“Victims” Versus “Righteous Victims”: The Rhetorical Construction of Social Categories in Historical Dialogue Among Israeli and Palestinian Youth

Informed by social identity theory and a rhetorical approach to the study of social category construction in social interaction, this study analyzed the nature and function of participant utterances in two conditions of intergroup dialogue about history between Israelis and Palestinians. Across conditions that sought to either emphasize recategorization into a common in‐group identity or subcategorization into mutually differentiated identities, Palestinian and Arab Israeli utterances primarily reflected the theme of victimization, while Jewish Israeli utterances primarily reflected themes of justification and victimization. The way in which these utterances produced social competition for victim and perpetrator roles and reproduced master historical narratives of Palestinian victimization versus Jewish Israeli “righteous” victimization is illustrated. Findings are discussed in terms of the role of narrative and rhetoric about social categories in settings of intractable political conflict, and implications for dialogue‐based intervention about history are addressed.     

The sensory nature of knowledge: Sensory priming effects in semantic categorization

The aim of the present study was to show the perceptual nature of conceptual knowledge by using a priming paradigm that excluded an interpretation exclusively in terms of amodal representation. This paradigm was divided into two phases. The first phase consisted in learning a systematic association between a geometrical shape and a white noise. The second phase consisted of a short-term priming paradigm in which a primed shape (either associated or not with a sound in the first phase) preceded a picture of an object, which the participants had to categorize as representing a large or a small object. The objects were chosen in such a way that their principal function either was associated with the production of noise (“noisy” target) or was not typically associated the production of noise (“silent” target). The stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the prime and the target was 100 ms or 500 ms. The results revealed an interference effect with a 100-ms SOA and a facilitatory effect with a 500-ms SOA for the noisy targets only. We interpreted the interference effect obtained at the 100-ms SOA as the result of an overlap between the components reactivated by the sound prime and those activated by the processing of the noisy target. At an SOA of 500 ms, there was no temporal overlap. The observed facilitatory effect was explained by the preactivation of auditory areas by the sound prime, thus facilitating the categorization of the noisy targets only.     

Masked translation priming asymmetry in Chinese-English bilinguals: Making sense of the Sense Model

Masked translation priming asymmetry is the robust finding that priming from a bilingual's first language (L1) to their second language (L2) is stronger than priming from L2 to L1. This asymmetry has been claimed to be task dependent. The Sense Model proposed by Finkbeiner, Forster, Nicol, and Nakamura (2004) claims that the asymmetry is reduced in semantic categorization relative to lexical decision due to a category filtering mechanism that limits the features considered in categorization decisions to dominant, category-relevant features. This paper reports two pairs of semantic categorization and lexical decision tasks designed to test the Sense Model's predictions. The experiments replicated the finding of Finkbeiner et al. that L2-L1 priming is somewhat stronger in semantic categorization than lexical decision, selectively for exemplars of the category. However, the direct comparison of L2-L1 and L1-L2 translation priming across tasks failed to confirm the Sense Model's central prediction that translation priming asymmetry is significantly reduced in semantic categorization. The data therefore fail to support the category filtering account of translation priming asymmetry. Rather, they suggest that pre-activation of conceptual features of the target category provides feedback to lexical forms that compensates for the weak connections between the lexical and conceptual representations of L2 words.     

Executive functions and achievements in school: Shifting,updating, inhibition,and working memory

Links have recently been established between measures of educational attainment and both verbal and visuo-spatial aspects of working memory. Relationships have also been identified between specific executive functions—shifting, updating, and inhibition—and scholastic achievement. In the present study, scholastic attainment, shifting, updating, inhibition, and verbal and visuo-spatial working memory were assessed in 11- and 12-year-old children. Exploratory factor analysis identified two executive factors: one associated with updating functions and one associated with inhibition. Updating abilities were closely linked with performance on both verbal and visuo-spatial working memory span tasks. Working memory was closely linked with attainment in English and mathematics, and inhibition was associated with achievement in English, mathematics, and science. Domain-specific associations existed between verbal working memory and attainment in English, and between visuo-spatial working memory and attainment in English, mathematics and science. Implications of the findings for the theoretical analysis of executive functioning, working memory and children's learning are discussed.     

