Psychological Review

doi: 10.1037/0033-295X.105.3.411pmid: N/A

Informal arguments take place when individuals exchange views on whether it is worthwhile to believe some assertion or take some action. Debates between friends or family members,classroom sparring about an idea,scientific exchanges about empirical results or theories,and critical discussions and responses in many fields can all be instances of arguments. This article describes the structure of these arguments in terms of the conversational moves that participants can make within them—for example,asking for a justification,giving a reason,offering an objection,or conceding a point. The central part of the article proposes a model for the way people determine to which of the argument's claims each participant is committed. According to the model,commitment is the result of rules defined over the sequence of conversational moves. A participant's commitment to claims that occur later in the argument has well-defined implications for commitment to claims that occurred earlier. Predictions from the model compare well with people's judgments of commitment over a range of argument types. The analysis of argument commitment also illuminates concepts such as burden of proofthat are difficult to define within current reasoning theories that treat just a single side of an issue.

Ashby, F. Gregory; Alfonso-Reese, Leola A.; Turken, And U.; Waldron, Elliott M.

doi: 10.1037/0033-295X.105.3.442pmid: 9697427

A neuropsychological theory is proposed that assumes category learning is a competition between separate verbal and implicit (i.e.,procedural-learning-based) categorization systems. The theory assumes that the caudate nucleus is an important component of the implicit system and that the anterior cingulate and prefrontal cortices are critical to the verbal system. In addition to making predictions for normal human adults,the theory makes specific predictions for children,elderly people,and patients suffering from Parkinson's disease,Huntington's disease,major depression,amnesia,or lesions of the prefrontal cortex. Two separate formal descriptions of the theory are also provided. One describes trial-by-trial learning,and the other describes global dynamics. The theory is tested on published neuropsychological data and on category learning data with normal adults.

doi: 10.1037/0033-295X.105.3.442pmid: 9697427

A neuropsychological theory is proposed that assumes category learning is a competition between separate verbal and implicit (i.e.,procedural-learning-based) categorization systems. The theory assumes that the caudate nucleus is an important component of the implicit system and that the anterior cingulate and prefrontal cortices are critical to the verbal system. In addition to making predictions for normal human adults,the theory makes specific predictions for children,elderly people,and patients suffering from Parkinson's disease,Huntington's disease,major depression,amnesia,or lesions of the prefrontal cortex. Two separate formal descriptions of the theory are also provided. One describes trial-by-trial learning,and the other describes global dynamics. The theory is tested on published neuropsychological data and on category learning data with normal adults.

doi: 10.1037/0033-295X.105.3.482pmid: 9697428

There is growing evidence that face recognition is “special” but less certainty concerning the way in which it is special. The authors review and compare previous proposals and their own more recent hypothesis,that faces are recognized “holistically” (i.e.,using relatively less part decomposition than other types of objects). This hypothesis,which can account for a variety of data from experiments on face memory,was tested with 4 new experiments on face perception. A selective attention paradigm and a masking paradigm were used to compare the perception of faces with the perception of inverted faces,words,and houses. Evidence was found of relatively less part-based shape representation for faces. The literatures on machine vision and single unit recording in monkey temporal cortex are also reviewed for converging evidence on face representation. The neuropsychological literature is reviewed for evidence on the question of whether face representation differs in degree or kind from the representation of other types of objects.

doi: 10.1037/0033-295X.105.3.499pmid: 9697429

In social psychology,specific research traditions,which often spring up in response to external events or social problems,tend to perpetuate the theoretical assumptions and methodological approaches with which they began. As a result,theories and methods that have proven powerful in 1 topic area are often not applied in other areas,even to conceptually similar issues. The authors adopt a theoretically integrative approach to the topic of intergroup relations. Theories and empirical approaches from the domains of attitudes,impression formation,the self,personal relationships,and norms offer many new insights into problematic issues,such as repeated findings of dissociations among stereotyping,prejudice,and discrimination. This integrative approach not only promises new theoretical advances,but also suggests numerous potential practical approaches to limiting or reducing destructive patterns of intergroup relations.

doi: 10.1037/0033-295X.105.3.530pmid: N/A

The author examined macroscopic behavioral patterns in a crowd of pedestrians in a large crosswalk from the perspective of micro–macro linkage in collective behavior. Study 1 developed a macrolevel index to evaluate by field observation a “banded structure” of a pedestrian crowd. The index distinguished 2 patterns of crowd behavior: one with a firmly established structure and one without a clear structure. To examine the formation of the structure,Study 2 used a computer simulation model of pedestrian behavior with a close relationship between the microlevel behavior of individuals and macrolevel behavior of crowds. The micro–macro linkage is expressed through feeding the macrolevel index developed in Study 1 back into a behavioral model for each pedestrian. The results show that models without the linkage between the 2 levels tend to simulate disorganized crowd behavior.

doi: 10.1037/0033-295X.105.3.558pmid: 9697430

This article describes a neuropsychological theory of motor skill learning that is based on the idea that learning grows directly out of motor control processes. Three motor control processes may be tuned to specific tasks,thereby improving performance: selecting spatial targets for movement,sequencing these targets,and transforming them into muscle commands. These processes operate outside of awareness. A 4th,conscious process can improve performance in either of 2 ways: by selecting more effective goals of what should be changed in the environment or by selecting and sequencing spatial targets. The theory accounts for patterns of impairment of motor skill learning in patient populations and for learning-related changes in activity in functional imaging studies. It also makes a number of predictions about the purely cognitive,including accounts of mental practice,the representation of motor skill,and the interaction of conscious and unconscious processes in motor skill learning.

doi: 10.1037/0033-295X.105.3.585pmid: N/A

Cognitive behaviorist E. C. Tolman (1932)proposed many years ago that rats and men navigate with the aid of cognitive maps,but his theory was incomplete. Critic E. R. Guthrie (1935)pointed out that Tolman's maps lack a rule for action,a route finder. We show that a dynamic model for stimulus generalization based on an elementary diffusion process can reproduce the qualitative properties of spatial orientation in animals: area-restricted search in the open field,finding shortcuts,barrier learning (the Umweg problem),spatial “insight” in mazes,and radial maze behavior. The model provides a behavioristic reader for Tolman's cognitive map.

doi: 10.1037/0033-295X.105.3.602pmid: N/A

Different interpretations of an apparent temporal pattern to the experience of regret were addressed through joint research. T. Gilovich and V. H. Medvec (1995a)argued that people regret actions more in the short term and inactions more in the long run because the sting of regrettable action diminishes relatively quickly,whereas the pain of regrettable inaction lingers longer. D. Kahneman (1995)disagreed,arguing that people's long-term regrets of inaction are largely wistful and therefore not terribly troublesome. Three studies that examined the emotional profile of action and inaction regrets established considerable common ground. Action regrets were found to elicit primarily “hot” emotions (e.g.,anger),and inaction regrets were found to elicit both feelings of wistfulness (e.g.,nostalgia) and despair (e.g.,misery). Thus,some inaction regrets are indeed wistful (as Kahneman argued),whereas others are troublesome (as Gilovich and Medvec maintained).