Between a rock and a hard place: Damned if you do, damned if you don’t

Individuals are frequently forced to make decisions from among undesirable choice-sets. Raise taxes or cut social services? Lay off workers or go bankrupt? Go deep in debt or forgo a college education? The research presented here suggests that in such situations, decision-makers are often evaluated negatively regardless of the choice they make. In Experiment 1, participants read about a judge deciding which of two seemingly unfit parents to award sole custody in a real-life divorce case. In Experiment 2, participants were led to believe that their partner in the experiment was forced to pick one of two unpleasant tasks for the participant to perform. In both cases, the decision and decision-maker were evaluated negatively regardless of the alternative chosen–and regardless of the fact that they were the only options in the choice-set. Discussion focuses on the source, scope, and consequences of this phenomenon.     

Do local properties function as cues for musical key perception?1

Abstract: A global property (i.e., pitch set) of a melody appears to serve as a primary cue for key identification. Previous studies have proposed specific local properties in a melody (e.g., the augmented fourth, the perfect fifth, etc.) that may function as further cues. However, the role of the latter in key identification is controversial. The present study was designed to investigate what kinds of local properties, if any, function as reliable cues for key identification. Listeners were asked to identify keys for 450 melodies that consisted of the same pitch set, but which differed in sequential constraints. Using multiple discriminant analyses, we evaluated relative contributions of as many kinds of local properties as possible (e.g., single intervals, single pitch classes in each sequential position, etc.). The results showed that, except for the pitch class of the final tone, for which interpretation should be taken cautiously, none of the specific local properties examined contributed significantly to key identification. This finding suggests that, contrary to prior findings, key identification is derived from unidentified properties other than the specific local properties.     

Culture and visual perception: Does perceptual inference depend on culture?1,2

Abstract: Some perceptual cues carry information about the overall pattern of an object (holistic cues), whereas others carry information about the distinct parts of an object (part cues). Drawing on recent work on culture and cognition, the authors predicted that people with European‐American cultural backgrounds would be more capable of using part cues in perceptual inference than those with Asian backgrounds. No such cross‐cultural difference was expected for the ability to use holistic cues. In two studies, participants were presented with either one of the two types of cues and asked to infer the identity of the original objects. As predicted, in the part‐cue condition European‐American participants performed better than did Japanese (Study 1) and Asian‐American participants (Study 2). Also as predicted, there was no cultural difference in the holistic‐cue condition. The results were interpreted with reference to other related studies documenting reliable cross‐cultural differences in cognition.     

A pox on the mind: Disjunction of attention and memory in the processing of physical disfigurement

The unfavorable treatment of people with physical disfigurements is well-documented, yet little is known about basic perceptual and cognitive responses to disfigurement. Here, we identify a specialized pattern of cognitive processing consistent with the hypothesis that disfigurements act as heuristic cues to contagious disease. Disfigurements are often invariant across time and difficult to conceal, and thus observers can detect the presence of such cues without necessarily remembering the particular individuals bearing these cues. Indeed, despite the fact that disfigured faces were especially likely to hold disease-sensitive perceivers’ attention (Study 1), disfigured individuals were often confused with one another and thus not well remembered later (Study 2), revealing a disjunction of the typical relationship between elevated attention and elevated memory. We discuss the implications of our results for stigmatization of people with and without physical abnormalities and suggest the possibility that cognitive mechanisms for processing social information may be functionally tuned to the variant nature of important cues.     

Person perception by active versus passive perceivers

Person perception research is dominated by studies of passive perceivers who exert no control over the information they receive. In contrast, perceivers in everyday life can often actively choose the type and quantity of information they receive. In this study, active and yoked passive perceivers formed impressions of individuals based on information from Facebook. Compared to active perceivers, passive perceivers reported greater confidence and ease in their judgments. Passive perceivers exhibited greater confidence (though not greater accuracy) with increased information, but active perceivers did not show this effect, placing a boundary condition on past research. Passive perceivers also liked targets more than active perceivers, a finding that is not explained by valence-dependant sampling by active participants, or by misattribution of fluency or greater sensitivity among passive participants. These provocative findings highlight the need to account for active and interactive processes in person perception rather than continuing to focus on passive perceivers.     

