Effect of theory-based feature correlations on typicality judgments

In the present study, we examine what types of feature correlations are salient in our conceptual representations. It was hypothesized that of all possible feature pairs, those that are explicitly recognized as correlated (i.e., explicit pairs) and affect typicality judgments are the ones that are more likely theory based than are those that are not explicitly recognized (i.e., implicit pairs). Real-world categories and their properties, taken from Malt and Smith (1984), were examined. We found that explicit pairs had a greater number of asymmetric dependency relations (i.e., one feature depends on the other feature, but not vice versa) and stronger dependency relations than did implicit pairs, which were statistically correlated in the environment but were not recognized as such. In addition, people more often provided specific relation labels for explicit pairs than for implicit pairs; these labels were most often causal relations. Finally, typicality judgments were more affected when explicit correlations were broken than when implicit correlations were broken. It is concluded that in natural categories, feature correlations that are explicitly represented and affect typicality judgments are the ones about which people have theories.     

Identifying With Winners: A Reexamination of Sport Fans’ Tendency to BIRG1

This investigation examined whether or not sport fans are more likely to identify with successful teams than unsuccessful teams. College students (N= 78) were asked to list the sport teams with which they identified in order of personal preference. Using numerous criteria and the teams’ performances during their previous season, participant‐listed teams were deemed as being successful or unsuccessful. The results showed that fans were more likely to identify with successful teams than unsuccessful teams. A positive relationship also was found between fan preference (favorite team) and the success of the team. Fans’ tendencies to bask in reflected glory (BIRG) suggest that these sport fan identities may be premeditated for self‐presentational benefits. These results are discussed in the context of social identity theory.     

Do the laws of physics forbid the operation of time machines?

We address the question of whether it is possible to operate a time machine by manipulating matter and energy so as to manufacture closed timelike curves. This question has received a great deal of attention in the physics literature, with attempts to prove no-go theorems based on classical general relativity and various hybrid theories serving as steps along the way towards quantum gravity. Despite the effort put into these no-go theorems, there is no widely accepted definition of a time machine. We explain the conundrum that must be faced in providing a satisfactory definition and propose a resolution. Roughly, we require that all extensions of the time machine region contain closed timelike curves; the actions of the time machine operator are then sufficiently “potent” to guarantee that closed timelike curves appear. We then review no-go theorems based on classical general relativity, semi-classical quantum gravity, quantum field theory on curved spacetime, and Euclidean quantum gravity. Our verdict on the question of our title is that no result of sufficient generality to underwrite a confident “yes” has been proven. Our review of the no-go results does, however, highlight several foundational problems at the intersection of general relativity and quantum physics that lend substance to the search for an answer.     

Interactions between working memory, attention and eye movements

This paper reviews the recent findings on working memory, attention and eye movements. We discuss the research that shows that many phenomena related to visual attention taking place when selecting relevant information from the environment are similar to processes needed to keep information active in working memory. We discuss new data that show that when retrieving information from working memory, people may allocate visual spatial attention to the empty location in space that used to contain the information that has to be retrieved. Moreover, we show that maintaining a location in working memory not only may involve attention rehearsal, but might also recruit the oculomotor system. Recent findings seem to suggest that remembering a location may involve attention-based rehearsal in higher brain areas, while at the same time there is inhibition of specific motor programs at lower brain areas. We discuss the possibility that working memory functions do not reside at a special area in the brain, but emerge from the selective recruitment of brain areas that are typically involved in spatial attention and motor control.     

Goal-driven modulation of stimulus-driven attentional capture in multiple-cue displays

Six location-cuing experiments were conducted to examine the goal-driven control of attentional capture in multiple-cue displays. In most of the experiments, the cue display consisted of the simultaneous presentation of a red direct cue that was highly predictive of the target location (the unique cue) and three gray direct cues (the standard cues) that were not predictive of the location. The results indicated that although target responses were faster at all cued locations relative to uncued locations, they were significantly faster at the unique-cue location than at the standard-cue locations. Other results suggest that the faster responses produced by direct cues may be associated with two different components: an attention-related component that can be modulated by goal-driven factors and a nonattentional component that occurs in parallel at multiple direct-cue locations and is minimally affected by the same goal-driven factors.     

Culture modifies the operation of prime-to-behavior effects

Culture affects the extent to which people focus on other people or on the situation in drawing inferences. Building on recent research showing that perceptions of others and situations can mediate prime-to-behavior effects, we tested whether culture would modify both the mechanism and the outcome of primed constructs on behavior. Easterners and Westerners were primed with competitiveness or cooperativeness before playing a social dilemma game with an ambiguously or unambiguously competitive player. Results indicated that the primes had different effects on the social dilemma decisions of Easterners and Westerners and that these effects were due to the different consequences the primes had for Easterners' and Westerners' perceptions of the other player and construals of the situation.     

Looking, language, and memory: Bridging research from the visual world and visual search paradigms

In the visual world paradigm as used in psycholinguistics, eye gaze (i.e. visual orienting) is measured in order to draw conclusions about linguistic processing. However, current theories are underspecified with respect to how visual attention is guided on the basis of linguistic representations. In the visual search paradigm as used within the area of visual attention research, investigators have become more and more interested in how visual orienting is affected by higher order representations, such as those involved in memory and language. Within this area more specific models of orienting on the basis of visual information exist, but they need to be extended with mechanisms that allow for language-mediated orienting. In the present paper we review the evidence from these two different – but highly related – research areas. We arrive at a model in which working memory serves as the nexus in which long-term visual as well as linguistic representations (i.e. types) are bound to specific locations (i.e. tokens or indices). The model predicts that the interaction between language and visual attention is subject to a number of conditions, such as the presence of the guiding representation in working memory, capacity limitations, and cognitive control mechanisms.     

Similarity and categorization: from vision to touch

Even though human perceptual development relies on combining multiple modalities, most categorization studies so far have focused on the visual modality. To better understand the mechanisms underlying multisensory categorization, we analyzed visual and haptic perceptual spaces and compared them with human categorization behavior. As stimuli we used a three-dimensional object space of complex, parametrically-defined objects. First, we gathered similarity ratings for all objects and analyzed the perceptual spaces of both modalities using multidimensional scaling analysis. Next, we performed three different categorization tasks which are representative of every-day learning scenarios: in a fully unconstrained task, objects were freely categorized, in a semi-constrained task, exactly three groups had to be created, whereas in a constrained task, participants received three prototype objects and had to assign all other objects accordingly. We found that the haptic modality was on par with the visual modality both in recovering the topology of the physical space and in solving the categorization tasks. We also found that within-category similarity was consistently higher than across-category similarity for all categorization tasks and thus show how perceptual spaces based on similarity can explain visual and haptic object categorization. Our results suggest that both modalities employ similar processes in forming categories of complex objects.