Comparing viewer and array mental rotations in different planes

Participants imagined rotating either themselves or an array of objects that surrounded them. Their task was to report on the egocentric position of an item in the array following the imagined rotation. The dependent measures were response latency and number of errors committed. Past research has shown that self-rotation is easier than array rotation. However, we found that imagined egocentric rotations were as difficult to imagine as rotations of the environment when people performed imagined rotations in the midsagittal or coronal plane. The advantages of imagined self-rotations are specific to mental rotations performed in the transverse plane.     

The Ecological Validity of Delay Aversion and Response Inhibition as Measures of Impulsivity in AD/HD: A Supplement to the NIMH Multimodal Treatment Study of AD/HD

Impulsivity is a primary symptom of the combined type of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (AD/HD). The Stop Signal Paradigm is premised upon a primary deficit in inhibitory control in AD/HD, whereas the Delay Aversion Hypothesis, by contrast, conceptualizes impulsivity in AD/HD, not as an inability to inhibit a response, but rather as a choice to avoid delay. This study compared the ecological validity of the Stop Signal Task (SST) and Choice-Delay Task (C-DT) measure of delay aversion, with respect to their relative utility in discriminating AD/HD children from normal control participants, and their correlations with classroom observations and with ratings of impulsivity and other core AD/HD symptoms on the Conners and SNAP-IV checklists. The tasks exhibited modest discriminant validity when used individually and excellent discriminant validity when used in combination. The C-DT correlated with teacher ratings of impulsivity, hyperactivity, and conduct problems, and with observations of gross motor activity, physical aggression, and an AD/HD composite score. The SST correlated with the observations only. These results suggest that delay aversion is associated with a broad range of AD/HD characteristics whereas inhibitory failure seems to tap a more discrete dimension of executive control     

The Effects of Musical and Voice “Fit” on Responses to Advertisements1

Research on musical “fit” suggests that listeners might recall more of a radio advertisement if it features musical/voice content that corresponds with features of the advertised brand. This is because the music/voice should prime certain aspects of listeners' knowledge. Two studies were carried out to test this, each involving 5 specially prepared radio ads. The first indicated that musical fit enhanced recall of the products advertised, the brands advertised, and specific claims made during the course of the ad copy; and also participants' ratings of liking for the ad and likelihood of purchasing the advertised product. A second similar study considered voice fit and found that this could also promote recall of specific product claims and lead to higher ratings of liking for the ad and likelihood of purchasing the advertised product. These results confirm that both musical and voice fit can prime certain aspects of listeners' knowledge and also increase liking for ads, such that it might improve knowledge-based and affective responses to advertising. The theoretical implications of this are discussed in terms of the concept of involvement and what precisely is meant by musical/voice fit.     

Motivation and performance: Uncertainty regulation in Canada and Japan

In a field study involving university students from Canada and Japan, we tested hypotheses from the theory of uncertainty orientation (Sorrentino and Roney in The uncertain mind: Individual differences in facing the unknown. Psychology Press, Philadelphia 2000). Consistent with previous research, those possessing an uncertainty orientation that matched their culture’s predominant style of uncertainty regulation perceived a better student-classroom fit than those who did not match their culture’s predominant style of uncertainty regulation. More importantly, we predicted and found that actual course grades varied as a function of the culture’s style of uncertainty regulation in interaction with the participant’s uncertainty orientation and achievement-related motives. Implications of these findings and applied relevance are discussed.     

The role of listening in interpersonal influence

Using informant reports on working professionals, we explored the role of listening in interpersonal influence and how listening may account for at least some of the relationship between personality and influence. The results extended prior work which has suggested that listening is positively related to influence for informational and relational reasons. As predicted, we found that: (1) listening had a positive effect on influence beyond the impact of verbal expression, (2) listening interacted with verbal expression to predict influence (such that the relationship between listening and influence was stronger among those more expressive), and (3) listening partly mediated the positive relationships between each of the Big Five dimensions of agreeableness and openness and influence.     

Intervention Induced Changes in Perceptions of Parenting and Risk Opportunities Among Rural African American

A randomized prevention trial was conducted contrasting families who took part in the Strong African American Families Program (SAAF), a preventive intervention for rural African American parents and their 11-year-olds, with control families. The trial, which included 671 families, indicated that intervention-induced changes occurred in intervention-targeted parenting and youth behavior, as well as youth initiation of alcohol use and sexual activity. Four waves of data collected were obtained at pretest, 3-month post-test, 29 month long-term follow up; and 65 month long-term follow up. Three data points were selected and analyzed in the current study: pretest, post-test, and 65 month long-term follow up to capture the sustainability of SAAF during three critical developmental stages—middle childhood, early adolescence, and late adolescence. Intervention-induced changes in parenting mediated the effect of intervention-group influences on changes in the onset and escalation of alcohol use and sexual activity over 65 months through its positive influence on youths’ perceptions and internalization of parental norms and resistance to engaging in risk opportunities. These findings highlight the potential for family-based prevention programs to enhance positive developmental outcomes to reduce HIV-related risk behaviors among rural African American youth.     

