Attribution of dispositional states by 12-month-olds

The ability to interpret the behavior of other individuals is essential for effective social functioning. Many investigators now believe that even young infants can recognize that agents act toward goals. Here we report three experiments suggesting that 12-month-old infants not only can recognize goal-related action, but also can interpret future actions of an actor on the basis of previously witnessed behavior in another context. The possibility that this inference is made through the attribution of mental states is discussed.     

Love and space in the nursing home

Nursing homes and other institutionsdesigned for persons with impairments are not,in fact, designed for persons with impairments.They are typically designed for theimpairments, not the persons, and therebybecome a part of the problem by reinforcingphysical and cultural manifestations of theimpairments. In the essay that follows, Idescribe an architectural design project inwhich students were asked to make changes to anexisting nursing home for the persons who livedthere. This requires not only becoming familiarwith the spaces, but with the personsthemselves and designing space to helparticulate their voices and being. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Treatment of Prostitution Using Integrative Therapy Techniques: A Case Study

This case study examines a pattern we believe to be common among female prostitutes: a woman (Bonnie) who, like most prostitutes, is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. Bonnie's prostitution is part of the unconscious repetition compulsion common in trauma victims; by prostituting herself, Bonnie re-creates the scenario of sexual abuse that occurred during her childhood, while maintaining an illusion of control over the situation. We maintain that an effective approach to treatment for Bonnie is integrative therapy, a type of psychological counseling designed to address the major aftereffects of sexual abuse: dissociation from the body and sexuality in general; a profound sense of powerlessness; critically low valuation of the self; and mistrust and fear of intimacy. Bonnie's story shows the dynamics of both prostitute behavior and integrative therapy, providing an example we believe to be applicable far beyond this case study.     

Visual perspective taking for avatars in a Simon task

In modern digital applications, users often interact with virtual representations of themselves or others, called avatars. We examined how these avatars and their perspectives influence stimulus–response compatibility in a Simon task. Participants responded to light/dark blue stimuli with left/right key presses in the presence of a task-irrelevant avatar. Changes in stimulus–response compatibility were used to quantify changes in the mental representation of the task and perspective taking toward this avatar. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that perspective taking for an avatar occurred in orthogonal stimulus–response mappings, causing a compatibility effect from the avatar’s point of view. In the following two experiments we introduced a larger variety of angular disparities between the participant and avatar. In Experiment 3, the Simon effect with lateralized stimulus positions remained largely unaffected by the avatar, pointing toward an absence of perspective taking. In Experiment 4, after avatar hand movements were added in order to strengthen the participants’ sense of agency over the avatar, a spatial compatibility effect from the avatar’s perspective was observed again, and hints of the selective use of perspective taking on a trial-by-trial basis were found. Overall, the results indicate that users can incorporate the perspective of an avatar into their mental representation of a situation, even when this perspective is unnecessary to complete a task, but that certain contextual requirements have to be met.     

Intended and unintended effects of explicit warnings on eyewitness suggestibility: Evidence from source identification tests

Previous studies have shown that source identification (ID) tests reduce, and in some cases eliminate, eyewitness suggestibility errors. The present study showed that the suggestibility errors participants committed on a source ID test were further reduced when they were given the explicit postwarning that the experimenter was trying to trick them. These postwarnings reduced suggestibility to the same extent as prewarnings, and they did so for both once and repeatedly suggested items. In addition, the benefits of the pre- and postwarnings persisted when participants were retested 1 week later, but only if the suggestions had been repeated. For once-suggested items, the warning had the unintended effect of improving old/new recognition of the suggested information at retest, an effect that offset the improvements in source discrimination accuracy conferred by the warning. The advantages of using source ID tests for investigating group differences in eyewitness suggestibility are discussed.     

Knowledge level learning and the power law: A soar model of skill acquisition in scheduling

Zusammenfassung. Das hier vorgestellte Modell lernt graduell, Planungsaufgaben aus der Klasse der Maschinenbelegungsprobleme (job-shop-scheduling problems) zu lösen. Mit Hilfe des Chunking-Mechanismus von Soar wird episodisches Wissen über die Belegungsreihenfolge von Aufträgen auf Maschinen memoriert. Bei der Entwicklung des Modells wurden zahlreiche qualitative (z. B. Transfereffekte) und quantitative Befunde (z. B. Bearbeitungszeiten) aus einer früheren empirischen Untersuchung berücksichtigt. In einer Validierungsstudie wurden dieselben Aufgaben von 14 Probanden und dem Modell bearbeitet. Die Passung von Simulationsdaten und empirischen Ergebnissen fiel insgesamt gut aus. Allerdings löst das Modell die Aufgaben schneller und zeigt auch einen etwas besseren Lernverlauf als die Probanden. Das Modell liefert eine Erklärung für das Rauschen, das typischerweise bei Bearbeitungszeiten zu beobachten ist: es handelt sich um erworbenes Wissen, das mehr oder weniger gut und auch unterschiedlich häufig auf neue Situationen übertragen wird. Der Lernverlauf der Probanden entspricht nur für aggregierte Daten einer Potenzfunktion (power law). Der vorgestellte Mechanismus zeigt, wie ein symbolisches Modell der Informationsverarbeitung graduelle Verhaltensänderungen generiert und wie der offensichtliche Erwerb allgemeiner Prozeduren ohne explizites Lernen von deklarativen Regeln erfolgen kann. Es wird nahegelegt, daß es sich hier um die Modellierung einer Form impliziten Lernens handelt. Summary. The model presented here gradually learns how to perform a job-shop scheduling task. It uses Soar's chunking mechanism to acquire episodic memories about the order to schedule jobs. The model was based on many qualitative (e.g., transfer effects) and quantitative (e.g., solution time) regularities found in previously collected data. The model was tested with new data where scheduling tasks were given to the model and to 14 subjects. The model generally fit these data with the restrictions that the model performs the task (in simulated time) faster than the subjects, and its performance improves somewhat more quickly than the subjects' performance. The model provides an explanation of the noise typically found in problem solving times - it is the result of learning actual pieces of knowledge that transfer more or less to new situations but rarely by an average amount. Only when the data are averaged (i.e., over subjects) does the smooth power law appear. This mechanism demonstrates how symbolic models can exhibit a gradual change in behavior and how the apparent acquisition of general procedures can be performed without resorting to explicit declarative rule generation. We suggest that this may represent a type of implicit learning.