Are personality questionnaires answered mindlessly?

Langer (1978) suggests that repetitive tasks may induce more automatic or mindless responding. Since many personality questionnaires consist of large numbers of questions of a similar form, a possible implication is that such questionnaires are sometimes completed mindlessly. To test this implication, a questionnaire was presented to 150 subjects which contained (both early and late in the questionnaire) items from the Dominance and Impulsivity subscales of Jackson's (1974) Personality Research Form. These items were separated by, or randomly interspersed with, filler items that were either similar (other subscales of the Personality Research Form) or dissimilar (attitude statements concerning nuclear energy). Item order was counterbalanced. It was hypothesized that the inclusion of dissimilar filler items should inhibit mindless responding to the later items. Change scores comparing late and early items showed a significant effect of the type of filler on the Impulsivity scores. A similar trend on the Dominance subscale was not significant. It is argued that personality research should pay more attention to the nature of the cognitive processes involved in self-rating measures.     

Developing Intuitions about How Personal and Social Properties Are Linked to the Brain and the Body

This study investigated the development of intuitions about which properties are associated with the brain and which are associated with the body. A sample of 60 children aged 6, 8, and 10 years, as well a sample of 20 adults, were told about a brain transplant between two individuals and were asked about where certain properties resided after the transplant. Adults and older children construed the characteristics associated with fine-motor behaviour, culpability, social contract and best friendships as transferring with the brain. Characteristics associated with gross-motor behaviour, physical/biological properties, ownership and familial relationships were more likely to be seen as remaining with the body. Domain-based explanations for this pattern of results are discussed.     

Early adolescents show sustained susceptibility to cognitive interference by emotional distractors

A child's ability to continuously pay attention to a cognitive task is often challenged by distracting events. Distraction is especially detrimental in a learning or classroom environment in which attended information is typically associated with establishing skills and knowledge. Here we report a study examining the effect of emotional distractors on performance in a subsequent visual lexical decision task in 11- to 13-year-old students (n=30). Lexical decisions about neutral verbs and verb-like pseudowords (i.e., targets) were analysed as a function of the preceding distractor type (pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant photos) and the picture–target stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA; 200 or 600 ms). Across distractor categories, emotionally arousing pictures prolonged decisions about word targets when compared to neutral pictures, irrespective of the SOA. The present results demonstrate that similar to adults, early adolescent students exhibit sustained susceptibility to cognitive interference by irrelevant emotional events.     

Biases towards internal features in infants' reasoning about objects

This paper reports the results of two sets of studies demonstrating 14-month-olds' tendency to associate an object's behavior with internal, rather than external features. In Experiment 1 infants were familiarized to two animated cats that each exhibited a different style of self-generated motion. Infants then saw a novel individual that had an internal feature (stomach color) similar to one cat, but an external feature (hat color) similar to the other. Infants looked reliably longer when the individual's motion was congruent with the hat than when it was congruent with the stomach. Using a converging method involving object choice, Experiment 2 found that infants prioritized the internal feature over the external feature only when the object's behavior was self-generated. In the absence of self-generated behaviors, however, infants did not show a preference towards the internal feature.     

Discerning the Division of Cognitive Labor: An Emerging Understanding of How Knowledge Is Clustered in Other Minds

The division of cognitive labor is fundamental to all cultures. Adults have a strong sense of how knowledge is clustered in the world around them and use that sense to access additional information, defer to relevant experts, and ground their own incomplete understandings. One prominent way of clustering knowledge is by disciplines similar to those that comprise the natural and social sciences. Seven studies explored an emerging sense of these discipline-based ways of clustering of knowledge. Even 5-year-olds could cluster knowledge in a manner roughly corresponding to the departments of natural and social sciences in a university, doing so without any explicit awareness of those academic disciplines. But this awareness is fragile early on and competes with other ways of clustering knowledge. Over the next few years, children come to see discipline-based clusters as having a privileged status, one that may be linked to increasingly sophisticated assumptions about essences for natural kinds. Possible mechanisms for this developmental shift are examined.     

