Speaker–listener incompatibility: Joint and separate processing in risky choice framing

Framing effects are considered in a conversational framework using the well-known Asian Disease problem [Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1981). The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice. Science, 211, 453–458]. Speakers’ preferred message framing is examined and its corresponding persuasiveness is assessed using listeners’ responses. The results show that speakers exhibit a marked and consistent preference for positive over negative framing (Experiment 1). Judged from listeners’ responses, this preference is effective for promoting riskless, but not risky options. The incompatibility between speakers and listeners may be resolved by noting that speakers can jointly (i.e., comparatively) assess the information and the persuasive qualities of alternative frames. In contrast, listeners are exposed only to one of these frames and, consequently, can only assess the information separately (i.e., non-comparatively). Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrate that no incompatibility exists when both speakers and listeners are either in separate, or in joint evaluation mode. Differences between risky choice and attribute framing [Levin, I.P., Schneider, S.L., & Gaeth, G.J. (1998). All frames are not created equal: a typology and critical analysis of framing effects. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 76, 149–188] are briefly discussed.     

Effects of plantar cutaneo-muscular and tendon vibration on posture and balance during quiet and perturbed stance

Modulation of lower limb somatosensory information by tendon or plantar vibration produces directionally specific, vibration-induced falling reactions that depend on the tendon or the region of the sole that is vibrated. This study characterized the effects of different patterns of plantar cutaneo-muscular vibration and bilateral Achilles tendon vibration (ATV) on the postural strategies observed during quiet and perturbed stance. Twelve healthy young participants stood barefooted, with their vision blocked, on two sets of plantar vibrators placed on two AMTI force plates embedded in a moveable support surface. Two other vibrators were positioned over the Achilles tendons. Participants were randomly exposed to different patterns of plantar cutaneo-muscular and ATV. Tilts of the support surface in the toes-up (TU) and toes-down (TD) directions were given 5-8 s after the beginning of vibration. Body kinematics in 3D and ground reaction forces were recorded. Bilateral ATV applied with or without rearfoot vibration (RFV) during quiet stance resulted in a whole-body backward leaning accompanied by an increase in trunk extension and hip and knee flexion. RFV alone produced a forward whole-body tilt with increased flexion in trunk, hip, and ankle. When stance was perturbed by TU tilts, the center of mass (CoM) and center of pressure (CoP) displacements were larger in the presence of RFV or ATV and associated with increased peak trunk flexion. TD tilts with or without ATV resulted in no significant difference in CoM and CoP displacements, while larger trunk extension and smaller distal angular displacements were observed during ATV. RFV altered the magnitude of the balance reactions, as observed by an increase in CoP displacements and variable response in trunk displacement. Significant interactions between ATV and RFV were obtained for the peak angular excursions for both directions of perturbations, where ATV either enhanced (for TU tilts) or attenuated (for TD tilts) the influence of RFV. Manipulating somatosensory information from the plantar cutaneo-muscular and muscle spindle Ia afferents thus results in altered and widespread postural responses, as shown by profound changes in body kinematics and CoM and CoP displacements. This suggests that the CNS uses plantar cutaneo-muscular and ankle spindle afferent inputs to build an appropriate reference of verticality that influences the control of equilibrium during quiet and perturbed stance.     

Rules versus statistics: insights from a highly inflected language

Inflectional morphology has been taken as a paradigmatic example of rule-governed grammatical knowledge (Pinker, 1999). The plausibility of this claim may be related to the fact that it is mainly based on studies of English, which has a very simple inflectional system. We examined the representation of inflectional morphology in Serbian, which encodes number, gender, and case for nouns. Linguists standardly characterize this system as a complex set of rules, with disagreements about their exact form. We present analyses of a large corpus of nouns which showed that, as in English, Serbian inflectional morphology is quasiregular: It exhibits numerous partial regularities creating neighborhoods that vary in size and consistency. We then asked whether a simple connectionist network could encode this statistical information in a manner that also supported generalization. A network trained on 3,244 Serbian nouns learned to produce correctly inflected phonological forms from a specification of a word's lemma, gender, number, and case, and generalized to untrained cases. The model's performance was sensitive to variables that also influence human performance, including surface and lemma frequency. It was also influenced by inflectional neighborhood size, a novel measure of the consistency of meaning to form mapping. A word-naming experiment with native Serbian speakers showed that this measure also affects human performance. The results suggest that, as in English, generating correctly inflected forms involves satisfying a small number of simultaneous probabilistic constraints relating form and meaning. Thus, common computational mechanisms may govern the representation and use of inflectional information across typologically diverse languages.     

The Social Regulation of Classroom Performances: a Theoretical Outline

Based on 20 years of research on the social regulation of academic performances, this paper provides arguments for the idea that the social context in which cognitive functioning takes place is an integral part of that functioning, not just the surrounding context for it. Several studies in the classroom setting indeed reveal that student's cognitive performances can depend on interactions between their actual and past social experiences, most notably interpersonal comparison and evaluation episodes. Because of their recurrence, these episodes can become part of student's autobiographical memory and, therefore, can affect their actual behavior in specific conditions. Theoretical suggestions are made for a ‘social psychology of cognition.’ This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Are Arabic numerals processed as pictures in a Stroop interference task?

