The Cognitive Architecture of Perceived Animacy: Intention,Attention, and Memory

Human vision supports social perception by efficiently detecting agents and extracting rich information about their actions, goals, and intentions. Here, we explore the cognitive architecture of perceived animacy by constructing Bayesian models that integrate domain‐specific hypotheses of social agency with domain‐general cognitive constraints on sensory, memory, and attentional processing. Our model posits that perceived animacy combines a bottom–up, feature‐based, parallel search for goal‐directed movements with a top–down selection process for intent inference. The interaction of these architecturally distinct processes makes perceived animacy fast, flexible, and yet cognitively efficient. In the context of chasing, in which a predator (the “wolf”) pursues a prey (the “sheep”), our model addresses the computational challenge of identifying target agents among varying numbers of distractor objects, despite a quadratic increase in the number of possible interactions as more objects appear in a scene. By comparing modeling results with human psychophysics in several studies, we show that the effectiveness and efficiency of human perceived animacy can be explained by a Bayesian ideal observer model with realistic cognitive constraints. These results provide an understanding of perceived animacy at the algorithmic level—how it is achieved by cognitive mechanisms such as attention and working memory, and how it can be integrated with higher‐level reasoning about social agency.     

Affect,Behaviour, Cognition and Desire in the Big Five: An Analysis of Item Content and Structure

Personality psychology is concerned with affect (A), behaviour (B), cognition (C) and desire (D), and personality traits have been defined conceptually as abstractions used to either explain or summarise coherent ABC (and sometimes D) patterns over time and space. However, this conceptual definition of traits has not been reflected in their operationalisation, possibly resulting in theoretical and practical limitations to current trait inventories. Thus, the goal of this project was to determine the affective, behavioural, cognitive and desire (ABCD) components of Big‐Five personality traits. The first study assessed the ABCD content of items measuring Big‐Five traits in order to determine the ABCD composition of traits and identify items measuring relatively high amounts of only one ABCD content. The second study examined the correlational structure of scales constructed from items assessing ABCD content via a large, web‐based study. An assessment of Big‐Five traits that delineates ABCD components of each trait is presented, and the discussion focuses on how this assessment builds upon current approaches of assessing personality. Copyright © 2015 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Multiplex Conflict: Examining the Effects of Overlapping Task and Relationship Conflict on Advice Seeking in Organizations

This study examines the extent to which multiplex conflict relationships, or those infused with both relationship and task conflict, are related to employee decisions regarding from whom to seek advice at work. Data were gathered from 75 employees in a medium-sized life sciences firm in the US Midwest and analyzed using social network analysis. Findings demonstrate that although employees were less likely to seek advice from someone with whom they experienced relationship conflict, employees were more likely to seek advice from those with whom they experienced task conflict. Moreover, advice was still sought from those with whom both forms of conflict were present simultaneously. The current study demonstrates that employees are willing to seek advice from those with whom there is task conflict despite the simultaneous presence of relationship conflict. Compared to relationships free of relationship conflict (e.g., friendships), those characterized by multiplex conflicts provide greater access to others with divergent perspectives while also reducing the need for advice seekers to invest resources towards the protection and maintenance of the positive affective portion of the relationship. Although much of the focus of conflict research has been directed towards intragroup task and relationship conflict, our multiplex social network approach provides a unique opportunity to explore the effects on advice seeking stemming from the co-occurrence of these distinct types of conflict within the same employee dyad. In doing so, we contribute to the continuing debate regarding the primacy of affective or cognitive concerns in judgment and behavior.     

Scaling Up the Self,Scaling Down the World: Self-objectification and the Politics of Carbon Offsets and Personalised Genomics

Two global initiatives, the Genographic Project and the Carbon Lottery, share an ambition to make abstract, global processes—human evolution and climate change—comprehensible and engaging to non-specialists. Despite their differences, they both do so by means of self-objectifications that scale up the selves of participants and scale down complex, spatio-temporal models of human–world relations. The author’s auto-ethnographic experiences in both initiatives illustrate how carbon calculators and personalised genomics involve a pragmatics of scale that evaluates and compares users on the basis of their relative expression of, or deviation from, a standard. Furthermore, this is not based on actual resources that participants do or do not possess, but on forms of capitalist exchange that underwrite carbon trading and population genomics, as experts and corporations make intellectual property derived from purportedly rare DNA and sustainable practices, which are typically indigenous and non-western. In fact, the global inequalities that make possible transactions in carbon offsets and genetic ancestry are obscured from view. As a result, though initiatives like the Genographic Project and Carbon Lottery may provide comprehensible self-objectifications, they potentially make the world more unequal in the process.     

The sound-board account of reasoning: A one-system alternative to dual-process theory

In order to explain the effects found in the heuristics and biases literature, dual-process theories of reasoning claim that human reasoning is of two kinds: Type-1 processing is fast, automatic, and associative, while Type-2 reasoning is slow, controlled, and rule based. If human reasoning is so divided, it would have important consequences for morality, epistemology, and philosophy of mind. Although dual-process theorists have typically argued for their position by way of an inference to the best explanation, they have generally failed to consider alternative hypotheses. Worse still, it is unclear how we might test dual-process theories. In this article, I offer a one-system theory, which I call the Sound-Board Account of Reasoning, according to which there is one reasoning system which is flexible, allowing the properties used to distinguished Type-1 and Type-2 reasoning to cross-cut one another. I empirically distinguish my theory from the two dominant versions of dual-process theory (parallel-competitive and default-interventionist dual-process theory) and argue that my theory’s predictions are confirmed over both of these versions of dual-process theory.