Effectance and control as determinants of video game enjoyment.

This article explores video game enjoyment originated by games' key characteristic, interactivity. An online experiment (N=500) tested experiences of effectance (perceived influence on the game world) and of being in control as mechanisms that link interactivity to enjoyment. A video game was manipulated to either allow normal play, reduce perceived effectance, or reduce perceived control. Enjoyment ratings suggest that effectance is an important factor in video game enjoyment but that the relationship between control of the game situation and enjoyment is more complex.     

技术伦理需要机制化

技术伦理的有效运用离不开机构制度的支持.制度和机构一方面承担着对工程师的教育和伦理论坛的职能,是传授技术伦理思想的平台,另一方面,它也承担着单个工程师所无法独立承担的责任.德国工程师协会制定的工程师的伦理守则就是技术伦理机制化的一个范例.     

Task-set inertia, attitude accessibility, and compatibility-order effects: new evidence for a task-set switching account of the implicit association test effect

Based on a task-set switching account of the Implicit Association Test (IAT), the authors predict a specific pattern of aftereffects as a consequence of working through IAT blocks. In Study 1, performance in an evaluative decision task, but not in a color-naming task, was decreased after working through the incompatible rather than compatible block of a flower-insect IAT. In Study 2, response latencies in an evaluative rating task, but not in a color-rating task, were analogously affected, whereas the ratings themselves were not a function of the compatibility of prior IAT blocks. The aftereffects demonstrate reactivity of the IAT; they bear on the mechanisms underlying the IAT and on compatibility-order effects.     

Confusion and compensation in visual perception: effects of spatiotemporal proximity and selective attention

The authors investigated spatial, temporal, and attentional manipulations in a short-term repetition priming paradigm. Brief primes produced a strong preference to choose the primed alternative, whereas long primes had the opposite effect. However, a 2nd brief presentation of a long prime produced a preference for the primed word despite the long total prime duration. These surprising results are explained by a computational model that posits the offsetting components of source confusion (prime features are confused with target features) and discounting (evidence from primed features is discounted). The authors obtained compelling evidence for these components by showing how they can cooperate or compete through different manipulations of prime salience. The model allows for dissociations between prime salience and the magnitude of priming, thereby providing a unified account of "subliminal" and "supraliminal" priming.     

Does ignoring lead to worse evaluations? A new explanation of the stimulus devaluation effect

Affective evaluation of stimuli just seen in visual search tasks has been shown to depend on task-relevant stimulus configuration (Raymond, Fenske, & Tavassoli, 2003): Whereas targets and novel stimuli were evaluated similarly, distractors were devaluated. These results were explained by an inhibition-based account of the influence of selective attention on emotion. In the present experiments, we demonstrated that stimulus devaluation might not be a consequence of attentional inhibition. By simply instructing participants to react to an accepted or rejected stimulus in the visual search task of Experiment 1, we found distractor devaluation in the first case and target devaluation in the second case. We conclude that devaluation of stimuli is mediated by the affective connotation implied by response labels and instructions. This was confirmed in Experiment 2: To-be-ignored stimuli were not devaluated when participants knew that those stimuli would become task-relevant during the experiment.     

On being stuck in time

It is sometimes claimed that non-human animals (and perhaps also young children) live their lives entirely in the present and are cognitively ‘stuck in time’. Adult humans, by contrast, are said to be able to engage in ‘mental time travel’. One possible way of making sense of this distinction is in terms of the idea that animals and young children cannot engage in tensed thought, which might seem a preposterous idea in the light of certain findings in comparative and developmental psychology. I try to make this idea less preposterous by looking into some of the cognitive requirements for tensed thought. In particular, I suggest that tensed thought requires a specific form of causal understanding, which animals and young children may not possess.