知识背景对觉察配对词间语义联系的影响

研究探讨了生物领域知识丰富者和贫乏者判断来自生物领域或一般领域亲疏度不同的配对词间联系的差异。采用2（生物领域丰富者和贫乏者）×2（生物领域配对词和一般领域配对词）×2（语义关系疏远配对词和语义关系密切配对词）混合实验设计,要求被试尽快判断4种类型共120组配对词的两个词间是否存在语义上的联系。结果发现：生物领域知识丰富者比贫乏者更倾向于接受生物领域配对词间的联系,且在判断生物领域关系疏远配对词时花费更长时间;而两者在判断一般领域配对词间的联系时,无论在接受性或反应时上均不存在差异。这一结果说明,知识背景影响个体觉察特定范畴或特定领域中观念间联系的敏感性,觉察观念间联系的能力表现出领域特殊的特征。     

Environmental representations of local communities' spokespersons in protected areas

Despite the popularization of the environmental discourse, rural environmental belief‐systems should not be viewed as homogenous. Focusing on the largest protected area in Greece, we examined heterogeneity in local environmental views. Local spokespersons elicited word associations to two stimulus terms, namely, ‘environmentalists’ and ‘protected area’. Based on association categories for both terms, we identified two sample segments. ‘Naturalists’ appealed to a naturalistic image, which shaped the core compartment of their representations. On the other hand, ‘skeptics’ provided both environmentalist claims and critical accounts. Our findings revealed that the environmental discourse was widely diffused among local spokespersons. Issues of power and participation in decision‐making processes within protected areas are discussed. For instance, dimensions of power and legitimacy were reflected in the frequency of association categories and their allocation among sample segments. Specifically, environmentalist accounts were overtly expressed by both ‘naturalists’ and skeptics, while a more socially, politically and critically inclined view was revealed by a small percentage of associations that were all elicited by ‘skeptics’. We conclude that appreciating the heterogeneity of rural environmental views can reinforce the democratic mandate in environmental policy‐making. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Will the Real Moral Judgment Please Stand Up?

The recent, influential Social Intuitionist Model of moral judgment (Haidt, Psychological Review 108, 814–834, 2001) proposes a primary role for fast, automatic and affectively charged moral intuitions in the formation of moral judgments. Haidt’s research challenges our normative conception of ourselves as agents capable of grasping and responding to reasons. We argue that there can be no ‘real’ moral judgments in the absence of a capacity for reflective shaping and endorsement of moral judgments. However, we suggest that the empirical literature indicates a complex interplay between automatic and deliberative mental processes in moral judgment formation, with the latter constraining the expression and influence of moral intuitions. We therefore conclude that the psychological literature supports a normative conception of agency.

Multinomial process tree models of control and automaticity in weapon misidentification

When primed with a Black face, people are more likely to misidentify a non-weapon as a weapon. Weapon misidentification may hinge on the distinction between controlled and automatic processes. Various relationships between controlled and automatic processes are cast in the form of five multinomial process models, which are illustrated and compared. It is shown that variants of the traditional Process Dissociation model and the Stroop model are nested within the Quad-Model. Across four different studies, various complexity corrected model performance measures converged to support the Process Dissociation account. This account suggests that the automatic association between race and weapons is subordinate to controlled processing. More generally, these results suggest that the weapon-bias might be alleviated without interventions that directly target stereotypes.     

When the method makes a difference: Antagonistic effects on “automatic evaluations” as a function of task characteristics of the measure

Researchers often employ implicit measures as dependent variables to investigate processes of attitude formation and change. In such studies, experimentally induced differences are typically interpreted as reflecting change in automatic evaluations. We argue that experimentally induced effects on implicit measures may not always reflect genuine changes in evaluative responses, but can be driven by the mechanisms underlying the measurement procedure. In line with this assumption, the present research shows that these mechanisms can produce opposite effects of the same experimental manipulation for otherwise equivalent implicit measures. These results indicate that merely observing experimental effects on implicit measures does not allow direct inferences regarding changes in automatic evaluations. Instead, psychological interpretations of such effects hinge upon the mechanics of how a given measurement procedure responds to variations in the context. Implications for research using implicit measures are discussed.     

Blocking a selective association in pigeons

Experiment 1 demonstrated for the first time a stimulus-reinforcer interaction in pigeons trained with free-operant multiple schedules of reinforcement. Pigeons that treadle pressed in the presence of a tone-light (TL) compound for food exhibited primarily visual stimulus control on a stimulus-element test, whereas pigeons that avoided shock in TL exhibited auditory control. In Experiment 2, this selective association was blocked in pigeons pretrained with the biologically contingency-disadvantage element of the compound (i.e., tone-food or light-shock) before TL training. When this pretraining preceded compound-stimulus training, control was now auditory in pigeons that treadle pressed for food and was visual in pigeons that avoided shock. Previous attempts at blocking this selective association were unsuccessful in pigeons (LoLordo, Jacobs, & Foree, 1982) but were successful in rats (Schindler & Weiss, 1985). Experiment 2 established that selective associations can be blocked in pigeons when the procedures that were effective with rats were systematically replicated. These results further demonstrate the cross-species generality of an associative attentional mechanism involving a biological constraint on learning in species with different dominant sensory systems.     

