Isolating observer-based reference directions in human spatial memory: head, body, and the self-to-array axis

Several lines of research have suggested the importance of egocentric reference systems for determining how the spatial properties of one's environment are mentally organized. Yet relatively little is known about the bases for egocentric reference systems in human spatial memory. In three experiments, we examine the relative importance of observer-based reference directions in human memory by controlling the orientation of head and body during acquisition. Experiment 1 suggests that spatial memory is organized by a head-aligned reference direction; however, Experiment 2 shows that a body-aligned reference direction can be more influential than a head-aligned direction when the axis defined by the relative positions of the observer and the learned environment (the "self-to-array" axis) is properly controlled. A third experiment shows that the self-to-array axis is distinct from - and can dominate - retina, head, and body-based egocentric reference systems.     

Is a Single‐Bladed Knife Enough to Dissect Human Cognition? Commentary on Griffiths et al.

Griffiths, Christian, and Kalish (this issue) present an iterative-learning paradigm applying a Bayesian model to understand inductive biases in categorization. The authors argue that the paradigm is useful as an exploratory tool to understand inductive biases in situations where little is known about the task. It is argued that a theory developed only at the computational level is much like a single-bladed knife that is only useful in highly idealized situations. To be useful as a general tool that cuts through the complex fabric of cognition, we need at least two-bladed scissors that combine both computational and psychological constraints to characterize human behavior. To temper its sometimes expansive claims, it is time to show what a Bayesian model cannot explain. Insight as to how human reality may differ from the Bayesian predictions may shed more light on human cognition than the simpler focus on what the Bayesian approach can explain. There remains much to be done in terms of integrating Bayesian approaches and other approaches in modeling human cognition.     

Group information elaboration and group decision making: The role of shared task representations

Decision making groups often exchange and integrate distributed information to a lesser extent than is desirable for high-quality decisions. We propose that group members’ shared task representations play an important role in this respect, because groups are often insufficiently attuned to the task’s information elaboration requirements. Task representations emphasizing elaboration of decision-relevant information should therefore enhance decision-making performance. This should hold especially when group members realize that they share these task representations, because this realization removes psychological barriers to introducing new insights. Testing these hypotheses, we compared information elaboration and decision-making performance of control groups and groups receiving instructions emphasizing information elaboration in two experiments. Half of the experimental groups were also made to realize that they shared the elaboration instructions. As predicted, groups with task representations emphasizing information elaboration and the realization they shared these representations outperformed groups in the other conditions. This effect was mediated by information elaboration.     

手指的感知、运动以及数量表征对数字认知的促进作用

手指是儿童在习得数字符号之前最常使用的表征数量的工具,大量研究都表明手指在数字认知中具有促进作用。但是,目前仍不清楚手指在数字认知中的作用机制。综述从手指感知、手指运动以及手指数量表征三个方面总结了手指在数字认知中所起的作用。手指感知可能通过影响儿童的数量表征能力间接地影响其它数学能力;与表征量有关的手指运动可能促进了数量大小的加工。关于手指数量表征在数字认知中的作用存在两种有争议的观点：一种认为手指数量表征促进了儿童由非符号数量表征向符号数量表征的转化;另一种认为手指数量表征可能是一种数量语义表征方式。未来应该在发展、作用机制、性别差异等方向继续开展研究,进一步探讨手指在数字认知中所起的作用。     

Applying social psychology to the study of environmental concern and environmental worldviews: contributions from the social representations approach

Recently some social psychological approaches have intensified their contributions to research in the environmental domain, helping it to focus more consistently on the shared aspects of all environment related experiences. The goal of this paper is that of joining these efforts, exploring the contributions of the social representations approach to research on environmental concern and environmental thought, as another area for applying social psychological knowledge. The paper first sketches how the environmental concern of the publics emerged in the 70s as a problem for the social sciences and proceeds to summarizing the main characteristics of this research, focusing on three problematic areas: (1) incipient theoretical integration among the frameworks dominating research; (2) insufficient reflection about the assumptions and measurement of the concepts employed; (3) a need for new research questions that push studies beyond the analysis of the socio‐demographical correlates of beliefs. Afterwards a presentation of social representations theory will be undertaken and the usefulness of the approach to deal with some aspects of the problematic areas identified will be explored, with examples from recent research, and highlighting the importance of focusing on contradiction, polyphasia, and the articulation of the local and the global. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Young children's comprehension of English SVO word order revisited: Testing the same children in act-out and intermodal preferential looking tasks

