Visual behavior and perception of trajectories of moving objects with visual occlusion

Experienced athletes in sports with moving objects have shown greater skill when using visual information to anticipate the direction of a moving object than nonexperienced athletes of those sports. Studies have shown that expert athletes are more effective than novices in occlusion situations in the first stages of the sports sequence. In this study, 12 athletes with different competitive experience in sports with moving objects viewed a sequence of tennis ball launches with and without visual occlusion, launched by a ball-shooting machine toward different areas with respect to the participant's position. The relation among visual behavior, occlusion time, and the precision of the task is reviewed. The spot where the balls bounced was analysed by a digital camera and visual behavior by an Eye Tracking System. Analysis showed that the nonexperienced athletes made significantly more errors and were more variable in visual occlusion conditions. Participants had a stable visual search strategy.     

Associative and causal reasoning accounts of causal induction: Symmetries and asymmetries in predictive and diagnostic inferences

Associative and causal reasoning accounts are probably the two most influential types of accounts of causal reasoning processes. Only causal reasoning accounts predict certain asymmetries between predictive (i.e., reasoning from causes to effects) and diagnostic (i.e., reasoning from effects to causes) inferences regarding cue-interaction phenomena (e.g., the overshadowing effect). In the experiments reported here, we attempted to delimit the conditions under which these asymmetries occur. The results show that unless participants perceived the relevance of causal information to solving the task, predictive and diagnostic inferences were symmetrical. Specifically, Experiments 1A and 1B showed that implicitly stressing the relevance of causal information by having participants review the instructions favored the presence of asymmetries between predictive and diagnostic situations. In addition, Experiment 2 showed that explicitly stressing the relevance of causal information by stating the importance of the causal role of events after the instructions were given also favored the asymmetry.     

"Economic man" in cross-cultural perspective: behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies

Researchers from across the social sciences have found consistent deviations from the predictions of the canonical model of self-interest in hundreds of experiments from around the world. This research, however, cannot determine whether the uniformity results from universal patterns of human behavior or from the limited cultural variation available among the university students used in virtually all prior experimental work. To address this, we undertook a cross-cultural study of behavior in ultimatum, public goods, and dictator games in a range of small-scale societies exhibiting a wide variety of economic and cultural conditions. We found, first, that the canonical model - based on self-interest - fails in all of the societies studied. Second, our data reveal substantially more behavioral variability across social groups than has been found in previous research. Third, group-level differences in economic organization and the structure of social interactions explain a substantial portion of the behavioral variation across societies: the higher the degree of market integration and the higher the payoffs to cooperation in everyday life, the greater the level of prosociality expressed in experimental games. Fourth, the available individual-level economic and demographic variables do not consistently explain game behavior, either within or across groups. Fifth, in many cases experimental play appears to reflect the common interactional patterns of everyday life.     

The Positive and Negative Suicide Ideation (PANSI) inventory: psychometric evaluation with adolescent psychiatric inpatient samples

In this study, we evaluated the factor structure of the Positive and Negative Suicide Ideation (PANSI) Inventory (Osman, Gutierrez, Kopper, Barrios, & Chiros, 1998) using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The PANSI assesses the frequency of negative risk and protective factors that are related to suicidal behavior. Participants (n = 195) were adolescent psychiatric inpatients, ages 14 to 17 years, in the CFA. Results of the CFA supported the fit for the 2-factor oblique model as the best fitting model. The internal consistency reliability estimates of the 2 subscales, the PANSI-Negative (alpha = .96) and the PANSI-Positive (alpha = .89) were high. Scores on the PANSI scales differentiated between suicide attempters and controls and those at severe risk for suicide and controls. Correlational analyses provide strong support for the concurrent validity of the scales. The results of the logistic regression analyses provide support for the use of this new inventory as a risk measure of suicide-related behaviors: Scores on the PANSI scales (n = 54) also showed satisfactory evidence for test-retest reliability over a 2-week period.     

Mental models in deductive reasoning

We report research investigating the role of mental models in deduction. The first study deals with conjunctive inferences (from one conjunction and two conditional premises) and disjunctive inferences (from one disjunction and the same two conditionals). The second study examines reasoning from multiple conditionals such as: If e then b; If a then b; If b then c; What follows between a and c? The third study addresses reasoning from different sorts of conditional assertions, including conditionals based on if then, only if, and unless. The paper also presents research on figural effects in syllogistic reasoning, on the effects of structure and believability in reasoning from double conditionals, and on reasoning from factual, counterfactual, and semifactual conditionals. The findings of these studies support the model theory, pose some difficulties for rule theories, and show the influence on reasoning of the linguistic structure and the semantic content of problems.     

