Aligning Spinoza with Descartes: An informed Cartesian account of the truth bias

There is a bias towards believing information is true rather than false. The Spinozan account claims there is an early, automatic bias towards believing. Only afterwards can people engage in an effortful re‐evaluation and disbelieve the information. Supporting this account, there is a greater bias towards believing information is true when under cognitive load. However, developing on the Adaptive Lie Detector (ALIED) theory, the informed Cartesian can equally explain this data. The account claims the bias under load is not evidence of automatic belief; rather, people are undecided, but if forced to guess they can rely on context information to make an informed judgement. The account predicts, and we found, that if people can explicitly indicate their uncertainty, there should be no bias towards believing because they are no longer required to guess. Thus, we conclude that belief formation can be better explained by an informed Cartesian account – an attempt to make an informed judgment under uncertainty.     

Assimilation Effects of Eye Shadow on Facial Colors

Makeup can change facial complexion, making it of interest both practically and for empirical research on perception. We examined the assimilation effect of eye shadow on complexion using two series of eye shadows: typical colors that are not evenly saturated and colors with saturation as even as possible. Twenty participants assessed the degree of redness in reddish faces, yellowness in yellowish faces, and lightness in both faces via paired comparisons. The results indicated that: (a) the reddish face was perceived as redder when it had eye shadow of pinkish and purplish colors or reddish saturated colors instead of containing yellowish components; (b) the yellowish face became less yellow with colors without a greenish or yellowish component; and (c) except for the lighter yellowish shade, eye shadow made the face perceptually darker. We confirmed the assimilation effect of eye shadow on complexion and showed differences in perceptual hue change according to the original face colors.     

The effects of active worrying on working memory capacity

According to the attentional control theory, worry, a crucial component of anxiety, impairs task performance through its direct effect on working memory capacity (WMC) by using up the limited resources available for performance thus reducing attentional control. We tested this hypothesis in the current study by examining the causal influence of active worrying on WMC in a sample of undergraduate university students (n?=?64) assigned either to a worry condition or to a non-worry control condition. Participants performed a change detection task before and after the worry/control manipulation. Mediation analyses showed that the level of self-reported worry mediated the effects of condition on change in WMC as demonstrated by the significant indirect effect of worry and the resulting non-significant direct effect of condition on change in WMC. Similar results were obtained when using state anxiety measures as mediating factors. Results of the current study are amongst the first to demonstrate that worry impairs WMC and as such have important implications for understanding the impact of worry.     

Context learning for threat detection

It is hypothesised that threatening stimuli are detected better due to their salience or physical properties. However, these stimuli are typically embedded in a rich context, motivating the question whether threat detection is facilitated via learning of contexts in which threat stimuli appear. To address this question, we presented threatening face targets in new or old spatial configurations consisting of schematic faces and found that detection of threatening targets was faster in old configurations. This indicates that individuals are able to learn regularities within visual contexts and use this contextual information to guide detection of threatening targets. Next, we presented threatening and non-threatening face targets embedded in new or old spatial configurations. Detection of threatening targets was facilitated in old configurations, and this effect was reversed for non-threatening targets. Present findings show that detection of threatening targets is driven not only by stimulus properties as theorised traditionally but also by learning of contexts in which threatening stimuli appear. Further, results show that context learning for threatening targets obstructs context learning for non-threatening targets. Overall, in addition to typically emphasised bottom-up factors, our findings highlight the importance of top-down factors such as context and learning in detection of salient, threatening stimuli.     

A study of metrics of distance and correlation between ranked lists for compositionality detection

Compositionality in language refers to how much the meaning of some phrase can be decomposed into the meaning of its constituents and the way these constituents are combined. Based on the premise that substitution by synonyms is meaning-preserving, compositionality can be approximated as the semantic similarity between a phrase and a version of that phrase where words have been replaced by their synonyms. Different ways of representing such phrases exist (e.g., vectors (Kiela and Clark, 2013) or language models (Lioma, Simonsen, Larsen, and Hansen, 2015)), and the choice of representation affects the measurement of semantic similarity.We propose a new compositionality detection method that represents phrases as ranked lists of term weights. Our method approximates the semantic similarity between two ranked list representations using a range of well-known distance and correlation metrics. In contrast to most state-of-the-art approaches in compositionality detection, our method is completely unsupervised. Experiments with a publicly available dataset of 1048 human-annotated phrases shows that, compared to strong supervised baselines, our approach provides superior measurement of compositionality using any of the distance and correlation metrics considered.     

Police officers' beliefs about,and use of,cues to deception

Meta‐analytic findings indicate that people, including police officers, are generally poor at detecting low‐stakes deception. Related to this, investigations of behaviours that people reportedly use to make truth or lie judgements tend to conclude that people rely on incorrect stereotypes. However, consistent findings suggest that police officers are able to detect high‐stakes deception; this implies that, at least in some contexts, police officers utilise reliable cues to deception. The research presented here was an investigation of cues to deception used by police officers (N  = 69), when making veracity decisions about real world, high‐stakes communications. Data were collected on both free report cues, and also prescribed cues that were known (from previous research), to discriminate between liars and truth‐tellers in the communications that the police officers observed. Officers free reported using cues related to verbal content, emotion, body language, eyes, vocal cues, and external cues. Most prescribed cues were self‐reportedly used correctly by large majorities of the officers, suggesting that they may not rely on inaccurate stereotypes. Self‐report use of categories of free report cues, and prescribed cues, was not related to accuracy in detecting deception. As people may not always be aware of the behaviours on which their judgements are based, the relationships between some of the behaviours actually displayed in the communications, and group accuracy in detecting deception in those communications, were also investigated. Group accuracy was related to the presence of subjective, emotion‐related cues in the communications.     

差序公正与差序关怀：论中国人道德取向中的集体偏见

在中国传统的道德取向中,既有皮亚杰、科尔伯格的“道德公正”,也有吉利根、诺丁斯的“道德关怀”,但是,这两种道德取向在中国社会是以“差序格局”的样态运作的,即以“差序公正”和“差序关怀”的形式存在于中国人的道德判断中。“差序公正”和“差序关怀”的概念准确地表征了中国人道德取向的集体偏见。随着改革的不断深入,各项制度的不断建立和完善,人们的现代化层次不断提高,这种集体偏见正在逐渐得到克服和纠正。     

视觉工作记忆巩固机制：固化抑或衰退

视觉工作记忆巩固机制是工作记忆研究领域的前沿科学问题。Vogel等(2006)采用掩蔽的变化检测范式揭示视觉工作记忆巩固过程及其规律, 指出巩固是从容易受到干扰的感觉表征转化为稳定的工作记忆的表征的过程。本文系统梳理了视觉工作记忆巩固的实验范式, 以及相关影响因素的研究成果, 分析了视觉工作记忆巩固现象所反映的内部机制, 指出Vogel等所揭示的视觉工作记忆巩固现象反映的可能并非记忆项目的固化过程, 而是掩蔽刺激对记忆项目的干扰作用的衰退过程。     

整体加工方式下面孔结构与特征关系

探讨面孔整体性加工方式下结构信息和特征信息加工之间的关系。通过聚焦窗口技术在结构信息和特征信息的权变过程中考察二者对面孔整体性加工的影响, 从而进一步确定两类信息的加工关系模式。结果表明: 面孔以整体的方式进行加工; 结构信息加工系统和特征信息加工系统两者并行存在, 在当前实验任务中两类信息加工之间为竞争关系; 面孔以结构信息加工为主还是以特征信息加工为主取决于两类信息在当前任务中提取和加工难度。