Individuating games

Synthese - Games, which philosophers commonly invoke as models for diverse phenomena, are plausibly understood in terms of rules and goals, but this gives rise to two puzzles. The first concerns...     

Organizational Citizenship Behavior,Job Attitudes,and the Psychological Contract

Previous research has shown a positive relationship between job satisfaction and various dimensions of organizational citizenship behavior. These studies, however, have focused almost exclusively on civilian sector organizations. While insight gained from these studies is instructive, it remains to be seen if these relationships also exist in the context of military organizations. The relationships between job satisfaction as well as cynicism (as moderated by psychological contracts) with organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) are explored. Data were collected from military officers (n = 151) attending a 10-month professional military education school. As an improvement over other similar studies, control measures were incorporated to address potential confounds associated with self-reported attitudes. Results showed job satisfaction was a strong predictor of OCB, cynicism was negatively related to the altruism dimension of OCB, and the relationship between cynicism and the altruism dimension of organizational citizenship behavior was moderated such that the relationship was stronger when there were high levels of perceived psychological contract support than when there were low levels of support.     

Approaches to Research on Intersectionality: Perspectives on Gender, LGBT, and Racial/Ethnic Identities

Intersectionality theories, or the recognition of multiple interlocking identities, defined by relative sociocultural power and privilege, constitute a vital step forward in research across multiple domains of inquiry. This special issue, which extends Shields (2008) contribution in Sex Roles, provides an opportunity to reflect on past, present, and future promise in intersectionality scholarship. To provide a common ground for this work, each paper in this special issue addresses the intersections of gender; lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT); and racial/ethnic identities and related experiences. In this introduction, we (1) provide an overview of definitions and conceptualizations of intersectionality, (2) discuss the various approaches utilized in this issue to conceptualize and assess gender, LGBT, and racial/ethnic identities, (3) describe how these conceptualizations and assessments were translated into analyses of intersectionality, and (4) close with a discussion of some additional approaches and considerations intended to advance intersectionality research.     

Learning new faces in an interactive activation and competition model

Abstract

Certain contemporary accounts of object and face recognition use connectionist networks with local representations. This paper describes and extends one such account: an interactive activation and competition (IAC) model of face recognition. In contrast to many networks with distributed representations, IAC models do not incorporate a learning mechanism. This limits their use in psychological modelling. This paper describes how a learning mechanism can be built into an IAC model. The mechanism automatically learns new representations and appears to have many of the desirable properties traditionally associated with distributed networks. Some simulations that produce results consistent with our knowledge of human face learning are reported. Finally, the relation between this work and current theories of visual object recognition is discussed.     

Dissociating object-based and space-based affordances

In what we term the orientation effect, faster spatial responses are made to the corresponding task irrelevant orientation of an object. We ask how this effect relates to object affordances, how attention may be involved, and how the effect relates to the better understood Simon effect. Two separate stimulus-response compatibility effects (an orientation effect and a Simon effect) were observed when spatial responses were made to photographs of objects whose orientation and location had been simultaneously manipulated. When attentional demands were high these separate effects were found using hand responses and foot responses, suggesting an abstract rather than specific coding of object affordances. However, when attentional demands were low only the Simon effect was observed, suggesting that, in order to obtain the orientation effect, objects must be represented at the level of an object.     

Internalists Relax: We Can’t All Be Amoralists!

Philosophia - In “Internalists Beware – We Might All Be Amoralists!” Gunnar Björnsson and Ragnar Francén Olinder [henceforth B&O] offer an original objection to...     

