The role of salience in conceptual combination

The present study investigated three factors that affect the interpretation of novel noun-noun (N-N) combinations: simple feature salience, ontological category, and assessed similarity. Participants read and defined a series of novel N-N combinations in which the feature salience of N1 and N2 was manipulated. Participants also rated the combinations for similarity. The combinations were constrained to be within ontological category. All interpretations were scored in terms of the strategies (property mapping vs. relation linking) used to produce the given interpretations. Highly salient features drove property-mapping interpretations based on those features. Natural kinds produced more property-mapping interpretations than did artifacts. There was no correlation between the proportion of property-mapping interpretations and the assessed similarity of the N-N combinations. These results are discussed as an extension of Estes and Glucksberg's (2000) interactive theory of conceptual combination and argue for the importance of feature salience as a factor in conceptual combination.     

The Impact of Resource Loss and Critical Incidents on Psychological Functioning in Fire-Emergency Workers: A Pilot Study

The relationship between critical incident exposure and resource loss, as conceptualized by Conservation of Resources (COR) theory, in predicting later psychological outcome (e.g., depressive symptoms, anger expression, and state anger) was examined in a sample of 150 fire-emergency workers from a Fire Department in a mid-sized, midwestern city. Additionally, a measure of critical incidents (Critical Incidents Inventory) was developed, and preliminary data on its validity are presented. Results from multiple regression analyses indicated that fire-emergency workers' exposure to critical incidents was directly related to their report of depressive symptoms, outward expression of anger, and state anger. Additionally, results indicated that fire-emergency workers' resource loss was strongly related to their psychological outcome. Results also suggest that resource loss may mediate the impact of critical incident stress exposure on depressive symptoms and the outward expression of anger. These results offer support to applying COR theory to populations under extreme stress.     

Experience, context, and the visual perception of human movement

Why are human observers particularly sensitive to human movement? Seven experiments examined the roles of visual experience and motor processes in human movement perception by comparing visual sensitivities to point-light displays of familiar, unusual, and impossible gaits across gait-speed and identity discrimination tasks. In both tasks, visual sensitivity to physically possible gaits was superior to visual sensitivity to physically impossible gaits, supporting perception-action coupling theories of human movement perception. Visual experience influenced walker-identity perception but not gait-speed discrimination. Thus, both motor experience and visual experience define visual sensitivity to human movement. An ecological perspective can be used to define the conditions necessary for experience-dependent sensitivity to human movement.