Shedding new light on an old problem: The estimation of shadow sizes in children and adults

Two experiments using the 'projection of shadows' paradigm investigated multidimensional reasoning, implicit and explicit knowledge, and the nonlinearity concept in 5-, 9-, and 13-year-olds and adults. Participants estimated the resulting shadow lengths of differently sized objects, placed at varying distances from a light source. Experiment 1 (N=80) revealed that, on the group level, 5-year-olds took both object size and light-object distance into account when estimating shadow size. Moreover, half of the children in this age group even considered the subordinate distance dimension. In addition, we found a large discrepancy between implicit and explicit knowledge about shadows in 5-year-olds that decreased with age. Finally, only a minority of older participants and very few younger children recognized the nonlinear relationship between light-object distance and shadow size, suggesting domain dependence of the nonlinearity concept. Experiment 2 (N=20) predominately replicated the findings for 5-year-olds using slightly different stimuli.     

Improving postswitch performance in the dimensional change card-sorting task: the importance of the switch and of pretraining by redescribing the test cards

The dimensional change card-sorting task (DCCS) is used to assess the executive abilities of young children. Typically, 3-year-olds have difficulty in performing this task. However, the exact nature of this difficulty is still being debated. In the standard DCCS, children need to sort, for example, test cards with a blue flower or a red car into two boxes marked with the target cards. The 3-year-olds commonly have pronounced difficulty in switching from one sorting criterion (e.g., color) to another (e.g., shape). Here two experiments with 3-year-olds showed that making the transition between the sorting criteria more distinct improved performance significantly. This was achieved by taking away the target cards for a brief time period, asking a question irrelevant to the task, and pretraining the children by redescribing the test cards.     

The development of expert face processing: are infants sensitive to normal differences in second-order relational information?

Sensitivity to second-order relational information (i.e., spatial relations among features such as the distance between eyes) is a vital part of achieving expertise with face processing. Prior research is unclear on whether infants are sensitive to second-order differences seen in typical human populations. In the current experiments, we examined whether infants are sensitive to changes in the space between the eyes and between the nose and the mouth that are within the normal range of variability in Caucasian female faces. In Experiment 1, 7-month-olds detected these changes in second-order relational information. Experiment 2 extended this finding to 5-month-olds and also found that infants detect second-order relations in upright faces but not in inverted faces, thereby exhibiting an inversion effect that has been considered to be a hallmark of second-order relational processing during adulthood. These results suggest that infants as young as 5 months are sensitive to second-order relational changes that are within the normal range of human variability. They also indicate that at least rudimentary aspects of face processing expertise are available early in life.     

Status generalization in context: The moderating role of groups

Status generalization has been described as a process directly linking social status at the societal level to influence in interpersonal interactions, providing one mechanism through which status inequalities in society are maintained. It is argued in this paper that groups can moderate status generalization when a status characteristic is non-prototypical of the group. Two experiments are reported that measured the relative influence of an older and younger target within different group contexts: an undergraduate student group and a broader university group. In both experiments, the older target was more influential than the younger target in the context of the university group, but the younger target was more influential in the context of the undergraduate student group. Findings are discussed in relation to status generalization and referent informational influence as separate influence processes.     

Completed vs. interrupted priming: Reduced accessibility from post-fulfillment inhibition

We conceptualized an interrupted priming task as a state of an unfulfilled goal and a completed priming task as a post-fulfillment state. The accessibility of a primed construct was measured with both lexical decision and impression formation procedures. Lexical decisions showed enhanced accessibility of prime-related constructs after interrupted priming and reduced accessibility of the prime-related construct after completed priming. Replicating previous findings [Martin, L. L. (1986). Set/reset: Use and disuse of concepts in impression formation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51, 493-504], an ambiguous target was assimilated to the primed construct after interrupted priming, and was contrasted away from the primed construct after completed priming. Together, these results suggest that task fulfillment instigates inhibition of accessible constructs, in addition to (or instead of) a process of suppressing accessible constructs upon encountering a new target. These findings demonstrate how motivation can affect accessibility through inhibition as well as through suppression.     

A grotesque and dark beauty: How moral identity and mechanisms of moral disengagement influence cognitive and emotional reactions to war

Two studies examine the extent to which moral identity and moral disengagement jointly drive reactions to war. Study 1 finds support for a hypothesized positive relationship between moral disengagement and the perceived morality of a highly punitive response to the perpetuators of the September 11th attacks. It also finds that this effect was eliminated for participants who place high self-importance on their moral identities. Study 2 finds that moral disengagement effectively reduced the extent to which participants experienced negative emotions in reaction to abuses of Iraqi detainees by American soldiers; however, the effectiveness of moral disengagement was negated when participants’ moral identities were primed.     

The mere acceptance effect: Can it influence responses on racial Implicit Association Tests?

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is designed to measure the strength of mental association between each of a pair of target categories (e.g., Black vs. White) and each of a pair of attributes (e.g., negative vs. positive). Recent work on the mere acceptance effect shows that, if one of the categories is the focus of attention, then an apparent preference for the focal category can emerge on the IAT, even when no such preference actually exists. It has been suggested that mere acceptance could influence responding on names-based racial IATs, perhaps leading to an exaggeration of anti-Black/pro-White bias. Whether such IATs can be influenced by a mere acceptance effect is unknown, though. By manipulating whether “Black” or “White” was the focal category on a names-based racial IAT, the present studies addressed this very issue. The results were consistent with the operation of mere acceptance effects, but not effects large enough to fully explain the appearance of bias on the IAT.     

Multiple Cues in Social Perception: The Time Course of Processing Race and Facial Expression

The purpose of the present study was to examine the time course of race and expression processing to determine how these cues influence early perceptual as well as explicit categorization judgments. Despite their importance in social perception, little research has examined how social category information and emotional expression are processed over time. Moreover, although models of face processing suggest that the two cues should be processed independently, this has rarely been directly examined. Event-related brain potentials were recorded as participants made race and emotion categorization judgments of Black and White men posing either happy, angry, or neutral expressions. Our findings support that processing of race and emotion cues occur independently and in parallel, relatively early in processing.     

Gassing, braking, and self-regulating: Error self-regulation, well-being, and goal-related processes

Social cognitive models point to a widespread appreciation for the role that self-regulation functions play in mediating social outcomes. The present five studies, involving 527 undergraduate participants, sought to build on such models in the context of individual differences in error self-regulation. In this respect, the studies used a robust cognitive model, namely one that proposes that people seek to interrupt processing routines after making an error in choice reaction time tasks. Studies 1-3 showed that greater tendencies toward error self-regulation predicted higher levels of well-being. Studies 4-5 extended such results by showing that greater tendencies toward error self-regulation predicted superior abilities to recognize motive-relevant stimuli (Study 4) and override a prior task set in favor of a new task set (Study 5). Overall, the findings both point to the functionality of individual differences in error self-regulation and help to elucidate the processing basis of such relations.     

The role of egocentrism and focalism in the emotion intensity bias

People sometimes judge their emotions, preferences, and attitudes to be more intense than those of other people. Two experiments tested whether this emotion intensity bias in direct comparisons results from two non-motivated cognitive processes—egocentrism and focalism. In Study 1, the intensity bias was found even when comparing a friend’s preferences to peers. In Study 2, attention given to own versus other’s preferences, and the referent of the comparison (self or others) were manipulated. Results indicated that attention to others reduced the bias, presumably by reducing egocentrism. Consistent with focalism, the bias also emerged when a friend was the target of comparison, and the bias was eliminated when the self was the referent rather than the target of comparison. In the discussion, we evaluate these accounts in light of some alternative explanations for the intensity bias.