Cognition and Perception Commons^™

Law, Environment, And The “Nondismal” Social Sciences, William Boyd, Douglas Kysar, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski

Jeffrey J. Rachlinski

Over the past 30 years, the influence of economics over the study of environmental law and policy has expanded considerably, becoming in the process the predominant framework for analyzing regulations that address pollution, natural resource use, and other environmental issues. This review seeks to complement the expansion of economic reasoning and methodology within the field of environmental law and policy by identifying insights to be gleaned from various “nondismal” social sciences. In particular, three areas of inquiry are highlighted as illustrative of interdisciplinary work that might help to complement law and economics and, in some cases, compensate for it: the …

Do Student Perceptions Of Diversity Emphasis Relate To Learning Of Psychology?, J. Elicker, A. Snell, Allison O'Malley

Alison L. O'Malley

We examined the extent to which students' perceived inclusion of diversity issues in the Introduction to Psychology course related to perceptions of learning. Based on the responses of 625 students, multilevel linear modeling analyses revealed that student perceptions of diversity emphasis in the class were positively related to how well students believed they understood concepts and the extent to which they believed they learned concepts they could apply to their lives. We also examined the relation between individual differences (e.g., age, race) and perceived learning. We discuss the importance of including issues of diversity in psychology classes.

Effect Of Knowledge Of Apoe Genotype On Subjective And Objective Memory Performance In Healthy Older Adults, Tara Lineweaver, Mark Bondi, Douglas Galasko, David Salmon

Tara T. Lineweaver

Objective—The knowledge that one carries the apolipoprotein E (APOE) ε4 allele risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease was recently found to have little short-term psychological risk. The authors investigated the impact of knowledge of carrying the risk allele on subjective ratings of memory and objective memory test performance of older adults. Method—Using a nested case-control design, the authors administered objective verbal and visual memory tests and self-rating scales of memory function to 144 cognitively normal older adults (ages 52–89) with known APOE genotype who knew (ε4+, N=25; ε4−, N=49) or did not know (ε4+, N=25; ε4−, N=45) their genotype and genetic …

Patients’ Perceptions Of Memory Functioning Before And After Surgical Intervention To Treat Medically Refractory Epilepsy., Tara T. Lineweaver, R. I. Naugle, A. M. Cafaro, W. Bingaman, H. O. Lüders

Tara T. Lineweaver

Purpose:One risk associated with epilepsy surgery is memory loss, but perhaps more important is how patients perceive changes in their memories. This longitudinal study evaluated changes in memory self-reports and investigated how self-reports relate to changes on objective memory measures in temporal or extratemporal epilepsy patients who underwent surgery. Methods: Objective memory (Wechsler Memory Scale–Revised) and subjective memory self-reports (Memory Assessment Clinics Self-Rating Scale) were individually assessed for 136 patients ∼6 months before and 6 months after surgery. A measure of depressive affect (Beck Depression Inventory–2nd Edition) was used to control variance attributable to emotional distress. Results: Despite a lack …

Young And Older Adults’ Beliefs About Effective Ways To Mitigate Age-Related Memory Decline, Michael Horhorta, Tara T. Lineweaver, Monique Ositelu, Kristi Summers, Christopher Herzog

Tara T. Lineweaver

This study investigated whether young and older adults vary in their beliefs about the impact of various mitigating factors on age-related memory decline. Eighty young (ages 18–23) and eighty older (ages 60–82) participants reported their beliefs about their own memory abilities and the strategies that they use in their everyday lives to attempt to control their memory. Participants also reported their beliefs about memory change with age for hypothetical target individuals who were described as using (or not using) various means to mitigate memory decline. There were no age differences in personal beliefs about control over current or future memory …

Innovative Representations Of Light, Behaving As Both Particles And Waves, Among The Paintings Of Monet And Renoir, Charles Smith

Charles Kay Smith

Monet and Renoir, friends collaborating in open air about 1865, discovered that sunlight filtering through a canopy of tree leaves does not produce the splotches and dapples that studio artists conventionally represented at the time but circles of light. Sometimes the circles of light punctuating the shade are clear, separate and crisp, as though light is being propagated as particles, but if the pin-hole gaps between leaves are very close together, they will project compound or superimposed circles that look like the waves that Thomas Young saw in his double slit experiment in 1803-4. Newton’s Opticks published in 1704 had …

Kinematic Effects In Large Transport Aircraft, Shem Malmquist, Dennis Vincenzi, Dahai Liu

