A NOTE ON THE POSSIBLE DETERMINANT OF “SPLIT REPRESENTATION” AS AN ARTISTIC STYLE

L'A. fait L'hypothèse que le dédoublement de la représentation, qui est caractéristique du style graphique de certaines cultures, provient d'une préférence universelle pour ce type de dessin chez les tout jeunes enfants de toutes cultures; mais dans la plupart des cultures, cette préférence serait supprimée parce que, paradoxalement, les dessins doubles ne permettent pas de reconnaître les objets dessinés aussi facilement que les dessins conventionnels qui sont plus proches de la projection rétinienne des objets. Les dessins avec enchaînement ou dédoublement de la représentation seraient conservés chaque fois qu'ils sont appréciés en tant que code utilisé à d'autres fins que L'information sur les objets peints et pour leur valeur esthétique.     

CIRCULAR RELATION BETWEEN UNDERSTANDING AND LOGIC

Procedures for determining logicality presuppose understanding, and procedures for determining understanding presuppose logic. One can escape from this circle only by presupposing logicality, in agreement with common-sense thinking. Understanding can then be studied as an empirical variable. Traditional research has been based on the opposite solution: Logicality is treated as an empirical variable, understanding is implicitly presupposed; hence results are obtained which do not 'make sense'. One cannot understand the illogical.     

DETERMINANTS OF PERFORMANCE ON DOUBLE CLASSIFICATION TASKS

Two groups of children, median ages 6–7 and 8–7, were presented with objects examplifying three combinations of two dichotomous attributes, and asked to indicate the remaining combination. Keeping objects covered vs. uncovered at the time of the test response had generally little effect. Labelling was consistently superior to perceptual matching, apparently because the latter involved a search process. The errors in the labelling condition consisted mostly in naming an object identical to or different in both attributes from those given, reflecting perhaps an inability to break down the impression of the objects into independent attributes.     

Parent and child perceptions of Boszormenyi-Nagy's ethical dimensions of the parent-child relationship

The parent-child relationship plays an important role in Boszormenyi-Nagy's contextual therapy. This article presents the results of four interview studies of the opinions of parents and children about their ethical relationship.The children in these studies were five-to-seven-year-olds, 10-to-12 year olds and 15-year-olds. In one study only the mothers were interviewed, in the other three both parents participated. In all 73 children, 62 mothers, and 43 fathers were interviewed. The majority of parents and children agreed with most aspects of Nagy's theory about the parent-child relation, but there were some notable exceptions. Very few shared Nagy's ideas about entitlement. The age of the child had a clear effect on the opinions of the children on the dimensions of trust/reliability, loyalty and shifting of the balance with age of the child and on the opinions of the parents on the dimensions of childrens' rights, parents' rights, and balance of fairness. The sex of the interviewee had some effect: Mothers and fathers differ on the dimension of parents' rights and adolescent girls and boys differ on the dimensions of childrens' rights and parents' duties.     

Shape from stereo: A systematic approach using quadratic surfaces

We used quadratic shapes in several psychophysical shape-from-stereo tasks. The shapes were elegantly represented in a 2-D parameter space by the scale-independentshape index and the scale-dependentcurvedness. Using random-dot stereograms to depict the surfaces, we found that the shape of hyperbolic surfaces is slightly more difficult to recognize than the shape of elliptic surfaces. We found that curvedness (and indirectly, scale) has little or no influence on shape recognition.     

On becoming a leader: Effects of gender and cultural differences on power distance reduction

The present research focused on power processes in a simulated organizational structure consisting of three hierarchical levels occupied by different numbers of mules and females. Subjects were presented with a chart showing the organizational hierarchy of which they were a member placed at the lowest level, and asked to nominate any person for the leader position vacated by the current incumbent. The results of Experiment I (n = 88 Dutch male and female university students) showed that male subjects strongly overnominated themselves, whereas a majority of the female subjects nominated either self or another female. Of the others that were nominated by both males and females, almost all were occupants of positions immediately below the leader position, indicating the normative influence of a bureaucratic rule of leader succession. Experiment 2 was a replicational study carried out in a different culture (n = lOl Polish male and female university students). Polish subjects adhered to the bureaucratic rule more strongly than their Dutch counterparts, and both females and males nominated mostly males. Results are discussed with reference to gender self-stereotypes and cultural differences.     

Attitude change following persuasive communication: Integrating Social Judgment Theory and the Elaboration Likelihood Model

An experiment was conducted to examine the influence of the perceived extremity of a message and motivation to elaborate upon the process of persuasion. The first goal was to test a model of attitude change relating Social Judgment Theory to the Elaboration Likelihood Model. The second objective was to develop an instrument to measure attitude structure (latitudes of acceptance, non-commitment, and rejection) that allowed for a more refined assessment of the discrepancy between the position advocated in a message and the recipient's initial attitude. The main dependent variable was the attitude towards the use of automobiles in relation to environmental issues. Subjects were confronted with a message located in their own latitude of acceptance, rejection or non-commitment. Shortly after, a second measurement of attitude took place. The results showed that messages within the latitudes of non-commitment gave rise to the greatest attitude change. The data support the susceptibility hypothesis that subjects elaborate messages mainly in the latitude of non-commitment.     

The role of position in object selection in vision

Summary Within contemporary visual-information-processing psychology, two classes of selective-attention theories can be distinguished: position-not-special theories and position-special theories. The position-not-special theories postulate that attentional selection by colour, by form, and by position are equivalent selective operations. The position-special theories assume that selection by position is more basic or direct than selection by colour or by form. Examples of both types of theory are briefly described, and irrelevant and relevant evidence is critically discussed. It is concluded that the relevant evidence is directly compatible with the position-special views and that the position-not-special theories require additional extraneous assumptions. The position-special model presented in Van der Heijden (1992) is elaborated in further detail. It is shown that this model is compatible with two important and often substantiated assumptions of the position-not-special theories: the assumption that pre-attentive analysers organize the visual scene in objects against a background, and the assumption that visual-selective attention can be directed at objects isolated in this way. This position-special theory is a parsimonious theory because it can identify the mentalistic conceptselective attention with the materialistic conceptspatial position.     

Auditory accessory effects on visual processing

A series of experiments on intersensory facilitation demonstrates that non-informative sound of low to moderate intensity (30/80 dB) facilitates the reaction to a visual stimulus. By manipulating the preprocessing and perceptual stages of the visual signals, it appears that auditory intensity reduces choice reaction time independently from the positive influence of the intensity and duration of the visual imperative signal, but interacts with the effect of stimulus degradation. Degraded stimuli take more profit of the sound than intact stimuli. Besides a short-term activation effect, originated by accessories of the auditory modality, on the motor adjustment stage (cf. Sanders 1983), the results suggest that the accessory influences the stage of feature extraction.     

Is the match/mismatch model based on a statistical artefact?

In the match/mismatch model, recently formulated by Rachman and coworkers, it is stated that incorrectly predicted aversive experiences are generally followed by an immediate adjustment of the predictions concerning aversiveness of the next experience. This model can be considered to reflect a psychological process of the formation of expectations. In the present article it is argued that a simple H0 model, assuming that predictions are completely randomly generated by the subject, may account for the same effects. This H0 model is used in a stringent test of empirical data to determine if there are any effects of the discrepancy between prediction and experience on next prediction that exceed the effects explained by the H0 model. Although the H0 model produces effects very similar to the empirically observed effects, there is clear support for the hypothesized influence of the discrepancy between prediction and experience. Therefore, the model appears to reflect 'real' psychological processes and not chance findings.