Repeated exposure to objects and peers in a play setting

Two hypotheses were contrasted. One posed a positive relationship between mere repeated exposure and preference for stimulus of concern; the other predicted that preference for stimuli would be modulated by their relative novelty and complexity. These hypotheses were tested within the context of a naturalistic play situation in which 40 4- to 5-year-old children were repeatedly exposed to and interacted with play settings differing in complexity. Overt preference for play objects declined with repeated exposure, the rate of decline being inversely determined by the complexity of the play stimuli. Preference for peers, however, increased as a function of repeated exposure, with the amount of increase being an inverse function of the complexity of the external setting.     

The perceived tempi of coherent and streaming tone sequences

Previous research has demonstrated that a sequence of tones that is alternated between ears is stretched out in echoic memory, as compared with monaural sequences. Although the stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) were the same in the interaural and monaural conditions, the perceptual onset asynchronies (POAs) differed by 24 msec. The present study investigated whether an analogous perceptual phenomenon exists for frequency-alternating tone sequences. It turned out that the POAs of coherent and even of streaming tone sequences were precisely the same as with nonalternating tone sequences.     

The perceived tempi of coherent and streaming tone sequences: II

Previous research demonstrated, by means of a reaction time technique, that there is no difference between the perceptual onset asynchronies (POAs) of nonalternating tone sequences and of frequency-alternating tone sequences, even if the latter are streaming. This finding implies that listeners are capable of extracting the tempo of the total alternating sequence, even though successive tones belong to different streams. The present study investigated whether subjects are also capable of establishing the tempo of one stream. To this end, listeners were required to match the rate of one stream by adjusting the rate of a nonalternating comparison stream (a pulse sequence). In addition, they were required to match the total rate of the streaming sequence. It turned out that the total tempo could be matched precisely and that the tempo of one stream could be approximated very closely.     

Vibrotactual choice reaction time,tactile receptor systems and ideomotor compatibility

In most of the literature on human performance the results of an experiment by Leonard (1959) are quoted as the most outstanding example of perfect S-R-compatibility. In that experiment the fingertips were stimulated by a 50 Hz vibration; the vibrating armature had to be depressed and the reaction times of the right index finger were recorded. The reaction time was found not to increase with an increasing number of tactual choices. In experiment 1 of the present study, also applying 50 Hz vibrations, the reaction times of other fingers were also reported. In addition the response stimulus interval (RSI) was varied. Leonard's results were not replicated: reaction time increased with the number of tactual choices at all levels of RSI. In experiment 2 the frequency and amplitude of vibration were systematically varied and it turned out that these variables could account for the differences between the results found. An increase in reaction time with the number of tactual choices was found with weak vibrations, but not with strong vibrations. The differences in reaction time patterns appeared to be caused by differences in tactile receptor systems (i.e. the non-Pacini versus the Pacinian system). It was concluded that the concept of S-R-compatibility did not cover the pattern of results but that the concept of ideomotor compatibility did.     

Neo‐pragmatism,Representationalism and the Emotions

This paper offers a neo‐pragmatist account of the representational character of the emotions, for those emotions that have such a character. Put most generally, neo‐pragmatism is the view that language should not be conceived primarily in terms of a robust relation of reference to or representation of antecedently given objects and properties. Rather, we should view it as a social practice that lets us do various quite different sorts of things. One of those things might be called ‘assessing representational accuracy’, but this need not be thought of in terms of a metaphysically heavyweight relation. In applying neo‐pragmatist techniques to the domain of the emotions, the result will be an alternative to currently popular accounts that individuate emotions partly in terms of what they represent. This alternative continues to allow us to use representational language in connection with some emotions. And it also helps to explain the awkwardness of representational talk in connection with other emotions: an awkwardness that was always a liability of monolithic representationalist views.     