Dahai Liu

The control of an aircraft relies on sensory feedback. It follows that any aspect that could create a situation where that feedback is faulty can lead to unintended outcomes. The size of very large jet aircraft can result in kinematic effects that impact the perceptions of the flight crew. Due to the large amount of inertia involved, coupled with aerodynamic factors, when the aircraft pitch (θ) is initially changed, the short term actual motion of the aircraft, as viewed from the center of gravity, remains relatively unchanged. As a consequence of aircraft design, this results in the flight deck changing …

Mixed-Case Format And Lexical Decision Performance: Initial Uppercase Is Special, Julia Harvey Azzolina, Lois Rotuno, April Butler Waltonen, Albert Smith

April D Waltonen

Previous research has shown that there are phenomena that may require a route to word identification by means other than through letters. For example, in a lexical decision task, in which an experimental participant is asked to determine if a string of letters is a word or not, responses to items in a MIXed caSE format are slower than to items in PURE UPPERCASE or pure lowercase formats. In this experiment, we investigated the effect of different mixed-case formats on lexical decision performance, focusing on the type and location of the case transition. Twenty-four students participated in a lexical decision …

Mixed-Case Format And Lexical Decision Performance: Initial Uppercase Is Special, Julia C. Harvey Azzolina, Lois M. Rotuno, April D. Butler Waltonen, Albert F. Smith

Julia Harvey Azzolina

Previous research has shown that there are phenomena that may require a route to word identification by means other than through letters. For example, in a lexical decision task, in which an experimental participant is asked to determine if a string of letters is a word or not, responses to items in a MIXed caSE format are slower than to items in PURE UPPERCASE or pure lowercase formats. In this experiment, we investigated the effect of different mixed-case formats on lexical decision performance, focusing on the type and location of the case transition. Twenty-four students participated in a lexical decision …

Using A Photographic Gestalt In Your Therapy / Counselling Work, Harry B. Mayr

harry b mayr

Hi everyone,

I was lucky enough to take the photo below on a recent trip to Fraser Island. When I got home and started looking through my photos, I found that this photo (which I like to call 'THE STEPS OF LIFE' ), had the same qualities as those illustrations shown to us during psychology / social work / counselling courses e.g. the old woman's face gestalt.

I would like to share my photo with everyone as I feel it is a great tool in helping people learn and grow in their individual lives. Please just mention where you got …

Vessel Traffic Service (Vts): A Maritime Information Service Or Traffic Control System? Understanding Everyday Performance And Resilience In A Socio-Technical System Under Change, Gesa Praetorius

Gesa Praetorius

Vessel Traffic Service (VTS) is a shore-side maritime assistance service that supports bridge teams in their safe navigation of port approaches and other areas that present navigational difficulties. The VTS is implemented in national waters and provides vessels with information through transmissions and broadcasts on Very High Frequency (VHF) radio. With a continued growth in the number, size and cargo volumes of merchant vessels, the role of the VTS has recently become a matter of discussion, and it has been argued that changes, such as implementing an aviation-like control system, would be of an enormous benefit for stakeholders and guarantee …

Public Management In Political Institutions: Explaining Perceptions Of White House Chief Of Staff Influence, José Villalobos, Justin Vaughn, David Cohen

José D. Villalobos

The notion that public managers influence organizational performance is common in public administration research. However, less is known about why some managers are better at influencing organizational performance than others. Furthermore, relatively few studies have systematically examined managerial influence and scholars have yet to investigate either quantitatively or systematically managerial influence in the White House. Utilizing original survey data collected from former White House officials who served in the Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton administrations, this study applies empirical public management theory to examine for the first time the key determinants that shape perceptions of chief of staff managerial …

Blowin’ Against The Wind, Prose/Poem 7/17/2014, Charles Kay Smith

Charles Kay Smith

Thoughts on Science, Contemporary Poetry and Human Nature.

They're Praying For The Worst. Is That Wrong?, Elizabeth Mcalister

Elizabeth McAlister

No abstract provided.

