Levels Of Salience Research Articles

Interpreting pronouns and demonstratives in Finnish: Evidence for a form-specific approach to reference resolution

Two Finnish language comprehension experiments are presented which suggest that the referential properties of pronouns and demonstratives cannot be reduced straightforwardly to the salience level of the antecedent. The findings, from a sentence completion study and visual world eye-tracking study, reveal an asymmetry in which features of the antecedent Finnish pronouns and demonstratives are most sensitive to, both in terms of their final interpretations and during real-time processing. In particular, the syntactic role and linear position of the antecedent, two factors which have been claimed to influence referent salience, have different effects on the interpretation of pronouns and demonstratives. Contrary to what is commonly assumed, pronouns and demonstratives cannot be mapped onto a unified salience hierarchy, because they exhibit different degrees of sensitivity to syntactic role and word order. We offer an alternative approach to anaphor resolution, the form-specific multiple-constraints approach.

Destination Word of Mouth

Recent research has identified identity salience and satisfaction as important variables affecting word-of-mouth communications in several contexts, such as university giving, retail environments, and leisure activities. Given these findings, these same variables may also be important in a tourism context, depending on the type of tourist. This study explores the effects of satisfaction and identity salience on word-of-mouth promotion and differences in these variables based on five different destination market segments, including tourists and local residents. The data indicate that satisfaction and identity salience are significant in predicting word-of-mouth promotions and that level of satisfaction and identity salience vary significantly depending on tourist type and resident type.

Religion and Alcohol Use among College Students: Exploring the Role of Domain-Specific Religious Salience

A growing body of work examines links between religious involvement and alcohol use patterns. Most studies in this vein have relied upon generic measures of religion such as affiliation, service attendance, or overall salience. This study contributes to the literature by developing refined measures of domain-specific religious salience, and exploring their links with the frequency of alcohol use in a diverse sample of college students. Results confirm the importance of domain-specific religious salience in shaping alcohol choices, but at the same time, also show that overall levels of such salience in this sample are relatively low, indicating that other influences (e.g., peers, parents) are also important. The effects of other religious variables (e.g., religious tradition, attendance, prayer) on drinking frequency are largely indirect, serving primarily to heighten the salience of religious convictions in the domain of alcohol behavior. Implications, study limitations, and directions for future research are discussed.

Signal salience and the mindlessness theory of vigilance

The present study was designed to explore whether sustained attention tasks can be adequately described by a mindlessness perspective or a limited resource perspective. One hundred and seventy six participants (88 women and 88 men) were assigned at random to one of two signal salience conditions: high and low. Performance and self-reported states, Energetic Arousal, Tense Arousal, Task-Related-Thoughts, and Task-Unrelated-Thoughts, were collected. Overall performance efficiency and the rate of the vigilance decrement were influenced by the salience level of the signal being observed. Post-task self-reports of Task-Unrelated-Thoughts were significantly related to overall performance efficiency, but not with the vigilance decrement. Post-task self-reports of Energetic Arousal were significantly related to both overall performance and the vigilance decrement. The results support a resource theory perspective in regards to the vigilance decrement and are in contradiction to the mindlessness theory in regards to the vigilance decrement.

Distinct error-correcting and incidental learning of location relative to landmarks and boundaries

Associative reinforcement provides a powerful explanation of learned behavior. However, an unproven but long-held conjecture holds that spatial learning can occur incidentally rather than by reinforcement. Using a carefully controlled virtual-reality object-location memory task, we formally demonstrate that locations are concurrently learned relative to both local landmarks and local boundaries but that landmark-learning obeys associative reinforcement (showing "overshadowing" and "blocking" or "learned irrelevance"), whereas boundary-learning is incidental, showing neither overshadowing nor blocking nor learned irrelevance. Crucially, both types of learning occur at similar rates and do not reflect differences in levels of performance, cue salience, or instructions. These distinct types of learning likely reflect the distinct neural systems implicated in processing of landmarks and boundaries: the striatum and hippocampus, respectively [Doeller CF, King JA, Burgess N (2008) Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 105:5915-5920]. In turn, our results suggest the use of fundamentally different learning rules by these two systems, potentially explaining their differential roles in procedural and declarative memory more generally. Our results suggest a privileged role for surface geometry in determining spatial context and support the idea of a "geometric module," albeit for location rather than orientation. Finally, the demonstration that reinforcement learning applies selectively to formally equivalent aspects of task-performance supports broader consideration of two-system models in analyses of learning and decision making.

