Attention set for number: Expectation and perceptual load in inattentional blindness.

Inattentional blindness is the failure to detect unexpected events when attention is otherwise engaged. Previous research indicates that inattentional blindness increases as perceptual demands intensify. The authors present 6 cuing experiments that manipulated both the perceptual demands of a primary letter-naming task and the expectations of the individual. Inattentional blindness was greatest for individuals who held a numerical expectation that was consistent with the number of primary-task items presented. Expectation also affected detection differentially at various levels of perceptual load: Detection at moderate and high perceptual load was significantly affected by expectation, whereas detection at low perceptual load was not. The authors suggest that at moderate to high levels of perceptual load, individuals whose numerical expectations are fulfilled terminate processing when the primary task is complete, at the expense of the unexpected visual event. These experiments provide compelling evidence that expectations do affect detection of an unexpected stimulus, and they are the first to demonstrate that individuals set their attention for the number of items to be detected and are vulnerable to inattentional blindness whenever their primary-task numerical expectation is fulfilled. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Outcome dependency and attention to inconsistent information.

Hypothesized that people sometimes ignore information inconsistent with their expectations, but that outcome dependency (OCD) would increase people's attention to inconsistent information. When the perceiver's outcomes depend on the other person, the perceiver may be more motivated to have a sense of prediction and control, rather than only motivated to maintain the expectation. Attention to inconsistent information potentially increases the perceiver's sense of prediction and control, so it should increase under OCD. Attention to consistent information should be relatively unaffected by OCD. The results of 2 studies with 102 undergraduates support these hypotheses. OCD increased attention to inconsistent information, but did not influence attention to consistent information. In the 2nd study, think-aloud protocols revealed that outcome-dependent Ss made more dispositional comments while attending to inconsistent information, and generated both facilitative and inhibitory dispositional attributions for the inconsistent information. This suggests that whether they integrated the inconsistency or not, they responded with more thought about the other person's stable characteristics. Findings are considered in relation to previous work showing situational attributions for inconsistency and to models of meaning change in impression formation. (49 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Something in the way we move: Motion dynamics, not perceived sex, influence head movements in conversation.

During conversation, women tend to nod their heads more frequently and more vigorously than men. An individual speaking with a woman tends to nod his or her head more than when speaking with a man. Is this due to social expectation or due to coupled motion dynamics between the speakers? We present a novel methodology that allows us to randomly assign apparent identity during free conversation in a videoconference, thereby dissociating apparent sex from motion dynamics. The method uses motion-tracked synthesized avatars that are accepted by naive participants as being live video. We find that 1) motion dynamics affect head movements but that apparent sex does not; 2) judgments of sex are driven almost entirely by appearance; and 3) ratings of masculinity and femininity rely on a combination of both appearance and dynamics. Together, these findings are consistent with the hypothesis of separate perceptual streams for appearance and biological motion. In addition, our results are consistent with a view that head movements in conversation form a low level perception and action system that can operate independently from top–down social expectations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Preferences as expectation-driven inferences: Effects of affective expectations on affective experience.

Presents a model arguing that affect and emotion are often formed in an expectation-driven fashion. A pilot study and 2 experiments manipulated undergraduate Ss' affective expectations (e.g., how funny they expected a set of cartoons to be) and whether Ss' expectations were confirmed (e.g., whether the cartoons really were funny). When the value of a stimulus was consistent with an affective expectation, people formed evaluations relatively quickly. Even when the value of a stimulus was discrepant from an affective expectation, people sometimes assimilated the value of the stimulus to their expectations. Other times, such as when making a more fine-grained evaluation of the cartoons, people noticed that they were discrepant from their affective expectations. Under these conditions, people appeared to have more difficulty forming preferences. They took longer to evaluate and spent more time thinking about the cartoons. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Bring it on: Angry facial expressions potentiate approach-motivated motor behavior.

