Disposition-based categories: Structure and salience effects on memory

Two experiments investigated whether disposition-based categories influence the retrieval of behaviors related or unrelated to those categories. In Experiment 1, subjects studied a set of behaviors in order to form an impression of a target person. Impression ratings indicated which category had been activated. In an unexpected recognition test, accuracy was better for category-inconsistent information than for category-consistent behaviors. That result suggested that the structure of disposition-based categories includes qualitatively different representations of consistent and inconsistent acts related to the category. In Experiment 2, subjects rated behaviors with reference to a relevant or irrelevant disposition category. In an unexpected recall test, an advantage for category-inconsistent behaviors was found only when the behaviors had been studied from the perspective of the relevant category. It was concluded that categories are not represented in a form analogous to the representation of category-inconsistent behaviors.     

Confidence regions for INDSCAL using the jackknife and bootstrap techniques

Bootstrap and jackknife techniques are used to estimate ellipsoidal confidence regions of group stimulus points derived from INDSCAL. The validity of these estimates is assessed through Monte Carlo analysis. Asymptotic estimates of confidence regions based on a MULTISCALE solution are also evaluated. Our findings suggest that the bootstrap and jackknife techniques may be used to provide statements regarding the accuracy of the relative locations of points in space. Our findings also suggest that MULTISCALE asymptotic estimates of confidence regions based on small samples provide an optimistic view of the actual statistical reliability of the solution. The authors wish to thank Geert DeSoete, Richard A. Harshman, William Heiser, Jon Kettenring, Joseph B. Kruskal, Jacqueline Meulman, James O. Ramsay, John W. Tukey, Paul A. Tukey, and Mike Wish. Sharon L. Weinberg is a consultant at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey 07974.     

Attention in visual search: Multiple search classes

Data from visual-search tasks are typically interpreted to mean that searching for targets defined by feature differences does not require attention and thus can be performed in parallel, whereas searching for other targets requires serial allocation of attention. The question addressed here was whether a parallel-serial dichotomy would be obtained if data were collected using a variety of targets representing each of several kinds of defining features. Data analyses included several computations in addition to search rate: (1) target-absent to target-present slope ratios; (2) two separate data transformations to control for errors; (3) minimum reaction time; and (4) slopes of standard deviation as a function of set size. Some targets showed strongly parallel or strongly serial search, but there was evidence for several intermediate search classes. Sometimes, for a given target-distractor pair, the results depended strongly on which character was the target and which was the distractor. Implications from theories of visual search are discussed.     

Wishful thinking impairs belief-desire reasoning: a case of decoupling failure in adults?

Subjects were presented with a scenario that described how a certain type of opinion poll can be manipulated by respondents to put one particular political party (the threatened party) at a disadvantage. In a first experiment, people supporting this party but pretending to oppose it were found to be as likely to say that they would manipulate the poll as people who actually opposed it. In a second experiment, the threat embodied in the scenario was made more direct. It was also more salient because the study was carried out at a time of heightened political awareness when supporters of the threatened party were genuinely concerned about its future. People supporting the threatened party but pretending to oppose it were now about half as likely to say that they would manipulate the poll as those who actually opposed it. Two explanations for this breakdown in the belief-desire reasoning subserving pretense are considered.     

Dimensions of the contraceptive attributes questionnaire

This article describes the development and evaluation of the Contraceptive Attributes Questionnaire (CAQ), a research instrument designed to assess the subjective importance of specific contraceptive attributes (Importance) and the perceived characteristics of specific contraceptives (Agreement). Three birth control methods are examined–the sponge, pill, and diaphragm. Factor analyses indicate that the four scales are multidimensional, and as subscales the factors have reasonable internal consistency reliability. The validity of the CAQ was established through comparisons of ratings of women who use different contraceptive methods. The women differed by user status on the ratings of the importance factors and on the ratings of the agreement factors for all three methods rated.     

Dual coding under conditions of second stimulus modality uncertainty in successive matching tasks

Subjects matched successively presented stimuli within and across modalities. In conditions in which they were informed of the modalities of the two stimuli, no differences in matching performance were obtained between the four types of match (visual-visual, auditory-auditory, visual-auditory, and auditory-visual). Thus, there appeared to be no difference between the modalities in ability to perceive or retain the particular stimuli used. In conditions in which subjects were informed of the modality of the first stimulus but only of the modality in which the second stimulus would appear on 80% of trials, there was again no significant difference between auditory-auditory and visual-visual matching. However, auditory-visual matching was much faster than visual-auditory matching when the second stimulus appeared in the unexpected modality. The results suggest that subjects prepare for both possible types of match when uncertain of the second stimulus modality and that the cross-modal asymmetry reflects the additional attentional load that this incurs.     

Internal representation of visual texture as the basis for the judgment of similarity

The relationship between Fourier spectra of visual textures (represented both by the actual frequency components and by the response of four hypothetical channels selectively sensitive to spatial frequency) and the perceptual appearance of the textures was investigated. Thirty textures were synthesized by combining seven spatial frequencies whose amplitudes were randomly chosen and then scaled to give an overall contrast of .9. Similarity judgments were collected using both the method of triadic comparison (two subjects, 4,060 trials each) and the method of paired comparison (six subjects, 435 trials each). The similarity judgments were subjected to MDSCAL and INDSCAL dimensions were found to be optimally oriented in terms of spatial frequency information without rotation. The seven spatial frequency components accounted for 90.6% of the variance in the 3-D INDSCAL space, while the four channels accounted for 91.8% of the variance in the first two dimensions. The data further suggest that the four channels may interact in an opponent process manner. The results support the idea that the visual internal representation of stimuli is based on spatial frequency analysis rather than feature extraction.