Skill theory v2.0: dispositions,emulation, and spatial perception

An attempt is made to defend a general approach to the spatial content of perception, an approach according to which perception is imbued with spatial content in virtue of certain kinds of connections between perceiving organism’s sensory input and its behavioral output. The most important aspect of the defense involves clearly distinguishing two kinds of perceptuo-behavioral skills—the formation of dispositions, and a capacity for emulation. The former, the formation of dispositions, is argued to by the central pivot of spatial content. I provide a neural information processing interpretation of what these dispositions amount to, and describe how dispositions, so understood, are an obvious implementation of Gareth Evans’ proposal on the topic. Furthermore, I describe what sorts of contribution are made by emulation mechanisms, and I also describe exactly how the emulation framework differs from similar but distinct notions with which it is often unhelpfully confused, such as sensorimotor contingencies and forward models.     

Graded motor responses in the time course of categorizing atypical exemplars

The time course of categorization was investigated in four experiments, which revealed graded competitive effects in a categorization task. Participants clicked one of two categories (e.g., mammal or fish) in response to atypical or typical exemplars (e.g., whale or cat) in the form of words (Experiments 1 and 2) or pictures (Experiments 3 and 4). Streaming x, y coordinates of mouse movement trajectories were recorded. Normalized mean trajectories revealed a graded competitive process: Atypical exemplars produced trajectories with greater curvature toward the competing category than did typical exemplars. The experiments contribute to recent examination of the time course of categorization and carry implications for theories of representation in cognitive science.     

Evaluating Gender Biases on Actual Job Performance of Real People: A Meta‐Analysis1

This study examined gender bias on job performance in work settings where confounding variables (e. g., organizational level, experience, education) were cautiously taken into consideration to ensure fair comparisons. Although previous meta‐analyses examined gender biases on evaluations, findings in tightly controlled laboratory environments may differ from those in highly complicated field studies. We found little evidence of overall gender bias in performance appraisals in nonconfounded field studies. However, there were significant pro‐male biases when only men served as raters. Measure‐specific gender stereotypicality, instead of genera! stereotypicality about the job, produced gender bias in performance appraisal. Masculine measures produced pro‐male bias, and feminine measures produced pro‐female bias.     

Children with ADHD and depression: a multisource, multimethod assessment of clinical, social, and academic functioning

Although ADHD and depression are common comorbidities in youth, few studies have examined this particular clinical presentation. To address method bias limitations of previous research, this study uses multiple informants to compare the academic, social, and clinical functioning of children with ADHD, children with ADHD and depression, and children without ADHD, all derived from a large community sample. High levels of comorbid depression are found in children with ADHD. Children withADHDand depression are more depressed and anxious than their non-depressed ADHDcounterparts but do not have more extreme levels of ADHD or aggression. The association between depression and ADHD does not appear to be epiphenomenal, that is, related to a shared association with anxiety or externalizing symptoms. Finally, children with ADHD and depression display more impairment in social and academic functioning compared to controls. Although social impairment is greater in children with ADHD and depression than in children with only ADHD, conduct problems are not.     

The Parents Matter! Program Interventions: Content and the Facilitation Process

The Parents Matter! Program (PMP) has developed three interventions for parents of 4th and 5th grade African-American children (9–12 years old). The overarching goal of all three interventions is to provide parents with knowledge, skills, and support for enhancing their efforts to raise healthy children. The interventions are: (1) Enhanced Communication and Parenting (five 2 -hour sessions), (2) Brief Communication and Parenting (single 2 -hour session), and (3) General Health (single 2 -hour session). This article discusses the development of these interventions, presents an overview of the content of each intervention, and discusses issues related to the facilitation/presentation of these interventions.     

Emotion,the bodily,and the cognitive

In both psychology and philosophy, cognitive theories of emotion have met with increasing opposition in recent years. However, this apparent controversy is not so much a gridlock between antithetical stances as a critical debate in which each side is being forced to qualify its position in order to accommodate the other side of the story. Here, I attempt to sort out some of the disagreements between cognitivism and its rivals, adjudicating some disputes while showing that others are merely superficial. Looking at evidence from neuroscience and social psychology, as well as thought experiments and theoretical arguments, I conclude that it is necessary to acknowledge both that emotions have intentional content and that they involve somatic agitation. I also point out some of the more promising directions for future research in this area.     

Listeners invest in an assumed other's perspective despite cognitive cost

We explored perspective-taking behavior in a visuospatial mental rotation task that requires listeners to adopt an egocentric or “other-centric” frame of reference. In the current task, objects could be interpreted relative to the point-of-view of the listener (egocentric) or of a simulated partner (other-centric). Across three studies, we evaluated participants’ willingness to consider and act on partner-specific information, showing that a partner’s perceived ability to contribute to collaborative mutual understanding modulated participants’ perspective-taking behavior, either by increasing other-centric (Study 2) or egocentric (Study 3) responding. Moreover, we show that a large proportion of participants resolved referential ambiguity in terms of their partner’s perspective, even when it was more cognitively difficult to do so (as tracked by online movement measures), and when the presence of a social partner had to be assumed (Studies 1 and 2). In addition, participants continued to consider their partner’s perspective during trials where visual perspectives were shared. Our results show that participants will thoroughly invest in either an other-centric or egocentric mode of responding, and that perspective-taking strategies are not always dictated by minimizing processing demands, but by more potent (albeit subtle) factors in the social context.     

Parallel discrimination of subjective contours defined by offset gratings

Recent physiological studies (von der Heydt & Peterhans, 1989) suggest that the orientation of subjective contours is encoded very early in the visual system (V2 in monkey). This result is seemingly at odds with existing psychophysical data which suggest that the detection of subjective contours involves selective attention. It is argued that certain subjective contours are registered in a reflexive (bottom-up) manner by the visual system but that selective attention may be needed to gain access to this representation. To assess this suggestion, a visual-search task was used in which subjects were to detect the presence of a horizontal (vertical) subjective contour (defined by offset gratings) in a variable number of vertical (horizontal) subjective contours (also defined by offset gratings). When there were no competing organizations within the display, detection was indeed independent of the number of nontarget distractors, that is, selective attention was unnecessary. In a second experiment, we found that a curved form (a crescent defined by subjective contours) was easier to detect in a background of vertical bars (also defined by subjective contours) than vice versa, namely, a search asymmetry paralleling those found by Treisman and Gormican (1988). A final experiment showed that when the horizontal and vertical bars of the first experiment formed textured regions, they could be discriminated at very brief display durations (30–120 msec), However, when the line terminations aligned along the subjective contour were tapered rather than abrupt, discrimination dropped off with the degree of tapering. The latter result is consistent with the assumption that the registration of subjective contours in V2 involves the integration of responses from aligned, end-stopped cells found in VI (von der Heydt & Peterhans, 1989).