Clever hands: uncontrolled intelligence in facilitated communication

Five studies examined how people who are answering questions on behalf of another person may use their own knowledge to answer correctly while attributing authorship of their answers to the other. Experiments 1 and 2 found that participants instructed to answer yes/no questions randomly were unable to do so. They were more often correct on easy than hard questions, and extended opportunity and incentive did not reduce this effect. Experiments 3-5 found similar correctness for participants who were asked to answer yes/no questions by sensing either the ostensible keyboard finger movements or unvoiced inclinations of another person who had been admonished not to answer, and who was infact a confederate and was not even given the questions. In this paradigm, the answers were often attributed to the other.     

The Relation Between Coordinated Interpersonal Timing and Maternal Sensitivity in Four-Month-Old Infants

The relation between mother–infant coordinated interpersonal timing, an automated microanalytic measure of dyadic vocal coordination, and maternal sensitivity was explored. Thirty-five mothers and their developmentally normal 4-month-old infants were audio-recorded during a 20-min laboratory vocal interaction session, that was later analyzed for degree of vocal coordination. Maternal Sensitivity ratings (Ainsworth & Bell, 1969) were based on a video-taped 45-min unstructured laboratory interaction period. A significant curvilinear relation between the degree to which mother coordinated her noninterruptive co-occurring speech to that of her infant was found and revealed that mothers highest in sensitivity were characterized by moderate levels of coordination. Examining mother-infant interaction at the specific behavioral level, while incorporating tests of nonlinear trends, may provide important information about the nature of sensitive parenting.     

Attribution of dispositional states by 12-month-olds

The ability to interpret the behavior of other individuals is essential for effective social functioning. Many investigators now believe that even young infants can recognize that agents act toward goals. Here we report three experiments suggesting that 12-month-old infants not only can recognize goal-related action, but also can interpret future actions of an actor on the basis of previously witnessed behavior in another context. The possibility that this inference is made through the attribution of mental states is discussed.     

Visual perspective taking for avatars in a Simon task

In modern digital applications, users often interact with virtual representations of themselves or others, called avatars. We examined how these avatars and their perspectives influence stimulus–response compatibility in a Simon task. Participants responded to light/dark blue stimuli with left/right key presses in the presence of a task-irrelevant avatar. Changes in stimulus–response compatibility were used to quantify changes in the mental representation of the task and perspective taking toward this avatar. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that perspective taking for an avatar occurred in orthogonal stimulus–response mappings, causing a compatibility effect from the avatar’s point of view. In the following two experiments we introduced a larger variety of angular disparities between the participant and avatar. In Experiment 3, the Simon effect with lateralized stimulus positions remained largely unaffected by the avatar, pointing toward an absence of perspective taking. In Experiment 4, after avatar hand movements were added in order to strengthen the participants’ sense of agency over the avatar, a spatial compatibility effect from the avatar’s perspective was observed again, and hints of the selective use of perspective taking on a trial-by-trial basis were found. Overall, the results indicate that users can incorporate the perspective of an avatar into their mental representation of a situation, even when this perspective is unnecessary to complete a task, but that certain contextual requirements have to be met.     

Culture Is More than a Static Residual: Introduction to the Special Section on Culture and Foreign Policy

The literature on international relations frequently refers to culture in broad, macro-level ways to explain what cannot be explained by economic or military power. The assumptions that culture is simple, uniform and the opposite of power are, in the view of the authors, erroneous. Also, the authors note that there is a lack of scholarly interaction among psychologists interested in cross-cultural phenomena and international relations specialists interested in questions of identity and foreign policy. As an introduction to a special section on culture and foreign policy, this article calls for more communication among these scholarly communities; provides a set of observations about foreign policy and culture understood as a complex, dynamic concept; and calls for specific kinds of studies to better understand foreign policy in the context of cultural complexity and richness.     

Knowledge level learning and the power law: A soar model of skill acquisition in scheduling

Zusammenfassung. Das hier vorgestellte Modell lernt graduell, Planungsaufgaben aus der Klasse der Maschinenbelegungsprobleme (job-shop-scheduling problems) zu lösen. Mit Hilfe des Chunking-Mechanismus von Soar wird episodisches Wissen über die Belegungsreihenfolge von Aufträgen auf Maschinen memoriert. Bei der Entwicklung des Modells wurden zahlreiche qualitative (z. B. Transfereffekte) und quantitative Befunde (z. B. Bearbeitungszeiten) aus einer früheren empirischen Untersuchung berücksichtigt. In einer Validierungsstudie wurden dieselben Aufgaben von 14 Probanden und dem Modell bearbeitet. Die Passung von Simulationsdaten und empirischen Ergebnissen fiel insgesamt gut aus. Allerdings löst das Modell die Aufgaben schneller und zeigt auch einen etwas besseren Lernverlauf als die Probanden. Das Modell liefert eine Erklärung für das Rauschen, das typischerweise bei Bearbeitungszeiten zu beobachten ist: es handelt sich um erworbenes Wissen, das mehr oder weniger gut und auch unterschiedlich häufig auf neue Situationen übertragen wird. Der Lernverlauf der Probanden entspricht nur für aggregierte Daten einer Potenzfunktion (power law). Der vorgestellte Mechanismus zeigt, wie ein symbolisches Modell der Informationsverarbeitung graduelle Verhaltensänderungen generiert und wie der offensichtliche Erwerb allgemeiner Prozeduren ohne explizites Lernen von deklarativen Regeln erfolgen kann. Es wird nahegelegt, daß es sich hier um die Modellierung einer Form impliziten Lernens handelt. Summary. The model presented here gradually learns how to perform a job-shop scheduling task. It uses Soar's chunking mechanism to acquire episodic memories about the order to schedule jobs. The model was based on many qualitative (e.g., transfer effects) and quantitative (e.g., solution time) regularities found in previously collected data. The model was tested with new data where scheduling tasks were given to the model and to 14 subjects. The model generally fit these data with the restrictions that the model performs the task (in simulated time) faster than the subjects, and its performance improves somewhat more quickly than the subjects' performance. The model provides an explanation of the noise typically found in problem solving times - it is the result of learning actual pieces of knowledge that transfer more or less to new situations but rarely by an average amount. Only when the data are averaged (i.e., over subjects) does the smooth power law appear. This mechanism demonstrates how symbolic models can exhibit a gradual change in behavior and how the apparent acquisition of general procedures can be performed without resorting to explicit declarative rule generation. We suggest that this may represent a type of implicit learning.     

The puzzle of language evolution

Linguistics must again concentrate on the evolutionary nature of language, so that language models are more realistic with respect to human natural languages and have a greater explanatory force. Multi-agent systems are proposed as a possible route to develop such evolutionary models and an example is given of a concrete experiment in the origins and evolution of word-meaning based on a multi-agent approach.