Although many psychological models suggest that human beings are invariably motivated to avoid negative stimuli, more recent theories suggest that people are frequently motivated to approach angering social challenges in order to confront and overcome them. To examine these models, the current investigation sought to determine whether angry facial expressions potentiate approach-motivated motor behaviors. Across 3 studies, individuals were faster to initiate approach movements toward angry facial expressions than to initiate avoidance movements away from such facial expressions. This approach advantage differed significantly from participants’ responses to both emotionally neutral (Studies 1 & 3) and fearful (Study 2) facial expressions. Furthermore, this pattern was most apparent when physical approach appeared to be effective in overcoming the social challenge posed by angry facial expressions (Study 3). The results are discussed in terms of the processes underlying anger-related approach motivation and the conditions under which they are likely to arise. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Use of vocalic cues to consonant voicing and native language background: the influence of experimental design

For native speakers of English and several other languages, preceding vocalic duration and F1 offset frequency are two of the cues that convey the stop consonant voicing distinction in word-final position. For speakers learning English as a second language, there are indications that use of vocalic duration, but not F1 offset frequency, may be hindered by a lack of experience with phonemic (i.e., lexical) vowel length (the "phonemic vowel length account": Crowther & Mann, 1992). In this study, native speakers of Arabic, a language that includes a phonemic vowel length distinction, were tested for their use of vocalic duration and F1 offset in production and perception of the English consonant-vowel-consonant forms pod and pot. The phonemic vowel length hypothesis predicts that Arabic speakers should use vocalic duration extensively in production and perception. On the contrary, Experiment 1 revealed that, consistent with Flege and Port's (1981) findings, they produced only slightly (but significantly) longer vocalic segments in their pod tokens. It further indicated that their productions showed a significant variation in F1 offset as a function of final stop voicing. Perceptual sensitivity to vocalic duration and F1 offset as voicing cues was tested in two experiments. In Experiment 2, we employed a factorial combination of these two cues and a finely spaced vocalic duration continuum. Arabic speakers did not appear to be very sensitive to vocalic duration, but they were about as sensitive as native English speakers to F1 offset frequency. In Experiment 3, we employed a one-dimensional continuum of more widely spaced stimuli that varied only vocalic duration. Arabic speakers showed native-English-like sensitivity to vocalic duration. An explanation based on the perceptual anchor theory of context coding (Braida et al., 1984; Macmillan, 1987; Macmillan, Braida, & Goldberg, 1987) and phoneme perception theory (Schouten & Van Hessen, 1992) is offered to reconcile the apparently contradictory perceptual findings. The explanation does not attribute native-English-like voicing perception to the Arabic subjects. The findings in this study call for a modification of the phonemic vowel length hypothesis.     

Social anxiety and self-presentation: A conceptualization model.

Presents a self-presentation approach to the study of social anxiety that proposes that social anxiety arises when individuals are motivated to make a preferred impression on real or imagined audiences, but perceive or imagine unsatisfactory evaluative reactions from subjectively important audiences. The authors presume that specific situational and dispositional antecedents of social anxiety operate by influencing people's motivation to impress others and their expectations of satisfactorily doing so. In contrast to drive models of anxiety but consistent with social learning theory, it is argued that the cognitive state of the individual mediates both affective arousal and behavior. The traditional inverted-–U relation between anxiety and performance is reexamined in this light. Counseling implications are considered, including the recommendation that treatments be tailored to specific types of self-presentational problems. (142 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lifting the curtain on the Wizard of Oz: Biased voice-based impressions of speaker size.

The consistent, but often wrong, impressions people form of the size of unseen speakers are not random but rather point to a consistent misattribution bias, one that the advertising, broadcasting, and entertainment industries also routinely exploit. The authors report 3 experiments examining the perceptual basis of this bias. The results indicate that, under controlled experimental conditions, listeners can make relative size distinctions between male speakers using reliable cues carried in voice formant frequencies (resonant frequencies, or timbre) but that this ability can be perturbed by discordant voice fundamental frequency (F?, or pitch) differences between speakers. The authors introduce 3 accounts for the perceptual pull that voice F? can exert on our routine (mis)attributions of speaker size and consider the role that voice F? plays in additional voice-based attributions that may or may not be reliable but that have clear size connotations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Student perceptions of differential teacher treatment as moderators of teacher expectation effects.

Tested, in 2 studies, a student mediation model of teacher expectation effects that proposes that students acquire information about their abilities by observing the differential teacher treatment accorded high and low achievers. They then revise their own achievement expectations and subsequently perform according to the expectations perceived. Student perceptions of teacher treatment toward hypothetical high and low achievers were used to distinguish high from low-differential-treatment classrooms. In the 1st study, 101 3rd-, 4th-, and 5th-grade students were also asked to report teacher treatment toward themselves. Only in high-differential-treatment classrooms did recipients of high and low teacher expectations perceive teacher treatment toward themselves that was consistent with the patterns of differential teacher treatment reported. In the 2nd study, in which 234 4th-, 5th-, and 6th-graders served as Ss, hierarchical regression analyses showed that teacher expectations contributed more to the prediction of student expectations and achievement in high- than in low-differential-treatment classrooms. Findings support a student mediation model of teacher expectation effects. (21 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging and memory for expected and unexpected objects in real-world settings.

