Perceiving affect from arm movement.

We examined the visual perception of affect from point-light displays of arm movements. Two actors were instructed to perform drinking and knocking movements with ten different affects while the three-dimensional positions of their arms were recorded. Point-light animations of these natural movements and phase-scrambled, upside-down versions of the same knocking movements were shown to participants who were asked to categorize the affect of the display. In both cases the resulting confusion matrices were analyzed using multidimensional scaling. For the natural movements the resulting two-dimensional psychological space was similar to a circumplex with the first dimension appearing as activation and the second dimension as pleasantness. For the scrambled displays the first dimension was similar in structure to that obtained for the natural movements but the second dimension was not. With both natural and scrambled movements Dimension 1 of the psychological space was highly correlated to the kinematics of the movement. These results suggest that the corresponding activation of perceived affect is a formless cue that relates directly to the movement kinematics while the pleasantness of the movement appears to be carried in the phase relations between the different limb segments.

When being included is being excluded: a note on complement set focus and the inclusion relation.

Some negative quantifiers lead to pronominal reference patterns that are different from those obtained with positive quantifiers (Moxey & Sanford, 1993). This has been interpreted as meaning that the negatives give rise to a focus on the complement set (Moxey & Sanford, 1987); so, given few of the children enjoyed the trip, focus is on those who did not enjoy the trip. To date, this interpretation has depended on subjective judgments as to which set an anaphoric plural pronoun is referring to, allowing other interpretations of the data to be given by discourse semanticists. In two studies, we use the attachment patterns associated with the expression including, thereby circumventing the judgment problem. We show that a case like not many people enjoyed the race, including John leads to a representation in which John maps into the set of individuals who did not enjoy the race. We test and support the earlier claim that complement set focus is driven by denials associated with some negative quantifiers.

The influence of types of character on processing background information in narrative discourse.

The background sentence The air was cold and clammy depicts setting information which may or may not be of significance to a given character in a narrative. We tested the hypothesis that such information is processed with respect to the main character in a narrative rather than with respect to a secondary character. In Experiment 1, subjects making attributions of awareness of such background states were more likely to attribute such awareness to main than to secondary characters. In Experiment 2, using self-paced reading, we showed that such information is more important for main than for secondary characters during reading. Thus, unattached background information is processed with respect to main characters. This bias provides a source of control over the processing necessary to establish a coherent representation during the reading of narratives. Experiment 3 eliminated the possibility that the effects were due to generally shallower processing of sentences centered on secondary characters.

Attentional focusing with quantifiers in production and comprehension.

There is a very large number of quantifiers in English, so many that it seems impossible that the only information that they convey is about amounts. Building on the earlier work of Moxey and Sanford (1987), we report three experiments showing that positive and negative quantifiers focus on different subsets of the logical possibilities that quantifiers allow semantically. Experiments 1 and 2 feature a continuation task with quantifiers that span a full range of denotations (from near 0% to near 100%) and show that the effect is not restricted to quantifiers denoting small amounts. This enables a distinction to be made between generalization and complement set focus proper. The focus effects extend to comprehension, as shown by a self-paced reading study (Experiment 3). It is noted that the focus effects obtained are compatible with findings from earlier work by Just and Carpenter (1971), which used a verification paradigm, and in fact these effects constitute a direct test of inferences Just and Carpenter made about mechanisms of encoding negative quantifiers. A related but different explanation is put forward to explain the present data. The experiments show a quantifier function beyond the simple denotation of amount.

A case study of anomaly detection: shallow semantic processing and cohesion establishment.

Although the establishment of a coherent mental representation depends on semantic analysis, such analysis is not necessarily complete. This is illustrated by failures to notice the anomaly in questions such as, "When an airplane crashes, where should the survivors be buried?" Four experiments were carried out to extend knowledge of what determines the incidental detection of the critical item. Detection is a function of the goodness of global fit of the item (Experiments 1 and 2) and the extent to which the scenario predicts the item (Experiment 3). Global good fit appears to result in shallow processing of details. In Experiment 4, it is shown that if satisfactory coherence can be established without detailed semantic analysis, through the recruitment of suitable information from a sentence, then processing is indeed shallow. The studies also show that a text is not understood by first producing a local semantic representation and then incorporating this into a global model, and that semantic processing is not strictly incremental.

The elderly and the control of simple behaviour by probabilistic information.

The probabilities of events in the environment are important as controllers of how we cope with that environment. Attention is deployed to parts of the visual field where important events are most likely to happen; in predicting what will happen next in a situation, probable things tend to be predicted. This paper assess adult age differences in the use of probabilistic information, using the laboratory task-settings of choice reaction time, simple prediction, and selective attending. In almost all situations the elderly are less influenced by event probabilities than their juniors, although they are just as capable of registering the probabilities involved. This consistent age effect contradicts the predictions of Griew's theory which assumes that behavioural experience operates by increasing the use of probabilistic information. A second finding was that value and reward manipulations which alter the response patterns of the young do not influence the elderly to the same extent. It is tentatively concluded that attenuated use of probability information characterises the elderly, as does a reduced response to simple payoffs. Some avenues of theoretical exploration are discussed, together with some caveats concerning the applicability of the findings.

An age-related attentuation of selectivity of choice in a modified guessing task.

Previous research has shown that older Ss tend to be less selective in multi-source monitoring tasks in that they do not observe the more likely source of information as frequently as do the young. On the other hand, it has also been found that in a simple guessing-game or probability matching task older Ss are no different in their patterns of prediction. An experiment is described below in which old and young Ss take part in a simple quessing-game task where uncertainty as to the success of a guess is made artificially high by the introduction of a proportion of trials on which the stimulus event occurring could not be guessed. Under these conditions old Ss were less selective in their responses. It is suggested that the results support a view that older Ss are less selective at high levels of uncertainty in the likelihood of a guess being the correct one, and that the result is consistent with both types of earlier results, goes part-way towards clarifying the differences, and provides a further example of a situation in which attenuated guessing-selectivity is associated with age.

An independence of mechanism in the origins of reading and classification-related semantic distance effects.

Some members of prespecified classes are accepted as members more rapidly than others. This has normally been ascribed to processes operating at a stage where the members are evaluated with respect to the category. An alternative locus could be at an "encoding" stage. It is shown with two experiments that this seems most unlikely, and evidence emerges to support the idea that word-naming and classification tasks show a crucial independence of process. It would seem to be necessary to reevaluate any simplistic notions of processing stages in semantic verification tasks.

The impact of warning signal intensity on reaction time and components of the contingent negative variation.

Slow EEG potentials were recorded during performance of a simple reaction task in which warning signal intensity was varied from trial to trial under foreperiod durations of 1, 3 and 8 sec. As shown by speed of reaction, the warning signal had an activating effect which increased with its intensity and decreased with foreperiod duration. This effect was related to the amplitude of a slow potential which appears in the EEG shortly after presentation of the warning signal. This potential is interpreted as a component of the orienting response regulating sensitivity to subsequent stimulation, so that reaction time is affected through change in the effective intensity of the imperative signal.

Semantic distance effects in naming superordinates.

The time to select a superordinate label in response to a target word is shown to be a function of the normative likelihood of the target being produced as an exemplar of the superordinate. This extends the scope of semantic distance effects to a new task situation. The effect declines with practice (repetition) and is also reduced by other preceding tasks. Two alternative accounts of the processing underlying selection are discussed.