Prior Divergence: Do Researchers and Participants Share the Same Prior Probability Distributions?

Do participants bring their own priors to an experiment? If so, do they share the same priors as the researchers who design the experiment? In this article, we examine the extent to which self‐generated priors conform to experimenters’ expectations by explicitly asking participants to indicate their own priors in estimating the probability of a variety of events. We find in Study 1 that despite being instructed to follow a uniform distribution, participants appear to have used their own priors, which deviated from the given instructions. Using subjects’ own priors allows us to account better for their responses rather than merely to test the accuracy of their estimates. Implications for the study of judgment and decision making are discussed.     

Different attitudes toward humor between Chinese and American students: evidence from the Implicit Association Test

Although cross-cultural research indicates that Chinese people demonstrate less humor than do Americans, little research addresses the reasons. This cross-cultural difference may be largely due to different implicit attitudes toward humor held by Chinese and Americans, deeply rooted in the two cultural traditions. Both self-report evaluation and the Implicit Association Test (IAT) were used to compare Chinese and American attitudes toward humor. Although 60 Chinese undergraduate students showed no significant difference from 33 American exchange students in explicit attitudes toward humor, the former associated humor more frequently with unpleasant adjectives and seriousness with pleasant adjectives on the IAT; the opposite pattern was found for the American group. This indicated a negative implicit attitude toward humor among the Chinese students.     

On Endomorphisms of Ockham Algebras with Pseudocomplementation

A pO-algebra ${(L; f, \, ^{\star})}$ is an algebra in which (L; f) is an Ockham algebra, ${(L; \, ^{\star})}$ is a p-algebra, and the unary operations f and ${^{\star}}$ commute. Here we consider the endomorphism monoid of such an algebra. If ${(L; f, \, ^{\star})}$ is a subdirectly irreducible pK _1,1- algebra then every endomorphism ${\vartheta}$ is a monomorphism or ${\vartheta^3 = \vartheta}$ . When L is finite the endomorphism monoid of L is regular, and we determine precisely when it is a Clifford monoid.     

青少年道德情绪判断与归因特点研究

运用情境故事考察246名青少年在犯过情境中的道德情绪判断与归因特点,以年龄、犯过类别、行为者意图结果的匹配关系为因素进行对数线性分析。结果表明：犯过类别、行为者意图结果的匹配关系对青少年道德情绪判断与归因存在重要影响,青少年道德情绪判断与归因上的年龄差异主要存在于12岁组和14岁以上组之间,12岁组的情绪判断较为单一,归因上以道德定向为主,而14岁以上组出现了更多复杂情绪判断及移情定向归因。     

Cognitive obstacles against organ donation: The influence of negative attitudes,norms, and traditional beliefs on Chinese people's intention to donate organs after death

In China, the organ supply is severely insufficient to cover all people on the waiting list for donated organs, and numerous patients die awaiting transplant. To achieve a better understanding of cadaveric organ donation in Chinese culture, this study examined 300 Chinese adults, in both Fujian Province and Macao, regarding attitudes towards organ donation, subjective norms about organ donation and traditional beliefs about the body and death, examining the influences of these factors on respondents' donation intentions. Multiple hierarchical regression results suggest that more negative attitudes, unfavourable norms and traditional beliefs lead to lower donation intentions. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The role of color information on object recognition: a review and meta-analysis

In this study, we systematically review the scientific literature on the effect of color on object recognition. Thirty-five independent experiments, comprising 1535 participants, were included in a meta-analysis. We found a moderate effect of color on object recognition (d = 0.28). Specific effects of moderator variables were analyzed and we found that color diagnosticity is the factor with the greatest moderator effect on the influence of color in object recognition; studies using color diagnostic objects showed a significant color effect (d = 0.43), whereas a marginal color effect was found in studies that used non-color diagnostic objects (d = 0.18). The present study did not permit the drawing of specific conclusions about the moderator effect of the object recognition task; while the meta-analytic review showed that color information improves object recognition mainly in studies using naming tasks (d = 0.36), the literature review revealed a large body of evidence showing positive effects of color information on object recognition in studies using a large variety of visual recognition tasks. We also found that color is important for the ability to recognize artifacts and natural objects, to recognize objects presented as types (line-drawings) or as tokens (photographs), and to recognize objects that are presented without surface details, such as texture or shadow. Taken together, the results of the meta-analysis strongly support the contention that color plays a role in object recognition. This suggests that the role of color should be taken into account in models of visual object recognition.     

