Processing head fakes in basketball: Are there ironic effects of instructions on the head-fake effect in basketball?

Instructions in sports are used to improve athletes’ performance. However, instructions can also impair performance if they direct athletes’ attention to a to-be-avoided behavior which paradoxically provokes exactly that behavior (ironic effect). The present study investigates the impact of different instructions on the head-fake effect in basketball. Specifically, we asked here if deliberate attempts to ignore the deceptive cues gaze direction and head orientation increase the impact of that information and thus, paradoxically increase the head-fake effect. We found that the detrimental impact of spatially incongruent gaze direction and head orientation was essentially independent of whether participants were, or were not, instructed to deliberately ignore the task-irrelevant information. Hence, deceptive actions exert their impact independent of the perceivers’ attempts to ignore deceptive cues. We thus conclude that the deceptive cues gaze direction and head orientation are per se hyper-accessible or over-salient and its processing cannot be controlled with any amount of mental capacity (and even not with the non-ironic instruction). However, as both ignore instructions produce general processing costs (i.e., slower reactions) coaches should solely instruct athletes’ to focus attention on the processing of the pass direction.     

The Self As a Complex Adaptive System Part II: Levels of Analysis and the Position of the Observer

This article continues the project begun in the previous article titled: “The Self as a Complex Adaptive System. Part I: Complexity, Metapsychology, and Developmental Theories” (Palombo, 2013). Using systems theory and a complexity perspective, that article provided a critique of psychoanalytic developmental theories. This contribution addresses some of the methodological issues related to data collection on development and the effects of the observer on the observed. It introduces the Level of Analysis perspective as a heuristic that permits the use of a complexity view applicable to the construct of the self as a complex adaptive system. It proposes three levels, each of which is associated with a platform from which phenomena are observed, a neuropsychological level (L-1), an introspective level (L-2), and an interpersonal level (L-3). The article concludes with a plea for a unifying psychoanalytic paradigm that brings together the data from these three levels and that would lay the groundwork for a clinical theory that would bring together the major existing psychoanalytic theories.     

The memory drum theory after twenty years

The difference between the Henry “memory-drum” theory and our version is that ours includes an additional assumption that, after programming has occurred, the resultant representation can be stored in short-term memory. Otherwise, the essential ideas are the same in the two theories. Implications of the presently available data for the distinction between the theories are discussed. Regardless of how one evaluates our added assumption, it is clear that the essential insight of the Henry theory has fared very well in the 20 yr since the theory first appeared in print.     

Causal attributions for heart disease: A systematic review

Abstract

The aims of this systematic literature review are to describe the pattern of attributions made for the causes of heart disease, and to determine how this pattern varies with the method by which attributions are elicited, and the respondent group.

A search yielded 47 papers and reports, containing 54 datasets. Lifestyle factors and chronic stress were the most common causes cited across all datasets. Attributions to stressors and fate or luck were more likely to be reported in studies that used interval rating scales than in studies that used dichotomous ratings. Cardiac patients were more likely to mention stressors and fate or luck as causes of heart disease; non-patients rated being overweight and hypertensive as more important

The differences observed between the responses of patients and non-patients may be due to actor - observer differences, or to a methodological difference: patients are often asked to report their own experiences whereas non-patients are asked about the general case.     

Which modality is best for presenting navigation instructions?

Three experiments involved college students receiving and following instructions of various lengths for navigating in a three-dimensional space displayed on a computer screen. The purpose was to evaluate which is the best modality for presenting navigation instructions so that they can be executed successfully. Single modalities (read, hear, and see) were considered along with dual modalities presented simultaneously or successively. It was found that when there were differences between single modalities, generally execution accuracy was best for see and worst for read. Information presented in two modalities did not yield better accuracy than information presented twice in a single modality. Also, the ordering of modalities depended on the extent of practice. Thus, presentation modality does not have a consistently large effect on receiving and following navigation instructions. Repetition and the amount of practice are much more important variables than is presentation modality in determining how well navigation instructions are followed.     

The effects of funny and serious task content and expectations of fun versus importance on children's cognitive performance

This study investigated how children's performance on a cognitive task was influenced by funny and serious task content, and by fun or important instructions. Eighty‐four children in Grades 1 and 5 performed two versions of a paired‐associates word‐learning task, which paired nonsense words with novel definitions and illustrations. All children completed a version in which the definitions and illustrations were funny, and a version in which they were not, with either fun or important instructions. Results revealed significantly better performance on the funny than on the serious version, but only when the funny version was presented first. There were no significant effects of task instructions. The findings confirm that making children's cognitive tasks funnier can enhance task performance. Although there were no effects of expectations as created by task instructions, the enhancing effect of funny content was influenced by children's expectations as created by their prior experience with the task.     

