Is attention necessary for object identification? Evidence from eye movements during the inspection of real-world scenes

Eye movements were recorded during the display of two images of a real-world scene that were inspected to determine whether they were the same or not (a comparative visual search task). In the displays where the pictures were different, one object had been changed, and this object was sometimes taken from another scene and was incongruent with the gist. The experiment established that incongruous objects attract eye fixations earlier than the congruous counterparts, but that this effect is not apparent until the picture has been displayed for several seconds. By controlling the visual saliency of the objects the experiment eliminates the possibility that the incongruency effect is dependent upon the conspicuity of the changed objects. A model of scene perception is suggested whereby attention is unnecessary for the partial recognition of an object that delivers sufficient information about its visual characteristics for the viewer to know that the object is improbable in that particular scene, and in which full identification requires foveal inspection.     

Police officers ability to detect deception in high stakes situations and in repeated lie detection tests

Thirty‐seven police officers, not identified in previous research as belonging to groups that are superior in lie detection, attempted to detect truths and lies told by suspects during their videotaped police interviews. In order to measure consistency in their ability, the officers each participated in four different tests, each of which was on a different day. They were asked to indicate their confidence in being able to distinguish between truths and lies prior to the first test and after completing all four tests. We predicted that accuracy rates would be higher than those typically found in research with police officers; that good or poor performances on an individual test would be partly caused by luck, and, consequently, participants' accuracy scores were likely to progress towards the mean if their performance on all four tests was to be combined; and that officers would underestimate their own performance. These hypotheses were supported. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Finding evidence of dispositional coping

Data from college students and their parents were used in this longitudinal investigation, the primary goal of which was to examine the conditions under which coping style and coping behaviors are related. Participants completed a dispositional coping measure and reported on their coping with the most stressful event of the week for six weeks. Reports about the participants’ dispositional coping were also collected from the participants’ parents. Findings were consistent with the expectation that style would be a fairly weak predictor of coping in a given encounter but would predict more strongly aggregated coping responses across encounters. Additionally, parents tended to agree with each other about their child’s coping style, but the correlations between child and parental reports were generally small and nonsignificant.     

Gang involvement: psychological and behavioral characteristics of gang members,peripheral youth,and nongang Youth

Research has noted the existence of a loose and dynamic gang structure. However, the psychological processes that underpin gang membership have only begun to be addressed. This study examined gang members, peripheral youth, and nongang youth across measures of criminal activity, the importance they attach to status, their levels of moral disengagement, their perceptions of out‐group threat, and their attitudes toward authority. Of the 798 high school students who participated in this study, 59 were identified as gang members, 75 as peripheral youth, and 664 as nongang youth. Gang members and peripheral youth were more delinquent than nongang youth overall; however, gang members committed more minor offenses than nongang youth and peripheral youth committed more violent offenses than nongang youth. Gang members were more anti‐authority than nongang youth, and both gang and peripheral youth valued social status more than nongang youth. Gang members were also more likely to blame their victims for their actions and use euphemisms to sanitize their behavior than nongang youth, whereas peripheral youth were more likely than nongang youth to displace responsibility onto their superiors. These findings are discussed as they highlight the importance of examining individual differences in the cognitive processes that relate to gang involvement. Aggr. Behav. 36:423–436, 2010. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

The microgeographies of learning bodies and emotions in the ‘classroom-salon’

The role of the body and emotions in the workplace has become a fruitful area for sociological and, increasingly, geographical research over the past decade. This has been given particular emphasis and credence due to the growth of the service sector and its perceived ‘feminisation’, and the proliferation of work that focuses on the ‘improvement’ of bodies, most especially female bodies. This literature, though, has focused, as it suggests, on the processes of working and the geographies of the workplace, with those of training largely overlooked. Yet, given the emphasis on training for work and up-skilling in neoliberal economies, the sites and spaces of training warrant further attention. Here we focus on mothers engaged in training for massage and reflexology in the West London area, and draw together notions of body work and emotional labour to examine how bodies and emotions are learned and experienced through the microgeographies of the ‘classroom-salon’. In particular, the paper explores how the transformative space of the ‘classroom-salon’ is used to teach skills perceived simultaneously as natural and technical and how these link to perceived gender and maternal identities that extend beyond the classroom.     

Observational learning of tool use in children: Investigating cultural spread through diffusion chains and learning mechanisms through ghost displays

In the first of two experiments, we demonstrate the spread of a novel form of tool use across 20 “cultural generations” of child-to-child transmission. An experimentally seeded technique spread with 100% fidelity along twice as many “generations” as has been investigated in recent exploratory “diffusion” experiments of this type. This contrasted with only a single child discovering the technique spontaneously in a comparable group tested individually without any model. This study accordingly documents children’s social learning of tool use on a new, population-level scale that characterizes real-world cultural phenomena. In a second experiment, underlying social learning processes were investigated with a focus on the contrast between imitation (defined as copying actions) and emulation (defined as learning from the results of actions only). In two different “ghost” conditions, children were presented with the task used in the first experiment but now operated without sight of an agent performing the task, thereby presenting only the information used in emulation. Children in ghost conditions were less successful than those who had watched a model in action and showed variable matching to what they had seen. These findings suggest the importance of observational learning of complex tool use through imitation rather than only through emulation. Results of the two experiments are compared with those of similar experiments conducted previously with chimpanzees and are discussed in relation to the wider perspective of human culture and the influence of task complexity on social learning.     

A multicomponent approach to thinning reinforcer delivery during noncontingent reinforcement schedules

We evaluated a noncontingent reinforcement procedure that involved initially providing three subjects with signaled, continuous access to the functional reinforcer for aggression and slowly increasing the amount of time subjects were exposed to the signaled unavailability of the reinforcer. Additionally, alternative potential reinforcers were available throughout the sessions. Results showed immediate and substantial reductions in aggression for all three subjects. The clinical utility of this intervention is discussed, and future research directions are recommended.