Beiträge zur Psychologie der Gestalt

Zusammenfassung Im Teil I bestätigten wir das Resultat von Fuchs über den Einfluß einer Form auf die Farbe ihrer Teile und erbrachten einiges Material zur quantitativen Bestimmung dieses Einflusses. Liegen von 12 auf der Peripherie eines Kreises angeordneten gelben Scheibchen einige hinter einem blauen Episcotister, so werden diese von den außerhalb liegenden gelb gefärbt. Der Grad dieser Färbung hängt ab 1. von dem Verhältnis der Zahl der außen liegenden Scheibchen zu der Zahl der im Episcotisterfeld befindlichen, 2. von figuralen Faktoren: je stärker der figurale Zusammenhang zwischen den Scheibchen drinnen und draußen, um so stärker die färbende Wirkung.Im II. Teil versuchten wir den Faktoren nachzugehen, von denen die Durchsichtigkeit eines Episcotisters konstanter Öffnung abhängt. Als solche Faktoren ergaben sich: Helligkeit des Hintergrundes, Helligkeit des Episcotisters (beide wirken im entgegengesetzten Sinn), Helligkeitsdifferenz zwischen Episcotister und Hintergrund und Ausgeprägtheit der auf dem Hintergrund erscheinenden Figur. Es ergaben sich Bedingungen, unter denen der Episcotister unsichtbar wurde, und es ließ sich diese Unsichtbarkeit als höchster Grad von Durchsichtigkeit auffassen. Die Durchsichtigkeit ging ferner Hand in Hand mit anderen Strukturbeschaffenheiten des Episcotisters, auch die phänomenale Helligkeit des Episcotisters war von dem Grad seiner Durchsichtigkeit nicht unabhängig.     

Framing Effects in International Relations

Framing is the least well-developed central concept of prospect theory. Framing is both fundamental to prospect theory and remarkably underdeveloped in the prospect theory literature. This paper focuses on the many subtypes and variations of framing: thematic vs. evaluative; successful vs. failed; productive vs. counterproductive; purposeful, structural and interactive framing; counterframing; loss frames vs. gain frames; revolving framing vs. sequential framing; framing by a third party; and framing vs. priming. The bulk of the paper provides an analysis of framing and framing effects in foreign policy settings with an emphasis on U.S. foreign policy. We highlight framing effects during the Cold War, the Persian Gulf War, the current ``war on terrorism', and other IR/foreign policy settings. Our examination highlights the extent to which presidents and other significant world leaders use framing to shape policy debates and national security choices.     

Stress changes the representational landscape: evidence from word segmentation

Over the past couple of decades, research has established that infants are sensitive to the predominant stress pattern of their native language. However, the degree to which the stress pattern shapes infants' language development has yet to be fully determined. Whether stress is merely a cue to help organize the patterns of speech or whether it is an important part of the representation of speech sound sequences has still to be explored. Building on research in the areas of infant speech perception and segmentation, we asked how several months of exposure to the target language shapes infants' speech processing biases with respect to lexical stress. We hypothesize that infants represent stressed and unstressed syllables differently, and employed analyses of child-directed speech to show how this change to the representational landscape results in better distribution-based word segmentation as well as an advantage for stress-initial syllable sequences. A series of experiments then tested 9- and 7-month-old infants on their ability to use lexical stress without any other cues present to parse sequences from an artificial language. We found that infants adopted a stress-initial syllable strategy and that they appear to encode stress information as part of their proto-lexical representations. Together, the results of these studies suggest that stress information in the ambient language not only shapes how statistics are calculated over the speech input, but that it is also encoded in the representations of parsed speech sequences.     

Frequent frames as a cue for grammatical categories in child directed speech

This paper introduces the notion of frequent frames, distributional patterns based on co-occurrence patterns of words in sentences, then investigates the usefulness of this information in grammatical categorization. A frame is defined as two jointly occurring words with one word intervening. Qualitative and quantitative results from distributional analyses of six different corpora of child directed speech are presented in two experiments. In the analyses, words that were surrounded by the same frequent frame were categorized together. The results show that frequent frames yield very accurate categories. Furthermore, evidence from behavioral studies suggests that infants and adults are sensitive to frame-like units, and that adults use them to categorize words. This evidence, along with the success of frames in categorizing words, provides support for frames as a basis for the acquisition of grammatical categories.     

Gender role orientation and conflict as predictors of family roles for men

This study examined men's gender role factors (i.e., gender role orientation and gender role conflict) as they contribute to the formation of either traditional, participant, or rolesharing family roles in men. Responses from 71 married, mostly Caucasian, dual-career family men on measures of gender role orientation, gender role conflict, and measures of participation in child care and management of the household were analyzed. Results indicated that (a) rolesharing husbands were more likely to view their wives' interests as equal to their own as compared to participant and traditional husbands; (b) rolesharing husbands had less traditional attitudes about husbands'/fathers' authority than traditional husbands; and (c) traditional husbands reported greater pressure to be successful, powerful, and competitive compared to rolesharing and participant husbands.