The emergence of coherence over the course of decision making.

Previous research has indicated that decision making is accompanied by an increase in the coherence of assessments of the factors related to the decision alternatives. In the present study, the authors investigated whether this coherence shift is obtained before people commit to a decision, and whether it is obtained in the course of a number of other processing tasks. College students were presented with a complex legal case involving multiple conflicting arguments. Participants rated agreement with the individual arguments in isolation before seeing the case and after processing it under various initial sets, including playing the role of a judge assigned to decide the case. Coherence shifts were observed when participants were instructed to delay making the decision (Experiment 1), to memorize the case (Experiment 2), and to comprehend the case (Experiment 3). The findings support the hypothesis that a coherence-generating mechanism operates in a variety of processing tasks, including decision making. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Urban landscapes and the cultural politics of territorial control in Anglo-Norman England

It is examined how urban landscapes were physically shaped to meet the changing needs and desires of aristocratic elites during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Using case studies within the context of Anglo-Norman England, it is argued that newly-created towns were designed to help aristocratic lords establish and retain their political control along the frontier of the Norman kingdom, and that the forms of these towns embody the cultural processes of this territorial expansion. The first part of the paper places Norman England in the context of an expanding high medieval Europe and considers the idea of an 'urban renaissance' as part of this expansion. Following this, some of the problems in representing, or mapping, medieval urban landscapes are discussed. The rest of the paper is devoted to morphological studies of three Norman 'new towns', Alnwick, Bridgnorth and Ludlow, in order to show how the production of these urban landscapes was related to wider socio-political changes effected under the authority of an aristocratic hegemony. The selection of these three towns also provides an opportunity to review previous attempts at understanding their medieval designs.     

Prejudice and perception: The role of automatic and controlled processes in misperceiving a weapon.

Two experiments used a priming paradigm to investigate the influence of racial cues on the perceptual identification of weapons. In Experiment 1, participants identified guns faster when primed with Black faces compared with White faces. In Experiment 2, participants were required to respond quickly, causing the racial bias to shift from reaction time to accuracy. Participants misidentified tools as guns more often when primed with a Black face than with a White face. L. L. Jacoby's (1991) process dissociation procedure was applied to demonstrate that racial primes influenced automatic (A) processing, but not controlled (C) processing. The response deadline reduced the C estimate but not the A estimate. The motivation to control prejudice moderated the relationship between explicit prejudice and automatic bias. Implications are discussed on applied and theoretical levels. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Assessing the fit of measurement models at the individual level: A comparison of item response theory and covariance structure approaches.

The goal of this study was to explore similarities and differences in person-fit assessment under item response theory (IRT) and covariance structure analysis (CSA) measurement models. The responses of 3,245 individuals who completed 3 personality scales were analyzed under an IRT model and a CSA model. The authors then computed person-fit statistics for individual examinees under both IRT and CSA models. To be specific, for each examinee, the authors computed a standardized person-fit index for the IRT models, called Zl; in addition, an individual's contribution to chi-square, called IND{chi}, was used as a person-fit indicator for CSA models. Findings indicated that these indices are relatively free of confounds with examinee trait level. However, the relationship between Zl, and IND{chi}, values was small, suggesting that the indices identify different examinees as not fitting a model. Implications of the results and directions for future inquiry are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The use of personality measures in cross-cultural research: A test of three personality scales across two countries.

This study explored the measurement equivalence of 3 commonly used psychological measures across samples of U.S. and Indian male and female respondents. Multiple groups structural equations modeling indicated that locus of control was measured equivalently across U.S. and Indian male and female groups, whereas measurement equivalence of a self-esteem scale and a higher order need strength scale was observed across U.S. men, U.S. women, and Indian men. Baseline models for self-esteem and for higher order need strength failed to fit in the Indian female sample, suggesting basic differences in how respondents from this group conceptualized scale items. The results underscore the potential importance of culture as a factor that may moderate the types of inferences that can be made from test scores in cross-cultural research applications. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Estimation of Variance Components in Two-Stage Nested Designs With Composite Samples

If the cost of measurement is high, it is often expedient to composite several samples before taking measurements. Optimal designs for estimating (individually and jointly) the mean and variance components in two-stage nested designs are discussed, using the so-called analysis of variance estimation procedure. This traditional procedure is then compared numerically with two other unbiased estimation procedures; specific conditions are given whereby a particular procedure is superior to the other procedures.     

Optimal controller synthesis for a class of LTI systems via switched feedback

We develop a switched feedback controller that optimizes the rate of convergence of the state trajectories to the origin for a class of second order LTI systems. Specifically, we derive an algorithm which optimizes the rate of convergence by employing a controller that switches between symmetric gains. As a byproduct of our investigation, we find that, in general, the controllers which optimize the rate of convergence switch between two linear subsystems, one of which is unstable. The algorithm we investigate will design optimal switching laws for the specific case of second order LTI plants of relative degree two.     

SHIRAZ: an automated histology image annotation system for zebrafish phenomics

Histological characterization is used in clinical and research contexts as a highly sensitive method for detecting the morphological features of disease and abnormal gene function. Histology has recently been accepted as a phenotyping method for the forthcoming Zebrafish Phenome Project, a large-scale community effort to characterize the morphological, physiological, and behavioral phenotypes resulting from the mutations in all known genes in the zebrafish genome. In support of this project, we present a novel content-based image retrieval system for the automated annotation of images containing histological abnormalities in the developing eye of the larval zebrafish.