“Proactive” in many ways: Developmental evidence for a dynamic pluralistic approach to prediction

The anticipation of the forthcoming behaviour of social interaction partners is a useful ability supporting interaction and communication between social partners. Associations and prediction based on the production system (in line with views that listeners use the production system covertly to anticipate what the other person might be likely to say) are two potential factors, which have been proposed to be involved in anticipatory language processing. We examined the influence of both factors on the degree to which listeners predict upcoming linguistic input. Are listeners more likely to predict book as an appropriate continuation of the sentence “The boy reads a”, based on the strength of the association between the words read and book (strong association) and read and letter (weak association)? Do more proficient producers predict more? What is the interplay of these two influences on prediction? The results suggest that associations influence language-mediated anticipatory eye gaze in two-year-olds and adults only when two thematically appropriate target objects compete for overt attention but not when these objects are presented separately. Furthermore, children's prediction abilities are strongly related to their language production skills when appropriate target objects are presented separately but not when presented together. Both influences on prediction in language processing thus appear to be context dependent. We conclude that multiple factors simultaneously influence listeners’ anticipation of upcoming linguistic input and that only such a dynamic approach to prediction can capture listeners’ prowess at predictive language processing.     

Contextualizing Falk's Identity-Related Visitor Motivation Model

ABSTRACT

This article represents a companion to an article critiquing Falk's identity-related visitor motivations model. Provided here are a summary of the theory and assumptions that underlie the identity-related visitor motivations model and the empirical approaches that were used to develop the model. Particular attention is directed to clarifying the ways in which the identity-related visitor motivations model has and can be used as a segmentation tool, and the growing body of data from a wide range of institutions that support the basic validity and reliability of using the model for this purpose. The paradigmatic foundation of the model, pragmatism, is described. Pragmatism is an approach that emphasizes that knowledge is best gained through, and directed toward action; an approach that gives preference to practicality over theoretical discourses. Finally, thoughts on both the strengths and limitations of the identity-related visitor motivations model as a mechanism for better understanding museum visitors are presented.     

Visual-shape competition during language-mediated attention is based on lexical input and not modulated by contextual appropriateness

Visual attention can be directed immediately, as a spoken word unfolds, towards conceptually related but nonassociated objects, even if they mismatch on other dimensions that would normally determine which objects in the scene were appropriate referents for the unfolding word (Huettig & Altmann, 2005 Huettig, F. and Altmann, G. T. M. 2005. Word meaning and the control of eye fixation: Semantic competitor effects and the visual world paradigm. Cognition, 96: B23–B32. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Here we demonstrate that the mapping between language and concurrent visual objects can also be mediated by visual-shape relations. On hearing “snake”, participants directed overt attention immediately, within a visual display depicting four objects, to a picture of an electric cable, although participants had viewed the visual display with four objects for approximately 5 s before hearing the target word—sufficient time to recognize the objects for what they were. The time spent fixating the cable correlated significantly with ratings of the visual similarity between snakes in general and this particular cable. Importantly, with sentences contextually biased towards the concept snake, participants looked at the snake well before the onset of “snake”, but they did not look at the visually similar cable until hearing “snake”. Finally, we demonstrate that such activation can, under certain circumstances (e.g., during the processing of dominant meanings of homonyms), constrain the direction of visual attention even when it is clearly contextually inappropriate. We conclude that language-mediated attention can be guided by a visual match between spoken words and visual objects, but that such a match is based on lexical input and may not be modulated by contextual appropriateness.     

What are we frightened of?

I am concerned to understand that relation to a situation which we call fearing it. Some say this cannot be done: it is a brute fact about us that we fear certain things and we understand another's fear when we see that he confronts a situation of this sort (a basic fear object) or one which he understandably associates with this sort. In Section I, I argue that being associated with a basic fear object will not usefully explain a current fear. In Section II, I argue that the obvious candidates for being basic fears will not do the required work. The notion should be rejected. I then argue that to fear an object is to take it as exhibiting one's lack of control and I proceed to describe the nature and content of this notion.     

Recovering Substantive Factor Loadings in the Presence of Acquiescence Bias: A Comparison of Three Approaches

Researchers are often advised to write balanced scales (containing an equal number of positively and negatively worded items) when measuring psychological attributes. This practice is recommended to control for acquiescence bias (ACQ). However, little advice has been given on what to do with such data if the researcher subsequently wants to evaluate a 1-factor model for the scale. This article compares 3 approaches for dealing with the presence of ACQ bias, which make different assumptions: an ipsatization approach based on the work of Chan and Bentler (CB; 1993), a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) approach that includes an ACQ factor with equal loadings (Billiet & McClendon, 2000; Mirowsky & Ross, 1991), and an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) approach with a target rotation (Ferrando, Lorenzo-Seva, & Chico, 2003). We also examine the “do nothing” approach which fits the 1-factor model to the data ignoring the presence of ACQ bias. Our main findings are that the CFA method performs best overall and that it is robust to the violation of its assumptions, the EFA and the CB approaches work well when their assumptions are strictly met, and the “do nothing” approach can be surprisingly robust when the ACQ factor is not very strong.     

Eye movements during language-mediated visual search reveal a strong link between overt visual attention and lexical processing in 36-month-olds

The nature of children’s early lexical processing was investigated by asking what information 36-month-olds access and use when instructed to find a known but absent referent. Children readily retrieved stored knowledge about characteristic color, i.e., when asked to find an object with a typical color (e.g., strawberry), children tended to fixate more upon an object that had the same (e.g., red plane) as opposed to a different (e.g., yellow plane) color. They did so regardless of the fact that they had plenty of time to recognize the pictures for what they are, i.e., planes and not strawberries. These data represent the first demonstration that language-mediated shifts of overt attention in young children can be driven by individual stored visual attributes of known words that mismatch on most other dimensions. The finding suggests that lexical processing and overt attention are strongly linked from an early age.     

The allure of equality: uniformity in probabilistic and statistical judgment

Uniformity, that is, equiprobability of all available options is central as a theoretical presupposition and as a computational tool in probability theory. It is justified only when applied to an appropriate sample space. In five studies, we posed diversified problems that called for unequal probabilities or weights to be assigned to the given units. The predominant response was choice of equal probabilities and weights. Many participants failed the task of partitioning the possibilities into elements that justify uniformity. The uniformity fallacy proved compelling and robust across varied content areas, tasks, and cases in which the correct weights should either have been directly or inversely proportional to their respective values. Debiasing measures included presenting individualized and visual data and asking for extreme comparisons. The preference of uniformity obtains across several contexts. It seems to serve as an anchor also in mathematical and social judgments. People’s pervasive partiality for uniformity is explained as a quest for fairness and symmetry, and possibly in terms of expediency.