Effects of divided attention and social categorization on the own-race bias in face recognition

Perceivers remember own-race faces more accurately than other-race faces (i.e., Own-Race Bias). In the current experiments, we manipulated participants' attentional resources and social group membership to explore their influence on own and other-race face recognition memory. In Experiment 1, Chinese participants viewed own-race and Caucasian faces, and between-subjects we manipulated whether participants attention was divided during face encoding. We found that divided attention eliminated the Own-Race Bias in memory due to a reduction of memory accuracy for own-race faces, implicating that attention allocation plays a role in creating the bias. In Experiment 2, Chinese participants completed an ostensible personality test. Some participants were informed that their personality traits were most commonly found in Caucasian (i.e., other-race) individuals, resulting in these participants sharing a group membership with other-race targets. In contrast, other participants were not told anything about the personality test, resulting in the default own-race group membership. The participants encoded the faces for a subsequent recognition memory test either with or without performing a concurrent arithmetic distracting task. Results showed that other-race group membership and reducing attention during encoding independently eliminated the typical Own-Race Bias in face memory. The implications of these findings on perceptual-expertise and social-categorization models are discussed.     

Exploring the determinants of dual goal facilitation in a rule discovery task

Wason's standard 2-4-6 task requires discovery of a single rule and leads to around 20% solutions, whereas the dual goal (DG) version requires discovery of two rules and elevates solutions to over 60%. We report an experiment that aimed to discriminate between competing accounts of DG facilitation by manipulating the degree of complementarity between the to-be-discovered rules. Results indicated that perfect rule complementarity is not essential for task success, thereby undermining a key tenet of the goal complementarity account of DG facilitation. The triple heterogeneity account received a good degree of support since more varied triple exploration was associated with facilitatory DG conditions, in line with this account's prediction that task success is associated with the creative search of the problem space. The contrast class account (an extension of Oaksford & Chater's, 1994, iterative counterfactual model) was also corroborated in that the generation of descending triples was demonstrated to be the dominant predictor of DG success. We focus our discussion on conceptual ideas relating to the way in which iterative counterfactual testing and contrast class identification may work together to provide a powerful basis for effective hypothesis testing.     

Ecological perception affords an explanation of object permanence

In this paper I aim to present an explanation of object permanence that is derived from an ecological account of perceptually based action. In understanding why children below a certain age do not search for occluded objects, one must first understand the process by which these children perform certain intentional actions on non-occluded items; and to do this one must understand the role affordances play in eliciting retrieval behaviour. My affordance-based explanation is contrasted with Shinskey and Munakata's graded representation account; and although I do not reject totally the role representations play in initiating intentional action I nevertheless maintain that only by incorporating direct perception into an account of object permanence can a fuller understanding of this phenomenon be achieved.     

Dual-goal facilitation in Wason's 2–4–6 task: What mediates successful rule discovery?

The standard 2–4–6 task requires discovery of a single rule and produces success rates of about 20%, whereas the dual-goal (DG) version requests discovery of two complementary rules and elevates success to over 60%. The experiment examined two explanations of DG superiority: Evans' (1989) positivity-bias account, and Wharton, Cheng, and Wickens' (1993) goal-complementarity theory. Two DG conditions were employed that varied the linguistic labelling of rules (either positively labelled Dax vs. Med, or mixed-valence “fits” vs. “does not fit”). Solution-success results supported the goal-complementarity theory since facilitation arose in both DG conditions relative to single-goal tasks, irrespective of the linguistic labelling of hypotheses. DG instructions also altered quantitative and qualitative aspects of hypothesis-testing behaviour, and analyses revealed the novel result that the production of at least a single descending triple mediates between DG instructions and task success. We propose that the identification of an appropriate contrast class that delimits the scope of complementary rules may be facilitated through the generation of a descending instance. Overall, our findings can best be accommodated by Oaksford and Chater's (1994) iterative counterfactual model of hypotheses testing, which can readily subsume key elements of the goal-complementarity theory.     

Personal and cultural differences in responding to criticism in three countries

The present study investigated whether verbal aggression, argument approach, argument avoidance or assertiveness had any effect on how participants in three countries responded to criticism. Consistent with the first hypothesis, men were significantly more aggressive, assertive, less avoidant, and approached argument more than women. However, men did not respond more assertively to criticism. As predicted in the second hypothesis, US Americans responded more assertively to criticism than did Japanese and Chinese. The third hypothesis predicted that verbal aggression, argument approach, argument avoidance and assertiveness would be associated with a more assertive response to criticism. The data obtained were only partially consistent with the third hypothesis. While only a small number of participants in this study indicated that they would respond to criticism with silence, US Americans used silence to mean anger while for Chinese silence showed personal embarrassment. Very few Japanese selected silence as an option for responding to a neighbor's criticism. The implications of these results are discussed.     

Learning Consistent,Interactive, and Meaningful Task-Action Mappings: A Computational Model

Within the field of human-computer interaction, the study of the interaction between people and computers has revealed many phenomena. For example, highly interactive devices, such as the Apple Macintosh, are often easier to learn and use than keyboard-based devices such as Unix. Similarly, consistent interfaces are easier to learn and use than inconsistent ones. This article describes an integrated cognitive model designed to exhibit a range of these phenomena while learning task-action mappings: action sequences for achieving simple goals, such as opening a file in a word processor. The model, called TAL, is of a user who is familiar with the basic operations of a keyboard and mouse, but unfamiliar with the particular menu structures, words, and actions required to use the device. The model is constructed in Soar and employs a single set of architectural mechanisms. It exhibits behavior that captures human preference for consistent, interactive, and meaningful task-action mappings.     

The effects of exposure duration and practice on the immediate memory spans of children and adults

Immediate memory spans for alphabetic items were determined for second-grade, fifth-grade, and adult subjects. Subjects were tested on three days, ten trials per day at each of three exposure durations: 15, 50, and 200 msec. One half of the subjects were presented with exposure durations in an ascending order, the other half in a descending order. The results indicated that immediate memory span increases with age and practice. The exposure duration effect depended on the order and day in which durations were presented. There was a suggestion that the exposure duration effect was also dependent upon the age and sex of the subject. The ordering of array positions from most accurately reported to least accurately reported was identical for all three age levels, indicating that scanning strategies are well established at an early age.     

Effect of subvocalization on memory for speech sounds.

Subjects in two groups were presented with sequences of 6 consonant-vowel syllables for ordered recall. Subjects in both groups were trained to suppress subvocalization. Only subjects in the feedback group were asked to suppress subvocalization during the experiment, while subjects in the no-feedback group were allowed to subvocalize during the memory task. Analysis of the electromyographic records showed a large decrease in subvocalization in the feedback condition, and results of the memory task revealed an increase in errors for this group. However, a comparison of errors within each group revealed an identical pattern of overall errors and intrusion errors on subvocalization and nonsubvocalization trials, and these results were identical in both groups. The results suggest that requiring subjects to simultaneously suppress subvocalization and remember syllables depresses performance slightly, but encoding of speech sounds in short-term memory occurs independently of subvocal activity during the memory task.