Daylight savings: what an answer to the perceptual variation problem cannot be

Philosophical Studies - Significant variations in the way objects appear across different viewing conditions pose a challenge to the view that they have some true, determinate color. This view...     

Target selection during bimanual reaching to direct cues is unaffected by the perceptual similarity of the targets

Investigations of bimanual movements have shed considerable insight on the constraints underlying our ability to perform coordinated actions. One prominent limitation is evident when people are required to produce reaching movements in which the two trajectories are of different amplitudes and/or directions. This effect, however, is only obtained when the movements are cued symbolically (e.g., letters indicate target locations); these planning costs are absent when the target locations are directly cued (J. Diedrichsen, E. Hazeltine, S. Kennerley, & R. B. Ivry, 2001). The present experiments test whether the absence of planning costs under the latter condition is due to the perceptual similarity of the direct cues. The results demonstrate that measures of response planning and execution do not depend on the perceptual similarity of the direct cues. Limitations in our ability to perform distinct actions with the two hands appear to reflect interactions related to response selection involving the translation of symbolic cues into their associated movements rather than arise from interactions associated with perception, motor programming, and motor execution.     

Agent-based modeling: a new approach for theory building in social psychology.

Most social and psychological phenomena occur not as the result of isolated decisions by individuals but rather as the result of repeated interactions between multiple individuals over time. Yet the theory-building and modeling techniques most commonly used in social psychology are less than ideal for understanding such dynamic and interactive processes. This article describes an alternative approach to theory building, agent-based modeling (ABM), which involves simulation of large numbers of autonomous agents that interact with each other and with a simulated environment and the observation of emergent patterns from their interactions. The authors believe that the ABM approach is better able than prevailing approaches in the field, variable-based modeling (VBM) techniques such as causal modeling, to capture types of complex, dynamic, interactive processes so important in the social world. The article elaborates several important contrasts between ABM and VBM and offers specific recommendations for learning more and applying the ABM approach.     

I feel our pain: Antecedents and consequences of emotional self-stereotyping

According to Intergroup Emotions Theory people categorized as group members experience the emotions of their ingroup as a consequence of that membership. Four experiments showed that participants converged toward what they believed to be their specific ingroup’s distinct emotional experience when reporting emotions as group members, but not when reporting emotions as individuals. Such self-stereotyping of ingroup emotions occurred for an experimentally fabricated ingroup as well as a range of naturally occurring groups. Demonstrating the roots of this process in categorization, self-stereotyping was increased when motivations to affiliate were amplified and was moderated by ingroup identification. The adoption of ingroup emotions changed participants’ cognitive processing in a predictable way, demonstrating that emotional self-stereotyping involved the experience rather than merely the expression of group-based emotions. Self-stereotyping of ingroup emotions is thus one mechanism by which group-based emotions are shared and can be changed.     

Subtle activation of a social categorization triggers group-level emotions

Previous research [Smith, E. R., Seger, C. R., & Mackie, D. M. (2007). Can emotions be truly group-level? Evidence regarding four conceptual criteria. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93, 431-446] has demonstrated that when people are explicitly asked about the emotions they experience as members of a particular group, their reported emotions converge toward a profile typical for that group. Two studies demonstrate that the same type of convergence occurs when a group identity is made situationally salient through priming, without an explicit request to report group-level emotions. People who identify more strongly with the group converge more, and show more similarity between their group-primed emotions and explicitly reported group-level emotions. This research confirms that activating a social identity produces convergence for emotions as well as for attitudes and behaviors. It also suggests that some previous emotion research may have tapped group rather than individual-level emotions, potentially requiring some reconceptualization.     

Shifty characters

In “Demonstratives”, David Kaplan introduced a simple and remarkably robust semantics for indexicals. Unfortunately, Kaplan’s semantics is open to a number of apparent counterexamples, many of which involve recording devices. The classic case is the sentence “I am not here now” as recorded and played back on an answering machine. In this essay, I argue that the best way to accommodate these data is to conceive of recording technologies as introducing special, non-basic sorts of contexts, accompanied by non-basic conventions governing the use of indexicals in those contexts. The idea is that recording devices allow us to use indexicals in new and innovative ways to coordinate on objects. And, given sufficient regularity in the use of indexicals on such devices, linguistic conventions will, over time, come to reflect this innovation. I consider several alternatives to this ‘character-shifting’ theory, but none is able to account for the data as well as the present proposal. Many face additional theoretical difficulties as well. I conclude by explaining how the character-shifting theory not only retains many of the virtues of Kaplan’s original semantics, but also coheres with a plausible view on the nature of semantic theorizing more generally.     

On the automatic evaluation of social exemplars

The present article focuses on the automatic evaluation of exemplars whose category membership has been learned in the past. Studies 1 and 2 confirmed the hypothesis that once an exemplar has been encoded as a member of a given group, at a later encounter the evaluation associated with the group will be unintentionally retrieved from memory, even when no perceptual cue indicates the exemplar's category membership. Study 3 extended the results to the domain of in-group/out-group differentiation. In addition. Studies 4 and 5 confirmed the hypothesis that stored evaluations can be retrieved and affect responses even when the semantic information on which the evaluations were originally based is no longer available for retrieval. Finally, Study 6 investigated spontaneous approach-avoidance behavior tendencies. Overall, results demonstrate the pervasive effects of person-based representations, and they are discussed in terms of recent models of person perception and out-group discrimination.     

The role of input and output modality pairings in dual-task performance: evidence for content-dependent central interference

Recent debate regarding dual-task performance has focused on whether costs result from limitations in central capacity, and whether central operations can be performed in parallel. While these questions are controversial, the dominant models of dual-task performance share the assumption that central operations are generic--that is, their interactions are independent of stimulus and response modalities. To examine these issues, we conducted a series of dual-task experiments with different input and output modality pairings. One condition combined a visual-manual task with an auditory-vocal task, and the other condition reversed the input-output pairings, combining a visual-vocal task with an auditory-manual task. Input/output modality pairings proved to be a key factor; throughout practice, dual-task costs were generally more than twice as large with visual-vocal/auditory-manual tasks than with the opposite arrangement of modalities (Experiments 1 and 2). These differences could be explained neither by competition for peripheral resources nor by differences in single-task response times (Experiment 3). Moreover, the persistent dual-task costs did not appear to stem from a central bottleneck. Contrary to the dominant models of dual-task performance, we propose that central interference between tasks depends not just on the duration of central operations, nor just strategic adaptation, but also on the content of those operations. Implications for structural and strategic accounts of dual-task interference are discussed.