Horizontal asymmetries derived from script direction : consequences for attention and action

Tese apresentada para cumprimento dos requisitos necessários à obtenção do grau de Doutor em Psicologia na área de especialização de Psicologia Social apresentada no ISPA - Instituto Universitário, no ano de 2021.A direção de leitura e escrita estabelecem uma trajetória preferencial de exploração do espaço que é reforçada por diversas regularidades culturais consistentes com essa direccionalidade. A correlação espaço-movimento cria um esquema para a ação que enviesa a representação da agência humana, estendendo-se à representação de outros conceitos abstratos que não possuem bases sensoriomotoras. A dimensão horizontal é recrutada para melhor compreender estes conceitos, sendo ancorados de acordo com a direção de escrita e leitura da nossa língua. A assimetria espacial que esta direccionalidade induz constitui um contributo crucial para a área do embodiment, tendo sido demonstrado que afeta processos sociais e cognitivos. Contudo, os processos específicos que estas assimetrias ativam permanecem pouco explorados. Em sete estudos, esta dissertação investiga de que forma as assimetrias espaciais afetam inferências sociais e a performance visuo-motora para com estímulos ancorados na dimensão horizontal. O primeiro estudo indica que inferências sociais relacionadas com agência são preferencialmente atribuídas a faces de perfil orientadas para a direita (versus esquerda). Em duas experiências, o segundo estudo mostra que faces orientadas para a direita servem como pistas para a orientação de atenção. Faces orientadas para a direita, que traduzem a direção utilizada para representar a agência humana, facilitam a atenção para e deteção de alvos no campo visual direito, comparativamente a faces orientadas para a esquerda no campo visual esquerdo. No terceiro estudo, as faces foram substituídas por palavras temporais auditivas e visuais, que se sabe serem ancoradas horizontalmente. A assimetria espacial foi testada em duas experiências em comunidades com direções de leitura e escrita opostas (Português e Árabe). Observou-se uma ancoragem contrária do conceito abstrato ‘tempo’ entre as duas amostras (Português: passado-esquerda/futuro-direita; Árabe: passado-direita/futuro-esquerda). Adicionalmente, uma performance assimétrica reversa entre as duas comunidades linguísticas confirma que o mapeamento do tempo é enviesado pelos hábitos ortográficos e pela representação cultural da agência humana. Isto é, palavras temporais que coincidem com a direção induzida por ambos os sistemas de escrita (i.e., palavras relacionadas com futuro), dão origem a vantagem à direita na amostra Portuguesa, e vantagem à esquerda na amostra Árabe. O quarto estudo estendeu estes resultados à categoria da política, tipicamente representada através de coordenadas de esquerda e de direita. Respostas manuais e atencionais foram mais rápidas para alvos localizados à direita após terem sido apresentadas termos políticos de direita (versus alvos à esquerda após termos políticos de esquerda), que correspondiam à direção em que habitualmente se representa movimento. O quinto e último estudo demonstrou que a apresentação de palavras temporais simultaneamente com um tom auditivo não-espacial impede os efeitos de emergirem. Estas pistas bimodais revelaram as condições limitativas dos efeitos da assimetria espacial. Em conclusão, esta dissertação demonstra que existe uma propriedade genérica de movimento que deriva da direção ortográfica e que é transversal à representação de estímulos distintos, em várias tarefas e modalidades sensoriais. Estes resultados oferecem uma perspetiva mais abrangente sobre o impacto prevalente que uma característica da língua aparentemente irrelevante tem em processos cognitivos fundamentais de perceção, atenção, e julgamento.The directional activities of reading and writing have been shown to ground a preferential trajectory when scanning space. This horizontal directional formation is further reinforced by other cultural regularities that overlap with it. This space-movement correlation creates a left-right (or vice-versa) schema for action that biases the representation of human agency and extends to the representation of other abstract concepts lacking experiential sensorimotor bases. Consequently, the horizontal dimension is recruited to reason about abstract concepts that are mapped congruently with one’s dominant reading and writing or script direction. The spatial asymmetry that this combined directionality induces is a core finding in the embodiment area and has been shown to affect important social and cognitive processes. However, the specific processes activated by these asymmetries remain unclear. A series of seven experiments are outlined to investigate how spatial asymmetries affect social inferences and visuomotor performance to stimuli anchored in the horizontal dimension. The first study indicated that a range of agency-related social inferences are preferentially assigned to face profiles oriented rightward (versus leftward). Across two experiments, the second study showed that right oriented faces serve as attention-orienting primes. Rightward faces, which are in line with the direction used to represent human agency, facilitate attention to and detection of targets on the right hemifield, relative to leftward faces and targets on the left hemifield. In the third study, face primes were replaced by visual and auditory time words known to ground horizontally in space. Spatial asymmetries were tested in two experiments with communities holding opposite writing scripts (Portuguese and Arabic). We observed the mapping of time to be reversed between the two samples (Portuguese: past-left/future-right; Arabic: past-right/future-left). Further, a mirrored asymmetric performance between the two linguistic communities confirmed that the mapping of time is biased by orthographic habits and the cultural representation of human agency. That is, time words that coincide with the direction induced by both writing systems (i.e., future-related) gave rise to right-side advantage in the Portuguese sample and left-side advantage in the Arabic sample. The fourth study extended these results to the category of politics, commonly represented through coordinates of left and right. Manual and gaze responses were faster to targets embedded on the right following conservatism-related words (versus the left following socialism-related words) that embody the habitualized rightward movement direction. The fifth and final study demonstrated that presenting time words synchronously with an auditory nonspatial tone impaired cueing effects. These bimodal cues revealed the boundary conditions of the spatial agency bias. Overall, this dissertation underscores that a generic property of movement that is derived from orthographic direction underlies the representation of very distinct stimuli across tasks and sensory modalities. These findings offer a broader perspective on the pervasive impact a seemingly irrelevant feature of language has on fundamental cognitive processes of perception, attention, and judgment