Life after Kant: Natural purposes and the autopoietic foundations of biological individuality

This paper proposes a basic revision of the understanding of teleology in biological sciences. Since Kant, it has become customary to view purposiveness in organisms as a bias added by the observer; the recent notion of teleonomy expresses well this as-if character of natural purposes. In recent developments in science, however, notions such as self-organization (or complex systems) and the autopoiesis viewpoint, have displaced emergence and circular self-production as central features of life. Contrary to an often superficial reading, Kant gives a multi-faceted account of the living, and anticipates this modern reading of the organism, even introducing the term self-organization for the first time. Our re-reading of Kant in this light is strengthened by a group of philosophers of biology, with Hans Jonas as the central figure, who put back on center stage an organism-centered view of the living, an autonomous center of concern capable of providing an interior perspective. Thus, what is present in nuce in Kant, finds a convergent development from this current of philosophy of biology and the scientific ideas around autopoeisis, two independent but parallel developments culminating in the 1970s. Instead of viewing meaning or value as artifacts or illusions, both agree on a new understanding of a form of immanent teleology as truly biological features, inevitably intertwined with the self-establishment of an identity which is the living process.     

Accomplishing Structural Change: Identifying Intermediate Indicators of Success

Coalitions are routinely employed across the United States as a method of mobilizing communities to improve local conditions that impact on citizens’ well-being. Success in achieving specific objectives for environmental or structural community change may not quickly translate into improved population outcomes in the community, posing a dilemma for coalitions that pursue changes that focus on altering community conditions. Considerable effort by communities to plan for and pursue structural change objectives, without evidence of logical and appropriate intermediate markers of success could lead to wasted effort. Yet, the current literature provides little guidance on how coalitions might select intermediate indicators of achievement to judge their progress and the utility of their effort. The current paper explores the strengths and weaknesses of various indicators of intermediate success in creating structural changes among a sample of 13 coalitions organized to prevent exposure to HIV among high-risk adolescents in their local communities.     

Religious belief and intelligence: Worldwide evidence

Is there a positive impact of intelligence on religious disbelief after we account for the fact that both average intelligence and religious disbelief tend to be higher in more developed countries? We carry out four beta regression analyses and conclude that the answer is yes. We also compute impact curves that show how the effect of intelligence on atheism changes with average intelligence quotients. The impact is stronger at lower intelligence levels, peaks somewhere between 100 and 110, and then weakens. Bootstrap standard errors for our point estimates and bootstrap confidence intervals are also computed.     

El problema de la validez ecológica

RESUMEN

En este artículo se quiere tratar algunos de los problemas que plantean los defensores de una aproximación “ecológica” a la psicología, si bien teniendo en cuenta únicamente la aceptación genérica de esta palabra—ecología/ecológica- y tratando de poner de manifiesto el carácter simplista y confuso de tal aproximación. Para ello se analizaran las siguientes cuestiones planteadas por los defensores del enfoque “ecológico”: 1. Artificialidad del laboratorio. 2. Consecuentemente con lo anterior, extrapolación injustificada de los resultados obtenidos a situaciones naturales. 3. Si lo anterior es correcto, sería pertinente renunciar a la experimentación en el laboratorio. 4. Y en el fondo de todas estas cuestiones, estaría la urgencia de hacer preguntas interesantes frente a las rigurosamente triviales que se hace la psicología experimental.     

The Role of the Family in Promoting Responsible Substance Use in Adolescence

The aim of this study was to examine the role of family dimensions in tobacco, alcohol, and cannabis use among adolescents. Furthermore, we investigated how demographic variables (adolescents’ gender and age) influence substance use and moderate the relationship between family dimensions and substance use. The sample consisted of 14,825 adolescents aged 13–14, 15–16, and 17–18 who participated in the 2006 edition of the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) study in Spain. The HBSC-2006 questionnaire included demographic variables (gender and age), substance use variables (tobacco, alcohol, and cannabis use), and family dimensions (parental affection, parental promotion of autonomy, family activities, adolescent disclosure, parental solicitation, and parental knowledge). The results indicated that adolescent disclosure, family activities, and parental knowledge had a significant effect on substance use. Specifically, maternal variables were shown to be slightly more relevant than paternal variables. Additionally, substance use was higher in older adolescents than in younger adolescents, and boys smoked less than girls. The discussion focused on how family dimensions promoted responsible substance use in adolescence.