How can a stereotype inconsistency bias be encouraged in communication?

This study aimed to investigate what conditions can lead to a bias for communicating stereotype inconsistent (SI) information, relative to stereotype consistent (SC) information. Sixty‐three undergraduate university students (22 males, 41 females; M_age = 21.25) read a story about an Arab man who exhibited characteristics consistent and inconsistent with the stereotype of Arab men. The story was transmitted through 21 three‐person communication chains; each participant rewrote the story from memory for the next person in the chain to read, with only the first participant in each chain reading the original story. As hypothesized, when a surprising category conjunction was formed by pairing the primary stereotype (Arab men) with a secondary stereotype of a contradictory nature (kindergarten teachers), SC information was circulated less than SI information. This was also the case when a causal explanation was provided that accounted for the unexpected SI information. Findings indicate the potential of techniques that elicit cognitive elaboration of SI information to encourage an SI bias in communication, and show promise for exploring ways to reduce the impact of negative stereotypical information in the long term.     

Investigating the face inversion effect in a deaf population using the Dimensions Tasks

Early experience can change the way people process faces. Early deafness provides deaf children with the opportunity to learn sign language, which is likely to alter their face processing strategy. The goal of the current study was to investigate whether early deafness, combined with the sign language experience, was able to change the face processing strategy using the Dimensions Task. In the Face Dimensions Task, configural and featural information were parametrically and independently manipulated in the eye and mouth region of the face. The manipulations for configural information involved changing the distance between the eyes or the distance between the mouth and the nose. The manipulations for featural information involved changing the size of the eyes or the size of the mouth. Similar manipulations were applied in the House Dimensions Task, with top and bottom windows treated as eyes and mouth. In the Face Dimensions Task, both the signing deaf and hearing participants showed a larger inversion effect in the mouth condition than the eye condition. However, as compared to hearing participants, deaf participants showed smaller inversion effect in the mouth condition, because their performance in the inverted mouth condition was not compromised by inversion to the same extent as the hearing participants. In the House Dimensions Task, this effect was not present, suggesting that it was face specific. This effect could be explained by the redistributed attentional resources from the centre to peripheral visual fields of deaf participants.     

Diversity and Community Can Coexist

We examine the (in)compatibility of diversity and sense of community by means of agent‐based models based on the well‐known Schelling model of residential segregation and Axelrod model of cultural dissemination. We find that diversity and highly clustered social networks, on the assumptions of social tie formation based on spatial proximity and homophily, are incompatible when agent features are immutable, and this holds even for multiple independent features. We include both mutable and immutable features into a model that integrates Schelling and Axelrod models, and we find that even for multiple independent features, diversity and highly clustered social networks can be incompatible on the assumptions of social tie formation based on spatial proximity and homophily. However, this incompatibility breaks down when cultural diversity can be sufficiently large, at which point diversity and clustering need not be negatively correlated. This implies that segregation based on immutable characteristics such as race can possibly be overcome by sufficient similarity on mutable characteristics based on culture, which are subject to a process of social influence, provided a sufficiently large “scope of cultural possibilities” exists.     

Renewal of Extinguished Lever-Press Responses upon Return to the Training Context

Two experiments with rats explored renewal effects in operant conditioning preparations. When pressing a lever was trained in one context and then extinguished in a second context, the responding was renewed by returning to the original context (ABA renewal) in Experiment 1. This finding was replicated in Experiment 2 with discriminative operant performance signaled by a localized light cue. In spite of the successful demonstration of ABA renewal effect in these experiments, AAB renewal was detected in neither experiment: When the responses had been extinguished in the context of acquisition, testing the rats in a second context did not renew the responses. The demonstration of ABA renewal but no AAB renewal suggests that extinction in another context and/or a return to the original context are critical for renewal of extinguished operant performance.     

Parts and wholes in face recognition

Are faces recognized using more holistic representations than other types of stimuli? Taking holistic representation to mean representation without an internal part structure, we interpret the available evidence on this issue and then design new empirical tests. Based on previous research, we reasoned that if a portion of an object corresponds to an explicitly represented part in a hierarchical visual representation, then when that portion is presented in isolation it will be identified relatively more easily than if it did not have the status of an explicitly represented part. The hypothesis that face recognition is holistic therefore predicts that a part of a face will be disproportionately more easily recognized in the whole face than as an isolated part, relative to recognition of the parts and wholes of other kinds of stimuli. This prediction was borne out in three experiments: subjects were more accurate at identifying the parts of faces, presented in the whole object, than they were at identifying the same part presented in isolation, even though both parts and wholes were tested in a forced-choice format and the whole faces differed only by one part. In contrast, three other types of stimuli--scrambled faces, inverted faces, and houses--did not show this advantage for part identification in whole object recognition.     

An Infinitary Extension of Jankov’s Theorem

It is known that for any subdirectly irreducible finite Heyting algebra A and any Heyting algebra B, A is embeddable into a quotient algebra of B, if and only if Jankov’s formula χ _A for A is refuted in B. In this paper, we present an infinitary extension of the above theorem given by Jankov. More precisely, for any cardinal number κ, we present Jankov’s theorem for homomorphisms preserving infinite meets and joins, a class of subdirectly irreducible complete κ-Heyting algebras and κ-infinitary logic, where a κ-Heyting algebra is a Heyting algebra A with # ≥  κ and κ-infinitary logic is the infinitary logic such that for any set Θ of formulas with # Θ ≥  κ, ∨Θ and ∧Θ are well defined formulas.     

Culture and Context-sensitive Self: The Amount and Meaning of Context-sensitivity of Phenomenal Self Differ Across Cultures

Self-concepts change from context to context. The experience that one's self is context-sensitive may be universal, however the amount and meaning of context-sensitive self vary across cultures. Cross-cultural differences in the amount and meaning of context-sensitive self were investigated in three Western cultures (Australia, Germany, and UK) and two East Asian cultures (Japan and Korea). The amount of context-sensitivity of self was greater in Japan than in Western cultures and Korea. The meaning of context-sensitive self also varied across cultures. In the Western cultures, a context-invariant self was seen to be clear and true; however, these patterns were not observed in the East Asian cultures. In Korea, a context-invariant self was interpreted to be exhibiting a relational self, which adheres to the ethics of care. In Japan, it was a context-sensitive self that was seen to be true, implying that the true self in Japan may mean to be true to the self-in-context, rather than the transcendental, decontextualized self. The results suggest the importance of differentiating East Asian cultures such as Japan and Korea. The utility of quantitative methods in explicating cultural meaning was highlighted.     

Race-specific perceptual discrimination improvement following short individuation training with faces

This study explores the effect of individuation training on the acquisition of race-specific expertise. First, we investigated whether practice individuating other-race faces yields improvement in perceptual discrimination for novel faces of that race. Second, we asked whether there was similar improvement for novel faces of a different race for which participants received equal practice, but in an orthogonal task that did not require individuation. Caucasian participants were trained to individuate faces of one race (African American or Hispanic) and to make difficult eye-luminance judgments on faces of the other race. By equating these tasks we are able to rule out raw experience, visual attention, or performance/success-induced positivity as the critical factors that produce race-specific improvements. These results indicate that individuation practice is one mechanism through which cognitive, perceptual, and/or social processes promote growth of the own-race face recognition advantage.