Path integration while ignoring irrelevant movement

Participants attempted to return to the origin of travel after following an outbound path by locomotion on foot (Experiments 1-3) or in a virtual visual environment (Experiment 4). Critical conditions interrupted the outbound path with verbal distraction or irrelevant, to-be-ignored movements. Irrelevant movement, real or virtual, had greater effects than verbal or cognitive distraction, indicating inability to ignore displacement during path integration. Effects of the irrelevant movement's direction (backward vs. rightward) and location (1st vs. 2nd leg of path) indicated that participants encoded a configural representation of the pathway and then cognitively compensated for the movement, producing errors directly related to the demands of compensation. An encoding-error model fit to the data indicated that backward movement produced downward rescaling, whereas movement that led to implied rotation (rightward on 2nd leg) produced distortions of shape and scale.     

Evaluative conditioning in social psychology: Facts and speculations

The aim of the present paper is to examine the contribution of evaluative conditioning (EC) to attitude formation theory in social psychology. This aim is pursued on two fronts. First, evaluative conditioning is analysed for its relevance to social psychological research. We show that conditioned attitudes can be acquired through simple co-occurrences of a neutral and a valenced stimulus. Moreover, we argue that conditioned attitudes are not confined to direct contact with a valenced stimulus, but can be formed and dynamically reformed indirectly, through association chains. Second, social research is examined in an effort to identify evaluative learning mechanisms. We suggest that several important phenomena in social psychology (e.g., ingroup favouritism, prejudice, name letter effect) are at least partly due to simple mechanisms of evaluative learning. The implications for attitude formation theory and for applied settings are discussed.     

Differential effects of cast shadows on perception and action

In two experiments we investigated the effects of cast shadows on different real-life tasks. In experiment 1, participants were required to make a speeded verbal identification of the target object (perceptual task), whereas in experiment 2 participants were required to reach for and grasp the target object (motor task). In both experiments real three-dimensional (3-D) objects were presented, one at a time, either with their own natural cast shadow (congruent condition) or with the cast shadow of a different object (incongruent condition). Shadows were cast either to the left or to the right of the object. We asked whether the features of the shadow (ie whether it is congruent or incongruent with the object, and whether it is cast to the left or to the right of the object) could influence perception and action differently. Results showed that cast shadows did not influence identification of real 3-D objects (experiment 1), but they affected movement kinematics, producing distractor-like interference, particularly on movement trajectory (experiment 2). These findings suggest a task-dependent influence of cast shadows on human performance. In the case of object-oriented actions, cast shadows may represent further affordances of the object, and as such compete for the control of the action.     

Two measures of affect and emotion in Italian children aged 6 to 11 years

The authors investigated the relation between affective and cognitive processes in fantasy play and emotional understanding of 50 Italian children (25 boys and 25 girls) enrolled in regular elementary school in Northern Italy. Children were administered a standardized play task, the Affect in Play Scale, and answered questions about their understanding of emotions. Consistent, yet modest, relationships were found between dimensions of fantasy play and emotional understanding.     

Disposition to recognize goals in infant chimpanzees

Do nonhuman primates attribute goals to others? Traditional studies with chimpanzees provide equivocal evidence for “mind reading” in nonhuman primates. Here we adopt looking time, a methodology commonly used with human infants to test infant chimpanzees. In this experiment, four infant chimpanzees saw computer-generated stimuli that mimicked a goal-directed behavior. The baby chimps performed as well as human infants, namely, they were sensitive to the trajectories of the objects, thus suggesting that chimpanzees may be endowed with a disposition to understand goal-directed behaviors. The theoretical implications of these results are discussed.