories have different sorts of essences, artifacts and natural kinds may be categorized in qualitatively different manners. The results converged onthe finding of a robust domain difference in category structure: Artifactual categories were more graded than natural categories. Furthermore, typicality reliably predicted absolute category membership, but failed to predict graded category membership. These results suggest that resemblance theory and psychological essentialism may provide a concerted account of representation and categorization across domains.     

Goal‐Derived Categories: The Role of Personal and Situational Goals in Category Representations

Prior research often emphasized a stimulus‐based or bottom‐up view of product category representations. In contrast, we emphasize a more purposeful, top‐down perspective and examine categories that consumers might construct in the service of salient (i.e., highly accessible) goals. Specifically, we investigate how the point of view imposed by salient consumer goals might affect category representations assessed by participants’ similarity judgments of food products. A key factor in our study is that we examine both individual and situational sources of variability in goal salience. In addition, we also vary the surface‐level, visual resemblance of the stimulus pairs of foods used in the study. The results suggest that personal goals (e.g., health) and situational goals (e.g., convenience) act in conjunction and exert a systematic impact on category representations. Both types of goals, when salient, enhanced the perceived similarity of goal‐appropriate products and reduced the similarity of product pairs when only one product was ideal for the particular goal. The similarity‐enhancing effect was most pronounced when the surface resemblance between the products was low, and the similarity‐diminishing effect was more apparent when surface resemblance was high. Implications are discussed for current theoretical assumptions regarding categorization in consumer research.     

Impressions at the intersection of ambiguous and obvious social categories: Does gay + Black = likable?

How do perceivers combine information about perceptually obvious categories (e.g., Black) with information about perceptually ambiguous categories (e.g., gay) during impression formation? Given that gay stereotypes are activated automatically, we predicted that positive gay stereotypes confer evaluative benefits to Black gay targets, even when perceivers are unaware of targets' sexual orientations. Participants in Study 1 rated faces of White straight men as more likable than White gay men, but rated Black men in the opposite manner: gays were liked more than straights. In Study 2, participants approaching Whites during an approach–avoidance task responded faster to straights than gays, whereas participants approaching Blacks responded faster to gays than straights. These findings highlight the striking extent to which less visible categories, like sexual orientation, subtly influence person perception and determine the explicit and implicit evaluations individuals form about others.