Psychology, Experimental

When viewing advertisements, one could be exposed to new information about the product. During that time, one could construct ad hoc categories or simple attributes for the brand-name product. The current experiment used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to measure bilateral frontal and temporal cortices to understand the contribution of constructing ad hoc categories and simple attributes on purchase intentions. The current experiment also examined the feasibility of using the tensor decomposition method compared to the grand averaging method in multidimensional fNIRS signal analysis. This is to see if tensor decomposition can maintain the pattern of hemodynamic response without losing the temporal dynamics and spatial array to find a more optimized time and regions of interest to average across. The current experiments consisted of two parts: 1) participants studied brand-name products for various ad hoc categories (Experiment 1) or various simple attributes (Experiment 2) and 2) pick for purchase brand-name products in a two-alternative forced choice purchase intention test. Three methods were used to analyze the hemodynamic response data: the grand averaging method, the tensor decomposition method, and the revised grand averaging method. The revised grand averaging method is the same as the grand averaging method but uses information from the tensor decomposition method to inform what time and channel to average across. There were behavioral priming benefits compared to products that were not studied. However, there were no differences across the study conditions. Results revealed processing benefits, not purchasing benefits, for brand-name products studied for different simple attributes as marked by changes in the left prefrontal cortex. The results from tensor decomposition revealed more details on the time and channels of interest than the grand averaging method. Findings suggest that studying different simple attributes of a brand-name product produces benefits in the purchase intention process. Also, findings suggest tensor decomposition is a feasible method for fNIRS signal analysis.

Children who are perceived by classmates as being fun increase their peer status over time, but little is known about whether being fun predicts other peer outcomes. Also unknown are mechanisms whereby being fun predicts changes in peer outcomes. Associations with fun, like surgency, suggest that children high in fun are more likely to gain friends while children low in fun are more likely to lose friends, indicating that friend gain and friend loss may serve as intervening links between being fun and peer outcomes. Participants (171 girls, 190 boys) were third to seventh grade students attending a public school in Florida. Across three time points approximately three-months apart, participants reported who their friends were, nominated peers who best fit descriptions of fun and popular, and completed self-reports assessing peer problems. Results indicated that being fun predicted subsequent changes in popularity and peer problems via friend gain but not friend loss. The findings suggest that being fun is a unique predictor of peer outcomes and that friend gain is a mechanism whereby fun children experience positive peer outcomes.

When adults attempt to learn new speech sounds, they do so in the context of the phonology of their native language. The purpose of the present work is to investigate the nature of the learning process; that is, to examine, in individuals, (1) the process of acquiring a new phonetic category, (2) the impact of learning a new phonetic category on a similar, existing category, and (3) transfer of learning to a novel phonetic context. Monolingual American English speakers were required to learn the Hindi voiced, unaspirated, dental stop consonant. Two synthetic speech continua (one voiced, the other voiceless) were created, spanning a range from Hindi dental to American English alveolar stop consonants. Subjects underwent a perceptual mapping procedure that included identification, judged goodness, and difference-rating tasks in order to establish how they perceived the stimuli initially. Then they participated in a two-alternative, forced-choice training program using only voiced, natural speech stimuli. Progress was monitored throughout training. Following training, the mapping procedure was repeated with both the voiced and voiceless continua. After at least a two-week delay with no further training, subjects participated in a follow-up test. Results indicate that the nature of change during the learning process depends on how the individual listener perceives the stimuli prior to training and on the order of presentation of stimuli.

