The Home Field Advantage in Athletics: A Meta‐Analysis

This meta‐analysis examined the home‐field advantage in athletics, with an emphasis on potential moderators. The goal of this research was to quantify the probability of a home victory, thus only studies that included win–loss data were included in the meta‐analysis. A significant advantage for home teams was observed across all conditions (M_π= .604); and time era, season length, game type, and sport moderated the effect. Furthermore, it was found that season length mediated the effect of sport such that differences between sports could be attributed to some sports having longer seasons than other sports. This research has implications for athletes, fans, and the media alike.     

Training new, nonnative speech contrasts: a comparison of the prototype and perceptual fading techniques

We trained unilingual adult Canadian francophone listeners to identify the English voiceless and voiced linguadental ("th") frictives, /theta/ and /delta/, using synthetic exemplars of each phoneme. Identification training with feedback improved listeners' abilities to identify both natural and synthetic tokens. These results show that training with appropriately selected prototype stimuli can produce a linguistically meaningful improvement in a listener's ability to identify new, nonnative speech sounds--both natural and synthetic. However, it is not yet clear whether such training with a single prototype can improve performance as effectively as the fading technique used by Jamieson and Morosan (1986), since prototype training produced only a moderate improvement in listeners' identifications of synthetic stimuli containing brief frication. Differences between the techniques may reflect the need for listeners to experience the appropriate types of intraphonemic and interphonemic variability during training. Such variability may help to define the category prototype by desensitizing the subjects to differences between exemplars of the same category and by sharpening sensitivity to differences between categories.     

Applying an exemplar model to an implicit rule-learning task: Implicit learning of semantic structure

Studies of implicit learning often examine peoples’ sensitivity to sequential structure. Computational accounts have evolved to reflect this bias. An experiment conducted by Neil and Higham [Neil, G. J., & Higham, P. A.(2012). Implicit learning of conjunctive rule sets: An alternative to artificial grammars. Consciousness and Cognition, 21, 1393–1400] points to limitations in the sequential approach. In the experiment, participants studied words selected according to a conjunctive rule. At test, participants discriminated rule-consistent from rule-violating words but could not verbalize the rule. Although the data elude explanation by sequential models, an exemplar model of implicit learning can explain them. To make the case, we simulate the full pattern of results by incorporating vector representations for the words used in the experiment, derived from the large-scale semantic space models LSA and BEAGLE, into an exemplar model of memory, MINERVA 2. We show that basic memory processes in a classic model of memory capture implicit learning of non-sequential rules, provided that stimuli are appropriately represented.     

Presentation order effects in duration discrimination

Three separate experiments indicate that the second of a pair of durations tends to be overestimated relative to the first. These negative time-order errors are discussed as reliable perceptual phenomena, not explainable in terms of simple response biases, criterion biases, assimilation, or fading traces.     

Effects of subject-to-experimenter distance and instructions on lateral eye movement

Lateral eye movements and heart rate were recorded as 32 right-handed men answered verbal and spatial questions. Experimenter-to-subject distance (.8 and 1.5 m) and attention demand of instructions were manipulated in a 2 X 2 design. A significant main effect for distance and an interaction of distance by instructions appeared on the direction of eye movements independent of type of question. The greatest number of leftward eye movements occurred at the short distance with instructions demanding higher attention. These findings are consistent with evidence that emotional arousal produces greater right- than left-hemisphere activation.     

Visual influence on taste sensitivity

A claimed dependence of taste sensitivity on body state, accepted for 40 years, is investigated in two experiments. Neither the growth of sensation above threshold, as measured in a magnitude estimation experiment, nor taste sensitivity near threshold, as measured by a signal detection analysis, show the claimed increment when individuals are dark-adapted. On the contrary, in both cases, performance is superior in the light, when subjects taste with their eyes open, possibly due to an arousing effect of concurrent visual stimulation.     

Pseudomemory effects over time in the hypnotic setting

Highly (n = 36), moderately (n = 26), and low (n = 48) susceptible subjects were administered either hypnosis or waking instruction to examine the hypothesis that pseudomemory will occur for hypnotic subjects as long as 2 weeks after suggestions are given for accepting false events. Accuracy and confidence of memory were measured for all subjects, and memory was examined for free recall, structured recall, and recognition. Results indicated persistence of pseudomemory for the 2-week period for both highly and moderately susceptible subjects. Data highlighted the multifaceted operation of skill, contextual, and state instruction factors, and an hypothesis that ambiguity of communication when suggestion is delivered plays a part in the maintenance of pseudomemory over time is offered for further testing.