The development of infants' preference for motherese

Generally, infants prefer infant-directed (ID) to adult-directed (AD) speech. Mostly, researchers have used unfamiliar female voices in these studies. We investigated preferences for maternal ID speech in 1- and 4-month-olds. Using a procedure in which infants controlled access to voices by fixating a visual display, infants listened to recordings of natural female ID and AD speech. In Experiment 1, 1-month-olds heard recordings of maternal ID and AD speech, but these infants showed no preference for maternal ID speech. In Experiment 2, 1-month-olds heard the same ID and AD speech tapes but were not familiar with the speakers. Contrary to Experiment 1, these infants preferred ID speech. In Experiment 3, 4-month-olds heard recordings of maternal ID and AD speech and showed a significant preference for ID speech. Collectively, these results suggest that infant attention to ID speech depends on both speaker-general and speaker-specific characteristics, with interesting developmental changes occuring during early infancy.     

The selection of judges for preference testing

A scheme for choosing a few individuals whose preferences for given objects are most representative of those of a larger group of individuals is proposed. The method involves (a) quantifying the preferences of each individual so as to discriminate optimally among objects, (b) testing statistically whether or not a common preference continuum may be assumed for the quantified preferences, (c) constructing a linear estimator of values for the objects on this continuum, if it may be assumed, and (d) selecting as judges the least number of individuals whose quantified preferences, when used with this estimator, determine values for the objects with acceptable accuracy. A numerical example based on food preferences is presented. Preparation of this paper has been supported in part by the Quartermaster Food and Container Institute for the Armed Forces. Views or conclusions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or indorsement of the Department of Defense.     

An exploratory mindset reduces preference for prototypes and increases preference for novel exemplars

Previous research has shown that prototypes of familiar categories are preferred over novel exemplars of familiar and unfamiliar categories. The present research demonstrates a reversal of this effect by simply inducing an exploratory mindset. Specifically, participants were asked to judge the attractiveness of dot patterns that represented prototypes of familiar categories, exemplars of familiar categories, or exemplars of novel categories. An exploratory mindset was manipulated by asking participants to imagine the stimuli as stars (versus as peas). Results show that participants in the exploration condition preferred exemplars of novel categories (thereby reversing the classical prototypicality effect), whereas participants in the control condition preferred prototypes. The role of mindsets and familiarity in attractiveness ratings is discussed.     

The acceptability and preference for the psychological treatment of PTSD

The acceptability and preference of psychological treatments is important in understanding patient treatment seeking, choice, engagement and attrition and possibly treatment response in health care. The acceptability of, and preference for, 14 different types of psychological treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) were investigated in a student population through invitation to participate in a web-based survey. Respondents were asked to rate each treatment on 10 scales and to rank the treatments in order of preference. Respondents were also asked whether they would seek treatment themselves, recommend treatment to friends and family, feel stigmatised by suffering from PTSD, had any prior knowledge of the treatments and if this had been positive or negative and whether they had a history of psychological problems or treatment. A total of 330 respondents completed the survey. A past or current history of psychological problems and treatment was surprisingly high. Almost all respondents indicated that they would seek or recommend treatment in spite of high levels of stigmatisation. Factor analysis of the 10 scales indicated two factors: Endorsement and Discomfort. Rank ordering on preference and Endorsement scores was highly consistent. The highly preferred and endorsed treatments involved cognitive therapy, exposure or psycho-education in spite of high levels of discomfort anticipated with exposure. Treatments involving new technologies, EMDR and psychodynamic psychotherapy received the lowest Endorsement and preference. There was a modest influence of prior knowledge of a treatment.     

The role of spatial organization in preference for color pairs

We investigated how spatial organization influences color-pair preference asymmetries: differential preference for one color pair over another when the pairs contain the same colors in opposite spatial configurations. Schloss and Palmer (2011, Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics 73 55-571) found weak figure ground preference asymmetries for small squares centered on large squares in aesthetic ratings. Here, we found robust preference asymmetries using a more sensitive forced-choice task: participants strongly prefer pairs with yellower, lighter figures on bluer, darker grounds (experiment 1). We also investigated which spatial factors influence these preference asymmetries. Relative area of the two component regions is clearly important, and perceived 3-D area of the 2-D displays (ie after the ground is amodally completed behind the figure) is more influential than 2-D area (experiment 2). Surroundedness is not required, because yellowness blueness effects were comparable for pairs in which the figure was surrounded by the ground, and for mosaic arrangements in which the regions were adjacent and separated by a gap (experiment 3). Lightness darkness effects, however, were opposite for figure ground versus mosaic organizations: people prefer figure-ground organizations in which smaller regions are lighter, but prefer mosaic organizations in which smaller regions are darker. Physiological, phenomenological, and ecological explanations of the reported results are discussed.     

Fundamental axioms for preference relations

Summary The basic theory of preference relations contains a trivial part reflected by axioms A1 and A2, which say that preference relations are preorders. The next step is to find other axims which carry the theory beyond the level of the trivial. This paper is to a great part a critical survey of such suggested axioms. The results are much in the negative — many proposed axioms imply too strange theorems to be acceptable as axioms in a general theory of preference. This does not exclude, of course, that they may well be reasonable axioms for special calculi of preference. I believe that many axioms which are rejected here may be plausible if their range of application is restricted by conditions which are possible to formulate only in a language richer than that of the propositional calculus, e.g. in one containing modal operators or probabilistic concepts.     