Previous studies of the relative pitch of intervals composed of Shepard tones (Shepard, 1964) revealed a sinusoidal structure of the directional distortion. Deutsch and coworkers found a similar sinusoidal structure when tritones alone were presented to listeners (Deutsch, 1987). In the first study, the tritone paradox was studied among listeners in Florida. The typical sinusoidal response function appeared for averaged data as well as for tones generated in two different octave ranges, consistent with earlier work (Deutsch, 1991; 1994). The degree of context sensitivity of tritones composed of Shepard tones and Deutsch tones is discussed in terms of what we call a whole tone context. This idea is explored in the second study. The second study measures the relative distribution and rate of new musical information growth in melodic flows in pre-20th and 20th century diatonic styles, and compares these with 20th century melodies in whole tone and pantonal compositional settings. Three measures of complexity were used in these analyses: (1) metric or probabilistic entropy, hM, is derived from the melodic sequence as a Markov process yielding a logarithmic quantifier of the dispension of statistical weight in its asymptotic distribution; (2) topological entropy, hT, quantifies the logarithmic rate of growth of new pitch pattern subsequences along the melodic line; (3) hT - hM = 0 in a uniformly random system so that deviation from zero indicates nonuniformity in the melodic line, i.e., [(hT - hM) < 0]1 < [(hT - hM) < 0]2 says the former makes more motions on fewer melodic elements. Analyses of 34 compositions indicated that the metric entropy, hM, alone is not distinguishing, consistent with the findings of Boon and Decroly (1990). However, the topological entropy, hT, quantified differences within a composer's work, and the ratio hT - hM distinguished among composers. The findings suggest that complexity measured by the difference (ratio) in entropy computations is lower in 20th century styles in which the tritone is part of the interval vocabulary (e.g., Bartok and Schoenberg) than in 19th or 20th century styles (e.g., Mozart and Prokofiev) in which functional harmony dominates the tonal picture and the tritone is considered an altered fourth or fifth. The metric and topological entropies considered together suggest a technique for quantifiable characterization of differences between the works of composers studied, including those of the 20th century.

The purpose of this study was to investigate
differences in arousal reduction between males and
females as a function of the sex of target and type
of verbal counterresponse, during an interpersonal
conflict. The independent variables were the sex of
subject, sex of target and type of counterresponse.
The dependent variable was the arousal reduction score.
Twenty undergraduate males and twenty undergraduate
females were used. Sex differences in arousal reduction
for subjects counterresponding to verbal aggression were
found for sex of subject, sex of target and type of
counterresponse. Male subjects showed significant arousal
reduction only for the disagree counterresponse and females
showed arousal reduction only for the agreed counterresponse.
Significant arousal reduction occurred only when the subject
disagreed with a male target and agreed with a female
target.

The purpose of this study was to determine whether behavioral contingencies or pharmacological exposure governs the development, loss and retention of tolerance to amphetamine-induced hypophagia in rats. In Experiment 1, rats that had developed tolerance by learning to suppress stereotypy that interfered with feeding from a bottle were divided into three groups to test the retention of tolerance. The Before group received injections of amphetamine (2.0 mg/kg) before access to milk, the After group received injections of amphetamine after access to milk, and the Saline group received injections of saline before access to milk. Both the After and Saline groups lost tolerance when later tested with amphetamine before milk tests. Thus, the loss of tolerance was not a function of drug withdrawal, because drug exposure remained constant in the After group. When milk reward was obtained noncontingently, tolerance was lost even though pharmacological exposure was maintained. Behavioral strategies that were learned while intoxicated were replaced with new learning when the contingencies were changed. Experiment 2 determined that tolerance loss was a function of new learning and not simply ingesting milk in the unintoxicated state. Bottle-fed tolerant rats were given amphetamine prior to intraoral feeding of milk during a retention interval. Subsequent testing with amphetamine in the bottle condition revealed that tolerance was lost. Because the cannula feeding condition does not require suppression of stereotypy, milk reward was available noncontingently in the intoxicated state and tolerance was lost even though drug exposure was maintained. In Experiment 3 rats were given chronic amphetamine injections and intraoral feeding. Subsequent tests with amphetamine and bottle feeding revealed that no tolerance developed. These results demonstrate that even when ingestion occurs in the intoxicated state, no tolerance develops if milk reward is available noncontingently. Animals that drank intraorally were not tolerant when tested in the bottle condition.

Previous research has concluded that individuals high in perspective taking respond less aggressively to provocation than do those low in perspective taking. Whether the perspective-taking effect is automatic or not and many other process-related questions remain largely unanswered. One hundred sixteen female college students participated in a competitive reaction-time task, received escalatory negative feedback purportedly from another participant. In addition to being categorized as either high or low perspective takers, participants also received either high or low levels of situational information about the other and high or low levels of cognitive busyness. Participants high in perspective taking who were under high cognitive load responded significantly less aggressively than did participants low in perspective taking. Results suggest that perspective taking is an automatic process. The findings are discussed in terms of attribution theory, complexity-extremity theory, and in terms of an arousal-dominant response model.

