Linking cognitive and reaching trajectories via intermittent movement control

Theories of decision-making have traditionally been constrained by reaction time data. A limitation of reaction time data, particularly for studying the temporal dynamics of cognitive processing, is that they index only the endpoint of the decision making process. Recently, physical reaching trajectories have been used as proxies for underlying mental trajectories through decision space. We suggest that this approach has been oversimplified: while it is possible for the motor control system to access the current state of the evidence accumulation process, this access is intermittent. Instead, we demonstrate how a model of arm movements that assumes intermittent, not continuous, access to the decision process is sufficient to describe the effects of stimulus quality and viewing time in curved reaching movements.     

Preliminary Note on a General Purpose Recording Technique

The extent to which attitudes towards mental illness and the mentally ill were influenced by the respondent's own level of personal adjustment was studied for 77 female psychiatric aides. The data suggested that, for this sample, the two variables were relatively independent of each other.     

The Dynamics of Visual Speed,Time, and Space: A Reply to Cartwright,Koehler, and Wallach

The political attitudes of 50 feminist women in relation to “feminism” as a dimension were examined and contrasted with those of 50 of their contemporary female peers. They were administered the Attitudes Toward Feminism Belief-Pattern Scale (3), the Conservatism-Radicalism Opinionnaire (4), and a questionnaire providing biographical information and personal opinions regarding various timely political and feminine issues.

The feminist women and their peers were found to differ significantly in the attitudinal dimensions of feminism and political conservatism-radicalism. The feminist women manifested more feminism than their peers, as well as being more politically radical. Feminism as a dimension was also found to be positively correlated with political radicalism.

Both goups were also compared in their sentiments and opinions on several noteworthy issues; e.g., the potential influence of the women's vote in en- hancing the status of women. Surprisingly, the feminist women and their peers failed to differ on some of the more salient of these.

In order to understand and appreciate the feminist personality, the forces potentiating the Women's movement, and the apparent similarities and differences between the feminist women and their peers, the variables of feminism, political conservatism-radicalism, and activism seem to deserve consideration.     

Emerging Worldviews: The Supplicate Order—Invocation of the Sacred

Approaches to supplication, such as faith and single-minded devotion to an ultimate value or deity, are proposed to constitute the human interface between the manifest and the unmanifest. A reciprocal, resonant interchange between the unmanifest and human summoning of the holy can bring the sacred to expression in cultural forms and personal experience. Addressing the boundaries between the human and the divine, this paper presents a cross-cultural model for spiritual supplication. This model utilizes the anthropological term ritual frame and provides an integrative worldview with which to examine the dynamics of sacred contact and invocation. This suggests that supplication is the universal and fundamental human orientation to invoke the reception of profound healings, as well as spiritual blessings, cross-cultural understandings and innumerable gifts of creativity.     

Centrality Preferences in Choices Among Similar Options

Three explanations were explored for the finding that people prefer the middle option rather than the extremes when choosing from an array of similar options. In Study 1, 68% chose the middle item from a set of three highlighters and three surveys, whereas 32% chose an item from either end, p < .0001. In Study 2, 71% selected the middle chair from a row of three chairs that were either all empty, or had a backpack occupying either one of the two end chairs, p < .0001. These results support a minimal mental effort principle rather than a preference for symmetry rule. In Study 3, 54.2% recalled more graphic items from the center poster of a 3-poster collage, whereas 31.3% and 14.5% recalled more items from the left and right posters, respectively, p < .004. These findings lend additional support to a focus of attention explanation.     

The Performance of Attention-Deficit-Disordered and Normal Children on Conservation Tasks

The present study was designed to investigate whether a specific subgroup of learning-disabled children (attention-deficit-disordered, ADD) differed from their normal counterparts on Piagetian tasks of conservation. The subjects were 34 third- and fourth-grade children. Seventeen children had been diagnosed as ADD; the remaining half were designated as normal. The two groups were equivalent in chronological age, mental age, and intelligence. The results indicated significant differences between the two groups on tasks tapping conservation of substance and number. These results may support the theory of a lag in the development of conservation in children with specific learning disabilities (ADD). Implications of the present research for therapeutic and remedial programs that serve ADD children are also discussed.     

Preirradiation Fatigue as a Factor in the Prevention of Irradiation Deaths in Rats

The present study focuses on the potential use of factor analytic techniques for the identification of personality dimensions in young children. Earlier work in this area has tended to rely on rating scales which predetermined the outcome of the analyses by their built-in theoretical biases. The scales here were designed to reflect a child's total area of functioning and to require the least amount of inference on the part of the rater. Three studies were done with a total of 129 nursery and kindergarten children. Of the factors identified, three were reproduced consistently in each of the studies. Factor I, Social Confidence, is characterized by leadership and assertiveness in interpersonal relations. Factor II, Cooperation, suggests a passivity in interpersonal relations and somewhat of a dependent stance. Factor III, Persistence, reflects a potential for problem solving and task orientation. It seems to have some relationship, as well, to autonomy. Two additional factors which appear rather consistently are Mobility and Aggression The factors which appeared here are compared with findings from earlier work and suggest the possibility of deriving factor scores for separate children for comparative and developmental study.     

Sentencing,severity, and social norms: A rank-based model of contextual influence on judgments of crimes and punishments

Context effects have been shown to bias lay people's evaluations of the severity of crimes and punishments. To investigate the cognitive mechanisms behind these effects, we develop and apply a rank-based social norms approach to judgments of perceived crime seriousness and sentence appropriateness. In Study 1, we find that (a) people believe on average that 84% of people illegally download software more than they do themselves and (b) their judged severity of, and concern about, their own illegal software downloading is predicted not by its amount but by how this amount is believed (typically inaccurately) to rank within a social comparison distribution. Studies 2 and 3 find that the judged appropriateness of a given sentence length is highly dependent on the length of other sentences available in the decision-making context: The same objective sentence was judged as approximately four times stricter when it was the second longest sentence being considered than when it was the fifth longest. It is concluded that the same mechanisms that are used to judge the magnitude of psychophysical stimuli bias judgments about legal matters.