L2 Effect on Bilingual Spanish/English Encoding of Motion Events: Does Manner Salience Transfer?

This study explores the potential effect of a second language (L2) on first language (L1) encoding of motion events. The domain of interest is MANNER and the goal is to investigate if the degree of manner salience can be restructured under the effect of a L2. Slobin (2004, 2006) proposes an expansion of Talmy’s (1985, 1991, 2000) binary typology and observes that the degree of manner saliencevaries cross-linguistically. The two languages investigated in this study, Spanish and English, are at divergent points along the cline of manner salience. In addition, Slobin (1996b) suggests dividing MANNER into tier one (T1) manner and tier two (T2) manner. T1-MANNER is available in both Spanish and English, but T2-MANNER is not readily available in Spanish. Thus, it is postulated that if L2 transfer of manner salience occurs, a strong piece of evidence would be to observe an increase in the encoding of T2-MANNER in Spanish. In order to test this idea, the methodology and some of the stimuli from Sakurai (2014) were adapted. The experimental group consisted of adult L1-Spanish/L2-English bilinguals (n = 11 females; n = 19 males; M = 34.23 years of age, with SD = 10.32) and the control group consisted of adult L1-English speakers (n = 7 females; n = 13 males; M = 33.55 years of age, with SD = 11.91). There were two linguistic tasks and two non-linguistic tasks. The linguistic tasks involved narrating stories from Mayer’s (1969) picture book Frog, Where Are You? and from a custom-made animation created from episodes of Gazoon (Villemaine & Trouvé, 2007). The two non-linguistic tasks consisted of a MANNER/PATH categorical task and a MANNER/PATH similarity task originally designed by Sakurai (2014) and modified in the current study. In addition, the Bilingual Language Profile, BLP (Birdsong et al., 2012) was administered to the experimental group in order to assess the relationship (if any) between the L2 dominance scores and the performance in the tasks. The results show that both groups encoded more MANNER in the second linguistic task (the animation) as compared to the first linguistic task (the picture book). There are no statistically significant differences between groups for the proportions of MANNER encoded in the linguistic tasks. However, there is a significant positive correlation (p \u3c 0.01) between the L2 dominance scores and the encoding of T2-MANNER in the animation. This suggests that the effect goes beyond variances in stimulus type: subjects with high L2 dominance scores produced more MANNER expressions characteristic of their L2. The results for the non-linguistic tasks show that the L1-English speakers preferred MANNER to a significantly greater degree than the bilinguals in the first task (p \u3c 0.01). These results conform to the expected lexicalization patterns. There are no significant differences among groups for the second non-linguistic task in regards to MANNER. However, there are significant correlations (p \u3c 0.05) between L2 dominance score and these results. The higher the L2 dominance score, the higher the average MANNER rating and the lower the average PATH rating. Further analyses reveal that the initial between-group difference in the categorical task disappears when the degree of L2 dominance is taken into account. That is, the subjects with L2 dominance scores above the median preferred and rated MANNER in a similar way to the control group in both non-linguistic tasks. Overall, these preliminary findings support the idea of a L2 effect on motion event cognition which could make MANNER more salient in the L1. These results have implications in the fields of cognitive linguistics, linguistic relativity, linguistic typology, second language acquisition, and motion-event experimentation. More data needs to be collected to further validate these results