Newborns' preference for goal-directed actions

The central role of sensory-motor representations in cognitive functions is almost universally accepted. However, determining the link between motor execution and its sensory counterpart and when, during ontogenesis, this link originates are still under investigation. The aim of the present study is to investigate whether at birth this link is already present and 2-day-old newborns are able to discriminate between visual cues indicating goal-directed or non-goal-directed actions. Here, with a preferential looking technique, a hand grasping a ball was the observed movement and we orthogonally manipulated the three factors necessary to successfully reach the goal: (a) presence of the ball, (b) direction of the arm movement, and (c) hand shaping. Results indicated that newborns orient more frequently and look longer at a hand shape for whole hand prehension but only when the movement is directed away from the body and toward the external world. In addition, newborns prefer the away from the body movement only when the object is present. We argue that newborns prefer a movement directed toward the external world only when it may develop into a purposeful movement because of the presence of the to-be-grasped object. Overall, our results support the existence of primitive sensory-motor associations since the first days after birth.     

J scale models for preference behavior

Three models for preference behavior are developed within the framework of Coombs' theory of data, an absolute difference model, a ratio model, and a two-stage model. Each of these models describes a mechanism by which unilateral preferences may be determined on a unidimensionalJ scale. Differential implications of the models for response latencies are derived, and some early data employing an application of the unfolding technique are presented in support of the two-stage model.Based upon portions of the author's doctoral dissertation, University of Michigan, 1962. This research was supported in part by NSF Grant No. G5820 to Professor C. H. Coombs. The writer also wishes to thank Professor William Hays, who served as committee chairman and offered considerable support and assistance.     

Six-month-old infants' preference for lexical words

Previous work has shown that newborn infants categorically discriminate the fundamental syntactic category distinction between lexical and grammatical words. In this article, we show that by the age of 6 months, infants prefer to listen to lexical over grammatical words. In Experiment 1, infants were habituated to a list of either lexical or grammatical words, and then tested on new lists of words from the same and the contrasting categories. The infants showed recovery to lexical words after habituation to grammatical words but not vice versa. This asymmetry indicates a possible preference for lexical words. In Experiments 2 and 3, preference was assessed directly by presenting infants with alternating trials of lexical and grammatical words, in the central-fixation preference procedure. The infants looked significantly longer during lexical-word than grammatical-word trials. These results show that by 6 months, infants attend preferentially to lexical words. The implications of this emerging attentional preference for subsequent language acquisition are discussed.     

Personality and preference for painting style

40 university students were asked to choose between the cubist or surrealist from among 15 pairs of slides of paintings according to their aesthetic preference. Their choices were correlated with scores on Rotter's internal vs external locus of control scale. The data support the hypothesis that there is a positive relationship between preference for cubism over surrealism and internal locus control and vice versa.     

Presentation-order effects for aesthetic stimulus preference

For preference comparisons of paired successive musical excerpts, Koh (American Journal of Psychology, 80, 171?C185, 1967) found time-order effects (TOEs) that correlated negatively with stimulus valence??the first (vs. the second) of two unpleasant (vs. two pleasant) excerpts tended to be preferred. We present three experiments designed to investigate whether valence-level-dependent order effects for aesthetic preference (a) can be accounted for using Hellstr?m??s (e.g., Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 5, 460?C477, 1979) sensation-weighting (SW) model, (b) can be generalized to successive and to simultaneous visual stimuli, and (c) vary, in accordance with the stimulus weighting, with interstimulus interval (ISI; for successive stimuli) or stimulus duration (for simultaneous stimuli). Participants compared paired successive jingles (Exp. 1), successive color patterns (Exp. 2), and simultaneous color patterns (Exp. 3), selecting the preferred stimulus. The results were well described by the SW model, which provided a better fit than did two extended versions of the Bradley?CTerry?CLuce model. Experiments 1 and 2 revealed higher weights for the second stimulus than for the first, and negatively valence-level-dependent TOEs. In Experiment 3, there was no laterality effect on the stimulus weighting and no valence-level-dependent space-order effects (SOEs). In terms of the SW model, the valence-level-dependent TOEs can be explained as a consequence of differential stimulus weighting in combination with stimulus valence varying from low to high, and the absence of valence-level-dependent SOEs as a consequence of the absence of differential weighting. For successive stimuli, there were no important effects of ISI on weightings and TOEs, and, for simultaneous stimuli, duration had only a small effect on the weighting.     

The child's preference in Michigan custody disputes

Abstract

The provision in Michigan's law which requires the court to consider the preference of the child in the resolution of custody disputes is discussed. Problems have been encountered in the implementation of this provision. The need for participation by behavioral scientists in the process of determining and evaluating the child's preference is suggested.     

The expected likelihood of transitivity of preference

May's model of pairwise preference determination is used to assess the expected likelihood that a subject's pairwise preference comparisons on three alternatives will be transitive. A closed form representation for this expected likelihood is obtained for each situation considered. When the subject is assumed to act precisely according to rankings on attributes with May's model, the computed expected likelihoods the relatively large. When the subject becomes a probabilistic chooser, as defined in a specific manner, expected likelihoods of transitivity decrease significantly from corresponding values with May's model. For a probabilistic Chooser, there is a significant likelihood that the subject might yield transitive pairwise preferences substantially different than the results suggested by May's model.This research was supported by a grant from the General University Research Program and through a fellowship from the Center for Advanced Study, both of the University of Delaware. Very helpful input from John H. Antil, Meryl P. Gardner, and James M. Munch is also acknowledged.