Adding versus averaging models revisited: A test of a path-analytic integration model.

Evidence in support of the averaging model of information integration over the adding model is based on the assumption of independence among the items of information being integrated. When nonindependence is introduced in a manner relating to path analysis, the resulting path-analytic integration (PAI) model is shown to account for both crossover interaction and the decelerating set-size effect. The PAI model also makes a prediction contrary to the averaging model: When the set of correlations among 2 items of information and the overall judgment has a negative product, the crossover interaction is predicted to be the opposite of that previously reported. Results supporting the PAI model over the averaging model are obtained in an experiment in which 120 university students were asked to make judgments about the overall attractiveness of a product based on information given about its price and/or quality. (29 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Initial impression versus missing information as explanations of the set-size effect.

The averaging model of information integration generally predicts a decelerating set-size effect (SSE), because it assumes that an "initial neutral impression" is always averaged with the information items that are presented. However, a modified averaging model, called the path-analytic averaging (PAA) model, predicts that the SSE will not always occur. What is considered the "initial impression" in the averaging model is reconceptualized as "inferred missing information" in the PAA model. When the number of presented items equals the number of items deemed important and both increase together, the PAA model predicts that there will be no SSE because there is no missing information. When the number of presented items increases, so that the added items provide information previously missing, a SSE should occur. These predictions of the PAA model were tested in an experiment in which 36 undergraduates rated the desirability of candidates for secretarial positions based on 1, 2, or 3 items of information. For most Ss, the PAA predictions were confirmed; for some Ss, however, the results are inconsistent with both the PAA model and the usual averaging model predictions. The latter Ss were distinguished from the others by their apparent use of scores less than the scale midpoint when they inferred information that was considered important but missing. (6 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Information integration in consumer risk perception: A comparison of two models of component conceptualization.

Rules used for integrating components of risk into an overall risk rating were examined for 60 undergraduates using N. H. Anderson's 1970 information integration methodology. 30 Ss received stimuli based on a model of risk components developed by J. R. Bettman (1973) and 30 received stimuli based on S. M. Cunningham's (1967) conceptualization. Results indicate that the theoretically expected combination rule, multiplication of components, was not upheld for either model. The Bettman model, although graphically displaying a diverging fan (multiplicative combination), showed a significant residual interaction after the bilinear portion of the interaction was removed. The Cunningham model showed a converging graphical pattern opposite to that expected, supporting a differential weighted averaging model. The development of a theoretical basis for models of consumer risk perception is proposed as a necessary step for future research. (15 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Idiosyncratic weighting of trait information in impression formation.

Analyzes the role of unequal weighting (UW) in the averaging model of information integration. A distinction is made between UW at the normative level (which has been referred to as "differential weighting") and UW at the level of the individual S (which is here called "idiosyncratic weighting"—IW). The prevalence of IW in the trait-judgment impression formation task was examined in 2 studies. Whereas most past research on the question of UW in this task involved averaging responses across both Ss and stimulus replications, the present studies were analyzed at the level of an individual S's repeated responses to separate stimulus replications. Clear evidence of IW was obtained from half of the 120 undergraduate Ss; only 20% of Ss indicated no tendency toward UW. There was no evidence that IW was restricted to just a subset of stimuli, since all of the 20 stimulus replications showed IW effects. In more than 20% of the instances of UW, the more positive trait was accorded a higher weight. (40 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Combining information: Probability summation and probability averaging in detection and discrimination.

Detection may improve if a stimulus offers 2 cues rather than 1. This is sometimes attributed to probability summation of independent detections, which provides an especially simple model for sensory information combination. However, this model assumes a strong bias toward the positive response, which is not appropriate for discrimination. The probability summation model is here extended to apply to discrimination and to allow different degrees of summation, ranging from complete through partial to probability averaging, and the use of this model is illustrated for the method of constant stimuli. It allows performance based on independent decisions to be distinguished from performance (e.g., integration) that is better than summation can explain. Models for the discrimination of complex stimuli may provide a tool for studying the development of expertise in areas where this involves a perceptual component, such as clinical judgment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

An integrative cultural view of achievement motivation: Parental and classroom predictors of children's goal orientations when learning mathematics in Korea.

