Social understanding through direct perception? Yes,by interacting

This paper comments on Gallagher’s recently published direct perception proposal about social cognition [Gallagher, S. (2008a). Direct perception in the intersubjective context. Consciousness and Cognition, 17(2), 535–543]. I show that direct perception is in danger of being appropriated by the very cognitivist accounts criticised by Gallagher (theory theory and simulation theory). Then I argue that the experiential directness of perception in social situations can be understood only in the context of the role of the interaction process in social cognition. I elaborate on the role of social interaction with a discussion of participatory sense-making to show that direct perception, rather than being a perception enriched by mainly individual capacities, can be best understood as an interactional phenomenon.     

Enactive intersubjectivity: Participatory sense-making and mutual incorporation

Current theories of social cognition are mainly based on a representationalist view. Moreover, they focus on a rather sophisticated and limited aspect of understanding others, i.e. on how we predict and explain others’ behaviours through representing their mental states. Research into the ‘social brain’ has also favoured a third-person paradigm of social cognition as a passive observation of others’ behaviour, attributing it to an inferential, simulative or projective process in the individual brain. In this paper, we present a concept of social understanding as an ongoing, dynamical process of participatory sense-making and mutual incorporation. This process may be described (1) from a dynamical agentive systems point of view as an interaction and coordination of two embodied agents; (2) from a phenomenological approach as a mutual incorporation, i.e. a process in which the lived bodies of both participants extend and form a common intercorporality. Intersubjectivity, it is argued, is not a solitary task of deciphering or simulating the movements of others but means entering a process of embodied interaction and generating common meaning through it. This approach will be further illustrated by an analysis of primary dyadic interaction in early childhood.     

A counterexample to the rigidity assumption in the visual perception of structure from motion

It has been proposed that the human visual system prefers perceptions of objects that are rigid or undergo minimum form change. A counterexample is presented in which a rigid two-dimensional figure rotating in the frontal plane is perceived as a distorting three-dimensional shape. It is argued that this perception results from the stimulation of automatic processes for perceiving size change, and that these processes are not subject to a general rigidity assumption.     

Men's sexual self-schema

Sexual self-schemas are cognitive generalizations about sexual aspects of oneself. In Part 1, a measure of men's sexual self-schema is developed. Studies of test-retest and internal consistency reliability and validity studies of factor analysis, internal structure, convergent and discriminant validity, process, group difference, and change are provided. The construct consists of 3 dimensions: passionate-loving, powerful-aggressive, and open-minded-liberal traits. In Part 2, the data suggest that men's sexual schema is derived from past sexual experience, is manifest in current sexual experience, and guides future sexual behavior. In Part 3, the data document the cognitive processing aspects of sexual schema. Consistent with the investigators' schema research with women, these data substantiate the importance of cognitive representations of sexuality.     

The discrimination of heading from optic flow is not retinally invariant.

Three experiments were conducted to determine whether the discrimination of heading from optic flow is retinally invariant and to determine the importance of acuity in accounting for heading eccentricity effects. In the first experiment, observers were presented with radial flow fields simulating forward translation through a three-dimensional volume of dots. The flow fields subtended 10 degrees of visual angle and were presented at 0 degree, 10 degrees, 20 degrees, and 40 degrees of retinal eccentricity. The observers were asked to indicate whether the simulated movement was to the right or the left of a target that appeared at the end of the display sequence. Eye movements were monitored with an electrooculogram apparatus. In a second experiment, static acuity thresholds were derived for each of the observers at the same retinal eccentricities. There was a significant increase in heading detection thresholds with retinal eccentricity (from 0.92 degree at 0 degree retinal eccentricity to 3.47 degrees at 40 degrees). An analysis of covariance indicated that the variation in sensitivity to radial flow, as a function of retinal eccentricity, is independent of acuity. Similar results were obtained when the Vernier acuity of observers was measured. These results suggest that the discrimination of heading from radial flow is not retinally invariant.     

Why do Alzheimer patients have difficulty with pronouns? Working memory, semantics, and reference in comprehension and production in Alzheimer's disease

Three experiments investigated the extent to which semantic and working-memory deficits contribute to Alzheimer patients' impairments in producing and comprehending referring expressions. In Experiment 1, the spontaneous speech of 11 patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) contained a greater ratio of pronouns to full noun phrases than did the spontaneous speech produced by 9 healthy controls. Experiments 2 and 3 used a cross-modal naming methodology to compare reference comprehension in another group of 10 patients and 10 age-matched controls. In Experiment 2, patients were less sensitive than healthy controls to the grammatical information necessary for processing pronouns. In Experiment 3, patients were better able to remember referent information in short paragraphs when reference was maintained with full noun phrases rather than pronouns, but healthy controls showed the reverse pattern. Performance in all three experiments was linked to working memory performance but not to word finding difficulty. We discuss these findings in terms of a theory of reference processing, the Informational Load Hypothesis, which views referential impairments in AD as the consequence of normal discourse processing in the context of a working memory impairment.     

