Plumbing the depths of the bogus pipeline: A reprise

Several years ago a debate appeared in this journal concerning the utility of the “bogus pipeline” attitude measurement technique. Cherry, Byrne, and Mitchell (Journal of Research in Personality, 1976, 10, 69–75) found that the bogus pipeline technique was vulnerable to demand characteristics, especially among persons high in social desirability. However, Gaes, Quigley-Fernandez, and Tedeschi (Journal of Research in Personality, 1978, 12, 189–192) criticized this study on methodological grounds. The present conceptual replication failed entirely to produce the Cherry et al. finding; indeed, the present data show a tendency for responsiveness to demand characteristics only among subjects responding via “paper and pencil.” This finding is consistent with the traditional conceptualization of the bogus pipeline procedures and supports the meaningfulness of data obtained using the technique within the impression management literature. Interestingly, social desirability did not enter in any way into the effects; this fact raises some intriguing questions about the social desirability construct itself.     

The role of social perspective in perceiving the causes of success and failure1

An experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis that observers' causal attributions about an actor's performance at a task would be affected by their social perspective in observing the situation. Observer subjects were either assigned to serve in a role comparable to that of observer-subjects in most actor-observer experiments or were assigned a distinctive role more divergent from the social perspective of the actor. As expected, observers with a similar social perspective to that of the actor made more flattering attributions about the actor's performance than observers with a dissimilar social perspective. We concluded that actor-observer differences in attribution for an actor's performance in any one experiment cannot be taken as definitive evidence either for or against the defensive attribution idea.     

The role of mental rotations in primate-inspired robot navigation

Scripts store the temporal order of component events of everyday activities as well as the temporal position of the events within the activity (early or late). When confronted with an activity, predictions are generated about how the component events will unfold. Thereby, an error-detection mechanism continuously monitors whether they unfold as anticipated or not in order to reveal errors in the unfolding activity. We investigated whether the temporal position “early” or “late” influenced the detection of errors using the pupillary response as an index of cognitive resource consumption. An event triplet consisting of three events was presented in a chronological or non-chronological temporal order. Crucially, the triplet focused either on the beginning (temporal position “early”) or the end (temporal position “late”) of an activity. We assumed that these position codes would be used to facilitate error detection when a non-chronological event was presented. Results showed that errors in the temporal order were detected more successfully in early than in late triplets. Results further suggest that strong predictions are formed about how an activity begins. Violations of this prediction must be overcome by zooming into the representation and allocating attention to the temporal position that consumes cognitive resources. Only after zooming in has taken place successfully may the position codes be used to anticipate temporal violations in unfolding event sequences.     

The role of mental rotations in primate-inspired robot navigation

The use of a primate's spatial ability of mental rotation to serve as a basis for robotic navigation has been almost entirely overlooked by the robotics community to date. In this paper, the role of this cognitive capacity is presented as an adjunct to existing robotic control systems, with the underlying approach being derived from studies of primate spatial cognition. Specifically, optical flow is used as a basis for transitory representations (snapshots) that are compared to an a priori visual goal to provide corrective course action for a robot when moving through the world. The underlying architecture and procedures are described.