Beholding the beholder: The reception of “Dutch” painting

While a lucid and understandable interpretation can be given for most pictures, typically Dutch paintings (i.e. seventeenth-century genre and still-life pictures) seem to allow for or even demand some measure of freedom for the beholder. The cause of this ambiguity lies in the typically Protestant disregard for works of art and in a concomitant characteristic of these works: they address the viewer in an ethical manner.In memoriam Sixten Ringbom, 1935-1992     

Position-dependent and position-independent attention shifts: Evidence against the spotlight and premotor assumption of visual focussing

Summary One implication of the spotlight metaphor of visual-attention shifts is that attention moves from position to position, from one object in the visual field to another. According to this view, attention shifts start at the last-focussed position, their spatiotemporal course therefore being position dependent. A different, yet also position-dependent, formulation is implied in the so-called premotor hypothesis of attention (Rizzolatti et al., 1987; Umiltà et al., 1991). In this paper these two accounts are tested against an alternative, position-independent conception. It is maintained that in the case of onset-triggered processes, the course of the attentional shifts is independent of the last-focussed position.On the basis of these considerations, three experiments measure choice-reaction times of stimuli at different spatial positions after peripheral cuing of the same or another position within the visual field. Results show no evidence for the position-dependent conception of the spotlight metaphor or the premotor hypothesis with a long SOA (stimulus-onset asynchrony) between cue and stimulus. Only with a short SOA is the premotor hypothesis supported by the data. As an alternative interpretation, a position-independent thesis is favored, in which it is assumed that attention shifts can be adjusted during an early stage of processing.     

Perceived localizations and eye movements with action‐generated and computer‐generated vanishing points of moving stimuli

When observers localize the vanishing point of a moving target, localizations are reliably displaced beyond the final position, in the direction the stimulus was travelling just prior to its offset. We examined modulations of this phenomenon through eye movements and action control over the vanishing point. In Experiment 1 with pursuit eye movements, localization errors were in movement direction, but less pronounced when the vanishing point was self‐determined by a key press of the observer. In contrast, in Experiment 2 with fixation instruction, localization errors were opposite movement direction and independent from action control. This pattern of results points at the role of eye movements, which were gathered in Experiment 3. That experiment showed that the eyes lagged behind the target at the point in time, when it vanished from the screen, but that the eyes continued to drift on the targets' virtual trajectory. It is suggested that the perceived target position resulted from the spatial lag of the eyes and of the persisting retinal image during the drift.     

More than just the mean: moving to a dynamic view of performance-based compensation

Compensation decisions have important consequences for employees and organizations and affect factors such as retention, motivation, and recruitment. Past research has primarily focused on mean performance as a predictor of compensation, promoting the implicit assumption that alternative aspects of dynamic performance are not relevant. To address this gap in the literature, we examined the influence of dynamic performance characteristics on compensation decisions in the National Basketball Association (NBA). We predicted that, in addition to performance mean, performance trend and variability would also affect compensation decisions. Results revealed that performance mean and trend, but not variability, were significantly and positively related to changes in compensation levels of NBA players. Moreover, trend (but not mean or variability) predicted compensation when controlling for future performance, suggesting that organizations overweighted trend in their compensation decisions. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

A stochastic lie detector

Surveys on sensitive issues provide distorted prevalence estimates when participants fail to respond truthfully. The randomized-response technique (RRT) encourages more honest responding by adding random noise to responses, thereby removing any direct link between a participant’s response and his or her true status with regard to a sensitive attribute. However, in spite of the increased confidentiality, some respondents still refuse to disclose sensitive attitudes or behaviors. To remedy this problem, we propose an extension of Mangat’s (Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B, 56, 93–95, 1994) variant of the RRT that allows for determining whether participants respond truthfully. This method offers the genuine advantage of providing undistorted prevalence estimates for sensitive attributes even if respondents fail to respond truthfully. We show how to implement the method using both closed-form equations and easily accessible free software for multinomial processing tree models. Moreover, we report the results of two survey experiments that provide evidence for the validity of our extension of Mangat’s RRT approach.