Reward value effects on timing in the peak procedure

Three experiments examined the effect of motivational variables on timing in the peak procedure. In Experiment 1, rats received a 60-s peak procedure that was coupled with long-term, between-phase changes in reinforcer magnitude. Increases in reinforcer magnitude produced a leftward shift in the peak that persisted for 20 sessions of training. In a final phase, the rats received lithium chloride-induced aversion prior to testing and a rightward shift in the peak was observed. Experiment 2 confirmed the rightward shift in the peak under lithium chloride devaluation and induced a comparable shift with satiety devaluation. The degree of rightward shift was neither additive nor multiplicative, suggesting that two processes may have contributed. Experiment 3 examined the effect of extinction on peak responding, revealing a decrease in response rate, but no evidence of any change in the timing of responding. The implications of the results for contemporary timing theories are discussed.     

Inter-species variation in colour perception

Inter-species variation in colour perception poses a serious problem for the view that colours are mind-independent properties. Given that colour perception varies so drastically across species, which species perceives colours as they really are? In this paper, I argue that all do. Specifically, I argue that members of different species perceive properties that are determinates of different, mutually compatible, determinables. This is an instance of a general selectionist strategy for dealing with cases of perceptual variation. According to selectionist views, objects simultaneously instantiate a plurality of colours, all of them genuinely mind-independent, and subjects select from amongst this plurality which colours they perceive. I contrast selectionist views with relationalist views that deny the mind-independence of colour, and consider some general objections to this strategy.     

Chinese deaf adolescents' free recall of taxonomic, slot-filler, and thematic categories

Four experiments were conducted to show that deaf adolescents tended to process information in different ways from hearing adolescents. Memorizing items sequentially shown on computer screens under the control of their articulators' movements, deaf adolescents tended to treat items that cohered as taxonomic, thematic, or slot-filler categories as isolated pieces of information. Having to perceive information by means of sign language, however, their achievements were not worse than those of hearing adolescents anymore, no matter whether the stimuli were presented as words or pictures. They could not only utilize categories relations to help memorize categories exemplars but were relatively better aware of slot-filler or thematic than taxonomic relations as well, suggesting that they had a relatively delayed development of taxonomic category representations in comparison with hearing adolescents.     

Visual discrimination of vowel duration

Discrimination of vowel duration was explored with regard to discrimination threshold, error bias, and effects of modality and consonant context. A total of 122 normal-hearing participants were presented with disyllabic-like items such as /lal-lal/ or /mam-mam/ in which the lengths of the vowels were systematically varied and were asked to judge whether the first or second vowel was longer. Presentation was either visual, auditory, or audiovisual. Vowel duration differences varied in 24 steps: 12 with a longer first /a/ and 12 with a longer last /a/ (range: ±33–400 ms). Results: 50% JNDs were smaller than the lowest tested step size (33 ms); 75% JNDs were in the 33–66 ms range for all conditions but V /lal/, with a 75% JND at 66–100 ms. Errors were greatest for visual presentation and for /lal-lal/ tokens. There was an error bias towards reporting the first vowel as longer, and this was strongest for /mam-mam/ and when both vowels were short, possibly reflecting a sublinguistic processing strategy.     

Sociosexuality and face perception: Unrestricted sexual orientation facilitates sensitivity to female facial cues

Across two studies, sexually unrestricted men and women showed heightened sensitivity to female facial symmetry (a signal of genetic fitness) and female sexual receptivity (happy facial expressions). In Study 1, individuals assessed the attractiveness of male and female targets of varying facial symmetry. Sexually unrestricted men and women, compared to their sexually restricted counterparts, showed a stronger symmetry advantage in attractiveness ratings for female targets, an indication of greater sensitivity to facial symmetry. Study 2 asked participants to discriminate between genuine (Duchenne) and deceptive smiles on both male and female faces. Results indicated that sexually unrestricted men and women, compared to sexually restricted individuals, were better able to discriminate between these actual and deceptive signals of receptivity for female targets. Neither study found any relationship between sociosexual orientation and the perception of male targets. These results suggest that sexually unrestricted individuals are attuned to reproductively-relevant cues in female faces.