Pragmatic expectations and linguistic evidence: Listeners anticipate but do not integrate common ground

When listeners search for the referent of a speaker’s expression, they experience interference from privileged knowledge, knowledge outside of their ‘common ground’ with the speaker. Evidence is presented that this interference reflects limitations in lexical processing. In three experiments, listeners’ eye movements were monitored as they searched for the target of a speaker’s referring expression in a display that also contained a phonological competitor (e.g., bucket/buckle). Listeners anticipated that the speaker would refer to something in common ground, but they did not experience less interference from a competitor in privileged ground than from a matched competitor in common ground. In contrast, interference from the competitor was eliminated when it was ruled out by a semantic constraint. These findings support a view of comprehension as relying on multiple systems with distinct access to information and present a challenge for constraint-based views of common ground.     

Implicit motivation to control prejudice

This research examines whether spontaneous, unintentional discriminatory behavior can be moderated by an implicit (nonconscious) motivation to control prejudice. We operationalize implicit motivation to control prejudice (IMCP) in terms of an implicit negative attitude toward prejudice (NAP) and an implicit belief that oneself is prejudiced (BOP). In the present experiment, an implicit stereotypic association of Blacks (vs. Whites) with weapons was positively correlated with the tendency to “shoot” armed Black men faster than armed White men (the “Shooter Bias”) in a computer simulation. However, participants relatively high in implicit negative attitude toward prejudice showed no relation between the race-weapons stereotype and the shooter bias. Implicit belief that oneself is prejudiced had no direct effect on this relation, but the interaction of NAP and BOP did. Participants who had a strong association between self and prejudice (high BOP) but a weak association between prejudice and bad (low NAP) showed the strongest relation between the implicit race-weapons stereotype and the Shooter Bias, suggesting that these individuals freely employed their stereotypes in their behavior.     

An experimental investigation of the automatic/voluntary dissociation in limb apraxia

The ability of apraxic patients to perform gestures in everyday life is a controversial issue. In this paper, we aimed to evaluate the automatic/voluntary dissociation (AVD) in four patients affected by clinically relevant limb apraxia. For this purpose, we sampled different kinds of gestures belonging to patients' motor repertoire and then assessed their production in a testing session. Our experimental procedure consisted of two steps: in the first phase, we recorded gestures produced by patients in two natural conditions; in the second phase, we assessed production of correctly produced tool-actions, and of spontaneous non tool-actions and meaningless conversational (cohesive and beats) gestures under different modalities. AVD was observed for all types of gestures, albeit to different degree in single patients. The present findings demonstrate that the context provides strong bottom-up cues for the retrieval of motor patterns, while artificial testing conditions impose an additional cognitive load.     

Controllability and resource dependence in automatic evaluation

Two studies addressed automaticity features of evaluative priming. In Study 1, participants could strategically eliminate and partially reverse priming effects although stimulus onset asynchrony between prime and target was short (275 ms) and time pressure considerable. In Study 2, priming effects under a concurrent memory load increased as measured working-memory capacity decreased. The results bear on the interpretation of evaluative priming as a measure of spontaneous evaluation, and they support an account of evaluative priming in terms of Stroop-like response conflict and synergy.     

Innovation,research integrity,and change: A conflict of interest management framework for program developers

Psychology and the social sciences have an important role to play in developing innovative solutions to pressing global mental health and social problems. Programs developed by psychologists and other social scientists have immense potential to alleviate suffering and to promote healthy human development across the lifespan. In order to realise this potential program developers must manage the research and development challenges involved in testing an intervention, evaluating, and then preparing it for wider dissemination and scaling. Particular challenges and conflicts can occur in managing the joint roles of being a program developer and a researcher evaluating an intervention or innovation. This article examines the management of various forms of conflicts of interest that have the potential to produce bias and decrease the confidence of policy makers, funders, practitioners, fellow researchers, and the public in the value of psychological interventions. We argue that best practice guidelines are needed to assist developers negotiate the predictable, sometime unavoidable but challenging conflicts of interest that arise in the research process.     