Reading direction and the central perceptual span: Evidence from Arabic and English

In English and other alphabetic languages read from left to right, useful information acquired during each fixational pause is generally reported to extend much further to the right of each fixation than to the left. However, the asymmetry of the perceptual span for alphabetic languages read in the opposite direction (i.e., from right to left) has received very little attention in empirical research. Accordingly, we investigated the perceptual span for Arabic, which is one of the world’s most widely read languages and is read from right to left, using a gaze-contingent window paradigm in which a region of text was displayed normally around each point of fixation, while text outside this region was obscured. Skilled Arabic readers who were bilingual in Arabic and English read Arabic and English sentences while a window of normal text extended symmetrically 0.5^o to the left and right of fixation or asymmetrically, by increasing this window to 1.5^o or 2.5^o to either the left or the right. When English was read, performance across window conditions was superior when windows extended rightward. However, when Arabic was read, performance was superior when windows extended leftward and was essentially the reverse of that observed for English. These findings show for the first time that a leftward asymmetry in the central perceptual span occurs when Arabic is read and, for the first time in over 30 years, provide a new indication that the perceptual span for alphabetic languages is modified by the overall direction of reading.     

Spatial frequency filtering and the direct control of fixation durations during scene viewing

The present study employed a saccade-contingent change paradigm to investigate the effect of spatial frequency filtering on fixation durations during scene viewing. Subjects viewed grayscale scenes while encoding them for a later memory test. During randomly chosen saccades, the scene was replaced with an alternate version that remained throughout the critical fixation that followed. In Experiment 1, during the critical fixation, the scene could be changed to high-pass and low-pass spatial frequency filtered versions. Under both conditions, fixation durations increased, and the low-pass condition produced a greater effect than the high-pass condition. In subsequent experiments, we manipulated the familiarity of scene information during the critical fixation by flipping the filtered scenes upside down or horizontally. Under these conditions, we observed lengthening of fixation durations but no difference between the high-pass and low-pass conditions, suggesting that the filtering effect is related to the mismatch between information extracted within the critical fixation and the ongoing scene representation in memory. We also conducted control experiments that tested the effect of changes to scene orientation (Experiment 2a) and the addition of color to a grayscale scene (Experiment 2b). Fixation distribution analysis suggested two effects on the distribution fixation durations: a fast-acting effect that was sensitive to all transsaccadic changes tested and a later effect in the tail of the distribution that was likely tied to the processing of scene information. These findings are discussed in the context of theories of oculomotor control during scene viewing.     

Competitive Dynamics in Forecasting: The Interaction of Skill and Uncertainty

The outcomes in many competitive tasks depend upon both skill and luck. Behavioral theories on risk taking in tournaments indicate that low‐skilled individuals may have incentives to take more risks than high‐skilled ones. We build on these theories and suggest, in addition, that when luck is more important in determining outcomes, the increase in risk taking is larger for low‐skilled than high‐skilled individuals. We test this hypothesis by analyzing stock analysts' forecasts of companies' earnings per share under market conditions that vary in volatility and thus imply different levels of luck in outcomes. Specifically, noting that forecasts that deviate widely from the consensus—which is observable by the analyst—potentially carry career‐related rewards but also reputational risks, we examine the degree of deviation from consensus exhibited by analysts of different skill levels (measured by both past forecasting accuracy and education) in different market conditions. We find that average deviations from consensus increase as markets become more volatile. At the same time, under conditions of high volatility, low‐skilled analysts exhibit larger increases in deviations from consensus than high‐skilled analysts. These field data results support our hypothesis based on of risk taking in tournaments. We discuss alternative interpretations such as, for example, self‐serving attributions and indicate directions for future research. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

From Validating to Verifying: Public Appeals in Synthetic Biology

Synthetic biology provides a vivid and richly entangled contemporary example of a science being made public. A science, however, can be made public in different ways. A public could validate, legitimate, de-legimate, object to, verify, confirm or dissent from science. Practically, scientists could publicise science—in the mass media—or they could make science public. The contrast between high-profile, media scientists such as J. Craig Venter, and community-based participatory mechanisms such as OpenWetWare allows us to see how these alternatives play out in practice. While it is easy to criticise and dismiss the public-relations oriented promotion of synthetic biology by figures such as Venter, how should we evaluate the open participatory mechanisms of a social media effort such as OpenWetWare? I suggest, drawing on the work of Isabelle Stengers and Michael Warner, that the case of synthetic biology is interesting because many synthetic biologists commit themselves to making it public, and making its public-ness part of how it is done. They place hope in publics to make the science viable. At the same time, however, the publics who are welcomed into OpenWetWare are largely confined to validating the coordination mechanisms on which the claim to public-ness rests. Whether publics can do more than validate synthetic biology, then, remains a question both for publics outside and inside this emerging scientific field. And whether the alternatives of validation or participation themselves adequately frame what is at stake in the emergence of fields such as synthetic biology remains debatable.