The importance of feature distribution and correlation for simulating 3 to 4-month-old infants' visual categorization processes

Mareschal, French, and Quinn (2000) and Mareschal, Quinn, and French (2002) have proposed a connectionist model of visual categorization in 3- to 4-month-old infants that simulates and predicts previously unexplained behavioural effects such as the asymmetric categorization effect (French, Mareschal, Mermillod, & Quinn, 2004). In the current paper, we show that the model's ability to simulate the asymmetry depends on the correlational structure of the stimuli. These results are important given that adults (Anderson & Fincham, 1996) as well as infants (Younger & Cohen, 1986) are able to rely on correlation information to perform visual categorization. At a behavioural level, the current paper suggests that pure bottom-up processes, based on the correlational structure of the categories, could explain the disappearance of the asymmetry in older 10-month-old infants (Furrer & Younger, 2005). Moreover, our results also raise new challenges for visual categorization models that attempt to simulate the shift from asymmetric categorization in 3- to 4-month-old to symmetric categorization in 10-month-old infants (Shultz & Cohen, 2004; Westermann & Mareschal, 2004, 2012).     

Categorical perception of morphed objects using a free-naming experiment

Morphed figures entail a dominant and nondominant interpretation. Testing perception of morphed objects using forced-choice methods demonstrates that morphed figures are perceived as their dominant interpretation (“categorical perception”, or CP). Using a more natural free-naming response could reveal whether CP is an effect independent of method. In Experiment 1, therefore, series of morphed figures were tested for CP using free naming. Half of the morph series were identified as CP patterns. In Experiment 2, we used forced choice to investigate CP, resulting in an increase of number of CP series compared to free naming. The overlap between CP series of Experiments 1 and 2 was small, however. Experiment 3 revealed that higher perceptual similarity between the extremes of the series was strongly related to CP for the free-naming method, in contrast to the forced-choice method. We conclude that the observation of CP depends on the intactness of the intrinsic object structure caused by the morphing procedure.     

The influence of age and gender on ultra-rapid categorization

ABSTRACT

In ultra-rapid categorization studies, population-level reaction time differences in performance are consistently reported. In a previous study, we replicated these findings and also observed consistent gender differences in young adults (18–24 years old). We now tested a group of adolescents (11–16 years old) on the same ultra-rapid categorization tasks. Results indicated that age had a significant impact on categorization performance. Although women outperformed men during adulthood, this effect reversed in adolescence (boys faster than girls). This gender x age interaction for categorizing meaningful (non-)social visual scenes could be caused by gender-specific development processes underlying emotion regulation strategies and/or context sensitivity.     

Developmental and Social Determinants of Religious Social Categorization

The purpose of this study was to assess developmental and social determinants of the age at which children become aware that the social environment can be marked by categorization into religious groups and that those groups are associated with different religious beliefs. The results show that middle childhood is a critical period for this religious social categorization. Moreover, social factors play a role in the development. Religious categorization is likely to appear sooner in children attending heterogeneous schools than in those at homogeneous schools, and children from the minority religious group in the country understand religious categorization earlier than children from the majority group. However, no relation was found between the age at which religious categorization was understood and parents’ religious socialization practices. This study is of both theoretical and practical interest: It complements what is already known about gender, race, and ethnic categorization by integrating developmental and social frameworks, and it can serve as a guideline for educational programs.     

Typicality effects in contingency-shaped generalized equivalence classes

Two experiments were conducted using match-to-sample methodologies in an effort to model lexical classes, which include both arbitrary and perceptual relations between class members. Training in both experiments used a one-to-many mapping procedure with nonsense syllables as samples and eight sets of abstract stimuli as comparisons. These abstract stimuli differed along a number of dimensions, four of which were critical to the experimenter-defined class membership. Stimuli in some comparison sets included only one of the class-defining features, but stimuli in other sets included two, three, or all four of the critical features. After mastery of the baseline training, three types of probe tests were conducted: symmetry, transitivity/equivalence, and novel probe tests in which the training nonsense syllables served as samples, and comparisons were novel abstract stimuli that included one or more of the class-defining features. Symmetry and transitivity/equivalence probe tests showed that the stimuli used in training became members of equivalence classes. The novel stimuli also became class members on the basis of inclusion of any of the critical features. Thus these probe tests revealed the formation of open-ended generalized equivalence classes. In addition, typicality effects were observed such that comparison sets with more critical features were learned with fewer errors, responded to more rapidly, and judged to be better exemplars of the class. Contingency-shaped stimulus classes established through a match-to-sample procedure thus show several important behavioral similarities to natural lexical categories.