The role of automatic obesity stereotypes in real hiring discrimination

This study examined whether automatic stereotypes captured by the implicit association test (IAT) can predict real hiring discrimination against the obese. In an unobtrusive field experiment, job applications were sent to a large number of real job vacancies. The applications were matched on credentials but differed with respect to the applicant's weight. Discriminatory behavior was quantified by the extent to which the hiring managers invited normal-weight versus obese applicants to a job interview. Several months after the behavioral data were obtained, the hiring managers completed an obesity IAT and explicit hiring preference measures. Only the IAT scores reliably predicted interview decisions. More specifically, hiring managers holding more negative automatic stereotypes about the obese were less likely to invite an obese applicant for an interview. The present research is the first to show that automatic bias predicts labor market discrimination against obese individuals. Practical implications are discussed.     

Skulking around the dinosaur: Eliciting cues to children's deception via strategic disclosure of evidence

Research has shown that cues to deception are more salient as an effect of strategic use of evidence (SUE) during interviews. This study examined the feasibility of the SUE‐technique for eliciting cues to children's deception. Experiment 1 investigated verbal cues to deception as a function of early vs. late disclosure of evidence. Eighty‐four children (12–14 years) either guilty or innocent of a mock crime were interviewed. As predicted, deceptive statements were significantly more inconsistent with the evidence than truthful statements, and this was more pronounced as a function of late compared to early disclosure of evidence. In Experiment 2, adult observers (N = 168) made veracity assessments of the videotaped statements. Observers in the late disclosure condition achieved an accuracy rate higher than chance (63.1%), whereas accuracy rates in the early disclosure condition were at chance level (56%). Accuracy rates were significantly higher for truthful (70.2%), than deceptive statements (48.8%). Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

In‐court versus out‐of‐court testimonies: Children's experiences and adults' assessments

The study examined the effects of different presentation modes on child witnesses' experiences and adults' perception and assessments of the same witnesses. Child witnesses (N = 108) were interviewed about an event that they had either experienced or imagined. Adult mock jurors (N = 240) watched the children's testimonies live, via two‐way closed‐circuit television (CCTV), or via a pre‐recorded video. The results showed that the live observers perceived the children in more positive terms than did the two‐way CCTV observers, who in turn perceived the children in more positive terms than did the video observers. Briefly, it seems as the more proximal the presentation mode, the more positive the observers' perception. Somewhat in contrast to these results, a significantly smaller proportion of the children who testified on video stated that they were nervous, compared to the children who testified live or via two‐way CCTV. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Betting Against Compatibilism

Some argue that libertarianism represents the riskier incompatibilist view when it comes to the free will problem. An ethically cautious incompatibilist should bet that we are not free in the sense required for moral responsibility, these theorists claim, as doing so means that we no longer run the risk of holding the morally innocent responsible. In this paper, I show that the same reasoning also advises us to bet against compatibilism. Supposing that we are unsure about whether or not the causal order of the world is compatible with the kind of freedom that is required for moral responsibility, an ethically cautious approach would once again bet that hard incompatibilism is true.     

An adaptive algorithm for fixation,saccade, and glissade detection in eyetracking data

Event detection is used to classify recorded gaze points into periods of fixation, saccade, smooth pursuit, blink, and noise. Although there is an overall consensus that current algorithms for event detection have serious flaws and that a de facto standard for event detection does not exist, surprisingly little work has been done to remedy this problem. We suggest a new velocity-based algorithm that takes several of the previously known limitations into account. Most important, the new algorithm identifies so-called glissades, a wobbling movement at the end of many saccades, as a separate class of eye movements. Part of the solution involves designing an adaptive velocity threshold that makes the event detection less sensitive to variations in noise level and the algorithm settings-free for the user. We demonstrate the performance of the new algorithm on eye movements recorded during reading and scene perception and compare it with two of the most commonly used algorithms today. Results show that, unlike the currently used algorithms, fixations, saccades, and glissades are robustly identified by the new algorithm. Using this algorithm, we found that glissades occur in about half of the saccades, during both reading and scene perception, and that they have an average duration close to 24 msec. Due to the high prevalence and long durations of glissades, we argue that researchers must actively choose whether to assign the glissades to saccades or fixations; the choice affects dependent variables such as fixation and saccade duration significantly. Current algorithms do not offer this choice, and their assignments of each glissade are largely arbitrary.     

