Phenomenological model of variant change during magnetization of martensite

The present study deals with the straining of ferromagnetic martensite in a magnetizing field. A phenomenological model of the movement of the interface between martensitic variants is developed for calculation of the strength of the magnetic field required for a variant change. The effect of uniaxial stress on interface movement is also examined. The results are applied to the martensite phases of NiMnGa and FePd ferromagnetic shape-memory alloys.     

Observation of a threshold impact energy required to cause passive film rupture during slurry erosion of stainless steel

The impact of solid particles during the erosion of stainless steel by a slurry jet reveals a sequence of anodic current transients due to individual impacts. Measurement of these current transients shows that there is a minimum particle energy below which no transients can be detected. The result is interpreted as a threshold energy required to rupture the passivating oxide film on the metal surface. If this energy is exceeded, the current transients arise from electrochemical reaction of the depassivated metal surface after denudation. Below this threshold no rupture occurs and there are no current transients.     

Automatic Mechanisms for Social Attention Are Culturally Penetrable

Are mechanisms for social attention influenced by culture? Evidence that social attention is triggered automatically by bottom‐up gaze cues and is uninfluenced by top‐down verbal instructions may suggest it operates in the same way everywhere. Yet considerations from evolutionary and cultural psychology suggest that specific aspects of one's cultural background may have consequence for the way mechanisms for social attention develop and operate. In more interdependent cultures, the scope of social attention may be broader, focusing on more individuals and relations between those individuals. We administered a multi‐gaze cueing task requiring participants to fixate a foreground face flanked by background faces and measured shifts in attention using eye tracking. For European Americans, gaze cueing did not depend on the direction of background gaze cues, suggesting foreground gaze alone drives automatic attention shifting; for East Asians, cueing patterns differed depending on whether the foreground cue matched or mismatched background cues, suggesting foreground and background gaze information were integrated. These results demonstrate that cultural background influences the social attention system by shifting it into a narrow or broad mode of operation and, importantly, provides evidence challenging the assumption that mechanisms underlying automatic social attention are necessarily rigid and impenetrable to culture.     

In need of liberation or constraint? How intergroup attitudes moderate the behavioral implications of intergroup ideologies

This study examined how behavioral responses to ideologies prompting other- or self-focus during intergroup exchanges depend on what individuals see when they look out at an outgroup interaction partner or in toward themselves. Specifically, we predicted that the outward focus on learning about and from outgroup members encouraged by multiculturalism would benefit lower-prejudice individuals (LPs) but instead amplify the implications of negative perceptions for higher-prejudice individuals (HPs). In contrast, we predicted that the evaluative concerns and self-focus induced by anti-racism would harm LPs’ behavior by leading them to second-guess acting on positive impulses but improve HPs’ behavior by leading them to rein in unfavorable reactions. Results were generally consistent with these predictions. Color-blindness had a negative effect not moderated by prejudice. These results suggest that tailoring the ideology promoted in a specific setting to the particular individuals who will be exposed to it might enhance the effectiveness of intervention efforts.     

The Cultural Negotiations of Korean Immigrant Youth

The authors investigated the process of cultural adjustment among 13 Korean immigrant youths using consensual qualitative research (C. E. Hill, B. J. Thompson, & E. N. Williams, 1997). Results indicate that Korean youth are expected to negotiate and shift their identities to meet differing expectations across various interpersonal contexts. Participants also report struggling to balance “American” and “Korean” cultural values and norms and to use social support networks, such as family and friends, to deal with the stress of acculturation.     

Working memory load in the initial learning phase facilitates relearning: a study of vocabulary learning

In this study, the effect of working memory load in the initial learning phase on the relearning phase was examined. Exp. 1 examined the effect of articulatory suppression in paired associative learning with a relearning method. In the learning phase, 28 participants (M age=21.8 yr., SD=2.1) learned all word-nonword associations under conditions of articulatory suppression or simple tapping. After a delay, they answered a cued recall task in a nonsuppressed condition and a relearning task in a simple tapping condition. The subjects who learned under the simple tapping condition in the learning phase required significantly more trials in the relearning phase. In Exp. 2, 28 participants (M age=20.8 yr., SD=1.5) participated, and the result was replicated. These results suggested that working memory load facilitates relearning. Results are best explained by contextual interference (Battig) rather than by the less-is-more hypothesis of Newport.     

A pox on the mind: Disjunction of attention and memory in the processing of physical disfigurement

The unfavorable treatment of people with physical disfigurements is well-documented, yet little is known about basic perceptual and cognitive responses to disfigurement. Here, we identify a specialized pattern of cognitive processing consistent with the hypothesis that disfigurements act as heuristic cues to contagious disease. Disfigurements are often invariant across time and difficult to conceal, and thus observers can detect the presence of such cues without necessarily remembering the particular individuals bearing these cues. Indeed, despite the fact that disfigured faces were especially likely to hold disease-sensitive perceivers’ attention (Study 1), disfigured individuals were often confused with one another and thus not well remembered later (Study 2), revealing a disjunction of the typical relationship between elevated attention and elevated memory. We discuss the implications of our results for stigmatization of people with and without physical abnormalities and suggest the possibility that cognitive mechanisms for processing social information may be functionally tuned to the variant nature of important cues.     

Time-shrinking: A discontinuity in the perception of auditory temporal patterns

Recent research at our laboratories in the field of human auditory time perception revealed that the duration of short empty time intervals (<～200 msec) is considerably underestimated if they are immediately preceded by shorter time intervals. Within a certain range, the amount of subjective time shrinking is a monotonous function of the preceding time interval: the shorter it is, the more it shrinks its successor. In the present study, the preceding interval was kept constant at 50 msec, and the following interval for which the duration had to be judged, varied from 40 to 280 msec. The results showed that at up to 100 msec, the perceived duration increased to a much lesser extent than did the objective duration. Beyond 120 msec, the perceived duration quickly increased and reached a veridical value at 160 msec. Such a sudden change of perceived duration in a temporal pattern in which the objective duration varies gradually indicates a typical example of categorical perception. We suggest that such a categorization of the time dimension might be a clue for processes of speech and music perception.     

The effects of trial repetition and individual characteristics on decision making under uncertainty

The authors examined participants' preferences between certain and uncertain outcomes in a multistage gambling task and the effects of individual difference characteristics on those preferences. In Study 1, 144 participants made choices in single-stage gambles under gain and loss conditions and replicated the certainty effect in a previous study (D. Kahneman & A. Tversky, 1979). In Study 2, 94 participants engaged in a multistage gambling task using the same decision problems as those in Study 1. They also answered a questionnaire consisting of the Japanese version (M. Kamahara, K. Higuchi, & N. Shimizu, 2001) of the Locus of Control Scale (J. B. Rotter, 1966), the Reflection-Impulsivity Scale (K. Takigiku & A. Sakamoto, 2001), and a Japanese version (M. Terasaki, K. Shiomi, Y. Kishimoto, & K. Hiraoka, 1987) of the Sensation-Seeking Scale (M. Zuckerman, 1994). The results indicated that the certainty effect (Kahneman & Tversky) disappears in multistage gambling tasks and that differences in reflection-impulsivity and in gender influence the process of decision making under gain conditions. These results are discussed in terms of the decision strategies and cognitive biases involved in the multistage gambling task.