Low Salience Research Articles

Competing Perceptual Salience in a Visual Word Recognition Task Differentially Affects Children With and Without Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Differences in visual attention have long been recognized as a central characteristic of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Regardless of social content, children with ASD show a strong preference for perceptual salience-how interesting (i.e., striking) certain stimuli are, based on their visual properties (e.g., color, geometric patterning). However, we do not know the extent to which attentional allocation preferences for perceptual salience persist when they compete with top-down, linguistic information. This study examined the impact of competing perceptual salience on visual word recognition in 17 children with ASD (mean age 31 months) and 17 children with typical development (mean age 20 months) matched on receptive language skills. A word recognition task presented two images on a screen, one of which was named (e.g., Find the bowl!). On Neutral trials, both images had high salience (i.e., were colorful and had geometric patterning). On Competing trials, the distracter image had high salience but the target image had low salience, creating competition between bottom-up (i.e., salience-driven) and top-down (i.e., language-driven) processes. Though both groups of children showed word recognition in an absolute sense, competing perceptual salience significantly decreased attention to the target only in the children with ASD. These findings indicate that perceptual properties of objects can disrupt attention to relevant information in children with ASD, which has implications for supporting their language development. Findings also demonstrate that perceptual salience affects attentional allocation preferences in children with ASD, even in the absence of social stimuli. LAY SUMMARY: This study found that visually striking objects distract young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) from looking at relevant (but less striking) objects named by an adult. Language-matched, younger children with typical development were not significantly affected by this visual distraction. Though visual distraction could have cascading negative effects on language development in children with ASD, learning opportunities that build on children's focus of attention are likely to support positive outcomes.

Salience-based object prioritization during active viewing of naturalistic scenes in young and older adults

Whether fixation selection in real-world scenes is guided by image salience or by objects has been a matter of scientific debate. To contrast the two views, we compared effects of location-based and object-based visual salience in young and older (65 + years) adults. Generalized linear mixed models were used to assess the unique contribution of salience to fixation selection in scenes. When analysing fixation guidance without recurrence to objects, visual salience predicted whether image patches were fixated or not. This effect was reduced for the elderly, replicating an earlier finding. When using objects as the unit of analysis, we found that highly salient objects were more frequently selected for fixation than objects with low visual salience. Interestingly, this effect was larger for older adults. We also analysed where viewers fixate within objects, once they are selected. A preferred viewing location close to the centre of the object was found for both age groups. The results support the view that objects are important units of saccadic selection. Reconciling the salience view with the object view, we suggest that visual salience contributes to prioritization among objects. Moreover, the data point towards an increasing relevance of object-bound information with increasing age.

Does size matter? Non-market social and political engagement by accounting firms in the #Brexit discourse on Twitter

ABSTRACT Social media is widely used by accounting firms to achieve a variety of business objectives and is a key enabler of non-market strategies. Socio-political involvement (SPI) involves firms taking positions on issues that lack societal consensus, have low information rationality, evolving viewpoints and issue salience, with no clear performance outcomes for firms. SPI may result in firms alienating stakeholders with opposing views, resulting in no or adverse performance outcomes. Accounting firms traditionally may not engage with such issues due to the associated reputational risk. Further, research suggests firm size is one of the most prominent firm-level antecedents of socio-political engagement. As the empirical context for this paper, we choose the Brexit referendum, a significant historical but divisive event with contested social norms. This paper explores the engagement of accounting firms on Twitter with the #Brexit discourse from the referendum announcement to one month after the vote. The objectives of the study are to understand the nature of non-market socio-political engagement by accounting firms in the #Brexit discourse on Twitter, and explore the differences between accounting firms of different size in this context. Our findings suggest that accounting firms engaged in the #Brexit Twitter discourse through a variety of non-market socio-political engagement activities, and that smaller firms tended to engage more than larger firms, most likely reflecting the ideological inclination of firm management. The engagement of accounting firms in socio-political discourse extends our understanding of how accounting firms of all sizes use social media and supports critical accounting and institutional perspectives.

