Translating intentions into sunscreen use: an interaction of self-efficacy and appearance norms

The study examines whether self-efficacy mediates between intention and behavior, and whether appearance norms and self-efficacy are additive or synergistic predictors of sunscreen use. At two measurement points in time, 14 weeks apart, 154 individuals responded to an online questionnaire. Moderated mediation was tested by hierarchical regression analyses. Self-efficacy mediated the intention-behavior relationship, whereas appearance norms emerged as a moderator of the self-efficacy-sunscreen use relationship. The model accounted for 22% of the behavior variance at time 2. For individuals who believe that they would look more attractive with a tan, self-efficacy did not have a strong effect on behavior. Thus, for skin-protection motivation to become effective, self-efficacy is needed in conjunction with less positive appearance norms. Implications for public health promotion and mass media sunscreen use campaigns are discussed.     

Origins of the human pointing gesture: a training study

Despite its importance in the development of children’s skills of social cognition and communication, very little is known about the ontogenetic origins of the pointing gesture. We report a training study in which mothers gave children one month of extra daily experience with pointing as compared with a control group who had extra experience with musical activities. One hundred and two infants of 9, 10, or 11 months of age were seen at the beginning, middle, and end of this one‐month period and tested for declarative pointing and gaze following. Infants’ability to point with the index finger at the end of the study was not affected by the training but was instead predicted by infants’ prior ability to follow the gaze direction of an adult. The frequency with which infants pointed indexically was also affected by infant gaze following ability and, in addition, by maternal pointing frequency in free play, but not by training. In contrast, infants’ ability to monitor their partner’s gaze when pointing, and the frequency with which they did so, was affected by both training and maternal pointing frequency in free play. These results suggest that prior social cognitive advances, rather than adult socialization of pointing per se, determine the developmental onset of indexical pointing, but socialization processes such as imitation and adult shaping subsequently affect both infants’ ability to monitor their interlocutor’s gaze while they point and how frequently infants choose to point.     

Doing gesture promotes learning a mental transformation task better than seeing gesture

Performing action has been found to have a greater impact on learning than observing action. Here we ask whether a particular type of action – the gestures that accompany talk – affect learning in a comparable way. We gave 158 6‐year‐old children instruction in a mental transformation task. Half the children were asked to produce a Move gesture relevant to the task; half were asked to produce a Point gesture. The children also observed the experimenter producing either a Move or Point gesture. Children who produced a Move gesture improved more than children who observed the Move gesture. Neither producing nor observing the Point gesture facilitated learning. Doing gesture promotes learning better than seeing gesture, as long as the gesture conveys information that could help solve the task.     

Congruent visual information improves traffic signage

In the last five decades, cognitive scientists and the psychologists of reasoning have dedicated a lot of effort designing usable traffic signs. This study investigated the interference effect produced by the position of the sign elements in traffic signage on response accuracy and reaction time. Sixteen drivers performed a flanker interference reaction time task. Incongruent graphical/space solutions, actually used for the airport stack-type sign, lead to increased reaction time and a reduction in the proportion of correct answers. These results suggest that incongruent visual information should be avoided, as this might impair drivers’ performance. These findings provide important information for the specification of future signage design guidelines and for improving road safety.     

Unified framework for recognition, localization and mapping using wearable cameras

Monocular approaches to simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) have recently addressed with success the challenging problem of the fast computation of dense reconstructions from a single, moving camera. Thus, if these approaches initially relied on the detection of a reduced set of interest points to estimate the camera position and the map, they are currently able to reconstruct dense maps from a handheld camera while the camera coordinates are simultaneously computed. However, these maps of 3-dimensional points usually remain meaningless, that is, with no memorable items and without providing a way of encoding spatial relationships between objects and paths. In humans and mobile robotics, landmarks play a key role in the internalization of a spatial representation of an environment. They are memorable cues that can serve to define a region of the space or the location of other objects. In a topological representation of the space, landmarks can be identified and located according to its structural, perceptive or semantic significance and distinctiveness. But on the other hand, landmarks may be difficult to be located in a metric representation of the space. Restricted to the domain of visual landmarks, this work describes an approach where the map resulting from a point-based, monocular SLAM is annotated with the semantic information provided by a set of distinguished landmarks. Both features are obtained from the image. Hence, they can be linked by associating to each landmark all those point-based features that are superimposed to the landmark in a given image (key-frame). Visual landmarks will be obtained by means of an object-based, bottom-up attention mechanism, which will extract from the image a set of proto-objects. These proto-objects could not be always associated with natural objects, but they will typically constitute significant parts of these scene objects and can be appropriately annotated with semantic information. Moreover, they will be affine covariant regions, that is, they will be invariant to affine transformation, being detected under different viewing conditions (view-point angle, rotation, scale, etc.). Monocular SLAM will be solved using the accurate parallel tracking and mapping (PTAM) framework by Klein and Murray in Proceedings of IEEE/ACM international symposium on mixed and augmented reality, 2007.     

The role of skin color and facial physiognomy in racial categorization: Moderation by implicit racial attitudes

Previous research has not sufficiently addressed factors that define and moderate racial categorization judgments. This study independently manipulated skin color and facial physiognomy to determine their relative weighting in racial categorization. Participants (N = 250) judged faces varying on 10 levels of facial physiognomy (from Afrocentric to Eurocentric) and 10 levels of skin color (from dark to light) under either no time constraints, a modest time constraint, and under a stringent time constraint. Skin color was a powerful predictor of racial typicality ratings at all levels of facial physiognomy, but participants relied upon facial physiognomy more when rating faces of light than dark skin color. Skin color was a more important cue than facial physiognomy under no time constraints, but as time constraints became more severe, skin color's importance decreased, yet it remained a more important cue at extreme physiognomy levels. The relationship between skin color and racial typicality ratings was stronger for those with more negative implicit racial attitudes. These findings suggest the primary role of skin color in racial categorization and underscore the importance of implicit attitudes in explicit categorization judgments.     

The present projects past behavior into the future while the past projects attitudes into the future: How verb tense moderates predictors of drinking intentions

Three studies examined how the use of the present versus the past tense in recalling a past experience influences behavioral intentions. Experiment 1 revealed a stronger influence of past behaviors on drinking intentions when participants self-reported an episode of excessive drinking using the present tense. Correspondingly, there was a stronger influence of attitudes towards excessive drinking when participants self-reported the episode in the past tense. Experiments 2 and 3 liked this effect to changes in construal level (Liberman, Trope, & Stephan, 2007; Trope & Liberman, 2003), with the present tense being similar to a concrete construal level and the past tense being similar to an abstract construal level.     

System of Spheres-based Multiple Contractions

We propose a new class of multiple contraction operations — the system of spheres-based multiple contractions — which are a generalization of Grove’s system of spheres-based (singleton) contractions to the case of contractions by (possibly non-singleton) sets of sentences. Furthermore, we show that this new class of functions is a subclass of the class of the partial meet multiple contractions.     

Prioritized and Non-prioritized Multiple Change on Belief Bases

In this article we explore multiple change operators, i.e., operators in which the epistemic input is a set of sentences instead of a single sentence. We propose two types of change: prioritized change, in which the input set is fully accepted, and symmetric change, where both the epistemic state and the epistemic input are equally treated. In both kinds of operators we propose a set of postulates and we present different constructions: kernel changes and partial meet changes.