Religious Influences on Preventive Health Care Use in a Nationally Representative Sample of Middle-Age Women

Despite the many benefits of preventive services, they are often underutilized. Social factors, such as religion, can figure prominently in these discrepancies by either creating barriers or facilitating use. Using data from the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS, 1992-1996), the current study examines the relationship between religious attendance, religious salience, and denomination and three types of female preventive services in a sample of middle-age women (N = 4253). Findings indicate that women who attend religious services more frequently use more mammograms, Pap smears, and self-breast exams. In addition, women belonging to Mainline Protestant or Jewish denominations use certain preventive services more than Evangelical Protestants. Finally, women with higher levels of religious salience are more likely to conduct self-breast exams. These findings add important information to the public health literature concerning factors that influence preventive service use. They also add to the growing field of religion and health research where preventive health care use is emerging as a possible mechanism linking religion to a wide variety of physical health outcomes.

Does religion influence patient satisfaction?

To determine if patient satisfaction varies by level of individual religiosity. Data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a nationally representative sample of older adults in the United States, were used to assess the relationship between religious salience (importance) and patients' satisfaction with their health care encounters. Higher levels of religious salience are significantly related to being very satisfied with one's health care, even after demographic, social, and health variables are taken into account. Researchers, practitioners, and administrators should be aware that religion may significantly influence how patients rate their health care experiences.

Learning by selection: Visual search and object perception in young infants.

The authors examined how visual selection mechanisms may relate to developing cognitive functions in infancy. Twenty-two 3-month-old infants were tested in 2 tasks on the same day: perceptual completion and visual search. In the perceptual completion task, infants were habituated to a partly occluded moving rod and subsequently presented with unoccluded broken and complete rod test stimuli. In the visual search task, infants viewed displays in which single targets of varying levels of salience were cast among homogeneous static vertical distractors. Infants whose posthabituation preference indicated unity perception in the completion task provided evidence of a functional visual selective attention mechanism in the search task. The authors discuss the implications of the efficiency of attentional mechanisms for information processing and learning.

Communication and Terrorism: A Terror Management Theory Perspective

As terrorism continues to raise the specter of death to levels of salience best measured on a global scale, terror management theory (TMT) offers valuable insights for communication theorists regarding the nature and psychology of terrorism. TMT provides a metatheoretic framework, which can help to unify a diverse range of communication theory perspectives. Following a review of TMT's analysis of certain socioemotional factors associated with the human potential for existential anxiety and intercultural conflict, this paper examines how TMT relates to and illuminates diverse communication theory orientations bearing on a range of issues related to the causes and costs of terrorism.

The robustness of perception

The natural environment around us, which is often crowded, cluttered or even foggy, is subject to a dynamically changing composition of objects and events. The human brain is continuously perceiving, recognizing and evaluating this dynamic scene composition. If the perception of degraded visual objects is important, e.g. in the case of potential threat stimuli, the brain needs to be more sensitive in detecting these objects from the natural environment. It is therefore hypothesized that reacting to the dynamically changing environment involves a robust and quick processing of salient information, which can be either with or without conscious awareness. We investigated the dynamics and robustness of perception using pictures of three salience levels, i.e. fearful faces (most salient), neutral faces (salient) and houses (nonsalient), which appear from dynamically decreasing random visual noise. Stimuli were matched for luminance, contrast, brightness and spatial frequency information. Reaction times show a significantly earlier response for faces than for houses. Fearful faces were significantly more quickly detected than neutral faces. The neural correlates sustaining robust perception were investigated with event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The amygdala showed a significant perception-related response for faces, as compared to houses, that was further enhanced for fearful faces as compared to neutral faces. Our data indicate that emotionally salient information processing is (i) mediated by the amygdala and (ii) more robust than for nonsalient stimuli as it shows a significantly lower perceptual threshold.

Social Determinants of Preventive Service Utilization

Utilization of preventive services may be influenced by social factors, such as religion, that can create barriers or facilitate use. The purpose of this study is to determine how religious beliefs and activities affect the use of cholesterol screenings. Specifically, data from the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS) are used to examine the influence of religious attendance, salience, and affiliation on cholesterol screenings among older adults. The findings show that adults who attend religious services more frequently and those belonging to mainline Protestant denominations report more screenings. In contrast, utilization levels do not vary by level of religious salience, after controlling for demographic and socioeconomic factors. The current study is valuable because it identifies significant relationships between religion and cholesterol screening utilization and also adds an important dimension to the burgeoning religion and health literature.