Adult age differences in the consistency effect were examined in 3 experiments. The consistency effect refers to items inconsistent with expectations being better remembered than items consistent with expectations. Younger and older adults walked into an office room and viewed objects that varied in their consistency with expectation. Immediate and delayed recognition tests on item information (i.e., distractors were defined by their semantic identity) revealed that both age groups recognized unexpected items better than expected items. However, when recognition of token information was requested (i.e., distractors were defined by their physical appearance), younger adults, in contrast to older adults, exhibited consistency effects. Also, under divided attention, young adults revealed the same pattern of data as did elderly adults under full attention. The results are discussed in terms of capacity-related differences in distinctive encoding. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Game relativity: How context influences strategic decision making.

Existing models of strategic decision making typically assume that only the attributes of the currently played game need be considered when reaching a decision. The results presented in this article demonstrate that the so-called "cooperativeness" of the previously played prisoner's dilemma games influence choices and predictions in the current prisoner's dilemma game, which suggests that games are not considered independently. These effects involved reinforcement-based assimilation to the previous choices and also a perceptual contrast of the present game with preceding games, depending on the range and the rank of their cooperativeness. A. Parducci's (1965) range frequency theory and H. Helson's (1964) adaptation level theory are plausible theories of relative judgment of magnitude information, which could provide an account of these context effects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Putting Ifs to Work: Goal-Based Relevance in Conditional Directives.

Conditional directives are used by speakers to instruct hearers which actions are to be taken should certain events occur. The authors demonstrate that conditional directives are distinct from indicative conditionals in which speakers predict what is likely to be observed should certain events occur. The 1st set of experiments shows that goal structure determines what information speakers will select to test whether conditional directives have been followed but that these selections do not reflect their interpretations of the deontic necessity and sufficiency of the conditional relation. The 2nd set of experiments shows that formulations of conditional directives differ in how clearly speakers consider them to express their situation-specific intentions and that hearers accurately perceive what speakers intend them to do as a result of these formulations. The authors' findings illustrate a form of social rationality common in everyday interaction, which broadens normative conceptions of conditionals. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effect of temporal focus on the recall of expectancy-consistent and expectancy-inconsistent information.

Examined the impact of temporal focus on the recall of information that is consistent or inconsistent with an expectation. A consistent pattern of results across 4 experiments indicates that when Ss' expectations are temporally unfocused, better memory for consistent information is observed. In contrast, when expectations are focused in time (i.e., Ss know when the relevant events are likely to occur) recall for consistent and inconsistent information is more balanced. Exp 4 tied these recall findings to the amount of processing devoted to consistent and inconsistent events. When expectations were temporally unfocused, processing time and recall was greater for the confirmatory information. When expectations were temporally focused, more equivalent processing time and recall of consistent and inconsistent information was observed. Discussion centers on the role of temporal focus as a determinant of whether an event is 1-sided or 2-sided. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Pupil performance under varying teacher conditions of high and low expectations and high and low controls.

Studied the effects of 4 combinations of teachers' expectations and control on pupil performance in a well-controlled laboratory simulation of the classroom. Two male and 2 female teachers (aged 20–26.5 yrs) presented each of the 4 combinations (high expectations with high control, high expectations with low control, low expectations with high control, and low expectations with low control) to randomly selected samples of 3rd graders (N?=?160). The experimental teaching task was a series of spelling and sentence construction exercises. Data analyses indicated significant effects of teacher expectation and teacher control on the performance of pupils. Teachers' high expectations combined with high control motivated significantly greater performance in Ss, especially boys, who were more influenced by the high control factor than were girls. (French abstract) (22 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The processing of metonymy: Evidence from eye movements.