Our goal was to identify how students' perceptions of their parents shape the kind and degree of motivational goal orientations that they adopt in their mathematics classroom, broadening the application of achievement goal orientation theory and self-determination theory to students in Korea. Two groups of students participated, one from a middle school located in a large metropolitan area and the other from a small city high school. Multisample path analysis of data from both groups revealed that Korean students' different goal orientations were predicted by their perceptions of parental goals and motivating styles and by their perceptions of classroom goal structures, mediated by different types of self-regulated motivations. Particularly interesting was the finding that Korean students' degree of mastery goal adoption was associated mostly with identified regulation, not with intrinsic motivation, and predicted by their perceptions of their parents' motivating styles, both autonomy supportive and controlling, in addition to perceptions of parents' mastery goals. Perceptions of classroom goals were stronger predictors of students' own goals than were perceptions of parents' goals and motivating styles. We offer an integration of self-determination theory and achievement goal theory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Integration theory applied to children's judgments of equity.

Studied information integration in judgments of deservingness and fair shares in 3 experiments using 4–8 yr old children. Even the youngest children had a well-developed sense of equity, and no age trends were found in this respect. Integrational capacity increased with age, but even some of the 4-yr-olds were able to integrate 4 pieces of information. Centration tendencies were absent. At a quantitative level, the data support 3 algebraic models: an averaging model for deservingness, a ratio model for equity division, and an equity integration model for multidimensional equity judgments. These results add to the evidence for a cognitive algebra of children's judgments. The importance of analysis at the level of the individual child is stressed. (37 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Stimulus compounding in free-operant and classical conditioning: A review and analysis.

Reviews previous free-operant and classical conditioning studies reporting additive summation, suppressive summation, and response averaging to compounded stimuli. A stimulus control model applicable to additive and suppressive summation in both paradigms is presented. A symmetrical composite-stimulus continuum, defined by the on-off states of the discriminative or conditioned stimuli controlling behavior in training, is seen to be common to both types of summation, with the functions of the all-on and all-off continuum extremes interchangeable. Moreover, additive summation, suppressive summation, and response averaging appear to be (a) dependent on discrimination training; and (b) determined by the history of, and immediate relations between, response outputs and reinforcement densities conditioned to particular stimulus values along the composite training dimension. This evidence and the derived stimulus control model are used to functionally relate summation to generalization peak shift. It is suggested that these additive, suppressive, and averaging effects to compounded stimuli might further help in clarifying, and in placing in contextual perspective, what are currently thought of as "excitatory" and "inhibitory" mechanisms in learning. (72 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cultural difference in attribution of performance: An integration-theoretical analysis.

F. Heider's (1958) suggestion that Performance?=?Motivation?×?Ability has been empirically confirmed by N. H. Anderson and C. A. Butzin (1974) and by A. Kum et al (1974), using American students as Ss. This multiplying process failed to appear in the present 3 experiments performed with 56 male Indian college students. Contrary to the predicted linear fan pattern, the plot of Motivation?×?Ability effect displayed clear parallelism. An equal-weight averaging rule was able to account for the results obtained in both group and single-S analyses. Perhaps the integration rules underlying achievement judgments are culture-specific, and Indian college students average motivation and ability information in attribution of future scholastic performance. Results illustrate the potential power that information integration theory provides for the cross-cultural study of social perception and cognition. (18 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effectiveness of comprehensive professional development for teachers of at-risk preschoolers.

[Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 101(3) of Journal of Educational Psychology (see record 2009-11043-017). In the article, a disclosure statement was incorrectly omitted due to an error during the production process from the author note of the final article. The following statement should have appeared in the author note: The University of Texas Health Science Center—Houston owns intellectual property for the online professional development program and the progress monitoring program and receives remuneration as do Paul Swank and Susan Landry as two of the authors of those programs.] This study compared effectiveness of “business as usual” to that of 4 professional development (PD) programs that targeted teachers of at-risk preschool children. A 2 × 2 design was used to cross mentoring and progress monitoring conditions among the 4 PD programs. Specifically, some teachers received both in-classroom mentoring and detailed, instructionally linked feedback concerning children's progress in language and literacy. Some teachers received no mentoring but did receive the detailed, instructionally linked feedback concerning children's progress. Some teachers received in-classroom mentoring but only limited feedback on children's progress, which was not linked to curricular activities. Finally, some teachers received no mentoring and only limited feedback concerning children's progress. All 4 PD conditions included the same year-long, facilitated online course that emphasized language and literacy instruction, practice of learned material in one's classroom, and participation in online message boards with fellow teachers. Across 4 states, 158 schools (N = 262 classrooms) were randomly assigned to 1 of the 4 PD conditions or business as usual. The condition that included online coursework combined with mentoring and detailed, instructionally linked feedback yielded the greatest improvements in teaching behavior and children's school readiness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Inferences of ability and effort: Evidence for two different processes.