Implicit and explicit appraisals of the importance of intrusive thoughts

To evaluate cognitive theories of obsessions, the current study experimentally manipulated appraisals of the importance of intrusive thoughts. Undergraduate students (N = 156) completed measures of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) symptoms and beliefs and were primed with a list of commonly reported unwanted thoughts. Participants were then informed that unwanted thoughts are either (1) significant and indicative of their personal values, or (2) meaningless, or participants (3) received no instructions about unwanted thoughts. Participants then completed implicit and explicit measures of self-evaluation and interpretations of their unwanted thoughts. Results indicated that the manipulation shifted implicit appraisals of unwanted thoughts in the expected direction, but not self-evaluations of morality or dangerousness. Interestingly, explicit self-esteem and beliefs about the significance of unwanted thoughts were associated with measures of OCD beliefs, whereas implicit self-evaluations of dangerousness were better predicted by the interaction of pre-existing OCD beliefs with the manipulation. Results are discussed in terms of divergent predictors of implicit and explicit responses to unwanted thoughts.     

Preschoolers prior formal mathematics education engage numerical magnitude representation rather than counting principles in symbolic ±1 arithmetic: Evidence from the operational momentum effect

In numerical cognition research, the operational momentum (OM) phenomenon (tendency to overestimate the results of addition and/or binding addition to the right side and underestimating subtraction and/or binding it to the left side) can help illuminate the most basic representations and processes of mental arithmetic and their development. This study is the first to demonstrate OM in symbolic arithmetic in preschoolers. It was modeled on Haman and Lipowska's (2021) non-symbolic arithmetic task, using Arabic numerals instead of visual sets. Seventy-seven children (4–7 years old) who know Arabic numerals and counting principles (CP), but without prior school math education, solved addition and subtraction problems presented as videos with one as the second operand. In principle, such problems may be difficult when involving a non-symbolic approximate number processing system, whereas in symbolic format they can be solved based solely on the successor/predecessor functions and knowledge of numerical orders, without reference to representation of numerical magnitudes. Nevertheless, participants made systematic errors, in particular, overestimating results of addition in line with the typical OM tendency. Moreover, subtraction and addition induced longer response times when primed with left- and right-directed movement, respectively, which corresponds to the reversed spatial form of OM. These results largely replicate those of non-symbolic task and show that children at early stages of mastering symbolic arithmetic may rely on numerical magnitude processing and spatial-numerical associations rather than newly-mastered CP and the concept of an exact number.     

数字空间联结的灵活性及其内在机制

数字空间联结一直是认知心理学领域研究的热点之一。探索数字空间联结的一个重要指标为空间-数字反应联合编码(spatial-numerical association of response codes, SNARC)效应(左/右手对小/大数反应更快更准确)。以往研究已验证SNARC效应的普遍性及其在方向上的灵活性, 并提出多种理论解释。此外, SNARC效应在加工阶段上也具有灵活性, 其原因可能有：(1)加因素法则的理解偏差; (2)观察的角度单一; (3)观察效标的差异; (4)使用任务的差异。结合以上因素, 提出双阶段(数量信息的空间表征、空间表征到反应选择)加工模型, 不同的操控因素分别作用于两个阶段可能是引起SNARC效应灵活变化的核心原因。未来研究可从对比任务差异、引入不同干扰因素等方面进一步验证双阶段加工模型, 并结合认知神经科学技术揭示数字空间联结灵活性的内在神经机制。     

Task instructions and implicit theory of mind

It has been hypothesized that humans are able to track other’s mental states efficiently and without being conscious of doing so using their implicit theory of mind (iToM) system. However, while iToM appears to operate unconsciously recent work suggests it does draw on executive attentional resources ( Schneider, Lam, Bayliss, & Dux, 2012) bringing into question whether iToM is engaged efficiently. Here, we examined other aspects relating to automatic processing: The extent to which the operation of iToM is controllable and how it is influenced by behavioral intentions. This was implemented by assessing how task instructions affect eye-movement patterns in a Sally–Anne false-belief task. One group of subjects was given no task instructions (No Instructions), another overtly judged the location of a ball a protagonist interacted with (Ball Tracking) and a third indicated the location consistent with the actor’s belief about the ball’s location (Belief Tracking). Despite different task goals, all groups’ eye-movement patterns were consistent with belief analysis, and the No Instructions and Ball Tracking groups reported no explicit mentalizing when debriefed. These findings represent definitive evidence that humans implicitly track the belief states of others in an uncontrollable and unintentional manner.