On The Scope And Typology Of ‘Research Misconduct’: The Gaze Of The General Medical Council, 1990-2015

Violations of research integrity are understood to have wide-ranging negative consequences for the trustworthiness of science and the health of the public. My goal in this article is not to cause further outrage about research misconduct. Instead, this article queries research conducts expressly as seen through the eyes of a specific regulator and over a specific period (1990–2015). The result is an assessment of the strengths and limitations of the application of the General Medical Council’s (GMC’s) fitness to practice model in this area. It provides with an opportunity to shift the analytical attention back onto the existing typology of research misconduct—the classic Fabrication, Falsification, and Plagiarism or FFP—point to its deficiencies, and imagine how it could be refined in light of what the fitness to practice casework tells us about concrete, context-specific instances of research misconduct committed by medical practitioners. In the literature, there has been neither a systematic examination of research behaviours as they get apprehended—when they do—through the lens of the British medical professional regulator, nor a case-based reflection on whether the existing frameworks and typologies used in the scientific community describe adequately the practices of medical research misconduct. The article aims to fill these two gaps

Orphaned Rules in the Administrative State: The Fairness Doctrine and Other Orphaned Progeny of Interactive Deregulation

The recent trend toward deregulation has revealed a fundamental weakness in our administrative state. Agencies that have decided to eliminate agency-created rules that no longer serve their statutory mandate are effectively prevented from doing so by pressure from members of Congress who want to preserve the rule but are unable or unwilling to enact it as law

The Life Experiences of Ten Female Refugees from Iraq and Iran: An Oral History Research Study

This qualitative study about the experiences of 10 religiously persecuted female refugees from Iran (Baha’i) and Iraq (Chaldean) was conducted in both Northern (Bay Area) and Southern (San Diego County) California. The study focused on three periods in their lives: previous experiences in the refugee’s home country prior to resettlement; adaptation to a third country during the resettlement process, especially in regard to experiences with resettlement agencies; and finally, resettlement as refugees in the United States. An oral history methodology was used to conduct the in-depth interviews with the participants. Key findings in the research study included identifying various pull and push factors for leaving their home country and resettling in the United States, such as religious persecution in their homelands as a push factor and the availability of education in the United States as a pull factor. In addition, the findings revealed the hardships the refugees were exposed to while waiting in a third country for processing of their resettlement. Lastly, in regard to the refugees’ experience in the United States, findings showed that the refugees’ identity was more closely tied to their religion (Baha’i/Chaldean) rather than to their nationality and also revealed that some women had a stronger level of independence in the United States than in their home countries

A History of Intelligence and 'Intellectual Disability'

Starting with the hypothesis that not only human intelligence but also its antithesis 'intellectual disability' are nothing more than historical contingencies, C.F. Goodey's paradigm-shifting study traces the rich interplay between labelled human types and the radically changing characteristics attributed to them. From the twelfth-century beginnings of European social administration to the onset of formal human science disciplines in the modern era, A History of Intelligence and 'Intellectual Disability' reconstructs the socio-political and religious contexts of intellectual ability and disability, and demonstrates how these concepts became part of psychology, medicine and biology. Goodey examines a wide array of classical, late medieval and Renaissance texts, from popular guides on conduct and behavior to medical treatises and from religious and philosophical works to poetry and drama. Focusing especially on the period between the Protestant Reformation and 1700, Goodey challenges the accepted wisdom that would have us believe that 'intelligence' and 'disability' describe natural, trans-historical realities. Instead, Goodey argues for a model that views intellectual disability and indeed the intellectually disabled person as recent cultural creations. His book is destined to become a standard resource for scholars interested in the history of psychology and medicine, the social origins of human self-representation, and current ethical debates about the genetics of intelligence