Convincing Yourself to Care About Others: An Intervention for Enhancing Benevolence Values

To study value change, this research presents an intervention with multiple exercises designed to instigate change through both effortful and automatic routes. Aiming to increase the importance attributed to benevolence values, which reflect the motivation to help and care for others, the intervention combines three mechanisms for value change (self‐persuasion, consistency‐maintenance, and priming). In three experiments, 142 undergraduates (67% male, ages 19–26) participated in an intervention emphasizing the importance of either helping others (benevolence condition) or recognizing flexibility in personality (control condition). We measured the importance of benevolence values before and after the task. In Experiment 1, the intervention increased U.S. participants' benevolence values. In Experiment 2, we replicated these effects in a different culture (Israel) and also showed that by enhancing benevolence values, the intervention increased participants' willingness to volunteer to help others. Experiment 3 showed that the increases in the importance of benevolence values lasted at least 4 weeks. Our results provide evidence that value change does not require fictitious feedback or information about social norms, but can occur through a 30‐min intervention that evokes both effortful and automatic processes.     

Localization judgments under various levels of attention

We investigated the effects of attention on localization with two converging manipulations of attention. The results indicated that whereas attention improved localization, minimally attended stimuli were nonetheless localized fairly accurately. The distributions of localization responses around peripheral stimuli were asymmetric, with a greater dispersion along the axis linking fixation to stimulus location relative to its perpendicular axis. We propose that the unattended field comprises attentional receptive fields that are mediated by coarse location detectors. We speculate that attention produces fine localization by facilitating computations that integrate the relative activation of overlapping detectors.     

Correction to: Age-related differences in the attentional white bear

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - This article was originally published with errors in the graphs. It has been republished with corrections.     

Ideal Paraconsistent Logics

We define in precise terms the basic properties that an ??ideal propositional paraconsistent logic?? is expected to have, and investigate the relations between them. This leads to a precise characterization of ideal propositional paraconsistent logics. We show that every three-valued paraconsistent logic which is contained in classical logic, and has a proper implication connective, is ideal. Then we show that for every n > 2 there exists an extensive family of ideal n-valued logics, each one of which is not equivalent to any k-valued logic with k < n.     

Maximal and Premaximal Paraconsistency in the Framework of Three-Valued Semantics

Maximality is a desirable property of paraconsistent logics, motivated by the aspiration to tolerate inconsistencies, but at the same time retain from classical logic as much as possible. In this paper we introduce the strongest possible notion of maximal paraconsistency, and investigate it in the context of logics that are based on deterministic or non-deterministic three-valued matrices. We show that all reasonable paraconsistent logics based on three-valued deterministic matrices are maximal in our strong sense. This applies to practically all three-valued paraconsistent logics that have been considered in the literature, including a large family of logics which were developed by da Costa’s school. Then we show that in contrast, paraconsistent logics based on three-valued properly nondeterministic matrices are not maximal, except for a few special cases (which are fully characterized). However, these non-deterministic matrices are useful for representing in a clear and concise way the vast variety of the (deterministic) three-valued maximally paraconsistent matrices. The corresponding weaker notion of maximality, called premaximal paraconsistency, captures the “core” of maximal paraconsistency of all possible paraconsistent determinizations of a non-deterministic matrix, thus representing what is really essential for their maximal paraconsistency.     

Symmetry and transitivity assumptions about a nonspecified logical relation

Twenty-five subjects were presented with eight problems involving a non-specified relation, devoid of its concrete content. This relation was signified by the symbol (--), thus logically precluding any knowledge about the properties of the relation. The problems were so designed that the truth evaluation of their solution statements reflected assumptions about the symmetry and transitivity properties of the relation. Six subjects assumed that the relation was both symmetrical and transitive, and 12 subjects assumed that it was symmetrical only. When these same 18 subjects were presented with problems which lent themselves to only one of these assumptions, all assumed that the relation was symmetrical rather than transitive. The remaining seven subjects made neither of these two assumptions in any of the problems. Examples of logical relations, given as part of the problems, and varying in their properties of symmetry and transitivity, had no effect on the subjects' assumptions. It is proposed that symmetrical and transitive relations are conceptual good figures which predisposed subjects to perceive the nonspecified relation as symmetrical or as transitive. The stronger tendency towards symmetry assumptions than towards transitivity assumptions suggests that symmetrical relations are better figures than transitive relations.     

Perceptual load as a major determinant of the locus of selection in visual attention

In this paper, we propose that the debate concerning the locus of attentional selection can be resolved by specifying the conditions under which early selection is possible. In the first part, we present a theoretical discussion that integrates aspects from structural and capacity approaches to attention and suggest that perceptual load is a major factor in determining the locus of selection. In the second part, we present a literature review that examines the conditions influencing the processing of irrelevant information. This review supports the conclusion that a clear physical distinction between relevant and irrelevant information is not sufficient to prevent irrelevant processing; early selection also requires that the perceptual load of the task be sufficiently high to exceed the upper limit of available attentional resources.