Humans are often faced with tasks that require stabilizing inherently unstable situations. We performed four experiments to explore the nature of functional stabilization. In Experiment 1 participants balanced a pole until a time criterion was reached. The geometry, mass, and characteristic "fall time" of the pole were manipulated. Distributions of timing between pole and hand velocities showed strong action-perception coupling. When actions demonstrated a potential for failure, the period of hand oscillation correlated significantly with the "time to balance" (t bal=theta/theta.), where q is pole angle re: the vertical balance point, but not other quantities such as theta and theta. alone. This suggested that participants were attending to available t bal information during critical situations. In a model analysis and simulation, we demonstrated how discrete t bal information may be used to adjust the parameters of a controller to perform this task. In Experiment 2 participants balanced a virtual inverted pendulum under manipulations designed: (1) to decouple the mechanics of the system from its visual image; (2) to alter the mapping of perception and action; and (3) to perturb successful balancing. A replication of the correlation analysis of Experiment 1 revealed that across all conditions, significant relationships existed between visually specified t -variables and hand oscillation during critical motions of the pole. These results suggested that participants use the same t bal information to successfully stabilize both virtual and physical unstable systems, despite quite dramatic visual and mechanical transformations. In Experiments 3 and 4 we investigated how parts of the body, or individuals in a social dyad cooperate to perform a functional stabilization task. Participants balanced a pole either intermanually (using 2 separate hands) or interpersonally (2 persons each using their preferred right hand) until a time criterion was reached. Although the magnitudes of the forces exerted by each hand were different, an analysis of the timing of the forces revealed that intermanual (interpersonal) participants developed a consistent antiphase (inphase) coordination pattern. These different coordination patterns allowed for the recruitment of previously unavailable efferent and afferent connections to produce the net forces that served to stabilize the pole via theta. (see Experiment 1).

The time dynamics of moral judgments were investigated in two studies. In the first, participants recorded verbal recollections of an event in which they had been treated unjustly by another. Listening to their own recordings, participants used a relatively new instrument (the mouse paradigm) to express their moment to moment feelings, attributing "responsibility," "justification" and "intent" to their antagonist. In a second experiment, a different group of participants recorded their feelings about a scripted academic honor code violation. While listening to their recordings, participants used the computer mouse to indicate their moment to moment feelings about the "actor," "transgression," and "punishment" described in the story. Results from both studies suggest that at any one moment, participants made judgments that uniformly characterized the transgressor in either positive or negative terms. Expressions of moral judgments, however, often changed dramatically from moment to moment between positive or negative modal values. Moreover, the flow of moral judgment resembled the temporal patterns observed in many formal and natural dynamical systems. Despite these changes, moral judgments became more stable over time; demonstrated coherence among the separately measured dimensions; and showed sensitivity to an importance manipulation. By replicating these classic findings in the attitude literature, this research helps validate the utility of the mouse paradigm in measuring moral judgments. The results further suggest that moral judgments are multi modal over time---casting doubt on the usefulness of the (averaged) judgments that are computed with traditional questionnaire instruments.

Two experiments are reported, both dealing with syllable affiliation of a consonant. The first experiment extends the work of Tuller and Kelso (1990) and was designed to capture the signatures of loss of stability in a dynamical system (enhanced fluctuations and critical slowing). An Articulograph device (Carstens Medizinelektronik GmbH.) was used to track the movements of the tongue tip, the lower lip, and the jaw in the midsagittal plane while the subjects spoke a VCC word in time to an auditory metronome at a slowly increasing rate. A clear transition occurred in the phonetics (VCC -> CVC) as judged by a phonetically trained listener, and the transition in phonetics corresponded to a change in the relative phase between the tongue tip and the lower lip and between the tongue tip and jaw. The transition was accompanied by both enhanced fluctuations and critical slowing for subjects who complied with the metronome. The second experiment examined syllable affiliation in natural English phrases with contrasting metrical structures. The phonemes /s/, /t/ and /k/, were used, and the tongue tip, tongue blade, and jaw were recorded by the Articulograph device. Consistent relative timing of the consonant movement in relation to vowel movement was observed, thus supporting the position that syllable affiliation is expressed as distinct phase values in natural speech as well as reiterated speech. In addition, the evidence supports the view that the syllable is an organizational unit of speech in English.