The consequences of outgroup helping: Children’s and adolescents’ reasoning

The goal of this study was to examine the consequences of helping an outgroup in an intergroup context where the threat to the ingroup and outgroup varied. Fourth and eighth graders (N = 126; fourth graders: Mage = 9.07 years, SD = 0.38; eighth graders: Mage = 12.84 years, SD = 0.34) were asked whether excluding an ingroup member who helped an outgroup by sharing equally or not was acceptable. Equal helping or outgroup helping occurred when the groups had equal need for a vital resource, the outgroup needed it more, or the ingroup needed it more. Overall, excluding the helpful ingroup member was viewed as unacceptable. It was least acceptable when the outgroup needed the help and was given more help than the ingroup. Exclusion was judged to be most acceptable when both groups needed the same amount of help, or the ingroup needed more help, but more help was given to the outgroup, and these findings were driven by fourth graders. Participants’ social cognitions regarding perceptions of group interest, group identification, and approval of the helping act predicted their acceptability of excluding the helping member. Concerns for group loyalty were used to justify exclusion, but appeals to the emotional harm of exclusion, generosity, and the low salience of the act of helping were used to reject exclusion. The findings contribute to developmental research on intergroup relations and exclusion from peer groups.

The Dark Money Subsidy? Tax Policy and Donations to Section 501(c)(4) Organizations

AbstractThis article presents the first empirical examination of giving to §501(c)(4) organizations, which have recently become important players in U.S. politics. Unlike gifts to charity, donations to a 501(c)(4) are not legally deductible. Yet, gifts to c(4) organizations are highly elastic to the after-tax price of charitable giving. At the lower end of the observed tax price range, c(4) giving falls with tax price, consistent with the hypothesis that giving to c(3) and c(4) organizations are substitutes. Over the top quarter of the distribution of tax price, however, gifts to c(4) organizations are negatively correlated with the after-tax price of giving to charity. That is, donors appear to respond as though the deduction subsidized their gift to a c(4). Donor responses to benefits for which they are not eligible may reflect the low salience of legal limitations or deliberate overclaiming. These results imply subsidies for charity can crowd out or in donations to c(4) organizations, with potential implications for U.S. politics. I cannot observe whether donors claim tax deductions for ineligible gifts, so the net results for the Treasury are unclear.

Editorial Introduction: Advances in Theory and Practice of Policy Research from National to Local Level

Editorial Introduction: Advances in Theory and Practice of Policy Research from National to Local Level

Salience and Mutual Fund Investor Demand for Idiosyncratic Volatility

We find that mutual fund investors are more likely to both purchase and redeem funds with high idiosyncratic volatility (IV). Investors’ tendency to purchase high IV funds is largely driven by high IV funds having more extreme returns, which increases the salience of the fund. Including flexible controls for extreme past returns over multiple horizons decreases the effect of IV on new investment, and experimental evidence corroborates that increasing the salience of extreme returns increases investor demand for IV. Demand for IV is higher among retail investors and funds with otherwise lower salience. Collectively, the evidence suggests that extreme returns attract investor attention and contribute to investors’ risk seeking behavior when purchasing mutual funds. This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, finance.

In the shadow of the stars and stripes: testing the malleability of U.S. support for Puerto Rican statehood

ABSTRACT Do voters update their racialized political preferences in response to new information? To answer this long-standing question, we conduct an original survey examining U.S. mainland attitudes toward towards Puerto Rican statehood, a rare consequential racialized issue of low salience. To test whether public support for statehood can be changed, we embedded an information experiment describing Puerto Rico’s political status and its relationship to the U.S. The treatment was designed to increase the perceived connection between the groups through effortful thinking. Descriptively, our results indicate that Americans are generally ambivalent to the idea of Puerto Rico becoming the 51st state. We further find that opposition to statehood is related to anti-immigration attitudes, conservative ideology, and lack of knowledge about the issue. Nonetheless, we also show that highly racialized opposition to statehood can be significantly decreased among all groups of voters by providing simple background information on U.S. and Puerto Rico’s relationship.

