Do action goals mediate social inhibition of return?

Social inhibition of return is the phenomenon whereby an individual is slower to reach to locations to which another individual has recently responded. Although this suggests that an observer represents another person's action, little is known about which aspects of the action are encoded. The present work describes a series of three experiments examining whether social inhibition of return represents the endpoint goal of the action, i.e., is 'goal based'. Pairs of participants sat opposite to one another and alternated responses to a cued or non-cued object presented on a table top. Importantly, either the two participants performed the same interaction with the object or a different interaction. Although all our experiments showed social inhibition of return, the size of the effect was not modulated according to whether each participant had the same or different goal. We conclude that although the mechanisms giving rise to social inhibition of return do encode some aspects of a response they do not code for terminal action goals.     

Convergent, but not divergent, thinking predicts susceptibility to associative memory illusions

The relationship between creativity and susceptibility to associative memory illusions in the Deese/Roediger-McDermott procedure was investigated using a multiple regression analysis. Susceptibility to false recognition was significantly predicted by performance on a measure of convergent thinking (the Remote Associates Task) but not by performance on a measure of divergent thinking (the Alternative Uses Task). These findings suggest that the ability to engage in convergent (but not divergent) thinking underlies some of the individual variation in susceptibility to associative memory illusions by influencing the automaticity with which critical lures are activated at encoding.     

The Impact of Feminist Attitudes on the Relation between Racial Awareness and Racial Identity

This study examined the role of liberal and inclusive feminist attitudes in the development of a positive racial identity in a sample of White female undergraduates in the Midwestern United States. Participants (N?=?90) provided self-report data on their racial awareness, liberal and inclusive feminist attitudes, racial identity and demographic information. The main research question was how and to what extent liberal and inclusive feminism influence the relationship between racial awareness and racial identity. Building on conceptual scholarship on identity theory and the intersectionality, results indicated that the relation between racial awareness and racial identity was partially mediated by inclusive feminist attitudes but not by liberal feminist attitudes. The results suggest that a specific type of feminism, which takes into account the experience of race, plays a significant role in our understanding of how White women develop a positive White identity. Results highlight the intersection of race and gender in college student development and have potential implications for administrative responses to student adjustment in increasingly diverse college environments.     

Differentiating crisis incidents: A replication study using the action systems model

Crisis incidents are volatile situations that can pose significant risk to those involved and to law enforcement. The idiosyncratic conditions that lead to such incidents, as well as their volatility, often militate against consistent explanatory models. However, the application of overarching paradigms, such as the action systems model, has shown some promise in imposing order in the domain. Recent research has successfully differentiated crisis incidents into the four distinct modes of the action systems model: conservative, adaptive, integrative, and expressive. The purpose of this paper is to attempt to replicate this recent study using 242 cases from the United States, Ireland, Canada, and Sweden. Data analysis involves smallest space analyses and constrained multidimensional scaling. Although the results supported the underlying structure of original proposed behavioural model, there are a few deviances. These differences along with the potential influence of cultural variations, offence variable selection, the type of incident, and the sample under scrutiny are discussed. It is evident that there remain several challenges, and further research is required, prior to developing a unified framework.     

Scoring best-worst data in unbalanced many-item designs,with applications to crowdsourcing semantic judgments

Best-worst scaling is a judgment format in which participants are presented with a set of items and have to choose the superior and inferior items in the set. Best-worst scaling generates a large quantity of information per judgment because each judgment allows for inferences about the rank value of all unjudged items. This property of best-worst scaling makes it a promising judgment format for research in psychology and natural language processing concerned with estimating the semantic properties of tens of thousands of words. A variety of different scoring algorithms have been devised in the previous literature on best-worst scaling. However, due to problems of computational efficiency, these scoring algorithms cannot be applied efficiently to cases in which thousands of items need to be scored. New algorithms are presented here for converting responses from best-worst scaling into item scores for thousands of items (many-item scoring problems). These scoring algorithms are validated through simulation and empirical experiments, and considerations related to noise, the underlying distribution of true values, and trial design are identified that can affect the relative quality of the derived item scores. The newly introduced scoring algorithms consistently outperformed scoring algorithms used in the previous literature on scoring many-item best-worst data.     

Confidence intervals and replication: where will the next mean fall?

Confidence intervals (CIs) give information about replication, but many researchers have misconceptions about this information. One problem is that the percentage of future replication means captured by a particular CI varies markedly, depending on where in relation to the population mean that CI falls. The authors investigated the distribution of this percentage for varsigma known and unknown, for various sample sizes, and for robust CIs. The distribution has strong negative skew: Most 95% CIs will capture around 90% or more of replication means, but some will capture a much lower proportion. On average, a 95% CI will include just 83.4% of future replication means. The authors present figures designed to assist understanding of what CIs say about replication, and they also extend the discussion to explain how p values give information about replication.     

Examining the relationship between free recall and immediate serial recall: the effect of concurrent task performance

In 3 experiments, participants saw lists of 16 words for free recall with or without a 6-digit immediate serial recall (ISR) task after each word. Free recall was performed under standard visual silent and spoken-aloud conditions (Experiment 1), overt rehearsal conditions (Experiment 2), and fixed rehearsal conditions (Experiment 3). The authors found that in each experiment, there was no effect of ISR on the magnitude of the recency effect, but interleaved ISR disrupted free recall of those words that would otherwise be rehearsed. The authors conclude that ISR and recency cannot both be outputs from a unitary limited-capacity short-term memory store and discuss the possibility that the process of rehearsal may be common to both tasks.     

Social inhibition of return

Responses to a target stimulus can be slower when it appears in the same rather than a different location to a previous event, an effect known as inhibition of return (IOR). Recently, it has been shown that when two people alternate responses to a target, one person’s responses are slower when they are directed to the same locations as their partner’s previous response. The present study sought to investigate this highly novel effect, which we term social IOR (SIOR), in relation to what is known of IOR in individuals performing alone. We found that only a real conspecific can induce SIOR in another person, whereas an animated conspecific cannot. Additionally, SIOR emerges at locations to which a conspecific has been inferred to respond, even when direct observation of his/her responses is prevented. Finally, SIOR can be induced without the abrupt visual transients normally associated with the generation of IOR. These findings suggest that SIOR is the result of stronger activations of IOR mechanisms, or that it is subserved by entirely separate inhibitory processes.