Personal epistemology across cultures: exploring Norwegian and Spanish university students’ epistemic beliefs about climate change

The primary aim was to explore and compare the dimensionality of personal epistemology with respect to climate change across the contexts of Norwegian and Spanish students. A second aim was to examine relationships between topic-specific epistemic beliefs and the variables of gender, topic knowledge, and topic interest in the two contexts. Participants were 225 Norwegian and 217 Spanish undergraduates enrolled in psychology or education courses, and the dimensionality of topic-specific personal epistemology was explored through factor analyses of the scores on a 49-item questionnaire. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses were used to predict scores on the epistemic belief dimensions emerging from the factor analyses with gender, topic knowledge, and topic interest, respectively. Even though considerable cross-cultural generalizability in dimensionality was demonstrated, this research also draws attention to the cultural embeddedness of topic-specific epistemic beliefs. Moreover, differences in the predictability of topic knowledge and topic interest in Norway and Spain, suggest that factors constraining or enhancing adaptive epistemic beliefs concerning particular topics may vary across cultures.     

Inhibitory tagging in an interrupted visual search

Inhibition of return facilitates visual search, biasing attention away from previously examined locations. Prior research has shown that, as a result of inhibitory tags associated with rejected distractor items, observers are slower to detect small probes presented at these tagged locations than they are to detect probes presented at locations that were unoccupied during visual search, but only when the search stimuli remain visible during the probe-detection task. Using an interrupted visual search task, in which search displays alternated with blank displays, we found that inhibitory tagging occurred in the absence of the search array when probes were presented during these blank displays. Furthermore, by manipulating participants’ attentional set, we showed that these inhibitory tags were associated only with items that the participants actively searched. Finally, by probing before the search was completed, we also showed that, early in search, processing at distractor locations was actually facilitated, and only as the search progressed did evidence for inhibitory tagging arise at those locations. These results suggest that the context of a visual search determines the presence or absence of inhibitory tagging, as well as demonstrating for the first time the temporal dynamics of location prioritization while search is ongoing.     

Differential effects of stimulus context on perceived length: Implications for the horizontal-vertical illusion

Six experiments examined orientation-specific effects of stimulus context on the visual perception of horizontal and vertical lengths: Using a paired-comparison method, Experiments 1–5 showed that the probability of judging a given vertical line to be longer than a given horizontal line was relatively great when the stimulus set comprised relatively long horizontals and short verticals, and relatively small when the stimulus set comprised short horizontals with long verticals. To the extent that stimulus context exerts orientation-specific effects on perceived length, it thereby modulates the degree to which verticals appear longer than physically equivalent horizontals: the horizontal—vertical illusion (HVI). Under various contextual conditions, the HVI was as small as 3% (horizontals had to be 3% greater than verticals to be perceived as equally long) and as great as 15%, equaling about 12% in a “neutral” context. In Experiment 6, subjects judged the absolute physical length of each stimulus, and the results indicated that stimulus context acted largely by decreasing perceived lengths. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that differential effects of context reflect a process of stimulus-specific perceptual attenuation.     

Longitudinal Changes in Acculturation for Immigrant Women from the Former Soviet Union

Most research on immigrant acculturation has been conducted with cross-sectional samples, using statistical designs that may not capture different trajectories for the components that contribute to this complex concept. The purpose of this study was to examine change over time in acculturation for 226 women from the former Soviet Union who had lived in the US fewer than eight years when recruited. Using self-report data from four annual waves, growth trajectories were examined in four components of acculturation (American behavior, Russian behavior, English language proficiency, and cultural generativity). Results indicate that these components changed at varying rates. Acculturation is a process with multiple distinct components which should be measured separately to obtain a full profile of change over time.     

Strong memories are hard to scale

People are generally skilled at using a confidence scale to rate the strength of their memories over a wide range. Specifically, low-confidence recognition decisions are often associated with close-to-chance accuracy, whereas high-confidence recognition decisions can be associated with close-to-perfect accuracy. However, using a 20-point rating scale, the authors found that the ability to scale memory strength had its limitations in that a high proportion of list items received the highest rating of 20. Efforts to induce participants to differentiate between these strong memories using emphatic instructions and alternative scales were not successful. Remember/know judgments indicated that these strong and hard-to-scale memories were often based on familiarity (not just recollection). Providing error feedback on a plurals discrimination task finally produced a high-confidence criterion shift. The authors suggest that the ability to scale strong (and almost perfectly accurate) memories may be limited because of the absence of differential error feedback for very strong memories in the past (the kind of differential error feedback that may account for the memory-scaling expertise that participants otherwise exhibit).