Social Context and the Dynamics of Cooperative Choice

Recent work using decontextualized economic games suggests that cooperation is a dynamic decision‐making process: Automatic responses typically support cooperation on average, while deliberation leads to increased selfishness. Here, we performed two studies examining how these temporal effects generalize to games with richer social context cues. Study 1 found that time pressure increased cooperation to a similar extent in games played with in‐group members and out‐group members. Study 2 found that time pressure increased cooperation to a similar extent in games described as competitions and games described as collaborations. These results show that previous positive effects of time pressure on cooperation are not unique to neutrally framed games devoid of social context and are not driven by implicit assumptions of shared group membership or cooperative norms. In doing so, our findings provide further insight into the cognitive underpinnings of cooperative decision making. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Temporality and the torments of time

Immersion in time gives birth to consciousness, as well as conflict and torment. When human beings developed a sense of future, they also gained the ability to anticipate threats from nature or their fellow beings. They thereby created cultures that are bastions of survival, as well as places of poetry, art and religion where they could band together and reflect upon their common plight. The practice of psychoanalysis is in many ways a temporal process, a process of remembering, for owning and elaborating a past that gives us substance, thereby providing a basis for reflective consciousness. Stimulated by Freud's early writings, Lacan, Laplanche and their successors in particular have focussed extensively on time and psychoanalysis, and their views are a central point of this discussion. A substantial case study is offered that provides concrete examples of these perspectives. A multi‐faceted view of temporality emerges, one that is more syncopated than linear or teleological. In conclusion, I will briefly discuss recent findings in the neuroscience of memory and ‘time travel’ that underpin contemporary psychoanalytic ideas in surprising ways. It is important to remember that acceptance of the contradictory nature of temporal experience can open space for increased freedom and playfulness.     

The Academic Advantage of Devotion: Measuring Variation in the Value of Weekly Worship in Late Adolescence on Educational Attainment Using Propensity Score Matching

This study measures the effect of regular worship attendance at age 17 on total years of schooling by age 25, using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997. Expanding on previous work, this study estimates differences in the impact of worship attendance by race and family income status using propensity score matching. Individuals who frequently attend religious services complete .69 more years of schooling than similar individuals who do not frequently attend services. There are significantly greater returns to attendance for low‐income youth and no significant difference in returns by religious affiliation. These findings suggest that religious observance provides greater benefits for low‐income individuals or perhaps provides resources high‐income individuals have access to elsewhere. Moreover, this study extends previous work by examining a more recent and nationally representative sample of youth and by using methods that allow for greater causal inference.     

First‐time viewers' comprehension of films: Bridging shot transitions

Which perceptual and cognitive prerequisites must be met in order to be able to comprehend a film is still unresolved and a controversial issue. In order to gain some insights into this issue, our field experiment investigates how first‐time adult viewers extract and integrate meaningful information across film cuts. Three major types of commonalities between adjacent shots were differentiated, which may help first‐time viewers with bridging the shots: pictorial, causal, and conceptual. Twenty first‐time, 20 low‐experienced and 20 high‐experienced viewers from Turkey were shown a set of short film clips containing these three kinds of commonalities. Film clips conformed also to the principles of continuity editing. Analyses of viewers' spontaneous interpretations show that first‐time viewers indeed are able to notice basic pictorial (object identity), causal (chains of activity), as well as conceptual (links between gaze direction and object attention) commonalities between shots due to their close relationship with everyday perception and cognition. However, first‐time viewers' comprehension of the commonalities is to a large degree fragile, indicating the lack of a basic notion of what constitutes a film.     

Unfamiliar face matching: Pairs out‐perform individuals and provide a route to training

Matching unfamiliar faces is known to be difficult. Here, we ask whether performance can be improved by asking viewers to work in pairs, a manipulation known to increase accuracy for low‐level visual discrimination tasks. Across four experiments we consistently find that face matching accuracy is higher for pairs of viewers than for individuals. This ‘pairs advantage’ is generally driven by adopting the response of the higher scoring partner. However, when the task becomes difficult, both partners' performance is improved by working in a pair. In two experiments, we find evidence that working in a pair can lead to subsequent improvements in individual performance, specifically for viewers whose accuracy is initially low. The pairs' technique therefore offers the opportunity for substantial improvements in face matching performance, along with an added training benefit.     

Modeling response signal and response time data

The diffusion model (Ratcliff, 1978) and the leaky competing accumulator model (LCA, Usher & McClelland, 2001) were tested against two-choice data collected from the same subjects with the standard response time procedure and the response signal procedure. In the response signal procedure, a stimulus is presented and then, at one of a number of experimenter-determined times, a signal to respond is presented. The models were fit to the data from the two procedures simultaneously under the assumption that responses in the response signal procedure were based on a mixture of decision processes that had already terminated at response boundaries before the signal and decision processes that had not yet terminated. In the latter case, decisions were based on partial information in one variant of each model or on guessing in a second variant. Both variants of the diffusion model fit the data well and both fit better than either variant of the LCA model, although the differences in numerical goodness-of-fit measures were not large enough to allow decisive selection between the models.     

The effects of a high-probability instruction sequence and response-independent reinforcer delivery on child compliance

We compared the effects of a high-probability (high-p) instruction sequence and a fixed-time (FT) schedule of reinforcement on the compliance of 2 typically developing children. A multielement experimental design with a reversal component was implemented according to a multiple baseline across participants arrangement. Both the high-p and FT conditions resulted in increased compliance for both participants during the multielement sessions. These results suggest that it may be possible to increase compliance without a response requirement of the type arranged in the high-p instruction sequence.     

The effect of encoding time on retention by infants and young children

Using a Visual Recognition Memory (VRM) procedure, we examined the effect of encoding time on retention by 1- and 4-year olds. Irrespective of age, shorter familiarization time reduced retention, and longer familiarization time prolonged retention. The amount of familiarization that yielded retention after a given delay decreased as a function of age.     

With the future behind them: convergent evidence from aymara language and gesture in the crosslinguistic comparison of spatial construals of time

Cognitive research on metaphoric concepts of time has focused on differences between moving Ego and moving time models, but even more basic is the contrast between Ego‐ and temporal‐reference‐point models. Dynamic models appear to be quasi‐universal cross‐culturally, as does the generalization that in Ego‐reference‐point models, FUTURE IS IN FRONT OF EGO and PAST IS IN BACK OF EGO. The Aymara language instead has a major static model of time wherein FUTURE IS BEHIND EGO and PAST IS IN FRONT OF EGO; linguistic and gestural data give strong confirmation of this unusual culture‐specific cognitive pattern. Gestural data provide crucial information unavailable to purely linguistic analysis, suggesting that when investigating conceptual systems both forms of expression should be analyzed complementarily. Important issues in embodied cognition are raised: how fully shared are bodily grounded motivations for universal cognitive patterns, what makes a rare pattern emerge, and what are the cultural entailments of such patterns?