In 2 experiments, 295 undergraduates judged either ability (given performance and effort information) or effort (given performance and ability information) where both the reliability and value of the given information varied. Ss made judgments of IQ (or study time) based on information about the effort a person expended in studying (or IQ), student's performance, or both. Individual differences were found in the judged relationship between ability and effort. Some judged ability and effort to be positively related, whereas others judged ability and effort to be negatively related. These groups also differed in the way information reliability influenced their judgments. The positive group showed effects that agree with either an averaging or correlational model: Higher reliability of one type of information was correlated with a lesser effect of the other type of information. For the negative group, an increase in the reliability of one type of information actually increased the effect of the other type of information, a result that is inconsistent with the averaging model. Both an expectancy-contrast model and a correlational model can account for the results of the negative group. The different effects of information reliability for the 2 groups can be interpreted as evidence of 2 different inference processes. Results show flexibility of human judgment strategies and the need for research considering variables that influence strategy use. (24 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A study of salience and motivational theories of humor.

Compared the motivational model of humor, which emphasizes the thematic properties of jokes and views sexual and aggressive humor as serving a release function, with the salience model of humor, which emphasizes a cognitive set for processing sexual/aggressive stimuli more easily. 189 college students assigned humor ratings to 3 sets of jokes containing salient themes (examination content), taboo themes (sex and violence content), and neutral themes. The joke sets had been matched a priori for incongruity structure. The salience of examination content was manipulated by having the Ss rate jokes under 1 of 3 conditions: control (normal classroom setting), before taking an examination, and 20 min after beginning an examination. Results do not confirm hypotheses derived from the salience model; motivational factors (taboo content, mastery theme) were associated with high humor ratings. A conceptual integration of cognitive and psychoanalytic mechanisms of humor is suggested. (20 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Integration of auditory and kinesthetic information in motion: Alterations in Parkinson's disease.

The main aim in this work was to study the interaction between auditory and kinesthetic stimuli and its influence on motion control. The study was performed on healthy subjects and patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). Thirty-five right-handed volunteers (young, PD, and age-matched healthy participants, and PD-patients) were studied with three different motor tasks (slow cyclic movements, fast cyclic movements, and slow continuous movements) and under the action of kinesthetic stimuli and sounds at different beat rates. The action of kinesthesia was evaluated by comparing real movements with virtual movements (movements imaged but not executed). The fast cyclic task was accelerated by kinesthetic but not by auditory stimuli. The slow cyclic task changed with the beat rate of sounds but not with kinesthetic stimuli. The slow continuous task showed an integrated response to both sensorial modalities. These data show that the influence of the multisensory integration on motion changes with the motor task and that some motor patterns are modulated by the simultaneous action of auditory and kinesthetic information, a cross-modal integration that was different in PD-patients. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

“Effectiveness of comprehensive professional development for teachers of at-risk preschoolers”: Correction.

Reports an error in "Effectiveness of comprehensive professional development for teachers of at-risk preschoolers" by Susan H. Landry, Jason L. Anthony, Paul R. Swank and Pauline Monseque-Bailey (Journal of Educational Psychology, 2009[May], Vol 101[2], 448-465). In the article, a disclosure statement was incorrectly omitted due to an error during the production process from the author note of the final article. The following statement should have appeared in the author note: The University of Texas Health Science Center—Houston owns intellectual property for the online professional development program and the progress monitoring program and receives remuneration as do Paul Swank and Susan Landry as two of the authors of those programs. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2009-04640-017.) This study compared effectiveness of “business as usual” to that of 4 professional development (PD) programs that targeted teachers of at-risk preschool children. A 2 × 2 design was used to cross mentoring and progress monitoring conditions among the 4 PD programs. Specifically, some teachers received both in-classroom mentoring and detailed, instructionally linked feedback concerning children's progress in language and literacy. Some teachers received no mentoring but did receive the detailed, instructionally linked feedback concerning children's progress. Some teachers received in-classroom mentoring but only limited feedback on children's progress, which was not linked to curricular activities. Finally, some teachers received no mentoring and only limited feedback concerning children's progress. All 4 PD conditions included the same year-long, facilitated online course that emphasized language and literacy instruction, practice of learned material in one's classroom, and participation in online message boards with fellow teachers. Across 4 states, 158 schools (N = 262 classrooms) were randomly assigned to 1 of the 4 PD conditions or business as usual. The condition that included online coursework combined with mentoring and detailed, instructionally linked feedback yielded the greatest improvements in teaching behavior and children's school readiness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Gender-based schematic processing: An empirical investigation and reevaluation.