Awareness Luck

Nagel’s constitutive moral luck is one important type of moral luck, but discussions of it have tended to focus on temperament. Luck in how aware a person is of morally relevant aspects of her situation—awareness luck—though similar in some ways, also raises different issues. Luck in temperament impacts how difficult a person finds it to behave well, while awareness luck impacts whether she even recognizes that the situation is making a moral demand on her. For this reason, awareness luck raises some unique challenges for those who would deny the existence of moral luck.     

Curiosity‐based learning in infants: a neurocomputational approach

Infants are curious learners who drive their own cognitive development by imposing structure on their learning environment as they explore. Understanding the mechanisms by which infants structure their own learning is therefore critical to our understanding of development. Here we propose an explicit mechanism for intrinsically motivated information selection that maximizes learning. We first present a neurocomputational model of infant visual category learning, capturing existing empirical data on the role of environmental complexity on learning. Next we “set the model free”, allowing it to select its own stimuli based on a formalization of curiosity and three alternative selection mechanisms. We demonstrate that maximal learning emerges when the model is able to maximize stimulus novelty relative to its internal states, depending on the interaction across learning between the structure of the environment and the plasticity in the learner itself. We discuss the implications of this new curiosity mechanism for both existing computational models of reinforcement learning and for our understanding of this fundamental mechanism in early development.     

A formal ideal-based account of typicality

Inspired by Barsalou’s (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 11, 629–654, 1985) proposal that categories can be represented by ideals, we develop and test a computational model, the ideal dimension model (IDM). The IDM is tested in its account of the typicality gradient for 11 superordinate natural language concepts and, using Bayesian model evaluation, contrasted with a standard exemplar model and a central prototype model. The IDM is found to capture typicality better than do the exemplar model and the central tendency prototype model, in terms of both goodness of fit and generalizability. The present findings challenge the dominant view that exemplar representations are most successful and present compelling evidence that superordinate natural language categories can be represented using an abstract summary, in the form of ideal representations. Supplemental appendices for this article can be downloaded from .     

Short assessment of the Big Five: robust across survey methods except telephone interviewing

We examined measurement invariance and age-related robustness of a short 15-item Big Five Inventory (BFI-S) of personality dimensions, which is well suited for applications in large-scale multidisciplinary surveys. The BFI-S was assessed in three different interviewing conditions: computer-assisted or paper-assisted face-to-face interviewing, computer-assisted telephone interviewing, and a self-administered questionnaire. Randomized probability samples from a large-scale German panel survey and a related probability telephone study were used in order to test method effects on self-report measures of personality characteristics across early, middle, and late adulthood. Exploratory structural equation modeling was used in order to test for measurement invariance of the five-factor model of personality trait domains across different assessment methods. For the short inventory, findings suggest strong robustness of self-report measures of personality dimensions among young and middle-aged adults. In old age, telephone interviewing was associated with greater distortions in reliable personality assessment. It is concluded that the greater mental workload of telephone interviewing limits the reliability of self-report personality assessment. Face-to-face surveys and self-administrated questionnaire completion are clearly better suited than phone surveys when personality traits in age-heterogeneous samples are assessed.     

Assessing the informational value of parameter estimates in cognitive models

Mathematical models of cognition often contain unknown parameters whose values are estimated from the data. A question that generally receives little attention is how informative such estimates are. In a maximum likelihood framework, standard errors provide a measure of informativeness. Here, a standard error is interpreted as the standard deviation of the distribution of parameter estimates over multiple samples. A drawback to this interpretation is that the assumptions that are required for the maximum likelihood framework are very difficult to test and are not always met. However, at least in the cognitive science community, it appears to be not well known that standard error calculation also yields interpretable intervals outside the typical maximum likelihood framework. We describe and motivate this procedure and, in combination with graphical methods, apply it to two recent models of categorization: ALCOVE (Kruschke, 1992) and the exemplar-based random walk model (Nosofsky & Palmeri, 1997). The applications reveal aspects of these models that were not hitherto known and bring a mix of bad and good news concerning estimation of these models.