High and mighty: Height increases authority in professional refereeing

Throughout the animal kingdom, larger males are more likely to attain social dominance. Several lines of evidence suggest that this relationship extends to humans, as height is positively related to dominance, status and authority. We hypothesized that height is also a determinant of authority in professional refereeing. According to the International Football Association Board, FIFA, football ("soccer") referees have full authority to enforce the laws of the game and should use their body language to show authority and to help control the match. We show that height is indeed positively related to authority status: referees were taller than their assistants (who merely have an advisory role) in both a national (French League) and an international (World Cup 2010) tournament. Furthermore, using data from the German League, we found that height was positively associated with authoritative behavior. Taller referees were better able to maintain control of the game by giving fewer fouls, thereby increasing the "flow of the game". Referee height was also positively associated with perceived referee competence, as taller referees were assigned to matches in which the visiting team had a higher ranking. Thus, height appears to be positively related to authority in professional refereeing.     

Reasoning about actions and obligations in first-order logic

We describe a new way in which theories about the deontic status of actions can be represented in terms of the standard two-sorted first-order extensional predicate calculus. Some of the resulting formal theories are easy to implement in Prolog; one prototype implementation—R. M. Lee's deontic expert shell DX—is briefly described.This research was partially supported by the Esprit III Basic Research Working Group No. 8319 ModelAge.     

Effects of asynchrony on symmetry perception

The effect of temporal image segmentation on symmetry perception was investigated by means of stimuli composed of one part surrounding another. The two parts could be presented synchronously or with a temporal offset (20–100 ms), and each part could be either symmetrical or random. The task was to discriminate completely symmetrical (S) stimuli (in Experiment 1) or completely random (R) stimuli (in Experiment 2) from partially symmetrical (PS) stimuli in which one part was symmetrical and the other random. The R stimuli showed an asynchrony effect but the S stimuli did not. Furthermore, in both experiments, the PS stimuli showed an asynchrony effect when the symmetrical part was presented last but not when the symmetrical part was presented first (independent of whether it was the surrounded part or the surrounding part). Both results suggest that symmetry is strong enough to override this kind of temporal image segmentation.     

Determining the dimensionality in spatial representations of semantic concepts

When multidimensional scaling solutions are used to study semantic concepts, the dimensionality of the optimal configuration has to be determined. Several strategies have been proposed to choose the appropriate dimensionality. In the present paper, the traditional dimensionality choice criteria were evaluated and compared to a method based on the prediction of an external criterion. Two studies were conducted in which typicality of an exemplar within a semantic concept was predicted from its distance to the concept centroid. In contrast to the low-dimensional solutions selected by the traditional methods, predictions of an external criterion improved with additional dimensions up till dimensionalities that were much higher than what is common in the literature. This suggests that traditional methods underestimate the richness of semantic concepts as revealed in spatial representations derived from similarity measures.     

Dutch plural inflection: the exception that proves the analogy

We develop the view that inflection is driven partly by non-phonological analogy and that non-phonological information is of particular importance to the inflection of non-canonical roots, which in the view of [Marcus, G. F., Brinkmann, U., Clahsen, H., Wiese, R., & Pinker, S. (1995). German inflection: the exception that proves the rule. Cognitive Psychology, 29, 189-256.] are inflected by a symbolic rule process. We used the Dutch plural to evaluate these claims. An analysis of corpus data shows that a model using non-phonological information (orthography) produces significantly fewer errors on plurals of non-canonical Dutch nouns, in particular borrowings, than a model that includes only phonological information. Moreover, we show that a double default system, as proposed by Pinker [Pinker, S. (1999). Words and rules. London: Phoenix.], does not offer an advantage over the latter model. A second study, examining the use of orthography in an online plural production task, shows that, in Dutch, the chosen pseudoword plural is significantly affected by non-phonological information. A final simulation study confirms that these results are in line with a model of inflectional morphology that explains the inflection of non-canonical roots by non-phonological analogy instead of by a default rule process.     

The detection of anisochrony in monaural and interaural sound sequences

Nakao and Axelrod (1976) and van Noorden (1975) showed that the threshold for discriminating an anisochronous duple rhythm (a series of clicks with a temporal offset on every other one) from an isochronous rhythm (no offset) is poorer when the clicks are presented alternately to the two ears than when they are presented to the same ears. Van Noorden reported that the difference between the thresholds in the alternating and nonalternating conditions varied with the tempo of the sequence. Nakao and Axelrod found invariance of this threshold difference with sequence speed. According to our quantification of temporal processing of interaural sequences, the latter result should be expected. We carried out five psychophysical experiments to establish interaural and monaural discrimination between isochronous and anisochronous rhythms. Across experiments, base time intervals of 60–720 msec were spanned. The main result was that we replicated the poorer discrimination for interaural sequences. This deterioration in discrimination was the same for all sequence speeds. It was also the case that the thresholds were almost constant up to a sound repetition rate of about 3 per second, but increased linearly with slower rates. This result supports evidence in the literature that temporal processing of sequences faster than about 3–4 sounds per second differs from temporal processing of slower sequences.     

Is seeking bad mood cognitively demanding? Contra-hedonic orientation and working-memory capacity in everyday life

Hedonism, or wanting to feel good, is central to human motivation. At times, however, people also seek to maintain or enhance negative affect or to dampen positive affect, and this can be instrumental for the later attainment of their goals. Here, we investigate the assumption that such contra-hedonic orientation is cognitively more demanding than prohedonic orientation, above and beyond the effects of momentary affective experience. We provided 378 participants with mobile phones that they carried with them for 3 weeks while pursuing their daily routines. The phones prompted participants at least 54 times to report their current affect-regulation orientation and to work on two trials of a cognitively demanding working memory task. As expected, contra-hedonic orientation was substantially less prevalent than prohedonic orientation. It was reported in 15% of the measurement occasions. Participants who reported on average more contra-hedonic orientation showed lower average working memory performance throughout the study interval. Further, controlling for the effects of accompanying affective experiences, momentary occurrences of contra-hedonic orientation were associated with temporary declines in working memory performance within individuals, and this could neither be explained by lacking task compliance nor by other characteristics of the individual or the situation. Prohedonic orientation showed a considerably smaller association with working memory performance. These findings are consistent with the view that contra-hedonic orientation is accompanied by momentarily more diminished cognitive resources than is prohedonic orientation.     

Normative data for the Boston Naming Test in native Dutch-speaking Belgian children and the relation with intelligence

This paper reports the results of a normative study of the 60-item version of the Boston Naming Test (BNT) in a group of 371 native Dutch-speaking Flemish children between the ages of 6 and 12 years. Analysis of test results revealed that BNT performance was significantly affected by age and gender. The gathered norms were shown to be significantly lower than published norms for comparable North-American children. Error analysis disclosed remarkable similarities with data from elderly subjects, with verbal semantic paraphasias and 'don't know' responses occurring most frequently. Finally, BNT scores were shown to correlate strongly with general intelligence as measured with the Raven Progressive Matrices. The relation between both measures can be of help in the diagnosis of identification naming deficits and impaired word-retrieval capacities.