Make this detour and be unselfish! Influencing urban route choice by explaining traffic management

Traffic management policies aim to improve traffic flow by influencing the route choice of drivers, therefore preventing traffic jams in crowded cities. With respect to a system-optimum of the traffic network, drivers might have to make small-scale detours. The aim of this article is to encourage unselfish route choice behaviour in an urban context by informing drivers in advance about the objectives of traffic management. Two studies were conducted: (1) an online survey (N = 244) and (2) a driving simulation study (N = 48). The first study focussed on the general effect of recommendations for routes with longer travel times (system-optimal routes) when traffic management is explained. Other route choice attributes (travel time, red-light duration, time pressure) were analysed as well. Drivers were randomly confronted with 35 route choice scenarios consisting of a main route with certain red-light duration and an alternative route without. Results showed that the compliance with system-optimal routes is increased by around 10 percentage points when comparing the group with recommendation to the group without. This effect occurred independently of the variation of other route choice attributes. The second study aimed to determine if the compliance can be increased even more if drivers receive in-depth information about traffic management and experience ‘good’ as well as ‘bad’ recommendations in a driving simulator. Results showed no further effect of these manipulations on route choice. Only decision-making times and subjective evaluation were influenced by in-depth information compared to basic information. Altruism was partly correlated with decision-making. This article shows a novel approach to encouraging drivers to select routes with longer travel times for the benefit of the common good. Drivers’ knowledge gap regarding traffic management needs to be closed in order to enhance their understanding of traffic regulations. Finally, results of this research should be transferred to driver models within traffic simulations to estimate the effects on traffic networks.     

Pre-schoolers use head gestures rather than prosodic cues to highlight important information in speech

Previous evidence suggests that children's mastery of prosodic modulations to signal the informational status of discourse referents emerges quite late in development. In the present study, we investigate the children's use of head gestures as it compares to prosodic cues to signal a referent as being contrastive relative to a set of possible alternatives. A group of French-speaking pre-schoolers were audio-visually recorded while playing in a semi-spontaneous but controlled production task, to elicit target words in the context of broad focus, contrastive focus, or corrective focus utterances. We analysed the acoustic features of the target words (syllable duration and word-level pitch range), as well as the head gesture features accompanying these target words (head gesture type, alignment patterns with speech). We found that children's production of head gestures, but not their use of either syllable duration or word-level pitch range, was affected by focus condition. Children mostly aligned head gestures with relevant speech units, especially when the target word was in phrase-final position. Moreover, the presence of a head gesture was linked to greater syllable duration patterns in all focus conditions. Our results show that (a) 4- and 5-year-old French-speaking children use head gestures rather than prosodic cues to mark the informational status of discourse referents, (b) the use of head gestures may gradually entrain the production of adult-like prosodic features, and that (c) head gestures with no referential relation with speech may serve a linguistic structuring function in communication, at least during language development.     

情境模型建构过程中空间信息的作用探讨

本研究采用扇效应技术来进一步探讨空间信息在情境模型建构过程当中的作用。共分为两个分实验。实验1通过在材料中使用同样具有可“移动性”的物体概念（例如快餐车）来探讨“可移动性”是否是“[人]在[大场所]”材料范式下观察不到信息整合的根本原因。实验2将材料中的“大场所”地点替换为“中场所”地点,来进一步探讨空间信息在情境模型建构过程中的作用特点。结果表明“人的可移动性”不是“[人]在[大场所]”材料范式下观察不到信息整合的原因并且在不受个体背景知识衰减的情况下．空间信息对情境模型建构的影响作用强于主人公信息的影响作用。     

Applying evidence to support ethical decisions: Is the placebo really powerless?

Using placebos in day-to-day practice is an ethical problem. This paper summarises the available epidemiological evidence to support this difficult decision. Based on these data we propose to differentiate between placebo and “knowledge framing”. While the use of placebo should be confined to experimental settings in clinical trials, knowledge framing — which is only conceptually different from placebo — is a desired, expected and necessary component of any doctor-patient encounter. Examples from daily practice demonstrate both, the need to investigate the effects of knowledge framing and its impact on ethical, medical, economical and legal decisions. An earlier version of this paper was presented at an international conference, “Placebo: Its Action and Place in Health Research Today,” held in Warsaw, Poland on 12–13 April, 2003.     

Lateralization of object-shape information in semantic processing

An experiment was conducted to examine whether perceptual information, specifically the shape of objects, is activated during semantic processing. Subjects judged whether a target word was related to a prime word. Prime-target pairs that were not associated, but whose referents had similar shapes (e.g. LADDER-RAILROAD) yielded longer "no" responses than unassociated prime-target pairs, suggesting that shape information had been activated. A visual-field manipulation showed that, in right-handed subjects, this effect was localized in the left hemisphere. This finding is consistent with behavioral, brain imaging, and lesion data, which suggest that object shape at the category level is represented in the left hemisphere.     

Heuristics as beliefs and as behaviors: the adaptiveness of the "hot hand"

and analyzed reasoning by asking: what are the reasoner's goals? This emphasizes the adaptiveness of behavior rather than whether a belief is normative. Belief in the "hot hand" in basketball suggests that players experiencing streaks should be given more shots, but this has been seen as a fallacy due to failure to find dependencies between players' shots. Based on their findings, I demonstrate by Markov modeling and simulation that streaks are valid allocation cues for deciding who to give shots to, because this behavior achieves the team goal of scoring more. Empirically I show that this adaptive heuristic is supported by the fallacious belief in dependency, more so as skill level increases. I extend the theoretical analysis to identify general conditions under which following streaks should be beneficial. Overall, this approach illustrates the advantages of analyzing reasoning in terms of adaptiveness.     

The influence of intentional and incidental learning on acquiring spatial knowledge during navigation

In order to study the influence of intentional and incidental learning conditions on route learning, young adults walked a route through a university building. Half of the participants focused their attention on the route (intentional learning condition), while the other half did not (incidental learning condition). Five tests of spatial knowledge were employed: a route-length-estimation, landmark recognition, landmark ordering, map-drawing and navigation task. The intentional group performed better than the incidental group on the map-drawing and navigation task. No difference between the intentional and incidental group was found on the landmark-recognition and landmark-ordering task. Moreover, the intentional group overestimated the walking distance, while the incidental group underestimated it. These results suggest that route knowledge (landmark recognition and landmark ordering) requires less effortful processing than survey knowledge (developing a map-like representation and actual navigation).     

Effects of the "beauty is good" stereotype on children's information processing

The authors tested schematic information processing as a function of attractiveness stereotyping in two studies. An adult experimenter read children (ages 3 to 7 years) eight different stories in which a child narrator encountered two characters who varied in level of attractiveness and displayed positive or negative traits that were either consistent or inconsistent with the "beauty is good" stereotype. Following the story, the experimenter showed each child a photograph of the two characters' faces and asked the child to point to the character who displayed the positive trait. In Experiment 1, children made more errors in identifying female characters with stereotype inconsistent traits but did just the opposite with male characters. Experiment 2 replicated the findings with female characters but found no difference in errors with male characters. The findings have implications for how attractiveness and gender stereotypes affect children's information processing, how attractiveness schemata may be organized, and why physical attractiveness stereotypes are maintained.