Context, categorization, and recall: The “change-of-standard” effect

A psycholinguistically based conception of the relation among context, categorization, and memory is tested by examining what happens to people's memory of an object when the object is initially categorized in terms of the context in which it appears, but, when the object is later recalled, this context is no longer salient. Subjects read about the sentencing decisions of a target trial judge in the context of other trial judges who consistently gave either higher sentences or lower sentences than the target judge. As predicted, subjects tended to categorize the target judge as “lenient” in the former, harsh context condition, and as “harsh” in the latter, lenient context condition. A week later, subjects read about the sentencing decisions of some additional judges, and then recalled the sentencing decisions of the target judge they had read about the week before. Across the two sessions, either a harsh, moderate, or lenient category norm for judges' sentencing decisions was established by having subjects read about decisions that involved either high, medium, or low sentences, respectively. The results indicated that subjects recalled the target judge's decisions by interpreting their prior categorization of his behavior in terms of the category norm established across the two sessions rather than the original context. Thus, subjects who were exposed to the same target in the same circumstances, and initially categorized the target in the same way, nevertheless remembered his behavior differently if their category norm was different at the moment of recall. Other types of “change of standard” and their implications for human judgment and memory are discussed.     

House sparrows use learned information selectively based on whether reward is hidden or visible

Animal Cognition - Based on past experience, food-related-cues can help foragers to predict the presence and the expected quality of food. However, when the food is already visible there is no need...     

Wittgenstein on culture and civilization

Wittgenstein's remarks on the nature of culture presuppose a view according to which there is an important difference between culture and civilization. This view aligns his thinking to that of the Romantic tradition in philosophy. It also leads him to perceive ‘the disappearance of a culture’ in our time. In many of his remarks on art and certain artists he expresses this view by attempting to clarify the different ways in which the spirit of man is manifested in modern times (in arts, science, and industry) as opposed to how it is manifested in an age of culture. This article undertakes to describe and explain the remarks which lead him to this view. It then considers whether Wittgenstein was, in fact, correct in his evaluation regarding the disappearance of a culture.     

Cognitive imitation in typically-developing 3- and 4-year olds and individuals with autism

Individuals diagnosed with autism suffer from numerous social, affective and linguistic impairments. It has also been suggested that they have a global imitation deficit. That hypothesis, however, is compromised by the fact that individuals with autism suffer from various motor impairments. Here we describe an experiment on cognitive imitation, a type of imitation that doesn’t require motor learning. Nine male autistic subjects and 20 typically-developing 3- and 4-year olds were trained to respond, in a prescribed order, to different lists of photographs that were displayed simultaneously on a touch-sensitive monitor. Because the position of the photographs varied randomly from trial to trial, sequences could not be learned by motor imitation. In three different imitation treatments, including a ghost control, autistic subjects learned new sequences more rapidly after observing a model execute those sequences than when they had to learn new sequences entirely by trial and error. Moreover, the performance of autistic subjects did not significantly differ from the performance of typically-developing controls. The result of this and other studies suggests that individuals with autism suffer from a specific novel motor imitation deficit.     

Price‐Matching Guarantees and Consumer Evaluations of Price Information

In 3 experiments, we show that price‐matching guarantees affect the process through which consumers translate price information into subjective judgments. In Experiment 1, we find that price‐matching guarantees appear to change the standard used in price evaluation by raising consumers’ estimates of the lowest and average prices in the market. This leads consumers to perceive products and stores that offer price‐matching guarantees as less expensive. In Experiment 2, we show that evaluations of product price information are affected by the presence of a price‐matching guarantee only when consumers do not know the range of market prices. In Experiment 3, we extend these findings to show that consumer evaluations of the cost of products in a store, inferred on the basis of store characteristics, are also influenced by the presence of a price‐matching guarantee.