In a picture-word interference task, picture naming is interfered by an incongruent word, but word naming is hardly hindered by the presence of an incongruent picture. In this study, we investigated whether Arabic digits are processed more like pictures or like words. We report two experiments in which Arabic digits and verbal numerals were confronted in a Stroop task. Arabic digit naming is interfered by the presence of an incongruent verbal numeral, while naming the verbal numeral is not influenced by the presence of an incongruent Arabic digit. In a second experiment, we excluded the hypothesis that the results are due to ignoring the Arabic digits: interferences from an incongruent distracter were similar for both notations in a semantic classification task. It seems that an asemantic conversion for Arabic digits is too slow to influence naming times, and that Arabic digit naming, like picture naming, is semantically mediated.     

The perceptual aspect of skilled performance in chess: Evidence from eye movements

Expert and intermediate chess players attempted to choose the best move in five chess positions while their eye movements were monitored. Experts were faster and more accurate than intermediates in choosing the best move. Experts made fewer fixations per trial and greater amplitude saccades than did intermediates, but there was no difference in fixation duration across skill groups. Examining the spatial distribution of the first five fixations for each position by skill group revealed that experts produced more fixations on empty squares than did intermediates. When fixating pieces, experts produced a greater proportion of fixations on relevant pieces than did intermediates. It is argued that expert chess players perceptually encode chess configurations, rather than individual pieces, and, consequently, parafoveal or peripheral processing guides their eye movements, producing a pattern of saccadic selectivity by piece saliency.     

Prospective associations from family-of-origin interactions to adult marital interactions and relationship adjustment.

To test the social learning-based hypothesis that marital conflict resolution patterns are learned in the family of origin, longitudinal, observational data were used to assess prospective associations between family conflict interaction patterns during adolescence and offspring's later marital conflict interaction patterns. At age 14 years, 47 participants completed an observed family conflict resolution task with their parents. In a subsequent assessment 17 years later, the participants completed measures of marital adjustment and an observed marital conflict interaction task with their spouse. As predicted, levels of hostility and positive engagement expressed by parents and adolescents during family interactions were prospectively linked with levels of hostility and positive engagement expressed by offspring and their spouses during marital interactions. Family-of-origin hostility was a particularly robust predictor of marital interaction behaviors; it predicted later marital hostility and negatively predicted positive engagement, controlling for psychopathology and family-of-origin positive engagement. For men, family-of-origin hostility also predicted poorer marital adjustment, an effect that was mediated through hostility in marital interactions. These findings suggest a long-lasting influence of family communication patterns, particularly hostility, on offspring's intimate communication and relationship functioning.     

Familiarity and pop-out in visual search

In this paper, we report that when the low-level features of targets and distractors are held constant, visual search performance can be strongly influenced by familiarity. In the first condition, a was the target amid as distractors, and vice versa. The response time increased steeply as a function of number of distractors (82 msec/item). When the same stimuli were rotated by 90° (the second condition), however, they became familiar patterns— and —and gave rise to much shallower search functions (31 msec/item). In the third condition, when the search was for a familiar target, (or ), among unfamiliar distractors, (or ), the slope was about 46 msec/item. In the last condition, when the search was for an unfamiliar target, (or ), among familiar distractors, s (or s), parallel search functions were found with a slope of about 1.5 msec/item. These results show that familiarity speeds visual search and that it does so principally when the distractors, not the targets, are familiar.     

How should the History of Education be Written? Some Reflections about the Nature of the Discipline from the Perspective of the Reception of our Work

How should history of education be written? To put the question is far more easier than to provide a concrete answer. In contemporary research, there continue to be pedagogistic complaints about finding answers to present-day educational problems via history. In our view, such an ahistorical utilitarianism as well as the legitimizing and/or mythologizing belief in a particular pedagogical system, in which the history of this field is so rich since the institutionalization of the discipline at the end of the nineteenth century, should be avoided at all costs. But the danger of presentism lurks around the corner as a sine qua non condition in any form of historical research. As can be found out via the comments on our own work, much of the criticism goes back to old conceptions of the discipline, conceived as historical pedagogy rather than as history of education. Apparently, in the field of pedagogy people are still convinced that the history of education, even if it does not provide edifying examples and useful lessons, must in any case have a training value for professionals – which in the light of modern, advanced research is rather a difficult idea to defend.     

Structural awareness mitigates the effect of delay in human causal learning

Many studies have demonstrated that reinforcement delays exert a detrimental influence on human judgments of causality. In a free-operant procedure, the trial structure is usually only implicit, and delays are typically manipulated via trial duration, with longer trials tending to produce both longer experienced delays and also lower objective contingencies. If, however, a learner can become aware of this trial structure, this may mitigate the effects of delay on causal judgments. Here we tested this “structural-awareness” hypothesis by manipulating whether response–outcome contingencies were clearly identifiable as such, providing structural information in real time using an auditory tone to delineate consecutive trials. A first experiment demonstrated that providing cues to indicate trial structure, but without an explicit indication of their meaning, significantly increased the accuracy of causal judgments in the presence of delays. This effect was not mediated by changes in response frequency or timing, and a second experiment demonstrated that it cannot be attributed to the alternative explanation of enhanced outcome salience. In a third experiment, making trial structure explicit and unambiguous, by telling participants that the tones indicated trial structure, completely abolished the effect of delays. We concluded that, with sufficient information, a continuous stream of causes and effects can be perceived as a series of discrete trials, the contingency nature of the input may be exploited, and the effects of delay may be eliminated. These results have important implications for human contingency learning and in the characterization of temporal influences on causal inference.