EFFECTS OF PREFERENCE AND REINFORCER VARIATION ON WITHIN-SESSION PATTERNS OF RESPONDING

We examined correspondence between preference assessment outcome and within‐session patterns of responding in one subject with autism. Responding maintained by a single highly preferred item resulted in a greater total number of responses, a slower decline in within‐session response rates, and a greater proportion of short interresponse times compared to responding maintained by varied moderately preferred (MP) stimuli. Presenting varied MP stimuli within the same session produced greater levels and more sustained responding than presenting those same stimuli individually.     

Item and order information in semantic memory: students’ retention of the “CU fight song” lyrics

University of Colorado (CU) students were tested on memory for the “CU Fight Song” in order to examine serial position effects in semantic memory while controlling for familiarity across positions. In Experiment 1, students reconstructed the order of the nine lines of the song. Students with previous exposure to the song performed better and showed a more bowed serial position function than did students with no knowledge of the song. Experiment 2 added a task assessing memory of item information. One word was removed and replaced with a blank in each line, and an alternative word was offered as an option, along with the correct word. Students selected the word that fit into each blank and then reconstructed the order of the lines. There was a bow-shaped curve for order reconstruction, but not for item selection, which implies that the serial position function in semantic memory stems from order, rather than item, information.     

Memory for details about people: familiarity,relatedness, and gender congruency

This study examines factors that influence memory for details about people. In two experiments, subjects learned fictitious details about familiar (friends, relatives) and/or unfamiliar individuals, and were tested both immediately and after a 1-week delay. To control for a confounding between familiarity and genetic relatedness in Experiment 1, in Experiment 2 specific relationships (identical twin, first cousin, acquaintance) were assigned to unfamiliar individuals. Across experiments, retention was enhanced for familiar compared to unfamiliar individuals, for friends/acquaintances compared to relatives, for more closely than distantly related individuals, and for individuals of the opposite gender as the subject.     

Worldviews and World-Pictures. Avoiding the Myth of the Semantic Given

Topoi - In this paper I focus on the notion of worldview as a conceptual scheme and the role of language in shaping our view of reality. In particular, I engage with Wittgenstein’s notion of...     

Questioning Pygmalion in the twenty-first century: the formation,transmission, and attributional influence of teacher expectancies

Teacher expectancy effects, the class of phenomena in which teacher beliefs about students influence student outcomes, are widely believed to operate through recursive processes of teacher-student interaction. Recent work in “wise” interventions has shown profound and robust effects in educational domains, and has attributed these effects to similar recursive processes (Yeager and Walton 2011). In this paper, we lay a foundation for forging connections between what we know about expectancy effects and how we might envision applying that knowledge as a lever in intervention research. We review the evidence for the existence and significance of teacher expectancy effects, as well as their possible mediators, including perceptual biases, confirmation biases, stereotyping, and attributional biases. We also hypothesize that empathy could play a role in mediating a relationship between expectancies and attributions. Finally, we propose a research agenda focused on the transmission, mediation, and attributional effects of teacher expectancies.     

Whatever happened to Kony2012? Understanding a global Internet phenomenon as an emergent social identity

Kony2012 was a viral Internet video that attracted unprecedented online interest in promoting a campaign to arrest the leader of an African militant group. The current research considers the social psychological bases of social media‐based collective action. In three cross‐sectional surveys (N = 304) collected before, on, and after the key action date of 20 April 2012, we consider the nature (opinion based or global) and function (emergent or transforming) of social identity in modern forms of social action. Multigroup structural equation modelling showed that Kony2012 action was best captured by an emergent opinion‐based social identity. Moreover, the same factors that predicted Kony2012 action generally also predicted engagement in new repertoires of protest (involving the use of social media) and an observable traditional socio‐political action (signing a letter to a government minister). The results suggest that there is no sharp dividing line between traditional and new forms of collective action and that both may be understood as valid expressions of collective selfhood. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Learning the moves: the effect of familiarity and facial motion on person recognition across large changes in viewing format

Familiarity with a face or person can support recognition in tasks that require generalization to novel viewing contexts. Using naturalistic viewing conditions requiring recognition of people from face or whole body gait stimuli, we investigated the effects of familiarity, facial motion, and direction of learning/test transfer on person recognition. Participants were familiarized with previously unknown people from gait videos and were tested on faces (experiment 1a) or were familiarized with faces and were tested with gait videos (experiment 1b). Recognition was more accurate when learning from the face and testing with the gait videos, than when learning from the gait videos and testing with the face. The repetition of a single stimulus, either the face or gait, produced strong recognition gains across transfer conditions. Also, the presentation of moving faces resulted in better performance than that of static faces. In experiment 2, we investigated the role of facial motion further by testing recognition with static profile images. Motion provided no benefit for recognition, indicating that structure-from-motion is an unlikely source of the motion advantage found in the first set of experiments.     

Within-modality and cross-modality attentional blinks in a simple discrimination task

Following up on studies of the "attentional blink," we studied interference between successive target stimuli in visual and auditory modalities. In each experiment, stimuli were two tones and four dots, simultaneously presented for 1,800 msec. Targets were brief intensity changes in either a tone or a dot. Subjects gave unspeeded responses. In four experiments, our results showed interference between targets in the same modality, but not across modalities. We conclude that, under our experimental conditions, restrictions in concurrent target identification are largely modality specific.     

Strategy shifts in classification skill acquisition: Does memory retrieval dominate rule use?

In two experiments, we demonstrated two types of strategies (rule-based and memory-based) and strategy transitions within the same binary classification task. The strategy that dominated later in practice depended on the difficulty of the operative classification rule and on the salience of the cue for that rule. Accuracy increased over practice trials, and response times were faster for the dominant strategy, either rule or memory. Rule retention was superior to stimulus item retention, so that, even for participants who preferred a memory-based strategy, a rule-based strategy dominated at least temporarily after a 1-week interval. Strategy use over trials and the retention interval reflected a given task's affordance of a shift between rule- and memory-based processes.