Evaluations of relational aggression as a function of relationship type and conflict setting

The present study examined influences on girls' evaluations of relational aggression situations. Second‐, third‐, fifth‐, and sixth‐grade girls evaluated four relational aggression conflict scenarios in terms of attributions of aggressor's intentions, evaluator's behavioral response, evaluator's affective state, and how likely the situation was to actually occur. Girls evaluated intentions of a best friend more positively, reported being more mad at an enemy, and perceived conflict to be more likely to occur with an enemy than a best friend. Aggressor intentions in direct conflict scenarios (aggressor said something mean to evaluator) were perceived as more negative than aggressor intentions in indirect conflict scenarios (aggressor said something mean about evaluator to another peer). Younger girls reported intentions of their enemy as being more positive than did older girls. Further, older girls reported intentions of their best friend as being more positive than intentions of their enemy. Older girls also were more accurate in conceptualizing variations in the conflict setting (direct, indirect) and responding in a context‐consistent manner. Findings are discussed in terms of the social‐relational and social‐situational processes that influence children's evaluations of relational aggression and how the current study extends previous research on relational aggression. Aggr. Behav. 26:179–191, 2000. © 2000 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Exploring visuomotor priming following biological and non-biological stimuli

Observation of human actions influences the observer’s own motor system, termed visuomotor priming, and is believed to be caused by automatic activation of mirror neurons. Evidence suggests that priming effects are larger for biological (human) as opposed to non-biological (object) stimuli and enhanced when viewing stimuli in mirror compared to anatomical orientation. However, there is conflicting evidence concerning the extent of differences between biological and non-biological stimuli, which may be due to stimulus related confounds. Over three experiments, we compared how visuomotor priming for biological and non-biological stimuli was affected over views, over time and when attention to the moving stimulus was manipulated. The results indicated that the strength of priming for the two stimulus types was dependent on attentional location and load. This highlights that visuomotor priming is not an automatic process and provides a possible explanation for conflicting evidence regarding the differential effects of biological and non-biological stimuli.     

Subjectively different emotional schematic faces not automatically discriminated from the brain’s bioelectrical responses

The present study investigates how the brain automatically discriminates emotional schematic faces, as indicated by the mismatch responses, and how reliable these brain responses are. Thirty-three healthy volunteers participated in the vMMN EEG experiment with four experimental sets differing from each other by the type of standard (object with scrambled face features) and the type of deviants (Angry, Happy and Neutral schematic faces) presented. Conscious subjective evaluations of valence, arousal and attention catching of the same stimuli showed clear differentiation of emotional expressions. Deviant faces elicited rather similar vMMN at frontal and occipital sites. Bayesian analyses suggest that vMMN does not differ between angry and happy faces. Neutral faces, however, did not yield statistically significant vMMN at occipital leads. Pearson’s correlation and intra-class correlation analyses showed that the brain’s reactions to the stimuli were highly stable within individuals across the experimental sets, whereas the mismatch responses were much more variable.     

Fuzzy rough sets: Survey and proposal of an enhanced knowledge representation model based on automatic noisy sample detection

Fuzzy Rough Set (FRS) theory, which has been emerged thanks to unifying Rough Set and Fuzzy Set ones, is a powerful mathematical tool for handling and processing real data of imprecise, incomplete, inconsistent and uncertain nature. It has drawn attention of many researchers, scientists and industrials in various domains over the last three decades. However, different studies have showed that its classical knowledge representation model has a main weakness linked to its sensitivity to data noise which decreases both its effectiveness and application scope. In this paper, we survey the current FRS paradigms developed to deal with this issue and propose a new FRS model based on the Automatic Noisy Sample Detection (ANSD-FRS) able to cope with noise influence in classification tasks. Besides, we study the principal properties of this new model and reformulate the most applied FRS concepts relying on its operators. Numerous experiments have been conducted to analyze the ANSD-FRS behavior compared to the commonly used FRS models reputed as the most noise-resistant paradigms. These experiment results have proved the performance and robustness of the ANSD-FRS in comparison with those renowned models.