Is inclusion a valid control for ostracism?

Considerable knowledge about ostracism’s impact comes from research using Cyberball, an online ball-tossing game. In Cyberball, the inclusion condition is the control condition, to which ostracism is compared. The assumption is that Cyberball-inclusion is not affirming and represents an expected level of inclusion. However, without a no-inclusion control condition, it is unclear whether inclusion elevates need satisfaction, whether ostracism depresses need satisfaction, or both. We introduce Cybertree—a control condition designed to provide a similar experience to Cyberball without inclusion. Individuals playing Cybertree did not differ from included individuals in terms of feeling ostracized, level of need satisfaction, and mood. Both Cyberball inclusion and Cybertree differed significantly from ostracized individuals. We conclude that Cyberball inclusion is a reasonable control group for Cyberball ostracism but discuss research questions that may benefit from the use of Cybertree.     

Problems inhibiting attentional capture by irrelevant stimuli in patients with frontotemporal dementia

We studied the role of the frontal lobes in orienting spatial attention and inhibiting attentional capture by goal-irrelevant stimuli, using a spatial cueing method in patients with frontotemporal dementia (FTD). Two blocks of trials were presented, one with non-predictive cues and the other with counter-predictive cues. FTD patients showed a global orienting deficit, with a greater difference between invalid and valid trials than age-matched controls. However, they were able to use the (counter-) predictiveness of the cue to reduce the invalid/valid difference when targets occurred most often in the location opposite the cue. Thus, endogenous control of attention in our FTD patients was sufficient to reorient attention on the basis of the probability of events, but not to resist the capture of attention by goal-irrelevant stimuli. These results confirm the role of frontal lobes in the inhibition of attentional capture.     

Counter-stereotypical impulsivity and violence among African American college men

The study examined the relationship between impulse control and violence in terms of past feelings and acts among African American males enrolled in Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Data were gathered from a sample of 1,874 male undergraduates in eleven colleges and universities with predominantly African-American students. Less than six percent were classified as impulsive, and even less than half of the impulsive males had past feelings and acts of violence. The study offers strategies for impulse control which may help to further minimize incidents of violence on the college campus.     

Dissociations in performance on novel versus irregular items: single-route demonstrations with input gain in localist and distributed models

Four pairs of connectionist simulations are presented in which quasi-regular mappings are computed using localist and distributed representations. In each simulation, a control parameter termed input gain was modulated over the only level of representation that mapped inputs to outputs. Input gain caused both localist and distributed models to shift between regularity-based and item-based modes of processing. Performance on irregular items was selectively impaired in the regularity-based modes, whereas performance on novel items was selectively impaired in the item-based modes. Thus, the models exhibited double dissociations without separable processing components. These results are discussed in the context of analogous dissociations found in language domains such as word reading and inflectional morphology.     

Children Apply Principles of Physical Ownership to Ideas

Adults apply ownership not only to objects but also to ideas. But do people come to apply principles of ownership to ideas because of being taught about intellectual property and copyrights? Here, we investigate whether children apply rules from physical property ownership to ideas. Studies 1a and 1b show that children (6–8 years old) determine ownership of both objects and ideas based on who first establishes possession of the object or idea. Study 2 shows that children use another principle of object ownership, control of permission—an ability to restrict others’ access to the entity in question—to determine idea ownership. In Study 3 , we replicate these findings with different idea types. In Study 4 , we determine that children will not apply ownership to every entity, demonstrating that they do not apply ownership to a common word. Taken together, these results suggest that, like adults, children as young as 6 years old apply rules from ownership not only to objects but to ideas as well.     

Novelty as Opportunity and Risk: A Situated Cognition Analysis of Psychological Control and Novelty Seeking

Novel products present unknown opportunities as well as unknown risks. Past research suggested that low psychological control highlights risks and reduces the adoption of novel products. Consistent with a situated cognition perspective, we show that this depends on the specifics of low control. Across five studies, novelty seeking was lower after consumers thought about instances of low (vs. high) personal influence, but higher after consumers thought about instances of low (vs. high) predictability of the world. Thinking about a lack of personal influence increased the perceived importance of personal capability and in turn impaired the exploration of novel options, whereas thinking about an unpredictable world increased the perceived importance of preparedness for an unknown future and in turn the exploration of novel options. Throughout, perceiving low personal influence benefited familiar products, whereas seeing the world as unpredictable benefited novel products. This highlights that understanding consumers' responses to a lack of control requires joint consideration of the specifics of threat and task, consistent with situated cognition principles.     