Unobtrusive vehicle motion prediction cues reduced simulator sickness during passive travel in a driving simulator

This study investigated cues that permit prediction of turns during passive movement through a virtual environment. Effects on simulator sickness (SS), presence and enjoyment were examined. Subjects were exposed to complex visual motion through a cartoon-like simulated environment in a driving simulator. Forward velocity remained constant and the motion path was the same across all experimental conditions. Using a within-subject design, we examined visual paths that provided different levels of cue salience – detailed, simplified and no cues – for the upcoming simulated vehicle motion. Following each trial, participants completed questionnaires on SS, presence and enjoyment. After all of the trials were completed, a debriefing determined participants' perceptions of vehicle motion attributes and their awareness of the prediction cues. The results showed that SS in the no-cue condition was significantly greater than that in the conditions that provided vehicle motion cues. Presence and enjoyment responses were not different across the conditions. No participants reported differences between prediction cue conditions or recognized that the vehicle motion followed the same path across trials. However, participants tended to report that the motion was smoother for the detailed-cue than the no-cue condition. Participants ranked turn predictability as higher in conditions with prediction cues. The results support the hypothesis that unobtrusive and unreported motion cues may alleviate SS in a virtual environment.

The Relevance of Politically Relevant Dyads in the Study of Interdependence and Dyadic Disputes

The role of dyadic trade dependence in reducing conflict has been a subject of some dispute in the recent literature. Liberals have presented strong evidence that a higher level of trade dependence leads to lower probabilities of dyadic disputes, while an equally compelling literature has generated evidence that elevated levels of trade dependence generally increase the likelihood of disputes, or that dependence only decreases the likelihood of conflict for certain pairs of states under specific conditions. Unfortunately, the direct comparison of these competing perspectives has been hindered by the use of different estimation techniques, variable measurements, data sets, and samples. While recent work has attempted to provide a more systematic analysis of the effect of different data sets and sample choices on the relationship between interdependence and conflict (Schneider, Barbieri, & Gleditsch, 2003), no theoretical reason has been put forward as to why estimation results for some samples should differ from others. This paper employs three different data sets (Russett & Oneal, 2001; Barbieri, 2002; and Gleditsch, 2002) to test the effects of sample choice, especially that of politically relevant dyads, on the relationship between interdependence and conflict. Following Polachek, Robst, and Chang (1999) I note that the gains from trade are not homogeneous across dyad type; thus, the use of a politically relevant sample leads to biased estimates of the relationship between trade and conflict. Using a model that has been found to be critical of the liberal perspective (Barbieri, 2002), the results show that trade dependence does not have the same impact on conflict for dyads of different sizes. In sum, dyads with larger economies and high levels of trade salience have lower probabilities of conflict than dyads with smaller economies and equivalent amounts of trade.

Investigating the moderating influences of gender upon role salience and work‐family conflict

The existence of gender differences in the experience of work‐family concflict has been subject to recent debate. Contemporary research generally suggests that men and women experience work‐family conflict at comparative levels. However the majority of this research investigates direct relationships only, published investigations of the moderating influence of gender are scarce. The importance or salience of a role to an individual is also theorised to influence role perceptions, including conflict. However, role salience is commonly ignored in work‐family conflict research. The current research addresses these oversights by investigating the direct and indirect relationships between gender, work‐family conflict, role demands, and role salience. A total of 130 university students rated their perceptions of their university (work) and family roles. No significant direct relationships between gender and bi‐directional work‐family conflict were produced. However, gender significantly moderated the relationship between role salience and conflict; with females experiencing more conflict as their level of family role salience increased. The opposite results were produced for the male respondents. The implications of these findings for work‐family conflict research are discussed.

