Why Is There Still No Study of Cultural Equivalence in Standardized Cognitive Ability Tests?

To investigate how the culturalist perspective on investigating racial group differences in standardized cognitive ability tests has advanced, a content analysis of 28 studies citing J. E. Helms (1992) identified 7 general themes. Overall, researchers cited J. E. Helms (1992) as support for their own hypotheses but did not directly test the culturalist perspective. Para investigar cómo ha avanzado la perspectiva culturalista sobre la investigación de las diferencias entre grupos raciales en los tests estandarizados de abilidades cognitivas, un análisis de contenido de 28 estudios que citan a J. E. Helms (1992) identificó 7 temas generales. En conjunto, los investigadores citaron a J. E. Helms (1992) para apoyar sus propias hipótesis, pero no comprobaron la perspectiva culturalista directamente.     

Action comprehension in non-human primates: motor simulation or inferential reasoning?

Some argue that action comprehension is intimately connected with the observer's own motor capacities, whereas others argue that action comprehension depends on non-motor inferential mechanisms. We address this debate by reviewing comparative studies that license four conclusions: monkeys and apes extract the meaning of an action (i) by going beyond the surface properties of actions, attributing goals and intentions to the agent; (ii) by using environmental information to infer when actions are rational; (iii) by making predictions about an agent's goal, and the most probable action to obtain the goal given environmental constraints; (iv) in situations in which they are physiologically incapable of producing the actions. Motor theories are, thus, insufficient to account for primate action comprehension in the absence of inferential mechanisms.     

Personality in Non‐human Animals

Over the past decade, research on animal personality has flourished in numerous disciplines ranging from Behavioral Ecology and Developmental Psychobiology to Genetics and Comparative Psychology. The broad appeal of animal studies is that, in comparison with human studies, they afford greater experimental control, more options for measuring physiological and genetic parameters, greater opportunities for naturalistic observation, and an accelerated life course. Past research has established that personality (a) exists and can be measured in animals; (b) can be identified in a broad array of species, ranging from squid, crickets, and lizards, to trout, geese, and orangutans; and (c) shows considerable cross‐species generality for some dimensions. The wave of new studies is shedding fresh light on traditional issues in personality research (How do early experiences affect adult personality?), raising novel questions (What are the evolutionary origins of personality traits?) and addressing practical problems (Which dogs are best suited to detecting explosives?).     

Out with the old: Inhibition of old items in a preview search is limited

If some of the distractors in a visual search task are previewed prior to the presentation of the remaining distractors and the target, search time is reduced relative to when all of the items are displayed simultaneously. Here, we tested whether the ability to preferentially search new items during such a preview search is limited. We confirmed previous studies: The proportion of fixations on old items was significantly less than chance. However, the probability of fixating old locations was negatively affected by increasing the number of previewed distractors, suggesting that inhibition is limited to a small number of old items. Furthermore, the ability to inhibit old locations was limited to the first four fixations, indicating that by the fifth fixation, the resources required to sustain inhibition had been depleted. Together, these findings suggest that inhibition of old items in a preview search is a top-down mediated process dependent on capacity-limited cognitive resources.     

Book Reviews

From prejudice to intergroupemotions: Differentiated reactions to social groups
Diane M. Mackie and Eliot R. Smith (Eds). Psychology Press, NewYork, 2002. 299 pp.
ISBN 1-84169-047-3. Price US $75.00, hardcover.     

The effort heuristic

The research presented here suggests that effort is used as a heuristic for quality. Participants rating a poem (Experiment 1), a painting (Experiment 2), or a suit of armor (Experiment 3) provided higher ratings of quality, value, and liking for the work the more time and effort they thought it took to produce. Experiment 3 showed that the use of the effort heuristic, as with all heuristics, is moderated by ambiguity: Participants were more influenced by effort when the quality of the object being evaluated was difficult to ascertain. Discussion centers on the implications of the effort heuristic for everyday judgment and decision-making.     

Egocentrism and focalism in unrealistic optimism (and pessimism)

People tend to overestimate their comparative likelihood of experiencing a rosy future. The present research suggests that one reason for this error is that when people compare their likelihood of experiencing an event with that of the average person, they focus on their own chances of experiencing the event and insufficiently consider the likelihood of the average person experiencing the event. As a consequence, people tend to think that they are more likely than the average person to experience common events and less likely than the average person to experience rare events. This causes unrealistic optimism in the case of common desirable events and rare undesirable events, but unrealistic pessimism in the case of rare desirable events and common undesirable events (Studies 1 and 2). Study 2 further suggests that both egocentrism and focalism underlie these biases. These results suggest that unrealistic optimism is not as ubiquitous as once thought.     

The influence of quiet eye training and pressure on attention and visuo-motor control

The aim of this study was to examine the efficacy of an intervention designed to train effective visual attentional control (quiet eye-training) for a far aiming skill, and determine whether such training protected against attentional disruptions associated with performing under pressure. Sixteen novice participants wore a mobile eye-tracker to assess their visual attentional control (quiet eye) during the completion of 520 basketball free throws carried out over 8 days. They first performed 40 pre-test free throws and were randomly allocated into a quiet eye (QE) training or Control group (technical instruction only). Participants then performed 360 free throws during a training period and a further 120 test free throws under conditions designed to manipulate the level of anxiety experienced. The QE trained group maintained more effective visual attentional control and performed significantly better in the pressure test compared to the Control group, providing support for the efficacy of attentional training for visuo-motor skills.     

Is there a primordial Torah?

Is Orthodox Judaism committed to the existence of a Torah that pre-existed the world? This paper argues that Orthodoxy is so committed unless it can find compelling philosophical or theological reasons to reject the possibility of such an entity, and then to re-interpret allegorically all of the texts that speak of such a Torah. Providing an ontology of primordial texts, I argue that no compelling reason can be found to deny the existence of the primordial Torah.