Strategic adaptation to performance objectives in a dual-task setting

How do people interleave attention when multitasking? One dominant account is that the completion of a subtask serves as a cue to switch tasks. But what happens if switching solely at subtask boundaries led to poor performance? We report a study in which participants manually dialed a UK‐style telephone number while driving a simulated vehicle. If the driver were to exclusively return his or her attention to driving after completing a subtask (i.e., using the single break in the xxxxx‐xxxxxx representational structure of the number), then we would expect to see a relatively poor driving performance. In contrast, our results show that drivers choose to return attention to steering control before the natural subtask boundary. A computational modeling analysis shows that drivers had to adopt this strategy to meet the required performance objective of maintaining an acceptable lateral position in the road while dialing. Taken together these results support the idea that people can strategically control the allocation of attention in multitask settings to meet specific performance criteria.     

显示方式对小学生阅读动态文本的影响

以小学三年级和五年级学生为被试,在机控速度（240字/分）条件下,如何在单行呈现动态文本以提高小学生的阅读绩效。实验采用2（呈现方式：引导式、RSVP）×2（年级：三年级、五年级）×2（窗口：5字、10字）的多因素混合实验设计。结果发现：（1）在呈现方式上,平滑滚动引导式优于RSVP,更受被试偏爱;（2）在两种呈现方式下,五年级的阅读正确率显著高于三年级;（3）与平滑滚动引导式相比,窗口大小对RSVP的影响更大。     

基于系统动力学的群体情绪传播模型

选取某高校20个教学班级共计614人为被试,采用心理学实证与系统动力学（system of dynamic）与社会网络（social network）建模相结合的研究方法,对群体情绪传播的动力学规律进行了建模,并将模型仿真结果与心理实验结果进行了比对。结果表明,所建立的模型能够较好地刻画出群体情绪传播的动力学规律,具有较高的生态效度。该模型的建立对群体性事件的定量预警与监控提供了基础理论依据。     

动态非注意盲中的分心物加工机制：是否存在抑制

系统考察在控制目标与非目标颜色特征属性的条件下, 动态非注意盲中视觉系统是否存在对分心物的抑制机制。实验一为基线实验, 将目标与非目标设置为相同的白色圆形, 考察被试对不同颜色特征(白色或者黑色)新异刺激的觉察情况; 实验二和实验三通过改变目标与非目标的颜色特征, 进一步探讨视觉系统对分心物(包括非目标和新异刺激)的抑制机制。结果发现, 视觉系统对干扰目标追踪(并计数)任务的分心物均产生抑制作用, 并且不同颜色特征的分心物受到的抑制作用不同, 与目标颜色特征相同的分心物受到的抑制作用较大, 相应新异刺激的觉察率低; 与目标颜色特征区分明显的分心物受到的抑制作用较小, 相应新异刺激的觉察率较高。     

The Importance of Community Context for Young Women’s Occupational Aspirations

The effects of community context on occupational aspirations are examined in a national sample of young women in high school in the USA in 1979 (n = 2,210). Multilevel statistical models indicate that young women living in counties with a lower divorce rate, a lower percentage of women working, and more people employed in the wholesale and retail industrial sector tended to be less likely to aspire to paid work than young women living in areas with a higher divorce rate, a higher percentage of women working, and fewer people employed in the wholesale and retail industrial sector. Community context does not affect the level of young women’s occupational aspirations as predicted by prior scholarship. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2006 Southern Sociological Society Annual Meetings. The author thanks John Reynolds, Patricia Yancey Martin, Irene Padavic, Robert Kunovich, Jennifer Keene, Mary Guy, and the editor and reviewers at Sex Roles for their helpful comments on previous drafts of this paper.     

Don’t Ever Do That! Long-term Duties in <Emphasis Type="Italic">PD</Emphasis><Subscript><Emphasis Type="Italic">e</Emphasis></Subscript><Emphasis Type="Italic">L</Emphasis>

This paper studies long-term norms concerning actions. In Meyer’s Propositional Deontic Logic (PD _e L), only immediate duties can be expressed, however, often one has duties of longer durations such as: “Never do that”, or “Do this someday”. In this paper, we will investigate how to amend PD _e L so that such long-term duties can be expressed. This leads to the interesting and suprising consequence that the long-term prohibition and obligation are not interdefinable in our semantics, while there is a duality between these two notions. As a consequence, we have provided a new analysis of the long-term obligation by introducing a new atomic proposition I (indebtedness) to represent the condition that an agent has some unfulfilled obligation. Presented by Jacek Malinowski     

Preliminary evidence of diurnal rhythms in everyday behaviors associated with positive affect

The authors used the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR) to track within-day variability in everyday behaviors associated with positive and negative affect across two samples. The EAR is a portable audio recorder that periodically samples snippets of ambient sounds from participants’ momentary environments. The recorded sounds are then coded for different behaviors. The study tested whether previous findings regarding diurnal patterns in self-reported mood extend to naturalistically observed behavior. Across both samples, behavior associated with positive affect (i.e., socializing, laughing, and singing) varied according to a sinusoidal 24-h rhythm centered around participants’ average waketime while behavior associated with negative affect (i.e., arguing and sighing) did not. Further, there was preliminary evidence that personality traits can moderate these rhythms (e.g., their amplitude).     

Never quite good enough: The paradox of sticky developmental relationships for elite university graduates

Drawing on the mentoring, education, and social psychology literatures, this longitudinal study examines how the persistence of developmental relationships from an elite graduate school influences subjective career outcomes during early career. Participants (n = 136) were surveyed about their developmental networks—a group of individuals who take an active interest in and action to advance a focal individual’s career—and subjective career outcomes over the 10 years (1996-2006) post graduation. Results show that although receiving mentoring from one’s entire developmental network was positively related to career-related self-efficacy and perceptions of career success, this was not the case for ties retained from graduate school. Continuing to receive mentoring support from developers from graduate school and further, from peers from graduate school, was negatively related to perceptions of career success. These findings offer insight into the dynamics and potentially negative consequences of developmental networks and highlight the significance of social comparison during early career.     

A computational model of early argument structure acquisition

How children go about learning the general regularities that govern language, as well as keeping track of the exceptions to them, remains one of the challenging open questions in the cognitive science of language. Computational modeling is an important methodology in research aimed at addressing this issue. We must determine appropriate learning mechanisms that can grasp generalizations from examples of specific usages, and that exhibit patterns of behavior over the course of learning similar to those in children. Early learning of verb argument structure is an area of language acquisition that provides an interesting testbed for such approaches due to the complexity of verb usages. A range of linguistic factors interact in determining the felicitous use of a verb in various constructions —associations between syntactic forms and properties of meaning that form the basis for a number of linguistic and psycholinguistic theories of language. This article presents a computational model for the representation, acquisition, and use of verbs and constructions. The Bayesian framework is founded on a novel view of constructions as a probabilistic association between syntactic and semantic features. The computational experiments reported here demonstrate the feasibility of learning general constructions, and their exceptions, from individual usages of verbs. The behavior of the model over the timecourse of acquisition mimics, in relevant aspects, the stages of learning exhibited by children. Therefore, this proposal sheds light on the possible mechanisms at work in forming linguistic generalizations and maintaining knowledge of exceptions.