Comparing the Defendant to Images of the Culprit: Interpreting Results of Mock Witness Filler‐Control Tests

Criminals are occasionally recorded on video committing a crime. At trial, jurors may be shown images of the culprit to determine if they match the defendant. However, several sources of bias may influence juror matching decisions. Also, even with clear video, the accuracy of defendant‐culprit matching can be relatively poor. To reduce these problems, we propose that defendant‐culprit matching be viewed as a type of forensic test. If conducted as a forensic test, defendant‐culprit matching can be improved by adding fillers and testing mock witnesses rather than the actual jurors. A Bayesian analysis of data from two experiments shows that a filler‐control test can be highly diagnostic, even when the decisions of mock witnesses are far from unanimous. However, when viewing conditions are poor, a filler‐control test may not provide much new information about whether the defendant matches the culprit. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Responding to social and symbolic extrafoveal cues: cue shape trumps biological relevance

Psychological Research - Social cues presented at visual fixation have been shown to strongly influence an observer’s attention and response selection. Here we ask whether the same holds for...     

Forgiveness in Younger,Middle-Aged and Older Adults: Age and Gender Matters

The present study investigated age and gender differences in forgiveness of real-life transgressions. Emerging and young, middle-aged, and older adults recalled the most recent and serious interpersonal transgression and then completed the Transgression-Related Interpersonal Motivations Inventory (TRIM-18), which measured their avoidance, revenge, and benevolence motivation toward an offender and indicated to what extent they are generally concerned with the subject of forgiveness. The results revealed a trend among middle-aged adults to express more avoidance than younger adults. Moreover, young men had a greater motivation to seek revenge than middle-aged and older men. No such age differences were apparent for women. Additionally, forgiveness was a more manifest subject in everyday life for middle-aged adults and women. These findings emphasize the importance of age and gender when investigating forgiveness.     

Cognitive culture: theoretical and empirical insights into social learning strategies

Research into social learning (learning from others) has expanded significantly in recent years, not least because of productive interactions between theoretical and empirical approaches. This has been coupled with a new emphasis on learning strategies, which places social learning within a cognitive decision-making framework. Understanding when, how and why individuals learn from others is a significant challenge, but one that is critical to numerous fields in multiple academic disciplines, including the study of social cognition.     

The association between parent-child conflict and adolescent conduct problems over time: results from a longitudinal adoption study

A handful of prior adoption studies have confirmed that the cross-sectional relationship between child conduct problems and parent-child conflict at least partially originates in the shared environment. However, as the direction of causation between parenting and delinquency remains unclear, this relationship could be better explained by the adolescent's propensity to elicit conflictive parenting, a phenomenon referred to as an evocative gene-environment correlation. In the current study, the authors thus examined the prospective relationship between conduct problems and parent-child conflict in a sample of adoptive families. Participants included 672 adolescents in 405 adoptive families assessed at 2 time points roughly 4 years apart. Results indicated that parent-child conflict predicts the development of conduct problems, whereas conduct problems do not predict increases in parent-child conflict. Such findings suggest that evocative gene-environment correlations are highly unlikely to be an explanation of prior shared environmental effects during adolescence. Moreover, because the adolescents in this study do not share genes with their adoptive parents, the association between conduct problems and parent-child conflict is indicative of shared environmental mediation in particular. Implications of the findings are discussed.     

The mental representation of causal conditional reasoning: mental models or causal models

In this paper, two experiments are reported investigating the nature of the cognitive representations underlying causal conditional reasoning performance. The predictions of causal and logical interpretations of the conditional diverge sharply when inferences involving pairs of conditionals—such as if P₁then Q and if P₂then Q—are considered. From a causal perspective, the causal direction of these conditionals is critical: are the P_icauses of Q; or symptoms caused byQ. The rich variety of inference patterns can naturally be modelled by Bayesian networks. A pair of causal conditionals where Q is an effect corresponds to a “collider” structure where the two causes (P_i) converge on a common effect. In contrast, a pair of causal conditionals where Q is a cause corresponds to a network where two effects (P_i) diverge from a common cause. Very different predictions are made by fully explicit or initial mental models interpretations. These predictions were tested in two experiments, each of which yielded data most consistent with causal model theory, rather than with mental models.     

Learning new faces in typically developing children and children on the autistic spectrum

As faces become familiar, recognition becomes easier but the style of processing also changes. Here, twenty-one typically developing (TD) children and twenty-one children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) were familiarised with 6 identities over 3 days. Next, they completed a 4-alternative forced-choice matching test in which targets were the 6 familiarised faces and 6 unfamiliar faces. The TD group showed a significant advantage for familiarised faces when matching whole faces and both internal and external facial regions. The ASD group showed similar familiarisation effects for whole and external faces, but not for internal regions. The ASD group was also impaired at matching eyes and mouths of familiarised faces. Results suggest the process of acquiring familiarity with faces differs from ASD and TD children.     

Sexual Priming, Gender Stereotyping, and Likelihood to Sexually Harass: Examining the Cognitive Effects of Playing a Sexually-Explicit Video Game

The present study examines the short-term cognitive effects of playing a sexually explicit video game with female “objectification” content on male players. Seventy-four male students from a university in California, U.S. participated in a laboratory experiment. They were randomly assigned to play either a sexually-explicit game or one of two control games. Participants’ cognitive accessibility to sexual and sexually objectifying thoughts was measured in a lexical decision task. A likelihood-to-sexually-harass scale was also administered. Results show that playing a video game with the theme of female “objectification” may prime thoughts related to sex, encourage men to view women as sex objects, and lead to self-reported tendencies to behave inappropriately towards women in social situations.     

Evidence from the attentional blink for different sources of word repetition effects

T2 in an attentional blink paradigm served as a high- or low-frequency prime word for a subsequent repeated target. Consistent with research in visual word identification, only reported primes facilitated the identification of a target repeated approximately 8 s after RSVP. Priming was greater for low- than high-frequency words. Analogous with masked priming, a blinked T2 facilitated report of a repeated target occurring 318 ms after T2 in RSVP. The blinked repetition priming effect was additive with target frequency. These results indicate that: (1) the outcomes of processing prime words are a key factor in repetition priming effects, with blinked and reported T2s behaving like masked and unmasked primes, respectively, (2) there may be different sources of repetition effects, (3) there is a consistent cross-paradigm pattern of repetition effects that occurs as a function of prime–target interval and the ability to identify the word on its first and second presentation.