The impact of stimulus-specific practice and task instructions on response congruency effects between tasks

In task switching experiments participants have to respond to the same set of stimuli while task instructions vary (e.g., digit stimuli are assigned to left- or right-sided key presses by means of magnitude vs. parity classification). Response congruency effects denote worse performance for a stimulus, which is associated with different responses in the two tasks as compared to a stimulus, which is associated with the same response. Previous research suggests that such effects reflect direct links between stimuli and responses acquired in the course of experimental practice. In the current study we investigated the impact of stimulus-specific practice and task instruction by reversing the S–R mapping of one task (Experiment 1) or replacing one task with a new one (Experiment 2) in the second half of an experimental session. Consistent with the direct link account, S–R links practiced during the first half of the experiment largely determined congruency effects despite altered task instructions. Furthermore, the results suggest that previously practiced S–R links (a) can be relatively quickly overwritten by practicing a novel S–R mapping, and (b) are subject to passive decay when no longer in use.     

Immediate source-monitoring, self-focused attention and the positive symptoms of schizophrenia

Previous research suggests that tendencies to misattribute one's own thoughts to an external source, as assessed by an immediate source-monitoring test, are associated with auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs). However, recent research suggests that such tendencies are associated instead with symptoms of thought interference. The main aim of the present study was to examine whether such tendencies are differentially associated with different types of thought interference, with AVHs, or with both. It has also been suggested that external misattributions are especially likely to occur with emotionally salient material and if the individual's focus is on the self. These suggestions were also tested. The positive psychotic symptoms of 57 individuals with a diagnosis of schizophrenia were assessed and they then completed the Self-Focus Sentence Completion blank. Immediately after completing each sentence they were asked to indicate to what extent the sentence was their own. The number of sentences that were not rated as completely their own served as their externalisation score. Externalisation scores correlated significantly with the severity of three symptoms: voices commenting, delusions of being controlled, and thought insertion. In a logistic regression analysis, all three of these symptoms were significantly and independently related to externalisation. Externalisation was not associated with either a negative or a neutral self-focus. Thus tendencies to misattribute one's own thoughts to an external source are associated with AVHs and some, but not all, symptoms of thought interference. The importance for externalisation of self-focused attention and of the emotional salience of the elicited thoughts was not supported.     

The locus of semantic priming effects in person recognition

Semantic priming in person recognition has been studied extensively. In a typical experiment, participants are asked to make a familiarity decision to target items that have been immediately preceded by related or unrelated primes. Facilitation is usually observed from related primes, and this priming is equivalent across stimulus domains (i.e., faces and names prime one another equally). Structural models of face recognition (e.g., IAC: Burton, Bruce, & Johnston, 1990) accommodate these effects by proposing a level of person identity nodes (PINs) at which recognition routes converge, and which allow access to a common pool of semantics. We present three experiments that examine semantic priming for different decisions. Priming for a semantic decision (e.g., British/American?) shows exactly the same pattern that is normally observed for a familiarity decision. The pattern is equivalent for name and face recognition. However, no semantic priming is observed when participants are asked to make a sex decision. These results constrain future models of face processing and are discussed with reference to current theories of semantic priming.     

Adjustments to recent and frequent conflict reflect two distinguishable mechanisms

In conflict paradigms such as the Eriksen flanker task, interference has been found to be reduced under conditions of recent and/or frequent cognitive conflict. Using a modified flanker task, we investigated the interplay of conflict recency and conflict frequency by comparing the interference reductions following conflict trials under conditions in which conflict was either frequent or infrequent overall, while controlling for stimulus and response feature repetitions to rule out nonattentional accounts. The reduction of flanker interference after a conflict trial was attenuated when overall conflict was frequent. This result is consistent with models assuming that processing adjustments occur gradually in response to conflict strength, such as the connectionist model of Botvinick, Braver, Barch, Carter, and Cohen (2001), in which both recency and frequency modulations are brought about by the same mechanism. By decomposing response times into initiation times and movement times, we revealed that frequent conflict delayed response initiation but sped up movement. Moreover, whereas frequent conflict reduced interference in both components, interference reduction after individual conflict trials was confined to movement times. Taken together, these results suggest that different mechanisms underlie the two kinds of modulation.