Bayesian analogy with relational transformations

How can humans acquire relational representations that enable analogical inference and other forms of high-level reasoning? Using comparative relations as a model domain, we explore the possibility that bottom-up learning mechanisms applied to objects coded as feature vectors can yield representations of relations sufficient to solve analogy problems. We introduce Bayesian analogy with relational transformations (BART) and apply the model to the task of learning first-order comparative relations (e.g., larger, smaller, fiercer, meeker) from a set of animal pairs. Inputs are coded by vectors of continuous-valued features, based either on human magnitude ratings, normed feature ratings (De Deyne et al., 2008), or outputs of the topics model (Griffiths, Steyvers, & Tenenbaum, 2007). Bootstrapping from empirical priors, the model is able to induce first-order relations represented as probabilistic weight distributions, even when given positive examples only. These learned representations allow classification of novel instantiations of the relations and yield a symbolic distance effect of the sort obtained with both humans and other primates. BART then transforms its learned weight distributions by importance-guided mapping, thereby placing distinct dimensions into correspondence. These transformed representations allow BART to reliably solve 4-term analogies (e.g., larger:smaller::fiercer:meeker), a type of reasoning that is arguably specific to humans. Our results provide a proof-of-concept that structured analogies can be solved with representations induced from unstructured feature vectors by mechanisms that operate in a largely bottom-up fashion. We discuss potential implications for algorithmic and neural models of relational thinking, as well as for the evolution of abstract thought.     

You are what you tweet: Personality expression and perception on Twitter

Microblogging services such as Twitter have become increasingly popular in recent years. However, little is known about how personality is manifested and perceived in microblogs. In this study, we measured the Big Five personality traits of 142 participants and collected their tweets over a 1-month period. Extraversion, agreeableness, openness, and neuroticism were associated with specific linguistic markers, suggesting that personality manifests in microblogs. Meanwhile, eight observers rated the participants’ personality on the basis of their tweets. Results showed that observers relied on specific linguistic cues when making judgments, and could only judge agreeableness and neuroticism accurately. This study provides new empirical evidence of personality expression in naturalistic settings, and points to the potential of utilizing social media for personality research.     

Gender differences in children's arithmetic performance are accounted for by gender differences in language abilities

Studies have shown that female children, on average, consistently outperform male children in arithmetic. In the research reported here, 1,556 pupils (8 to 11 years of age) from urban and rural regions in the greater Beijing area completed 10 cognitive tasks. Results showed that girls outperformed boys in arithmetic tasks (i.e., simple subtraction, complex multiplication), as well as in numerosity-comparison, number-comparison, number-series-completion, choice reaction time, and word-rhyming tasks. Boys outperformed girls in a mental rotation task. Controlling for scores on the word-rhyming task eliminated gender differences in arithmetic, whereas controlling for scores on numerical-processing tasks (number comparison, numerosity estimation, numerosity comparison, and number-series completion) and general cognitive tasks (choice reaction time, Raven's Progressive Matrices, and mental rotation) did not. These results suggest that girls' advantage in arithmetic is likely due to their advantage in language processing.     

Individual differences in holistic processing predict face recognition ability

Why do some people recognize faces easily and others frequently make mistakes in recognizing faces? Classic behavioral work has shown that faces are processed in a distinctive holistic manner that is unlike the processing of objects. In the study reported here, we investigated whether individual differences in holistic face processing have a significant influence on face recognition. We found that the magnitude of face-specific recognition accuracy correlated with the extent to which participants processed faces holistically, as indexed by the composite-face effect and the whole-part effect. This association is due to face-specific processing in particular, not to a more general aspect of cognitive processing, such as general intelligence or global attention. This finding provides constraints on computational models of face recognition and may elucidate mechanisms underlying cognitive disorders, such as prosopagnosia and autism, that are associated with deficits in face recognition.