The Reduction of Adverse Impact in an Employment Setting Using a Short-Term Memory Test

Research suggests that less adverse impact should result from the use of employment tests assessing memory abilities than is obtained from tests assessing cognitive abilities. To test the application of this principle, a Short-Term Memory test and a Reading Comprehension test were administered as part of a selection battery for entry level police. Subjects were 1423 police officer applicants for a Midwestern city in the U.S. The results for the overall sample showed a smaller standardized difference between the scores of Blacks and Whites on the Short-Term Memory test than on the Reading Comprehension test, a difference which was further reduced when a subsample of Blacks and Whites was created which had been matched on gender, years of education and age.     

What You Feel Influences What You See: The Role of Affective Feelings in Resolving Binocular Rivalry

It seems obvious that what you see influences what you feel, but what if the opposite were also true? What if how you feel can shape your visual experience? In this experiment, we demonstrate that the affective state of a perceiver influences the contents of visual awareness. Participants received positive, negative, and neutral affect inductions and then completed a series of binocular rivalry trials in which a face (smiling, scowling, or neutral) was presented to one eye and a house to the other. The percepts “competed” for dominance in visual consciousness. We found, as predicted, that all faces (smiling, scowling, and neutral) were dominant for longer when perceivers experienced unpleasant affect compared to when they were in a neutral state (a social vigilance effect), although scowling faces increased their dominance when perceivers felt unpleasant (a relative negative congruence effect). Relatively speaking, smiling faces increased their dominance more when perceivers were experiencing pleasant affect (a positive congruence effect). These findings illustrate that the affective state of a perceiver serves as a context that influences the contents of consciousness.     

Functional analysis and mechanistic explanation

Piccinini and Craver (Synthese 183:283–311, 2011) argue for the surprising view that psychological explanation, properly understood, is a species of mechanistic explanation. This contrasts with the ‘received view’ (due, primarily, to Cummins and Fodor) which maintains a sharp distinction between psychological explanation and mechanistic explanation. The former is typically construed as functional analysis, the analysis of some psychological capacity into an organized series of subcapacities without specifying any of the structural features that underlie the explanandum capacity. The latter idea, of course, sees explanation as a matter of describing structures that maintain (or produce) the explanandum capacity. In this paper, I defend the received view by criticizing Piccinini and Craver’s argument for the claim that psychological explanation is not distinct from mechanistic explanation, and by showing how psychological explanations can possess explanatory force even when nothing is known about the underlying neurological details. I conclude with a few brief criticisms about the enterprise of mechanistic explanation in general.     

Language and the perception of emotion

Three studies assessed the relationship between language and the perception of emotion. The authors predicted and found that the accessibility of emotion words influenced participants' speed or accuracy in perceiving facial behaviors depicting emotion. Specifically, emotion words were either primed or temporarily made less accessible using a semantic satiation procedure. In Studies 1 and 2, participants were slower to categorize facial behaviors depicting emotion (i.e., a face depicting anger) after an emotion word (e.g., "anger") was satiated. In Study 3, participants were less accurate to categorize facial behaviors depicting emotion after an emotion word was satiated. The implications of these findings for a linguistically relative view of emotion perception are discussed.     

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.