STUDENT PERSONNEL WORK And Personality Development

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/89534/1/j.2164-4918.1954.tb01566.x.pd

The influence of hold regularity on perceptual-motor behaviour in indoor climbing

Climbers often train on indoor climbing walls, which are modifiable to simulate features of outdoor climbing environments at different levels of difficulty. The aim of this study was to evaluate the influence of regularity of climbing holds on emergent perceptual-motor behaviours. Skilled climbers performed six repetitions of two topographically similar routes on an indoor climbing wall. One route was composed of 18 different types of hand holds (irregular route), whereas the other route had only two types of hand holds (regular route). Preview and climbing durations, as well as visual search behaviours, were recorded. Participants rated the regular route as more difficult to climb, requiring greater perceived effort to complete. The time spent previewing, and then climbing the routes, was reduced on average by 12% and 16%, respectively in the irregular route compared to the regular route. There were more fixations made when climbing the regular route (281 vs. 222 fixations per trial). It seems the climbers were more careful and thorough in their gaze behaviours with the regular route because of the additional technical demands it presented, whereas the irregular route afforded a more superficial visual exploration with use of more frequent saccades between holds. The findings suggest how irregularity in the environment is exploited by skilled climbers, apparently making the practice context easier to perceive and act i

Consumer Evaluations of Competing Brands: Perceptual versus Predictive Validity

This study applies the concepts of consumer predictive and confidence values of information to consumer evaluations of food quality. Examining hypothetical findings from a thought experiment, the study offers advances in cue utilization, predictive validity, and achievement of consumer's perceived quality and actual quality. Separately, metrics for these concepts were applied in a consumer product-quality evaluation study of three brands of peanut butter. Actual quality was operationally defined in terms of Consumers Union ratings of the peanut butter. Using a between-groups, posttest only experimental design, female graduate students (n = 98) tasted and rated one of three peanut butters on the basis of quality and nine product attributes. These informants received no knowledge of brand names or comparative qualities prior to the test. The analysis indicates a nonsignificant correlation between actual quality of the brands and quality as perceived by the informants. The major cues used by informants in making their qualitative judgments (cue utilization) differed from the significant dimensions associated with actual quality (predictive validity). The findings inform the suggestion for consumer training in the process of making accurate quality evaluations

The effect of sleep deprivation on objective and subjective measures of facial appearance

This study was funded by the Swedish Research Council, FORTE (Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare), and The Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences.The faces of people who are sleep deprived are perceived by others as looking paler, less healthy and less attractive compared to when well rested. However, there is little research using objective measures to investigate sleep‐loss‐related changes in facial appearance. We aimed to assess the effects of sleep deprivation on skin colour, eye openness, mouth curvature and periorbital darkness using objective measures, as well as to replicate previous findings for subjective ratings. We also investigated the extent to which these facial features predicted ratings of fatigue by others and could be used to classify the sleep condition of the person. Subjects (n = 181) were randomised to one night of total sleep deprivation or a night of normal sleep (8–9 hr in bed). The following day facial photographs were taken and, in a subset (n = 141), skin colour was measured using spectrophotometry. A separate set of participants (n = 63) later rated the photographs in terms of health, paleness and fatigue. The photographs were also digitally analysed with respect to eye openness, mouth curvature and periorbital darkness. The results showed that neither sleep deprivation nor the subjects’ sleepiness was related to differences in any facial variable. Similarly, there was no difference in subjective ratings between the groups. Decreased skin yellowness, less eye openness, downward mouth curvature and periorbital darkness all predicted increased fatigue ratings by others. However, the combination of appearance variables could not be accurately used to classify sleep condition. These findings have implications for both face‐to‐face and computerised visual assessment of sleep loss and fatigue.PostprintPeer reviewe

Herbert Simon's decision-making approach: Investigation of cognitive processes in experts

This is a post print version of the article. The official published can be obtained from the links below - PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved.Herbert Simon's research endeavor aimed to understand the processes that participate in human decision making. However, despite his effort to investigate this question, his work did not have the impact in the “decision making” community that it had in other fields. His rejection of the assumption of perfect rationality, made in mainstream economics, led him to develop the concept of bounded rationality. Simon's approach also emphasized the limitations of the cognitive system, the change of processes due to expertise, and the direct empirical study of cognitive processes involved in decision making. In this article, we argue that his subsequent research program in problem solving and expertise offered critical tools for studying decision-making processes that took into account his original notion of bounded rationality. Unfortunately, these tools were ignored by the main research paradigms in decision making, such as Tversky and Kahneman's biased rationality approach (also known as the heuristics and biases approach) and the ecological approach advanced by Gigerenzer and others. We make a proposal of how to integrate Simon's approach with the main current approaches to decision making. We argue that this would lead to better models of decision making that are more generalizable, have higher ecological validity, include specification of cognitive processes, and provide a better understanding of the interaction between the characteristics of the cognitive system and the contingencies of the environment

Scientific measurement of sensory preferences using stimulus tetrads

This paper provides the evidence base to construct a professional standard for discriminative scaling of taints and optima. The measurement of suboptimal sensed characteristics of a product has logical and empirical requirements that specify a single overall rating of each sample in a tetrad. Those four pairs of response/stimulus data determine the discrimination distance of each sample from the comparison in memory used by the assessor, together with the position of that standard on the straight line specified by the two stimulus levels in the tetrad. The rating's reference anchor can be the match to a familiar version of the product or the personally most preferred level. Each sample can be assessed again for sensory and/or conceptual attributes, using vocabulary learned in life or by sensory training. Those data give the ideal or matching value of that verbal category and the individual's tolerance of deviations from that value

The effect of stimulus variability on children\u2019s judgements of quantity

This study investigates the effect of stimulus variability on development of the ability to make quantity judgements related to area. Participants were 241 children (aged 4, 5, 6, 8, and 12 years) and 82 university students, who were asked to compare the quantities in 2 sets of 5 chocolate bars of constant width but variable length. Participants indicated which set contained more chocolate or that the amounts of chocolate were equal. Judgement accuracy of 12-year-olds and adults decreased monotonically as the variance of bar lengths increased. In younger children, performance was low when variance was very low or very high, but accuracy was higher for intermediate levels of variance, thus resulting in an inverted U-shaped effect. This pattern was confirmed in a second experiment in which we controlled for a possible age-related response bias against \u201cequal\u201d judgements. Findings suggest that judgements of quantity are based on a mixture of learned heuristics and comparisons of approximate quantity representations, both of which develop throughout childhood

Neorealism: unifying cognition and environment

APA ProofsRecent trends in psychology have revealed increasing discontent toward representational explanations of behavior. However, whether these trends have the conceptual resources to address the full range of cognitive phenomena remains unclear. Here, I defend neorealism (Holt, 1914) as the missing philosophical link between radically embodied cognitive science and a more encompassing psychology. Neorealism identifies cognitive contents, however subjective or unreal in appearance, with portions or cross sections of the objective environment. These portions are extended in time and they sustain causal and historical relations to current behavior. I sketch how neorealist concepts can help psychologists to address phenomena such as dreams and imagery in fully environmental terms