Hindsight bias in gustatory judgments

Being in hindsight, people tend to overestimate what they had known in foresight. This phenomenon has been studied for a wide variety of knowledge domains (e.g., episodes with uncertain outcomes, or solutions to almanac questions). As a result of these studies, hindsight bias turned out to be a robust phenomenon. In this paper, we present two experiments that successfully extended the domain of hindsight bias to gustatory judgments. Participants tasted different food items and were asked to estimate the quantity of a certain ingredient, for example, the residual sugar in a white wine. Judgments in both experiments were systematically biased towards previously presented low or high values that were labeled as the true quantities. Thus, hindsight bias can be considered a phenomenon that extends well beyond the judgment domains studied so far.     

Adaptive motor behavior of cerebellar patients during exposure to unfamiliar external forces

The authors investigated adaptation of goal-directed forearm movements to an unknown external viscous force assisting forearm flexion in 6 patients with cerebellar dysfunction and in 6 control participants. Motor performance was generally degraded in cerebellar patients and was markedly reduced under the force condition in both groups. However, patients and controls were able to adapt to the novel force within 8 trials. Only the healthy controls were able to improve motor performance when readapting to a null-force condition. The results indicate that cerebellar patients' motor control system has imprecise estimations of actual limb dynamics at its disposal. Force adaptation may have been preserved because single-joint movements were performed, whereas the negative viscous force alone and no interaction forces had to be compensated.     

Do Childhood Emotional Lability and ADHD Symptoms Have Shared Neuropsychological Roots?

Emotional Lability (EL) is a source of impairment in multiple mental disorders of children, including attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). It has been proposed that the overlap between EL and ADHD symptoms is the result of common neuropsychological deficits. The aim of the present study was to test this hypothesis by using a multi-method approach. In a mixed sample of 61 children (49 community sample and 12 children with an ADHD diagnosis) aged between 8 and 12 years, we examined the relationship between parental reports of ADHD and EL, real-time children’s emotional expressions in an experimental context, children’s performance on neuropsychological tasks and parental ratings of neuropsychological functioning. Parental EL ratings were significantly predicted by task-based reaction time variability and by questionnaire measures of Self-Direction & Organization and Arousal Regulation. Parental EL ratings were also significantly related to both ADHD symptom dimensions. After controlling for shared neuropsychological factors, ADHD symptoms no longer predicted parental EL ratings. Neuropsychological task performance was not significantly related to real time emotional expressions. However, positive emotional expressions were significantly predicted by higher parental ratings of Cognition and negative emotional expressions by parental ratings of low Effort engagement – accounting for some of the correlation with ADHD symptoms. The current results highlight the plausible role of cognitive energetic processes in explaining the EL and ADHD symptom association.

     

Rape myths as neutralizing cognitions: evidence for a causal impact of anti-victim attitudes on men's self-reported likelihood of raping

Men's rape myth acceptance (RMA; prejudiced beliefs that serve to exonerate the rapist and blame the victim) has been shown to correlate positively with self-reported rape proclivity (RP). To explore the causal pathway underlying this correlation, two experiments were conducted in which the relative cognitive accessibility of RMA and RP was varied. Male students were asked to report their RP in the context of a scale assessing attraction toward sexual aggression (Experiment 1) or in response to five realistic date-rape scenarios (Experiment 2), either before or after they filled out a 20-item RMA scale. In both studies, the correlation of RMA and RP was significantly greater in the after than in the before condition, suggesting that the belief in rape myths has a causal influence on men's proclivity to rape. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Exploring and Exploiting Uncertainty: Statistical Learning Ability Affects How We Learn to Process Language Along Multiple Dimensions of Experience

While the effects of pattern learning on language processing are well known, the way in which pattern learning shapes exploratory behavior has long gone unnoticed. We report on the way in which individual differences in statistical pattern learning affect performance in the domain of language along multiple dimensions. Analyzing data from healthy monolingual adults' performance on a serial reaction time task and a self-paced reading task, we show how individual differences in statistical pattern learning are reflected in readers' knowledge of linguistic co-occurrence patterns and in their exploration and exploitation of content-specific and task-general information. First, we investigated the extent to which an individual's pattern learning correlates with his or her sensitivity to systematic morphological and syntactic co-occurrences, as evidenced while reading authentic sentences. We found that the stream of morphological and syntactic information has a more pronounced effect on the reading speed of, as we will label them, content-sensitive learners in that the more probable the co-occurrence pattern, the faster their reading of that pattern will be. Next, we investigated how differences in pattern learning are reflected in the ways in which individuals approach the reading task itself and adapt to it. Casting this relation in terms of exploration/exploitation strategies, known from Reinforcement Learning, we conclude that content-sensitive learners are also more likely to initially probe (explore) a wider range of directly relevant patterns, which they can later use (exploit) to optimize their reading performance further. By affecting exploratory behavior, pattern learning influences the information that is gathered and becomes available for exploitation, thereby increasing the effect pattern learning has on language cognition.     

Mentalisierungsdefizite bei stationären Patienten

Background

Fonagy (2009) considers the improvement of mentalization, understood as an element of structural change, as a global goal of psychotherapeutic treatment. Yet until now there is little knowledge about the mentalizing skills in clinical populations.

Material and methods

We examined the mentalizing skills in 201 patients on admission for complex psychotherapeutic inpatient treatment with the “Reading the mind in the eyes”-Test (RMET). We explored if there are diagnosis-related differences in the RMET and compared our findings to published data on the RMET in clinical and normal populations.

Results

Compared to normal populations our sample scored significantly lower in the RMET, however, no diagnosis-related differences were found.

Conclusions

Although our data are preliminary, psychotherapeutic inpatient treatment should consider the patients reduced mentalizing skills.     

The Spatial Power Motivation Scale: A Semi-Implicit Measure of Situational Power Motivation

We introduce a new nonverbal and unobtrusive measure to assess power motive activation, the Spatial Power Motivation Scale (SPMS). The unique features of this instrument are that it is (a) very simple and economical, (b) reliable and valid, and (c) sensitive to situational changes. Study 1 demonstrates the instrument's convergent and discriminant validity with explicit measures. Study 2 demonstrates the instrument's responsiveness to situational power motive salience: anticipating and winning competition versus losing competition and watching television. Studies 3 and 4 demonstrate that thoughts of competition result in higher power motivation specifically for individuals with a high dispositional power motive.