Errant Learning for a Foam World: Glissant,Sloterdijk, and the Foam of Pedagogy

Studies in Philosophy and Education - Through an educational reading of Édouard Glissant and Peter Sloterdijk, this article draws out and develops latent pedagogical philosophies that bear...     

Putting the cart before the horse: the benefits of arbitrating before mediating

The authors examined the impact of 2 hybrid dispute resolution procedures (mediation-arbitration [med-arb] and arbitration-mediation [arb-med]) and 3 disputant dyadic structures (individual vs. individual, individual vs. team, and team vs. team) on various dispute outcomes. Consistent with W. H. Ross and D. E. Conlon (2000), the authors found that disputants in the arb-med procedure (a) settled in the mediation phase of their procedure more frequently and (b) achieved settlements of higher joint benefit than did disputants in the med-arb procedure. These results suggest that arb-med may be a dispute resolution procedure with broader applicability than originally imagined.     

Semantic priming: on the role of awareness in visual word recognition in the absence of an expectancy

By hypothesis, awareness is involved in the modulation of feedback from semantics to the lexical level in the visual word recognition system. When subjects are aware of the fact that there are many related prime-target pairs in a semantic priming experiment, this knowledge is used to configure the system to feed activation back from semantics to the lexical level so as to facilitate processing. When subjects are unaware of this fact, the default set is maintained in which activation is not fed back from semantics to the lexical level so as to conserve limited resources. Qualitative differences in the pattern of data from two lexical decision experiments that employ masked priming are consistent with this hypothesis. Semantic context and stimulus quality interact when the prime is processed with awareness whereas these same two factors produce additive effects on RT when the prime is unlikely to have been processed with awareness. These experiments thus illustrate one way in which awareness (or lack thereof) affects the dynamics of visual word recognition.     

Measures of self-efficacy and optimism in older adults with generalized anxiety

This study provides initial psychometric data for the Self-Efficacy Scale (SES) and the Life Orientation Test (LOT) in a sample of older adults with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). Participants included 76 adults, ages 60 to 80, who met Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.) criteria for GAD. Self-efficacy and outcome expectancies were lower in older adults with GAD relative to published data from younger and older community samples. Both the SES and LOT demonstrated adequate internal consistency. Confirmatory factor analysis provided evidence for optimism and pessimism factors within the LOT and exploratory factor analysis of the SES suggested threefactors that overlap with previous findings. Overall, the data support the potential utility of these instruments in late-life GAD and set the stage forfuture investigations of generalized self-efficacy expectancies and outcome expectancies (or optimism) as they relate to the prediction of affect and behavior in this group.     

Levels-of-processing effects on Chinese character completion: The importance of lexical processing and test cue

The levels of processing (LoP) effect was studied in Chinese character completion tasks. The same stem cue, either graphemically or semantically related to the target character, was used to generate either a perceptual or a conceptual test. Participants received either direct or indirect instructions, so that the same stem cue also produced either an explicit or an implicit test of memory. This allowed us to examine simultaneously the roles of perceptual versus conceptual test and retrieval intentionality in the LoP effect. No LoP effects were found when the memory test was implicit. LoP effects were also not found for stems and characters related graphemically (perceptually), but were found for stems and characters related semantically (conceptually) when the memory test was explicit. The results are discussed in terms of the importance of lexical processing for character completion tests and the importance of reinstatement of the study process during retrieval for explicit memory tests.     

Effects of antecedent order and semantic context on Chinese pronoun resolution

Three reading time experiments were conducted in order to examine the relative contributions of order of antecedents and semantic context to the resolution of temporarily ambiguous Chinese pronouns. These pronouns were ambiguous because each of them was preceded by two antecedents, both of which were likely candidates for coreference. The identity of the pronoun was revealed by subsequent disambiguating information that constrained the pronoun to one particular interpretation. Experiment 1 showed that reading of the disambiguating phrase was slower when the phrase confined the pronoun to the second rather than to the first antecedent. Experiment 2 produced the same effect of antecedent order (first vs. second antecedent) regardless of whether the target antecedent was an action-performing or an action-receiving entity. In Experiment 3, the order effect was eliminated by a biasing modifier inserted immediately before the pronoun. These results indicate that in a semantically neutral environment, the first-appearing antecedent is the preferred candidate for coreferencing the ambiguous Chinese pronoun. The interaction between order of antecedents and semantic context (in the form of preposed biasing modifiers) suggests that the initial comprehension of Chinese pronouns depends as much on contextual as on structural factors.     

Interfering neighbours: the impact of novel word learning on the identification of visually similar words

We assessed the impact of visual similarity on written word identification by having participants learn new words (e.g. BANARA) that were neighbours of familiar words that previously had no neighbours (e.g. BANANA). Repeated exposure to these new words made it more difficult to semantically categorize the familiar words. There was some evidence of interference following an initial training phase, and clear evidence of interference the following day (without any additional training); interference was larger still following more training on the second day. These findings lend support to models of reading that include lexical competition as a key process.     

Digital chameleons: automatic assimilation of nonverbal gestures in immersive virtual environments

Previous research demonstrated social influence resulting from mimicry (the chameleon effect); a confederate who mimicked participants was more highly regarded than a confederate who did not, despite the fact that participants did not explicitly notice the mimicry. In the current study, participants interacted with an embodied artificial intelligence agent in immersive virtual reality. The agent either mimicked a participant's head movements at a 4-s delay or utilized prerecorded movements of another participant as it verbally presented an argument. Mimicking agents were more persuasive and received more positive trait ratings than nonmimickers, despite participants' inability to explicitly detect the mimicry. These data are uniquely powerful because they demonstrate the ability to use automatic, indiscriminate mimicking (i.e., a computer algorithm blindly applied to all movements) to gain social influence. Furthermore, this is the first study to demonstrate social influence effects with a nonhuman, nonverbal mimicker.     

The gaze of the optimist

Two studies used eye tracking to investigate the attentional preferences of optimists and pessimists to negative emotional stimuli. In both studies, optimistic and pessimistic college students viewed three types of visual stimuli while having their eye movements tracked: skin cancer (melanoma) images, matched schematic line drawings, and neutral faces. In the first study, participants were asked to view the images naturally, whereas in the second study, some participants received a relevance manipulation. Percentage of fixation time to the different images was measured. Optimists showed selective inattention to the skin cancer images, even after controlling for attention to matched schematic line drawings. This relationship remained significant in both studies after controlling for the effects of neuroticism, affect, anxiety, relevance, and perceptual variables. These data suggest that optimists may indeed wear "rose-colored glasses" in their processing of information from the world.