A COMPARISON OF COGNITIVE CONFLICT BETWEEN PERSONS IN WESTERN EUROPE AND THE UNITED STATES1

Etude comparative du conflit cognitif interpersonnel en Europe occidentale et aux Etats-Unis. — La recherche a été menée conjointement dans divers pays européens (Grande-Bretagne, France, Italie, RFA) et aux Etats-Unis, selon la même procédure. On induit des différences cognitives détetminées entre les 2 membres d'un groupe, en les entraînant différemment (ce dont ils ne sont pas conscients) dans une tâche d'apprentissage portant sur des problèmes politiques; il s'ensuit un conflit quand on réunit les deux sujets et qu'on leur demande d'aboutir à des solutions communes. Les résultats montrent que — a) les différences cognitives ne sont pas réduites en Europe alors qu'elles le sont, lentement, aux Etats-Unis; — b) les sujets européens aboutissent moins souvent que les sujets américains à des solutions de compromis; — c) les européens réagissent différemment à l'idée de « Contrôle de l'Etat ». Ce type de recherche peut être utilisé pour étudier le conflit cognitif sur une base interculturelle; les résultats font apparaître des problèmes importants qui n'ont pas encore été étudiés.     

Cognitive conditioning: Imagined stimulus contiguity and the third interval conditional GSR

The effect of repeatedly imagining paired or unpaired CSs and USs on the frequency of post-CS responses during real extinction was studied. Four groups of 10 Ss first received a model tone and shock. For two of the groups the stimuli were paired (delayed conditioning paradigm). For the others the stimuli were arranged in a long trace paradigm. The Ss then received a series of commands requiring them to imagine receiving paired CSs and USs, or to imagine the events singly. Then 10 real tone extinction trials were given. The groups which received delayed conditioning model stimuli were more responsive than trace groups, and groups which had imagined paired stimuli were more responsive than their unpaired controls. Cognitively oriented explanations of these findings were discussed.     

Reviews of current books

Pastoral Psychology -     

A multidimensional approach to skilled perception and performance in sport

Three experiments examined the relative importance of attributes determined largely by the efficiency of the visual/central nervous system versus cognitive domain‐specific skills, in the determination of expertise in soccer. In Experiment 1, expert and intermediate soccer players were assessed on various non‐specific abilities including: processing (simple reaction time, peripheral reaction time, visual correction time), optometric (static, dynamic and mesopic acuity), and perimetric parameters (horizontal and vertical peripheral range). In Experiment 2, domain‐specific variables were assessed including complex decision speed and accuracy, number of visual fixations, fixation duration, and fixation location in solving game problems. Stimuli were initially presented by slides (Experiment 2) and later by 16 mm film (Experiment 3). Eye movements were recorded and analysed. A stepwise discriminant analysis of both non‐specific abilities and soccer‐specific skills revealed an average squared canonical correlation=0.84, with the significant step variables all being domain‐specific skills. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Habituation, response to novelty, and dishabituation in human infants: tests of a dual-process theory of visual attention

Two experiments were conducted to test a dual-process theory of infants' performance on visual habituation-dishabituation tasks. The findings demonstrate that (a) infant habituation functions are often nonmonotonic, with fixation increasing before the eventual response waning; (b) this initial increment in responding is related to stimulus "complexity"; (c) response to novelty is enhanced by increasing the "complexity" of the novelty-test stimulus; and (d) dishabituation, followed by decay, occurs for familiarized patterns when retested after the introduction of a "complex" stimulus, but not after introduction of a "simple" stimulus. Following P. Groves and R. Thompson (1970, Psychological Review, 77, 419-450) we propose that infant visual attention to repeated presentations of a stimulus involves two processes, habituation and sensitization.     

On the automaticity of emotion processing in words and faces: event-related brain potentials evidence from a superficial task

The degree to which emotional aspects of stimuli are processed automatically is controversial. Here, we assessed the automatic elicitation of emotion-related brain potentials (ERPs) to positive, negative, and neutral words and facial expressions in an easy and superficial face-word discrimination task, for which the emotional valence was irrelevant. Both emotional words and facial expressions impacted ERPs already between 50 and 100 ms after stimulus onset, possibly reflecting rapid relevance detection. Following this initial processing stage only emotionality in faces but not in words was associated with an early posterior negativity (EPN). Therefore, when emotion is irrelevant in a task which requires superficial stimulus analysis, automatically enhanced sensory encoding of emotional content appears to occur only for evolutionary prepared emotional stimuli, as reflected in larger EPN amplitudes to faces, but not to symbolic word stimuli.