The Swedish National Adult Reading Test (NART-SWE): a test of premorbid IQ

The purpose of this study was to construct a Swedish version of the National Adult Reading Test (NART-SWE), a test for assessment of premorbid IQ, and to investigate its validity and reliability on healthy controls and patients with mild Alzheimer's disease. As Swedish pronunciation rules are fixed, NART-SWE was constructed using loan words. NART-SWE has satisfactory psychometric properties: Inter-rater and retest reliability as well as internal consistency are very high. The NART-SWE demonstrates face validity. In addition, high correlation with IQ was obtained. A significant model emerged when using NART-SWE to predict IQ. Furthermore, no significant differences were observed when comparing performance for healthy controls' with that of patients with Alzheimer's disease on NART-SWE. It does appear that reading of irregular words is intact in mild Alzheimer's disease.     

Is the mystery an illusion? Papineau on the problem of consciousness

A number of philosophers have recently argued that (i) consciousness properties are identical with some set of physical or functional properties and that (ii) we can explain away the frequently felt puzzlement about this claim as a delusion or confusion generated by our different ways of apprehending or thinking about consciousness. This paper examines David Papineau’s influential version of this view. According to Papineau, the difference between our “phenomenal” and “material” concepts of consciousness produces an instinctive but erroneous intuition that these concepts can’t co-refer. I claim that this account fails. To begin with, it is arguable that we are mystified about physicalism even when the account predicts that we shouldn’t be. Further, and worse, the account predicts that an “intuition of distinctness” will arise in cases where it clearly does not. In conclusion, I make some remarks on the prospects for, constraints on, and (physicalist) alternatives to, a successful defence of the claim (ii).     

Domain-dependent activation during spatial and nonspatial auditory working memory

Visual system has been proposed to be divided into two, the ventral and dorsal, processing streams. The ventral pathway is thought to be involved in object identification whereas the dorsal pathway processes information regarding the spatial locations of objects and the spatial relationships among objects. Several studies on working memory (WM) processing have further suggested that there is a dissociable domain-dependent functional organization within the prefrontal cortex for processing of spatial and nonspatial visual information. Also the auditory system is proposed to be organized into two domain-specific processing streams, similar to that seen in the visual system. Recent studies on auditory WM have further suggested that maintenance of nonspatial and spatial auditory information activates a distributed neural network including temporal, parietal, and frontal regions but the magnitude of activation within these activated areas shows a different functional topography depending on the type of information being maintained. The dorsal prefrontal cortex, specifically an area of the superior frontal sulcus (SFS), has been shown to exhibit greater activity for spatial than for nonspatial auditory tasks. Conversely, ventral frontal regions have been shown to be more recruited by nonspatial than by spatial auditory tasks. It has also been shown that the magnitude of this dissociation is dependent on the cognitive operations required during WM processing. Moreover, there is evidence that within the nonspatial domain in the ventral prefrontal cortex, there is an across-modality dissociation during maintenance of visual and auditory information. Taken together, human neuroimaging results on both visual and auditory sensory systems support the idea that the prefrontal cortex is organized according to the type of information being maintained in WM.     

Newborns' face recognition is based on spatial frequencies below 0.5 cycles per degree

A critical question in Cognitive Science concerns how knowledge of specific domains emerges during development. Here we examined how limitations of the visual system during the first days of life may shape subsequent development of face processing abilities. By manipulating the bands of spatial frequencies of face images, we investigated what is the nature of the visual information that newborn infants rely on to perform face recognition. Newborns were able to extract from a face the visual information lying from 0 to 1 cpd (Experiment 1), but only a narrower 0-0.5 cpd spatial frequency range was successful to accomplish face recognition (Experiment 2). These results provide the first empirical support of a low spatial frequency advantage in individual face recognition at birth and suggest that early in life low-level, non-specific perceptual constraints affect the development of the face processing system.     

Selecting from dynamic environments: attention distinguishes between blinking and moving

Pinto, Olivers, and Theeuwes (2006) showed that a static target can be efficiently found among different types of dynamically changing distractors. They hypothesized that attention employs a broad division between static and dynamic information, a hypothesis that conforms with earlier research. In the present study, we investigated whether attention can only make use of this crude division or can exploit more subtle discriminations within the dynamic domain. In Experiment 1, participants were able to efficiently find a blinking target among moving distractors and moving targets among blinking distractors, although all items changed at the same rate and produced the same change in local luminance. In Experiment 2, search for a dynamic target among dynamic distractors was aided when we gave the distractors additional dynamic cues. Experiment 3 showed that making the displays equiluminant affected search efficiency for a static target among moving distractors, but not among blinking distractors. The findings refute the broad division hypothesis and suggest that object continuity plays an important role in selection.