This study was designed to provide a test of two models of gender-based schematic processing: gender schema theory (Bem, 1981b) and self-schema theory (Markus, Crane, Bernstein, & Saldi, 1982). The former position stipulates that only sex-typed individuals should provide strong evidence for schematic processing of gender-related information, whereas the latter contends that individuals may exhibit such processing with respect to masculine, feminine, neither, or both classes of stimuli. A total of 167 male and female introductory psychology students were classified into the four sex role categories and then participated in a standard "me/not me" attribute rating task, followed by either a free-recall or "yes/no" recognition procedure, which used an independent set of stimuli. Results indicated that although predictions from self-schema theory were best able to account for the findings emerging from the attribute rating task, neither model satisfactorily addressed the data from the memory tasks. The discussion focuses on implications for current conceptualizations of gender schematic processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A pattern recognition account of decision making

In the domain of pattern recognition, experiments have shown that perceivers integrate multiple sources of information in an optimal manner. In contrast, other research has been interpreted to mean that decision making is nonoptimal. As an example, Tversky and Kahneman (1983) have shown that subjects commit a conjunction fallacy because they judge it more likely that a fictitious person named Linda is a bank teller and a feminist than just a bank teller. This judgment supposedly violates probability theory, because the probability of two events can never be greater than the probability of either event alone. The present research tests the hypothesis that subjects interpret this judgment task as a pattern recognition task. If this hypothesis is correct, subjects' judgments should be described accurately by the fuzzy logical model of perception (FLMP)--a successful model of pattern recognition. In the first experiment, the Linda task was extended to an expanded factorial design with five vocations and five avocations. The probability ratings were described well by the FLMP and described poorly by a simple probability model. The second experiment included (1) two fictitious people, Linda and Joan, as response alternatives and (2) both ratings and categorization judgments. Although the ratings were accurately described by both the FLMP and an averaging of the sources of information, the categorization judgments were described better by the FLMP. These results reveal important similarities in recognizing patterns and in decision making. Given that the FLMP is an optimal method for combining multiple sources of information, the probability judgments appear to be optimal in the same manner as pattern-recognition judgments.     

The Attentional Dynamics of Masked Detection.

A dichoptic masking procedure was used to test whether the mask-dependent cuing effects found in luminance detection by P. L. Smith (2000a) were due to integration masking or interruption masking. Attentional cuing enhanced detection sensitivity (d') when stimuli were backwardly masked with either dichoptic or monoptic masks, whereas no cuing effect was found with unmasked stimuli, implying the mask dependencies were due to interruption of stimulus processing in visual cortex by the mask. The effect is predicted by a gated diffusion process model in which masks interrupt stimulus processing and attention controls the flow of information to a sequential-sampling decision mechanism. The model correctly predicts different patterns of performance for detection and discrimination and cuing effects in simple reaction time. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotional effects of false automatic feedback.

Examines the theory of the effects of arousal information in emotion proposed by S. Valins (see record 1966-12940-001) and reviews subsequent research using the false autonomic feedback procedure that offers evidence concerning the validity of Valins's analysis. Alternative interpretations of these findings are considered that involve artefacts related to demand characteristics and inappropriate control procedures or cognitive and physiological mediation. Potential limitations to the generality of the false-feedback effect are discussed in terms of target strength and type. It is argued that feedback changes are perceived as credible in conjunction with only a limited range of emotional stimuli and that reactions to stimuli outside this range cannot be modified by provision or arousal information. It is concluded that Valins's model of affective processes has only restricted application to real-life emotional phenomena. (57 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)