The relation of perception and motor action: ideomotor compatibility and interference in divided attention

Ideomotor theory is one variation of the general position that perception and motor action are related. According to this theory, a perceptual representation of the goal of a response must be generated prior to response initiation. Ideomotor theory can be extended by assuming that generation of this representation, which usually is required prior to motor action, is not needed if the stimulus itself corresponds to the response goal, that is, if the stimulus and response are ideomotor compatible. Because processing to generate the response representation is not needed with ideomotor compatibility, it should be possible to control two responses simultaneously without mutual interference if at least one stimulus-response relation is ideomotor compatible. Although supported in previous work involving discrete responses, this prediction of perfect time-sharing was found not to hold in the experiments reported here. These experiments, unlike those showing perfect time-sharing, involved continuous responses. We propose an alternative version of ideomotor compatibility, in which perfect time-sharing can occur if an integrated stimulus is provided to match the continuous and integrated response.     

Strategy changes in human contingency judgments as a function of contingency tables.

Judgment strategies of 169 undergraduate students on problems to judge the contingency between two binary events were identified by the method of rule-based analysis to clarify whether or not the strategies the subjects used would be affected by the concrete nature of the contingency table. Problems were constructed along two factors: total cell frequency and width of range of objective contingencies. Although the factor of total cell frequency had no effect on subjects' strategies, the number of subjects who changed strategies corresponding with problem instances increased when the objective contingencies were set closer to zero or when problems became more difficult. These results are discussed in the context of previous studies of this issue in the literature.     

Fathers' involvement in their children's healthcare.

Fathers' involvement in the routine healthcare of young children was investigated, and fathers' relative participation in two tasks, staying home with a sick child and taking the child to the doctor or dentist, was assessed. The relationships between fathers' involvement in healthcare and several other measures, including mothers' employment status, fathers' attitudes toward women's rights and roles, the amount of time fathers spent at work, and fathers' involvement in housework, were also examined. The subjects were 50 fathers of young children in intact, White, middle-class families. Both staying home with a sick child and taking a child to the doctor or dentist were usually performed by mothers, but when mothers were employed, fathers were significantly more involved, regardless of the child's sex. Staying home with a sick child and taking a child to the doctor or dentist were positively related to fathers' involvement in housework. Fathers' staying home with a sick child was significantly correlated with fewer hours at work and liberal attitudes toward women's rights and roles; these variables were not related to taking a child to the doctor or dentist. Positive correlations between fathers' involvement in housework and staying home with a sick child and taking a child to the doctor or dentist suggests that fathers' involvement in childcare is viewed as an aspect of family work.     

Personality and susceptibility to positive and negative emotional states

Gray's (1981) theory suggests that extraverts and neurotics are differentially sensitive to stimuli that generate positive and negative affect, respectively. From this theory it was hypothesized that efficacy of a standard positive-affect induction would be more strongly related to extraversion than to neuroticism scores, whereas efficacy of a standard negative-affect induction would be more strongly related to neuroticism scores. Positive and negative affect was manipulated in a controlled setting, and the effectiveness of the mood induction was assessed using standard mood adjective rating scales. Results are consistent with the hypothesis that neurotic Ss (compared with stable Ss) show heightened emotional reactivity to the negative-mood induction, whereas extraverts (compared with intraverts) show heightened emotional reactivity to the positive-mood induction. Results corroborate and extend previous findings.     

Confusing one person with another: what errors reveal about the elementary forms of social relations

Seven studies investigated the cognitive structure of social relationships exhibited in the patterns of substitutions that occur when people confuse a person with another. The studies investigated natural errors in which people called a familiar person by the wrong name, misremembered with whom they had interacted, or mistakenly directed an action at an inappropriate person. These studies tested the relational-models theory of A. P. Fiske (1990b, 1991) that people use 4 basic models for social relationships. All 7 studies provide support for the theory; Ss tend to confuse people with whom they interact in the same basic relationship mode. In addition, Ss confuse people of the same gender. Other factors (age, race, role term, similarity of names) generally have smaller, less reliable effects, indicating that the 4 elementary modes of relationships are among the most salient schemata in everyday social cognition.     

