From the Editor Guest Column: Who Was Jack Shand?

Members of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR) hail from a number of diverse disciplines, but one theme unites them all: a commitment to studying religion scientifically. While many readers of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (JSSR) are quantitatively oriented, SSSR has a long history of sharing membership with fields utilizing a variety of qualitative methods, including religious studies, anthropology, and other scholarly disciplines within the humanities. As such, SSSR serves as a nexus for the sharing of different research, ideas, perspectives, and methodologies. Our guest “From the Editor” column is about a psychologist who appreciated SSSR and its multidisciplinary approach so much that he became a major benefactor to SSSR after his passing. That person was John Douglas “Jack” Shand, and this is a brief tribute to his legacy.     

The role of corpus size and syntax in deriving lexico-semantic representations for a wide range of concepts

One of the most significant recent advances in the study of semantic processing is the advent of models based on text and other corpora. In this study, we address what impact both the quantitative and qualitative properties of corpora have on mental representations derived from them. More precisely, we evaluate models with different linguistic and mental constraints on their ability to predict semantic relatedness between items from a vast range of domains and categories. We find that a model based on syntactic dependency relations captures significantly less of the variability for all kinds of words, regardless of the semantic relation between them or their abstractness. The largest difference was found for concrete nouns, which are commonly used to assess semantic processing. For both models we find that limited amounts of data suffice in order to obtain reliable predictions. Together, these findings suggest new constraints for the construction of mental models from corpora, both in terms of the corpus size and in terms of the linguistic properties that contribute to mental representations.     

Developmental eye-tracking research in reading: Introduction to the special issue

Extending our understanding of the interplay between visual and cognitive processes during reading is essential to understand how reading develops and changes across the lifespan. Monitoring readers' eye movements provides a fine-grained online protocol of the reading process as it evolves over time, but until recently eye movements have rarely been collected for young developing and ageing people. Developmental eye-tracking constitutes an emerging and innovative field that addresses various theoretical questions related to changes in the process of reading across the lifespan and the mechanisms that drive intra-individual trajectories and create inter-individual differences among readers. The aim of this editorial is to briefly summarise the current state of the field and to outline which questions are currently being investigated and presented in this Special Issue.     

Working memory,reading ability and the effects of distance and typicality on anaphor resolution in children

We investigated the time course of anaphor resolution in children and whether this is modulated by individual differences in working memory and reading skill. The eye movements of 30 children (10–11 years) were monitored as they read short paragraphs in which (1) the semantic typicality of an antecedent and (2) its distance in relation to an anaphor were orthogonally manipulated. Children showed effects of distance and typicality on the anaphor itself and also on the word to the right of the anaphor, suggesting that anaphoric processing begins immediately but continues after the eyes have left the anaphor. Furthermore, children showed no evidence of resolving anaphors in the most difficult condition (distant atypical antecedent), suggesting that anaphoric processing that is demanding may not occur online in children of this age. Finally, working memory capacity and reading comprehension skill affect the magnitude and time course of typicality and distance effects during anaphoric processing.     

Anchoring Effects in Simulated Academic Promotion Decisions: How the Promotion Criterion Affects Ratings and the Decision to Support an Application

Six experiments investigated the effect of the promotion criterion in simulated academic promotion decisions. In total, 547 undergraduate students and 33 university faculty members rated a promotion application, and some also indicated their decisions to support or to reject it. Performance ratings were reliably affected by the criterion, with a high criterion resulting in higher ratings than a low criterion, and this criterion effect was found regardless of the evaluator's expertise, whether he or she took the role of an independent assessor or the line manager to the applicant, or whether the criterion was provided by the experimenter or randomly generated by the participant. The criterion also affected the level of support for a candidate when the position applied for was perceived to be extremely competitive, or when a lesser position was considered at a later time. These results provide evidence that the use of a criterion, a fairly common practice in decision‐making processes, may bias performance evaluations, which in turn may have ripple effects that affect the outcome of a chain of events. Our results also shed light on the possible mechanisms that underlie the rating biases in performance appraisal. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

How to Create Shared Symbols

Human cognition and behavior are dominated by symbol use. This paper examines the social learning strategies that give rise to symbolic communication. Experiment 1 contrasts an individual‐level account, based on observational learning and cognitive bias, with an inter‐individual account, based on social coordinative learning. Participants played a referential communication game in which they tried to communicate a range of recurring meanings to a partner by drawing, but without using their conventional language. Individual‐level learning, via observation and cognitive bias, was sufficient to produce signs that became increasingly effective, efficient, and shared over games. However, breaking a referential precedent eliminated these benefits. The most effective, most efficient, and most shared signs arose when participants could directly interact with their partner, indicating that social coordinative learning is important to the creation of shared symbols. Experiment 2 investigated the contribution of two distinct aspects of social interaction: behavior alignment and concurrent partner feedback. Each played a complementary role in the creation of shared symbols: Behavior alignment primarily drove communication effectiveness, and partner feedback primarily drove the efficiency of the evolved signs. In conclusion, inter‐individual social coordinative learning is important to the evolution of effective, efficient, and shared symbols.     

Time course of free-choice priming effects explained by a simple accumulator model

Unconscious visual stimuli can be processed by human observers and modulate their behavior. This has been shown for masked prime stimuli that influence motor responses to subsequent target stimuli. Beyond this, masked stimuli can also affect participants' behavior when they are free to choose one of two response alternatives. This finding demonstrates that an apparently free-choice between alternative behaviors can be subject to influences that are outside of awareness. We report three experiments which exhibit that the temporal dynamic of free-choice priming effects corresponds to that of forced-choice priming effects. Forced-choice priming effects were relatively robust against variations of prime stimuli but sensitive to physical features of target stimuli. Free-choice priming effects, in contrast, depended largely on the stimulus-response compatibility of the prime. A simple accumulator model which accounts for forced-choice response priming can also explain free-choice priming effects by the assumption that unconscious stimuli can initiate motor responses when participants are engaged in a speeded choice-reaction time task. According to our analyses free-choice priming results from a response selection mechanism which integrates conscious and unconscious information from external, stimulus driven sources and also from internal sources.     

Estimation and interpretation of 1/f<Superscript>α</Superscript> noise in human cognition

Recent analyses of serial correlations in cognitive tasks have provided preliminary evidence of the presence of a particular form of long-range serial dependence known as 1/fnoise. It has been argued that long-range dependence has been largely ignored in mainstream cognitive psychology even though it accounts for a substantial proportion of variability in behavior (see, e.g., Gilden, 1997, 2001). In this article, we discuss the defining characteristics of long-range dependence and argue that claims about its presence need to be evaluated by testing against the alternative hypothesis of short-range dependence. For the data from three experiments, we accomplish such tests with autoregressive fractionally integrated moving-average time series modeling. We find that long-range serial dependence in these experiments can be explained by any of several mechanisms, including mixtures of a small number of short-range processes.