Effects of Quantity and Quality Instructions on Brainstorming

One of the basic presumptions of brainstorming is that a focus on generating a large number of ideas enhances both the number of ideas generated and the number of good ideas (original and useful). Prior research has not clearly demonstrated the utility of such a quantity focus in comparison to a condition in which quantity is not emphasized. There have been some comparisons of the impact of quantity and quality focus on the number and quality of ideas, but the results of these comparisons have been mixed. The present study examined brainstorming with four different types of instructions: no specific focus, a quantity goal, a quality goal, or a joint quantity and quality goal. The quantity goal condition was superior to the other three conditions in leading to the generation of more ideas and more good ideas. These findings support Osborn's (1953) assumption that a quantity focus is most beneficial for brainstorming.     

Classification objects, ideal observers & generative models

A successful vision system must solve the problem of deriving geometrical information about three-dimensional objects from two-dimensional photometric input. The human visual system solves this problem with remarkable efficiency, and one challenge in vision research is to understand how neural representations of objects are formed and what visual information is used to form these representations. Ideal observer analysis has demonstrated the advantages of studying vision from the perspective of explicit generative models and a specified visual task, which divides the causes of image variations into the separate categories of signal and noise. Classification image techniques estimate the visual information used in a task from the properties of “noise” images that interact most strongly with the task. Both ideal observer analysis and classification image techniques rely on the assumption of a generative model. We show here how the ability of the classification image approach to understand how an observer uses visual information can be improved by matching the type and dimensionality of the model to that of the neural representation or internal template being studied. Because image variation in real world object tasks can arise from both geometrical shape and photometric (illumination or material) changes, a realistic image generation process should model geometry as well as intensity. A simple example is used to demonstrate what we refer to as a “classification object” approach to studying three-dimensional object representations.     

‘Please sort these voice recordings into 2 identities’: Effects of task instructions on performance in voice sorting studies

We investigated the effects of two types of task instructions on performance on a voice sorting task by listeners who were either familiar or unfamiliar with the voices. Listeners were asked to sort 15 naturally varying stimuli from two voice identities into perceived identities. Half of the listeners sorted the recordings freely into as many identities as they perceived; the other half were forced to sort stimuli into two identities only. As reported in previous studies, unfamiliar listeners formed more clusters than familiar listeners. Listeners therefore perceived different naturally varying stimuli from the same identity as coming from different identities, while being highly accurate at telling apart the stimuli from different voices. We further show that a change in task instructions – forcing listeners to sort stimuli into two identities only – helped unfamiliar listeners to overcome this selective failure at ‘telling people together’. This improvement, however, came at the cost of an increase in errors in telling people apart. For familiar listeners, similar non-significant trends were apparent. Therefore, even when informed about correct number of identities, listeners may fail to accurately perceive identity further highlighting that voice identity perception in the context of natural within-person variability is a challenging task. We discuss our results in terms of similarities and differences to findings in the face perception literature and their importance in applied settings, such as forensic voice identification.     

Characterizing perceptual learning with external noise

Performance in perceptual tasks often improves with practice. This effect is known as ‘perceptual learning,’ and it has been the source of a great deal of interest and debate over the course of the last century. Here, we consider the effects of perceptual learning within the context of signal detection theory. According to signal detection theory, the improvements that take place with perceptual learning can be due to increases in internal signal strength or decreases in internal noise. We used a combination of psychophysical techniques (external noise masking and double-pass response consistency) that involve corrupting stimuli with externally added noise to discriminate between the effects of changes in signal and noise as observers learned to identify sets of unfamiliar visual patterns. Although practice reduced thresholds by as much as a factor of 14, internal noise remained virtually fixed throughout training, indicating learning served to predominantly increase the strength of the internal signal. We further examined the specific nature of the changes that took place in signal strength by correlating the externally added noise with observer’s decisions across trials (response classification). This technique allowed us to visualize some of the changes that took place in the linear templates used by the observers as learning occurred, as well as test the predictions of a linear template-matching model. Taken together, the results of our experiments offer important new theoretical constraints on models of perceptual learning.