Degradation of validity over time: a test and extension of Ackerman's model

The dynamic nature of the predictor-criterion relationship has long been a concern in psychology, especially with regard to the deterioration of validity over time. The authors examine P. L. Ackerman's ( 1987, 1988) hypothesized relationships between different types of predictors and criteria over time using data from previous longitudinal studies. Expert ratings categorized predictors and criteria according to P. L. Ackerman's model. Regression results support the predicted negative curvilinear relationship between cognitive ability and consistent and inconsistent task performance but do not support the predicted relationships between perceptual speed ability and psychomotor ability and consistent and inconsistent task performance. Deterioration of validity was more ubiquitous than has been suggested previously, and the pervasive form of deterioration was cubic with a negative trend. Findings are discussed in the context of catastrophe-chaos models.     

The Effect of Goal Difficulty on Escalation of Commitment

Escalation of commitment to a failing course of action is a problem in behavioral decision making that occurs across a wide range of social contexts. In this research, we show that examining escalation of commitment from a goal setting theory perspective provides fresh insights into how goal difficulty influences escalation of commitment. Specifically, through a series of two experiments, we found a curvilinear relationship between goal difficulty and post‐feedback goal commitment, which was mediated by valence and expectancy associated with goal attainment. In turn, it is commitment to goals that leads individuals to continue a previous course of action despite negative feedback. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Oscillatory brain activity differentially reflects false belief understanding and complementation syntax processing

False belief understanding (FBU) enables people to consider conflicting beliefs about the same situation. While language has been demonstrated to be a correlate of FBU, there is still controversy about the extent to which a specific aspect of language, complementation syntax, is a necessary condition for FBU. The present study tested an important notion from the debate proposing that complementation syntax task is redundant to FBU measures. Specifically, we examined electrophysiological correlates of false belief, false complementation, and their respective true conditions in adults using electroencephalography (EEG), focusing on indices of oscillatory brain activity and large-scale connectivity. The results showed strong modulation of parieto-occipital alpha (8–12 Hz) and beta (13–20 Hz) power by the experimental manipulations, with heightened sustained alpha power reflective of effortful internal processing observed in the false compared to the true conditions and reliable beta power reductions sensitive to mentalizing and/or syntactic demands in the belief versus the complementation conditions. In addition, higher coupling between parieto-occipital regions and widespread frontal sites in the beta band was found for the false-belief condition selectively. The result of divergence in beta oscillatory activity and in connectivity between false belief and false complementation does not support the redundancy hypothesis.     

Efficient visual search by category: specifying the features that mark the difference between artifacts and animals in preattentive vision.

In this report, we explored the features that support visual search for broadly inclusive natural categories. We used a paradigm in which subjects searched for a randomly selected target from one category (e.g., one of 32 line drawings of artifacts or animals in displays ranging from three to nine items) among a mixed set of distractors from the other. We found that search was surprisingly fast. Target-present slopes for animal targets among artifacts ranged from 10.8 to 16.0 msec/item, and slopes for artifact targets ranged from 5.5 to 6.2 msec/item. Experiments 2-5 tested factors that affect both the speed of the search and the search asymmetry favoring detection of artifacts among animals. They converge on the conclusion that target-distractor differences in global contour shape (e.g., rectilinearity/curvilinearity) and visual typicality of parts and form facilitate search by category. We argue that existing theories are helpful in understanding these findings but that they need to be supplemented to account for the specific features that specify categories and to account for subjects' ability to quickly locate targets representing heterogeneous and formally complex categories.     

Efficient visual search by category: Specifying the features that mark the difference between artifacts and animals in preattentive vision

In this report, we explored the features that support visual search for broadly inclusive natural categories. We used a paradigm in which subjects searched for a randomly selected target from one category (e.g., one of 32 line drawings of artifacts or animals in displays ranging from three to nine items) among a mixed set of distractors from the other. We found that search was surprisingly fast. Target-present slopes for animal targets among artifacts ranged from 10.8 to 16.0 msec/item, and slopes for artifact targets ranged from 5.5 to 6.2 msec/item. Experiments 2–5 tested factors that affect both the speed of the search and the search asymmetry favoring detection of artifacts among animals. They converge on the conclusion that target-distractor differences in global contour shape (e.g., rectilinearity/curvilinearity) and visual typicality of parts and form facilitate search by category. We argue that existing theories are helpful in understanding these findings but that they need to be supplemented to account for the specific features that specify categories and to account for subjects’ ability to quickly locate targets representing heterogeneous and formally complex categories.