The authors investigated the time course of the processing of metonymic expressions in comparison with literal ones in 2 eye-tracking experiments. Experiment 1 considered the processing of sentences containing place-for-institution metonymies such as the convent in That blasphemous woman had to answer to the convent; it was found that such expressions were of similar difficulty to sentences containing literal interpretations of the same expressions. In contrast, expressions without a relevant metonymic interpretation caused immediate difficulty. Experiment 2 found similar results for place-for-event metonymies such as A lot of Americans protested during Vietnam, except that the difficulty with expressions without a relevant metonymic interpretation was somewhat delayed. The authors argue that these findings are incompatible with models of figurative language processing in which either the literal sense is accessed first or the figurative sense is accessed first. Instead, they support an account in which both senses can be accessed immediately, perhaps through a single under specified representation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attitudes in the Fiber of Everyday Life: The Discourse of Racial Evaluation and the Lived Experience of Desegregation.

This article critically reviews the social-psychological literature on race attitudes, which has assumed that the prejudicial status of any expression is determined by the underlying psychological attitude that motivated it. Variation and inconsistency in individuals' attitudinal expressions and disagreement over how to measure prejudice have bedeviled attitude research. Contemporary theories of racial attitudes (symbolic racism, self-presentation, aversive racism) have responded to this problem by explaining how, when, and why attitudes vary and by proposing research paradigms for isolating prejudiced from nonprejudiced expressions. The authors argue that research in this area may be enhanced by the use of qualitative methods that place fewer constraints on the expression of racial attitudes and variability than quantitative methods do. Using empirical materials from a South African case study, the authors show that a focus on attitudinal discourse and the lived experience of desegregation allow researchers to investigate attitudes as social practices. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A social functional approach to emotions in bargaining: When communicating anger pays and when it backfires.

Previous research on the communication of emotions has suggested that bargainers obtain higher outcomes if they communicate anger than if they communicate happiness because anger signals higher limits, which in turn leads opponents to give in. Building on a social functional account of communicated emotions, the authors demonstrate that the behavioral consequences of communicated anger strongly depend on structural characteristics of the bargaining situation. The results of 3 experimental studies on ultimatum bargaining corroborate the notion that communicated anger signals higher limits and that emotion effects are contingent on bargainers' expectation that low offers will be rejected. The data also indicate, however, that communicating anger in bargaining may backfire. The findings suggest that bargainers who communicate anger may obtain lower outcomes (a) when their opponent has a possibility to deceive them during bargaining and (b) when the consequences of rejecting their opponent's offer are low. Taken together, the current article reveals the boundary conditions of successful communication of anger in bargaining. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mental set and creative thought in social conflict: Threat rigidity versus motivated focus.

According to the traditional threat-rigidity reasoning, people in social conflict will be less flexible, less creative, more narrow-minded, and more rigid in their thinking when they adopt a conflict rather than a cooperation mental set. The authors propose and test an alternative, motivated focus account that better fits existing evidence. The authors report experimental results inconsistent with a threat-rigidity account, but supporting the idea that people focus their cognitive resources on conflict-related material more when in a conflict rather than a cooperation mental set: Disputants with a conflict (cooperation) set have broader (smaller) and more (less) inclusive cognitive categories when the domain of thought is (un)related to conflict (Experiment 1a-1b). Furthermore, they generate more, and more original competition tactics (Experiments 2 - 4), especially when they have low rather than high need for cognitive closure. Implications for conflict theory, for motivated information processing, and creativity research are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Target complicity in the confirmation and disconfirmation of erroneous perceiver expectations: immediate and longer-term implications

The authors explored the role of target self-presentational goals in the expectation confirmation process within the context of simulated employment interviews. As predicted, applicants encouraged to be deferential inadvertently succumbed to their interviewers' expectation; applicants encouraged to be challenging, to advance their own agenda, did not. The challenging-motivated applicants succeeded in disconfirming negative expectations by presenting favorable information about themselves even in the face of negatively constraining interviewer questions; other theoretically relevant behaviors were not supported as mediators. Of added interest, the self-fulfilling prophecies observed for the deference-motivated applicants carried over to a 2nd interview because of changes in applicant self-perceptions following the 1st interview.     

Distinctive features hold a privileged status in the computation of word meaning: Implications for theories of semantic memory.

The authors present data from 2 feature verification experiments designed to determine whether distinctive features have a privileged status in the computation of word meaning. They use an attractor-based connectionist model of semantic memory to derive predictions for the experiments. Contrary to central predictions of the conceptual structure account, but consistent with their own model, the authors present empirical evidence that distinctive features of both living and nonliving things do indeed have a privileged role in the computation of word meaning. The authors explain the mechanism through which these effects are produced in their model by presenting an analysis of the weight structure developed in the network during training. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)