Cognitive Ethology And The Cost Of Anthropomorphiphobia, Robert H.I. Dale

Robert H. I. Dale

Book review for the following titles: Animal Minds: Beyond Cognition to Consciousness. By Donald R. Griffin, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001, 376 pages. $27.50 softcover The Smile of a Dolphin: Remarkable Accounts of Animal Emotions. Edited by Marc Bekoff, New York: Discovery Books, 2000, 240 pages. $35.00 hardcover Minds of Their Own: Thinking and Awareness in Animals. By Lesley J. Rogers, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998, 224 pages. $19.00 softcover

The Role Of Instrumental Emotion Regulation In The Emotions-Creativity Link: How Worries Render Neurotic Individuals More Creative, Angela K.-Y. Leung, Letty Kwan, Shyhnan Liou, Chi-Yue Chiu, Lin Qiu, Jose C. Yong

Ka Yee Angela LEUNG

Based on the instrumental account of emotion regulation, the current research seeks to offer a novel perspective to the emotions-creativity debate by investigating the instrumental value of trait-consistent emotions in creativity. We hypothesize that emotions such as worry (vs. happy) are some trait-consistent experiences for neurotic individuals and experiencing these emotions can facilitate performance in a creativity task. In two studies, we found support for our hypothesis. First, individuals higher in neuroticism had a greater preference for recalling worrisome (vs. happy) events in anticipation of performing a creativity task (Study 1). Moreover, when induced to recall a worrisome (vs. happy) …

Conformist Opinion Shift As An Accommodation-Motivated Cognitive Experience In Strong And Weak Situations, Ka Yee Angela Leung, Wing Mun Evelyn Au, C-Y. Chiu

Ka Yee Angela LEUNG

The authors introduce accommodation motivation as an individual difference construct that predicts personal preference to display conformist opinion shift, or the tendency to align opinion of the self with that of the group. The authors hypothesize that the relationship between accommodation motivation and conformist opinion shift will be stronger when the situational press for conformity is weak. Having clarified the conceptual meaning of accommodation motivation, the authors present evidence from two experiments that accommodation-motivated individuals readily display conformist opinion shift in anticipation of discussing with disagreeing others when conformity demand is weak (vs. strong). The second experiment offers initial support …

Meta-Knowledge Of Culture Promotes Cultural Competence, Angela K.-Y. Leung, Sau-Lai Lee, Chi-Yue Chiu

Ka Yee Angela LEUNG

A behavioral signature of cross-cultural competence is discriminative use of culturally appropriate behavioral strategies in different cultural contexts. Given the central role communication plays in cross-cultural adjustment and adaptation, the present investigation examines how meta-knowledge of culture—defined as knowledge of what members of a certain culture know—affects culturally competent cross-cultural communication. We reported two studies that examined display of discriminative, culturally sensitive use of cross-cultural communication strategies by bicultural Hong Kong Chinese (Study 1), Chinese students in the United States and European Americans (Study 2). Results showed that individuals formulating a communicative message for a member of a certain culture …

The Good, The Bad, And The Funny: An Erp Study Of Laughter As A Meaningful Socioemotional Cue, Nicholas P. Bello, R. Toby Amoss, Jessica R. Wise, Gwen A. Frishkoff

Gwen A Frishkoff

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On Being Better But Not Smarter Than Others: The Muhammad Ali Effect, Scott T. Allison, George R. Goethals, David M. Messick

Scott T. Allison

Past research suggests that people believe that they perform socially desirable behaviors more frequently and socially undesirable behaviors less frequently than others (Goethals, 1986; Messick, Bloom, Boldizar, & Samuelson, 1985). The present research examined whether this perception also characterizes people's thinking about intelligent and unintelligent behaviors. In Study 1, subjects wrote lists of behaviors that they or others did. Subjects indicated that they performed more good and intelligent behaviors and fewer bad and unintelligent behaviors than others, although the magnitude of these differences was greater for good and bad acts than for intelligent and unintelligent ones. In Study 2, a …

The Realism Continuum, Representation And Perception, Stuart Medley, Hanadi Haddad

Stuart Medley

The realism continuum is a visual model that presents any image as a series of pictures, iteratively reduced in representation from its referrent. A continuum has been used before to gauge the effectiveness of educational instruction (Wileman 1993; Dwyer 1972; Knowlton 1966; Gropper 1963) or to explain the communicative potential of different comics stylings (McCloud 1993). Reference is made in new design theory to less detailed images being easier to scan for pertinent information and generally reducing demand on working memory (Malamed, 2009). None of these theorists explains how it is we can see the less-real-than-real in the first instance, …

Driver Dynamics And The Longitudinal Control Model, Gabriel Leiner

Gabriel Leiner

Driver psychology is one of the most difficult phenomena to model in the realm of traffic flow theory because mathematics often cannot capture the human factors involved with driving a car. Over the past several decades, many models have attempted to model driver aggressiveness with varied results. The recently proposed Longitudinal Control Model (LCM) makes such an attempt, and this paper offers evidence of the LCM's usefulness in modeling road dynamics by analyzing deceleration rates that are commonly associated with various levels of aggression displayed by drivers. The paper is roughly divided into three sections, one outlining the LCM's ability …