A Longitudinal Investigation of Perceived Control and Cognitive Performance in Young,Midlife and Older Adults

ABSTRACT

Longitudinal associations between generalized control beliefs (one's perceived capacity to influence events) and cognitive test performance were examined in a population-based sample of young, midlife and older adults. Participants provided measures of perceived control, self-assessed health, education and depression and anxiety symptoms, and completed cognitive tests at two assessments, 4 years apart. For each age group, baseline (between-person) control was positively related to performance on tests of memory (immediate recall and digits backwards), speed (Symbol Digit Modalities Test and choice reaction time) and verbal intelligence (Spot-the-Word). Interaction effects indicated stronger associations of between-person control beliefs with indices of speed for the older age group relative to the younger groups. Within-person changes in control were not significantly associated with changes in cognitive test performance over the study interval. Implications of the findings for self-efficacy based interventions designed to promote cognitive functioning are discussed.     

Separating goals from behavioral control: Implications from learning predictive modularizations

The brain may be regarded as an anticipatory machine whose behavior strongly depends on its current predictive knowledge. Behavioral decision making depends on anticipated goal states as well as on the current internal motivations of the organism. Behavioral control, on the other hand, is guided by the goals currently chosen along with additional constraints. Both, decision making and control are thus anticipatory processes. Moreover, they are mutually dependent: while action control depends on currently selected goals, goal selection depends on achievability estimates, which must be based on the system's current action control competence. An autonomous, adaptive system thus faces the challenge of learning goal representations that are suitable for both, action selection and action control. We propose that a goal processing pathway should be separated from but also strongly interact with a sensorimotor control pathway. We investigate the encoding structures expectable along these two pathways for realizing effective and flexible action decision making and control. While the goal processing pathway needs to be able to distinguish motivation-oriented relevancies for decision making, the sensorimotor pathway needs to provide control-oriented encodings. We use an evolutionary machine learning technique to investigate how important modularity may be for realizing particular sensorimotor mappings. Next, we survey the results obtained by a neural network architecture, which show that enforcing multiplicative interactions between self-organizing sensorimotor control-oriented encodings and goal-oriented interaction selection encodings enables the learning of highly flexible decision making and action control structures. Furthermore, we show that the emerging goal-oriented encodings exhibit pre-linguistic compositional structures. We conclude that for bootstrapping higher-level cognitive capabilities it may be essential on the one hand to separate sensorimotor, anticipatory, control-oriented spatial encodings from compositional, goal-oriented spaces, and on the other hand to enable bidirectional, multiplicative interactions between these two sets of spatial encodings.     

Violations of Fitts’ Law in a Ballistic Task

ABSTRACT

The authors explored changes in the postural preparation and movement times during jumps into targets of different sizes placed at different distances from the participant. Both movement and preparation times scaled with movement distance. Neither movement nor preparation time showed an effect of target size, although preparation time showed a tendency to increase for smaller targets. These observations show that the classical Fitts’ law can be violated in tasks that involve a ballistic component. The data corroborate a hypothesis that Fitts’ law originates at the level of movement planning.     

framing of prenatal screening test results and women's health-illness orientations as determinants of perceptions of fetal health and approval of amniocentesis

Abstract

Framing effects of medical test results and interactions of these effects with personal perspectives were investigated in the context of prenatal screening. Hundred and Thirty-three pregnant women undergoing the ‘triple-test’ were assessed as having health or illness orientations, and were randomly presented with reassuring/moderate/severe diagnoses framed in normal/abnormal terms, forming a 2 × 3 × 2 between subjects design. Evaluations of fetus' health and recommendations to perform amniocentesis were assessed. Findings showed healthier evaluations of the fetus and weaker recommendations to perform amniocentesis in normal versus abnormal framings. An interaction was found between framing, diagnosis, and personal orientations: women with health orientations receiving a moderate diagnosis framed in abnormal terms were significantly more inclined to recommend amniocentesis than illness-oriented women given the same diagnosis; the normal/abnormal framing of severe diagnoses yielded opposite effects on health-oriented versus illness-oriented women. The influences of framing effects and health/ illness orientations on health perceptions and behavioral intentions were discussed.