Time course of attentional bias to emotional scenes in anxiety: Gaze direction and duration

Pictures of emotionally neutral, positive, and negative (threat‐ or harm‐related) scenes were presented for 3 seconds, paired with nonemotional control pictures. The eye fixations of high and low trait anxiety participants were monitored. Intensity of stimulus emotionality was varied, with two levels of perceptual salience for each picture (colour vs. greyscale). Regardless of perceptual salience, high anxiety was associated with preferential attention: (a) towards all types of emotional stimuli in initial orienting, as revealed by a higher probability of first fixation on the emotional picture than on the neutral picture of a pair; (b) towards positive and harm stimuli in a subsequent stage of early engagement, as shown by longer viewing times during the first 500 ms following onset of the pictures; and with (c) attention away from (i.e., avoidance) harm stimuli in a later phase, as indicated by shorter viewing times and lower frequency of fixation during the last 1000 ms of picture exposure. This suggests that the nature of the attentional bias varies as a function of the time course in the processing of emotional pictures.

Communication and Terrorism: A Terror Management Theory Perspective

As terrorism continues to raise the specter of death to levels of salience best measured on a global scale, terror management theory (TMT) offers valuable insights for communication theorists regarding the nature and psychology of terrorism. TMT provides a metatheoretic framework, which can help to unify a diverse range of communication theory perspectives. Following a review of TMT's analysis of certain socioemotional factors associated with the human potential for existential anxiety and intercultural conflict, this paper examines how TMT relates to and illuminates diverse communication theory orientations bearing on a range of issues related to the causes and costs of terrorism.

Stock price Reactions to Short-lived Public Information: The Case of Betting Odds

Stock markets and betting markets co-exist for professional soccer clubs listed on the London Stock Exchange. For each firm, two pieces of information are released to the stock market on a weekly basis from August to June: experts' expectations about game outcomes through the betting odds, and the game outcomes. Stock markets process the news about games results fast. By contrast, there is no evidence of abnormal returns on the trading days following release of betting information. Moreover, due to the absence of a market reaction to betting odds and the fact that these odds are very good predictors of game outcomes, these odds contain unpriced information and can be used to predict short-run stock returns. Our findings are consistent with theories of under-reaction to public information and the impact of the level of salience of information on the speed at which financial markets process information.

Brand and Advertising Awareness: A Replication and Extension of a Known Empirical Generalisation

From analysis of over 39 categories Laurent, Kapferer and Roussel (1995) found that top of mind, spontaneous and aided brand awareness measures have the same underlying structure. The difference in scores appears due to the difficulty of the measure. We have successfully replicated this work and extended it to similarly structured advertising awareness measures. However, additional analyses then revealed that while there is a good category level fit, modelling a single brand over time is less successful. Indeed, Laurent et al.’s excellent cross-sectional fit appears due to substantially different levels of salience between larger and smaller brands. This suggests that while the different types of awareness tend to vary with a brand's overall level of salience, this does not mean that the different measures simply reflect a single underlying construct. Further, our finding challenges the previous authors’ claim that knowing the score for one measure allows the estimation of the score for another measure. Instead, the model provides useful norms against which to compare actual scores.

Money Well Spent?

Organized interests employ a number of tactics to get what they want. One of the least understood of these tactics is running advertorials—issue advocacy advertisements that are designed to influence citizen opinion. Using a pretest-posttest control group experimental design, the authors examine the effects of advertorials on individual opinions. The authors find that advertorials have an effect on individual opinions but that their effects are different than those of traditional advertisements. Specifically, after examining the effects of an actualExxonMobil advertorial that appeared on the pages of The New York Times, the authors find that advertorials substantially affect levels of individual issue salience but do not affect individual perceptions of the organized interests that run them. The authors also find that those with relatively high levels of trust in the media are more likely than those with lower levels of trust to be influenced by advertorials.

WHEN WILL THEY EVER MAKE UP THEIR MINDS? THE SOCIAL STRUCTURE OF UNSTABLE DECISION MAKING

French (1977), Harary (1959), and Abelson (1964) initiated a prominent line of social influence models to explain social norms or collective decisions from the structure of influence networks. These models fail to generate unstable decision dynamics, a phenomenon that can be observed in collective decision-making. To capture instability, we assume that decision-makers raise their level of salience to reduce expected losses from decision-outcomes. Our model generates persistently unstable outcome patterns under conditions related to the social network and to intolerance for expected losses. A 6-actor example reveals stable outcomes for low intolerance, complex oscillations for intermediate levels of intolerance, and simple and regular oscillation for high intolerance. We discuss implications for the predictability of collective decision-making.