Maritime Traffic Management: A Need For Central Coordination?, Fulko Van Westrenen, Gesa Praetorius

Gesa Praetorius

Traffic management is not formally organised in the maritime domain. Ships are autonomous and find their own way. Traffic is organised through rules, regulations, and “good seamanship”; it is a distributed system. In areas of high traffic-density support is proved by vessel traffic service (VTS) to promote traffic safety and fluency. VTS does not take control. This organisational structure has proven itself in situations with sufficient resources. When resources become insufficient (e.g. not enough sailing space), the traffic needs an organising mechanism. In this article, the authors argue that the most promising way to do this is by organising centralised …

A New Perspective On Visual Word Processing Efficiency, Joseph W. Houpt, James T. Townsend, Christopher Donkin

Joseph W. Houpt

As a fundamental part of our daily lives, visual word processing has received much attention in the psychological literature. Despite the well established advantage of perceiving letters in a word or in a pseudoword over letters alone or in random sequences using accuracy, a comparable effect using response times has been elusive. Some researchers continue to question whether the advantage due to word context is perceptual. We use the capacity coefficient, a well established, response time based measure of efficiency to provide evidence of word processing as a particularly efficient perceptual process to complement those results from the accuracy domain.

Hemispheric Processes In The Perception Of Art, A Literature Review, Megan Levy

Megan Levy

A literature review on Jeffrey Coney’s and Christine Bruce’s “Hemispheric Processes in the Perception of Art” (Journal of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics, Empirical Studies of the Arts, Vol. 22(2) 181-200, 2004) presenting the results of their exploratory study on lateral asymmetry in the aesthetic evaluation of European art. This literature review proposes that Lateralization Theory, and specifically hemispheric preferences in art, are vast fields full of mystery and surprises, which require continuous research work within a deep understanding of the historical context. Coney’s and Bruce’s study is an example of interesting hard work which invites curiosity and replication, …

A Parent-Teacher View Of Teens Behaviors In Nuclear And Joint Family Systems In Pakistan, Rana Rashid Rehman

Rana Rashid Rehman

This research work tries to unveil the changing teen’s behaviors in nuclear and joint family systems in Pakistan. Pakistan enjoys the social values of joint families; and, where grandparents are very important constituent of the family, the family structure is an important component in shaping the teens behaviors. Therefore, this paper focuses the sample of parents and teachers of the teens in the postmodern urban society and tried to better point out the eminent changes in the attitudes and behaviors of teens. This study follows a qualitative approach of research that pursues a phenomenological inquiry describing lived experience of the …

Patrolling The Boundaries Of Synaesthesia, Mirko Farina

Mirko Farina

Synaesthesia is a neurological condition in which people make unusual associations between various sensations. In recent years, a number of non-developmental cases, including posthypnotic suggestion, drug-use, flavor perception, and use of sensory substitution devices have been linked or directly associated to the emergence of particular types of synaesthetic experiences. Our aim in this chapter is to investigate the extent to which the abovementioned borderline cases can be counted as genuine synesthetic experiences. To do so, we first discuss a number of criteria (i.e., inducer-concurrent pairing, idiosyncrasy, consistency over time, and automaticity of the process) that has been taken as definitional …

Emotional Doubt And Divine Hiddenness, A. Thornhill

A. Chadwick Thornhill

This essay will seek to develop a possible model for addressing the existential problem of divine hiddenness and the emotional doubt that it might cause in the life of a believer. In doing so, it will identify several potential "root causes" for the experience of the existential problem of divine hiddenness and attempt to guide a hurting individual through dealing with their doubt by applying misbelief therapy.

Situation Awareness And Maritime Traffic: Having Awareness Or Being In Control?, Fulko Van Westrenen, Gesa Praetorius

Gesa Praetorius

Situation awareness (SA) is generally seen as a mental representation of the system state, an objective measure of the ‘situation out there’. In this article, the authors make an argument that SA can only have a meaning in relation to the task of the user and characteristics of the system. This will be argued with the help of a specific environment: vessel traffic monitoring. The long-time constants and the complex constraints imposed on the ship require that the operator monitoring the traffic has a good SA: the operator must make long-term predictions about possible traffic developments. For this, being in …

Stimulus Induced Reversal Of Information Flow Through A Cortical Network For Animacy Perception., Sarah Shultz, Rebecca Van Den Honert, Andrew Engell, Gregory Mccarthy

Andrew Engell