Influence of sex and gender roles on high school status systems

Past research has indicated significant sex differences in determinants of male and female high school students' status as measured by how subjects would like to have been remembered from their high school years. In order to determine if remembrance preference is sex or gender role related, 671 subjects were administered the Bem Sex-Role Inventory (BSRI) and a questionnaire asking if they most wanted to be remembered from high school as a brilliant student, leader in activities, athletic star or most popular. Using both the median split and t-ratio procedures in scoring the BSRI, 206 subjects were selected because they were sex-typed (masculine males, feminine females), cross sex-typed (masculine females, feminine males), or androgynous (scoring high on both masculine and feminine traits). To find a model of best fit, the data were subjected to a log-linear analysis. The variables included were sex, gender role, and remembrance preference. Rather than sex being the influential factor, the model of best fit was a gender role by remembrance preference interaction. If subjects were masculine, they were more likely to choose athletic star than were feminine or androgynous subjects. Most popular and leader in activities were both more likely to be chosen by feminine and androgynous subjects. All groups chose brilliant student more often than any other category. It was concluded that some previously designated sex differences may instead be differences in gender role. Further research should address the distinction between the two.     

The ground dominance effect in the perception of relative distance in 3-D scenes is mainly due to characteristics of the ground surface

Previously, we (Bian, Braunstein, and& Andersen, 2005) reported a dominance effect of the ground plane over other environmental surfaces in determining the perceived relative distance of objects in 3-D scenes. In the present study, we conducted three experiments to investigate whether this ground dominance is due to inherent differences between ground and ceiling surfaces, or to the locations of these surfaces in the visual field. In Experiment 1, two vertical posts were positioned between a ground surface and a ceiling surface, and optical contact was manipulated so that the two surfaces provided contradictory information about the relative distances of the posts from the participant. The two surfaces were either both above, both below, or one above and one below fixation. In Experiment 2, only one surface was presented, either above, below, or at fixation. In Experiment 3, the posts were replaced by two red dots, and the eccentricity of the optical contact on the two surfaces was equated in each of five locations in the visual field. In all three experiments, participants judged which of the two objects appeared to be closer. Overall, we found a higher proportion of judgments consistent with a ground surface than with a ceiling surface in all locations, indicating that the ground dominance effect is mainly due to characteristics of the ground surface, with location in the visual field having only a minor effect.     

The ground dominance effect in the perception of 3-D layout

The relative effectiveness of the ground surface and other environmental surfaces (the ceiling and sidewalls) in determining perceived layout was investigated in five experiments and a real-world demonstration. In the first three experiments, two vertical or horizontal posts were positioned between two surfaces (ground and ceiling in all three experiments, left wall and right wall in Experiment 1), and optical contact was manipulated so that the two surfaces provided contradictory information about the relative distances of the posts. Observers judged which of the two posts appeared to be closer. In Experiment 4, to control the height on the posts at which the distance judgments were made, a blue dot was attached to both vertical posts at varying heights and observers judged which dot appeared closer. In Experiment 5, the posts were replaced by two gray ellipses to eliminate the effects of the regular shape and texture. Our findings were that (1) among all four surfaces tested, observers showed a preference to respond according to the optical contact information provided by the ground surface--a ground dominance effect, (2) this effect did not depend on the height of the posts in the image, (3) as the scene was tilted away from a ground/ceiling orientation, the ground dominance effect decreased, and (4) this effect was not due to the location of the judgment.     

National glorification and attachment differentially predict support for intergroup conflict resolution: Scrutinizing cross-country generalizability

Research on national identity distinguishes between national glorification and attachment. We tested whether glorification and attachment differentially predicted support for military and diplomatic conflict resolution strategies (CRS) in response to international conflicts. Using data collected in seven countries (Australia, United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Israel, China; total N = 1784), we investigated whether glorification and attachment can be equivalently measured (using tests of measurement invariance) and whether their relationships with CRS were generalizable across countries. The results revealed metric, but not scalar, measurement invariance of the two-factor structure of national identification across six countries, excluding China. Among these six countries, glorification predicted more support for military CRS, whereas attachment predicted more support for diplomatic CRS. Our study is novel in scrutinizing the cross-cultural generalizability of the bi-dimensional model of national identification. Implications for studying national identification and intergroup conflict cross-culturally are discussed.