Act-out and intermodal preferential looking (IPL) tasks were administered to 67 English children aged 2–0, 2–9 and 3–5 to assess their comprehension of canonical SVO transitive word order with both familiar and novel verbs. Children at 3–5 and at 2–9 showed evidence of comprehending word order in both verb conditions and both tasks, although children at 2–9 performed better with familiar than with novel verbs in the act-out task. Children at 2–0 showed no evidence of comprehending word order in either task with novel verbs; with familiar verbs they showed competence in the IPL task but not in the act-out task. The difference in performance for familiar and novel verbs from the same children at 2–0, on the IPL task, and at 2–9, on the act-out task, is consistent with the hypothesis that early linguistic/cognitive representations are graded in strength, with early representations still weak and very task dependent. However, these representations also become more abstract with development, as indicated by the familiarity effect even in the more sensitive IPL task.     

Keeping the vermin out: Perceived disease threat and ideological orientations as predictors of exclusionary immigration attitudes

Integrating evolutionary and social representations theories, the current study examines the relationship between perceived disease threat and exclusionary immigration attitudes in the context of a potential avian influenza pandemic. This large‐scale disease provides a realistic context for investigating the link between disease threat and immigration attitudes. The main aim of this cross‐sectional study (N = 412) was to explore mechanisms through which perceived chronic and contextual disease threats operate on immigration attitudes. Structural equation models show that the relationship between chronic disease threat (germ aversion) and exclusionary immigration attitudes (assimilationist immigration criteria, health‐based immigration criteria and desire to reduce the proportion of foreigners) was mediated by ideological and normative beliefs (social dominance orientation, belief in a dangerous world), but not by contextual disease threat (appraisal of avian influenza pandemic threat). Contextual disease threat only predicted support for health‐based immigration criteria. The conditions under which real‐life disease threats influence intergroup attitudes are scrutinized. Convergence and dissimilarity of evolutionary and social representational approaches in accounting for the link between disease threat and immigration attitudes are discussed. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

When competition merges people's behavior: Interdependency activates shared action representations

Previous research suggests that friendly, cooperative situations cause one to integrate a co-actor's actions into one's own action system. Departing from an interdependency perspective, we predict the activation of shared action representations even in hostile, competitive situations as a result of attending to the intentions of the co-actor. To test this, in Experiment 1 we manipulated the interdependency between actor and co-actor in a joint Simon task and observed a stronger activation of shared action representations in a cooperative as well as competitive context compared to an independent context. Experiment 2 replicated the competitive context effect on activation of shared action representations and provided additional evidence for the mediating role of attending to others’ intentions by taking into account the individual tendency to attend to others’ intentions. Together, our findings suggest that interdependency merges people's behavior even in competitive contexts, which we argue encourage actors to attend to others’ intentions.     

Incorporating Demographic Embeddings Into Language Understanding

Meaning depends on context. This applies in obvious cases like deictics or sarcasm as well as more subtle situations like framing or persuasion. One key aspect of this is the identity of the participants in an interaction. Our interpretation of an utterance shifts based on a variety of factors, including personal history, background knowledge, and our relationship to the source. While obviously an incomplete model of individual differences, demographic factors provide a useful starting point and allow us to capture some of this variance. However, the relevance of specific demographic factors varies between situations—where age might be the key factor in one context, ideology might dominate in another. To address this challenge, we introduce a method for combining demographics and context into situated demographic embeddings—mapping representations into a continuous geometric space appropriate for the given domain, showing the resulting representations to be functional and interpretable. We further demonstrate how to make use of related external data so as to apply this approach in low‐resource situations. Finally, we show how these representations can be incorporated into improve modeling of real‐world natural language understanding tasks, improving model performance and helping with issues of data sparsity.