Coping with health threat: social influence processes in reactions to medical test results

In a laboratory experiment, undergraduate subjects tested positive for an enzyme deficiency they believed to be a risk factor for pancreatic disorders. All Ss were tested with a confederate who received a positive or negative test result. For half the Ss, the confederate expressed a minimizing appraisal of the deficiency's seriousness. Although Ss' concern about the test result was significantly reduced by what the confederate said, behavioral intentions were determined by the confederate's diagnostic status. The effect of the confederate's diagnostic status on intentions was mediated by Ss' perceptions of the deficiency's prevalence. The results support Leventhal's self-regulation theory and demonstrate that the opinions and health characteristics of comparison others have differential effects on cognitive, emotional, and behavioral aspects of coping with a health threat.     

Stimulus control of Pavlovian facilitation

Two experiments were conducted using an autoshaping procedure with pigeons to examine whether dimensional stimulus control by a Pavlovian facilitator parallels the control established following operant discrimination training. Facilitation training consisted of the presentation of a black vertical line on a white background as the B stimulus in a feature-positive discrimination in which the A stimulus (white keylight) was followed by grain presentation only if preceded by B. In this way, B facilitates or sets the occasion for pecking at A. Subsequent testing for generalization along the line-orientation dimension produced decremental gradients when the facilitation paradigm incorporated an explicit feature-negative stimulus (B−). These results parallel the decremental control obtained following operant discrimination training and suggest that Pavlovian facilitators and instrumental discriminative stimuli are functionally equivalent.     

Behavioral economics of drug self-administration. II. A unit-price analysis of cigarette smoking.

In behavioral economics, the ratio of response requirement to reinforcer magnitude is referred to as unit price. Previous research with nonhuman subjects has demonstrated that (a) comparable amounts of food are consumed at the same unit price even though different response requirements and reinforcer magnitudes comprise that unit price and (b) increases in unit price decrease food consumption in a positively decelerating fashion. The present study assessed the generality of these findings to the cigarette smoking of 5 human volunteers. During approximately 18 3-hr sessions, various combinations of response requirement (fixed-ratio 200, 400, and 1,600) and reinforcer magnitude (1, 2, and 4 puffs per bout) were arranged. Consumption (i.e., the number of puffs) generally was comparable at the same unit price independent of the response requirement and reinforcer magnitude comprising that unit price. In addition, increasing unit price generally decreased consumption in a positively decelerating fashion. These results extend the generality of the unit-price analysis to human cigarette smoking. Moreover, these results further support the position that reinforcer magnitude and response requirement are functionally equivalent and interact to determine consumption. The concept of unit price, by integrating and summarizing the effects of those two operations, provides a more parsimonious explanation of the results than do separate evaluations of the effects of response requirement and reinforcer magnitude.     

Attentionally splitting the mass distribution of hand-held rods

Two experiments on the length-perception capabilities of effortful or dynamic touch differed only in terms of what the subject intended to perceive, while experimental conditions and apparatus were held constant. In each trial, a visually occluded rod was held as still as possible by the subject at an intermediate position. For two thirds of the trials, a weight was attached to the rod above or below the hand. In Experiment 1, in which the subject's task was to perceive the distance reachable with the portion of the rod forward of the hand, perceived extent was a function of the first moment of the mass distribution associated with the forward portion of the rod, and indifferent to the first moment of the entire rod. In Experiment 2, in which the task was to perceive the distance reachable with the entire rod if it was held at an end, the pattern of results was reversed. These results indicate the capability of selective sensitivity to different aspects of a hand-held object's mass distribution, without the possibility of differential exploration specific to these two tasks. Results are discussed in relation to possible roles of differential information, intention, and self-organization in the explanations of selective perceptual abilities.