Sexism Versus Partisanship: A New Look at the Question of Whether America is Ready for a Woman President

We question the validity of traditional polling about the likelihood of respondents to vote for a woman president and argue that the use of such polls may overestimate sexism and underestimate the role that party identification and individual characteristics play in deciding about whether to vote for a woman president. Our analysis of data collected in May–June 2004 show that many people who say they will not vote for a woman for president would do so if given realistic, specific, political scenarios via head-to-head match-ups with potential candidates. Although survey respondents preferred George W. Bush to Hillary Clinton, the margin between these candidates was close especially considering that Bush had been actively campaigning for months, whereas Clinton had not.     

The nature of the visual environment induces implicit biases during language-mediated visual search

Four eyetracking experiments examined whether semantic and visual-shape representations are routinely retrieved from printed word displays and used during language-mediated visual search. Participants listened to sentences containing target words that were similar semantically or in shape to concepts invoked by concurrently displayed printed words. In Experiment 1, the displays contained semantic and shape competitors of the targets along with two unrelated words. There were significant shifts in eye gaze as targets were heard toward semantic but not toward shape competitors. In Experiments 2–4, semantic competitors were replaced with unrelated words, semantically richer sentences were presented to encourage visual imagery, or participants rated the shape similarity of the stimuli before doing the eyetracking task. In all cases, there were no immediate shifts in eye gaze to shape competitors, even though, in response to the Experiment 1 spoken materials, participants looked to these competitors when they were presented as pictures (Huettig & McQueen, 2007). There was a late shape-competitor bias (more than 2,500 ms after target onset) in all experiments. These data show that shape information is not used in online search of printed word displays (whereas it is used with picture displays). The nature of the visual environment appears to induce implicit biases toward particular modes of processing during language-mediated visual search.     

Toddlers' language-mediated visual search: they need not have the words for it

Eye movements made by listeners during language-mediated visual search reveal a strong link between visual processing and conceptual processing. For example, upon hearing the word for a missing referent with a characteristic colour (e.g., "strawberry"), listeners tend to fixate a colour-matched distractor (e.g., a red plane) more than a colour-mismatched distractor (e.g., a yellow plane). We ask whether these shifts in visual attention are mediated by the retrieval of lexically stored colour labels. Do children who do not yet possess verbal labels for the colour attribute that spoken and viewed objects have in common exhibit language-mediated eye movements like those made by older children and adults? That is, do toddlers look at a red plane when hearing "strawberry"? We observed that 24-month-olds lacking colour term knowledge nonetheless recognized the perceptual-conceptual commonality between named and seen objects. This indicates that language-mediated visual search need not depend on stored labels for concepts.     

From neural responses to population behavior: neural focus group predicts population-level media effects

Can neural responses of a small group of individuals predict the behavior of large-scale populations? In this investigation, brain activations were recorded while smokers viewed three different television campaigns promoting the National Cancer Institute's telephone hotline to help smokers quit (1-800-QUIT-NOW). The smokers also provided self-report predictions of the campaigns' relative effectiveness. Population measures of the success of each campaign were computed by comparing call volume to 1-800-QUIT-NOW in the month before and the month after the launch of each campaign. This approach allowed us to directly compare the predictive value of self-reports with neural predictors of message effectiveness. Neural activity in a medial prefrontal region of interest, previously associated with individual behavior change, predicted the population response, whereas self-report judgments did not. This finding suggests a novel way of connecting neural signals to population responses that has not been previously demonstrated and provides information that may be difficult to obtain otherwise.     

Prelinguistic evolution in early hominins: whence motherese?

In order to formulate hypotheses about the evolutionary underpinnings that preceded the first glimmerings of language, mother-infant gestural and vocal interactions are compared in chimpanzees and humans and used to model those of early hominins. These data, along with paleoanthropological evidence, suggest that prelinguistic vocal substrates for protolanguage that had prosodic features similar to contemporary motherese evolved as the trend for enlarging brains in late australopithecines/early Homo progressively increased the difficulty of parturition, thus causing a selective shift toward females that gave birth to relatively undeveloped neonates. It is hypothesized that hominin mothers adopted new foraging strategies that entailed maternal silencing, reassuring, and controlling of the behaviors of physically removed infants (i.e., that shared human babies' inability to cling to their mothers' bodies). As mothers increasingly used prosodic and gestural markings to encourage juveniles to behave and to follow, the meanings of certain utterances (words) became conventionalized. This hypothesis is based on the premises that hominin mothers that attended vigilantly to infants were strongly selected for, and that such mothers had genetically based potentials for consciously modifying vocalizations and gestures to control infants, both of which receive support from the literature.     

IMPROVING THE PEER INTERACTIONS OF STUDENTS WITH EMOTIONAL AND BEHAVIORAL DISORDERS THROUGH SELF-EVALUATION PROCEDURES: A COMPONENT ANALYSIS AND GROUP APPLICATION

We conducted two experiments examining the effects of a self-evaluation package on the peer interactions of students described as emotionally or behaviorally disordered. Experiment 1 assessed the additive effects of various components of a self-evaluation package on the frequency of inappropriate and appropriate peer interactions. The components assessed were rewards alone, rewards plus discussion, and self-evaluation plus rewards. Results showed limited effectiveness when rewards alone and rewards plus discussion were implemented. However, substantial improvements in peer interactions were observed when the self-evaluation component was added. Experiment 2 examined the efficacy and feasibility of the procedures when implemented in a group setting. Students in three classrooms served as participants. Direct observation data collected for 8 of the participants showed the procedures to be effective in improving peer interactions when implemented in a group context.     

Consciousness and self-reference

Reflection on the self's way of being in consciousness yields two arguments for a theory of self-reference not based inany wayat all on self-cognition. First, I show that one theory of self-reference predicts an experience of the self because the theory inadequately analyzes the semantical facts about indexicality. I construct a dilemma for this cognitivism, which it cannot get out of, for it requires evensolitary self-reference to be based on some original self-knowledge, which is not available. I describe my kinetic model of unspoken self-reference, and I show how it fits the facts of four forms of consciousness, all of which presuppose self-reference, rather than yield it. Second, aspeaker uses the first person pronoun in sentences because she is aware of the unmediated role in agency of the beliefs she would express, and not because she is aware of herself in their content. The cognitive model, in contrast, succumbs to a vicious regress and is exposed as an obstacle to an understanding of consciousness.A version of this essay was read at Rabindra Bharati University, Calcutta (February 1985), University of North Bengal (March 1985) and Jadavpur University (March 1985). My thanks to S. Basu and S. Chakraborty at Rabindra Bharati, and to M. Ghosh and S. K. Sen at North Bengal, and to Ch. Gupta and P. K. Sen of Jadavpur University. Jadavpur's Prof. Sen's extensive comments in support of the cognitive model of reference led me to revise the essay thoroughly. North Bengal University may have published a version of this essay. I also thank Kent Baldner and the referees of this journal for insightful comments forcing further revisions.