Insects as Gibsonian Animals

Research on the visual behavior of insects has uncovered a number of cues that are used for controlling and stabilizing flight and for extracting information about the structure of the environment. Flies monitor their egomotion and maintain a straight course by sensing the patterns of image motion that are induced in the eyes. Bees flying through a tunnel maintain equidistance to the flanking walls by balancing the speeds of the images of the two walls. This enables them to safely negotiate narrow passages or to fly between obstacles. The speed of flight in the tunnel is controlled by holding constant the average image velocity as seen by the 2 eyes. This ensures that the bee slows down to a safer speed when the passage narrows. Bees landing on a horizontal surface hold constant the image velocity of the surface as they approach it, thus automatically ensuring that flight speed is close to 0 at touchdown. Flies and bees distinguish objects from backgrounds by sensing the relative motion between the images of the object and the background. Ranges of objects are gauged in terms of the speeds of motion of the images of the objects. Foraging bees estimate the distance that they have traveled to reach a food source by integrating the optic flow experienced en route—they possess a visually driven odometer.     

An intelligent task analysis approach for special education based on MIRA

This paper describes a novel approach for generating a logical sequence of tasks in the task analysis process of special education. This approach is based on the formalism MIRA (Mīmā?sā Inspired Representation of Actions), which has the feature of expressing an action as reason, instruction and goal. MIRA also prescribes a set of deduction rules, which helps in the reasoning process of actions. These features are incorporated in this approach and a software tool, namely MIRATaskGen is designed, which facilitates the task analysis process of special education. The software receives various action related inputs along with the start and finish stages and generates a sequence of tasks from the start to the finish. This tool also informs the user, whether the desired goal can be achieved. If the desired goal cannot be achieved, then the sequence of actions from the start to a point of discontinuity is detected.     

The effect of sadness on global-local processing

Gable and Harmon-Jones (Psychological Science, 21(2), 211-215, 2010) reported that sadness broadens attention in a global-local letter task. This finding provided the key test for their motivational intensity account, which states that the level of spatial processing is not determined by emotional valence, but by motivational intensity. However, their finding is at odds with several other studies, showing no effect, or even a narrowing effect of sadness on attention. This paper reports two attempts to replicate the broadening effect of sadness on attention. Both experiments used a global-local letter task, but differed in terms of emotion induction: Experiment 1 used the same pictures as Gable and Harmon-Jones, taken from the IAPS dataset; Experiment 2 used a sad video underlaid with sad music. Results showed a sadness-specific global advantage in the error rates, but not in the reaction times. The same null results were also found in a South-Asian sample in both experiments, showing that effects on global/local processing were not influenced by a culturally related processing bias.     

Explaining effervescence: Investigating the relationship between shared social identity and positive experience in crowds

We investigated the intensely positive emotional experiences arising from participation in a large-scale collective event. We predicted such experiences arise when those attending a collective event are (1) able to enact their valued collective identity and (2) experience close relations with other participants. In turn, we predicted both of these to be more likely when participants perceived crowd members to share a common collective identity. We investigated these predictions in a survey of pilgrims (N = 416) attending a month-long Hindu pilgrimage festival in north India. We found participants' perceptions of a shared identity amongst crowd members had an indirect effect on their positive experience at the event through (1) increasing participants' sense that they were able to enact their collective identity and (2) increasing the sense of intimacy with other crowd members. We discuss the implications of these data for how crowd emotion should be conceptualised.     

Do attitudes toward societal structure predict beliefs about free will and achievement? Evidence from the Indian caste system

Intuitive theories about the malleability of intellectual ability affect our motivation and achievement in life. But how are such theories shaped by the culture in which an individual is raised? We addressed this question by exploring how Indian children's and adults’ attitudes toward the Hindu caste system – and its deterministic worldview – are related to differences in their intuitive theories. Strikingly, we found that, beginning at least in middle school and continuing into adulthood, individuals who placed more importance on caste were more likely to adopt deterministic intuitive theories. We also found a developmental change in the scope of this relationship, such that in children, caste attitudes were linked only to abstract beliefs about personal freedom, but that by adulthood, caste attitudes were also linked to beliefs about the potential achievement of members of different castes, personal intellectual ability, and personality attributes. These results are the first to directly relate the societal structure in which a person is raised to the specific intuitive theories they adopt.     

Time course of visual attention across perceptual levels and objects

Theories of shifts of visual attention based on attentional blink or dwell time do not directly address shifts of attention across different levels (global or local) involving multiple objects. Two experiments were conducted employing the attentional dwell time paradigm to investigate the shifts of visual attention between objects selected at same or different levels. Participants were instructed to identify two successive compound stimuli at a pre-specified level (global or local) presented at two different locations with variable SOA. The initial pair of locations in which the stimulus was presented was fixed in Experiment 1 but not in Experiment 2. Experiment 1 results showed very little impairment for second target identification when both the targets were at the global level. Attentional shift was better with both targets at the same level compared to different levels. Experiment 2 results showed that local followed by global target identification is difficult at short SOAs compared to other conditions. The results indicate that scope of attention affects the time course of visual attention. Global processing could be performed with very little capacity limitation simultaneously with distributed attention. The default mode of attention might be distributed and attention becomes focused for target identification. Different mechanisms may underlie shifts in focused attention between different locations and changes in attentional set required by changes in perceptual levels.     

Time course of visual attention with emotional faces

When a briefly presented and then masked visual object is identified, it impairs the identification of the second target for several hundred milliseconds. This phenomenon is known as attentional blink or attentional dwell time. The present study is an attempt to investigate the role of salient emotional information in shifts of covert visual attention over time. Two experiments were conducted using the dwell time paradigm, in which two successive targets are presented at different locations with a variable stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA). In the first experiment, real emotional faces (happy/sad) were presented as the first target, and letters (L/T) were presented as the second target. The order of stimulus presentation was reversed in the second experiment. In the first experiment, identification of the letters preceded by happy faces showed better performance than did those preceded by sad faces at SOAs less than 200 msec. Similarly, happy faces were identified better than sad faces were at short SOAs in Experiment 2. The results show that the time course of visual attention is dependent on emotional content of the stimuli. The findings indicate that happy faces are associated with distributed attention or broad scope of attention and require fewer attentional resources than do sad faces.     

What causes the word gap? Financial concerns may systematically suppress child-directed speech

Parents with fewer educational and economic resources (low socioeconomic-status, SES) tend to speak less to their children, with consequences for children's later life outcomes. Despite this well-established and highly popularized link, less research addresses why the SES “word gap” exists. Moreover, while research has assessed individual-level contributors to the word gap—like differences in parenting knowledge—we know little about how structural constraints that vary according to SES might affect caregivers’ speech. In two pre-registered studies, we test whether experiencing financial scarcity can suppress caregivers’ speech to their children. Study 1 suggests that higher-SES caregivers who are prompted to reflect on scarcity—particularly those who reflect on financial scarcity—speak less to their 3-year-olds in a subsequent play session, relative to a control group. Study 2 suggests that mid- to higher-SES caregivers engage in fewer back-and-forth exchanges with their children at the end of the month—when they are more likely to be experiencing financial hardship—than the rest of the month. These studies provide preliminary evidence that—above and beyond caregivers’ individual characteristics—structural constraints may affect how much parents speak to their children.