The Myth of Power-Sharing and Polarisation: Evidence from Northern Ireland

Whether power-sharing increases polarisation or not in post-conflict societies remains deeply contested. Yet, we currently lack an adequate conceptualisation of polarisation to assess the link (if any) between the two. This article offers a new conceptualisation of polarisation and uses this to gather evidence from Northern Ireland to argue that the assumption that power-sharing entrenches polarisation is not the reality that many think it is. By examining legislator voting records, speeches by party leaders, manifestos and public opinion data, we disaggregate polarisation into different issues, track it over time, and examine both elite and mass levels. We find that overall polarisation declined, albeit some limited polarisation remained in cultural and identity issues, but these were of low salience. We argue that this is the result of parties using identity instrumentally for electoral distinction in a system of convergence – a process that is independent of the effects of power-sharing.

Affective modulation of cognitive flexibility: a behavioural and electrophysiological study (Modulación afectiva de la flexibilidad cognitiva: un estudio conductual y electrofisiológico)

ABSTRACT Executive functions (EF) correspond to a general construct of high-order cognitive skills aimed at optimizing problem solving. The study of EF categorizes it into three sub-processes; of these three, cognitive flexibility (CF) stands out because of its later development and because it requires a greater amount of neurocognitive resources. In developing an affective understanding of EFs, recent research has outlined the existence of hot EFs, referring to processing skills used in situations that are motivationally and emotionally charged, contrasting with cold EFs, which refer to skills we use in abstract situations and when the affective component is minimal. The purpose of this research study is to explore how different levels of affective salience can modulate performance and processing through the application of a standard CF task. At the behavioural level, participants presented lower reaction times, and the accuracy of their responses was unaffected, under conditions of low affective salience. At the level of brain activity, they presented latencies related to early attention processing and greater occipital activation under conditions of high affective salience.

Issue Salience and Pledge Fulfilment in Minority and Majority Coalitions: Evidence from the Czech Republic

The article focuses on the differences in pledge fulfilment strategies in majority and substantive minority governments. Issue ownership and dynamic agenda-setting literature are applied, expecting that government parties will focus on fulfilling the party’s most salient pledges, and also the pledges that are publicly salient for the whole electorate. Adding these expectations to the context of substantive minority governments, parties must accommodate these attempts because they face the opposition actor(s) with veto power and their own policy motivation. Compared to majority governments, the odds of adopting party-salient pledges should decrease for minority coalition parties. The effect of public-salient issues should also differ from the majority governments. This analysis is conducted on government party pledges in one minority and two majority governments in the Czech Republic (formed after 2006, 2010, and 2013 elections). The analysis shows a generally weak effect for party and public issue salience on pledge fulfilment. The decreasing effect of party issue salience for minority government parties is supported; the effect of public issue salience does, however, not differ in its decreasing direction from the majority governments. The additional model including combinations of the high and low party and public salience shows that for minority governments, public salience decreases the odds of fulfilment regardless of party issue salience. The article concludes with a contextual explanation of the minority government’s special character in the Czech case.

Neural Modulation in Approach-Avoidance Conflicts in Externalizing Psychopathology.

Externalizing psychopathology (EXT) is characterized by poor decision-making in situations that involve simultaneous cues for approach and avoidance behavior (i.e. approach-avoidance conflicts). Previous studies of EXT have examined these deficits primarily using tasks involving decisions between positive reward and negative punishment, suggesting that EXT is characterized by a general bias towards high salience (e.g. temporally proximal or reward) cues relative to low salience (e.g. temporally distal or loss) cues. However, in order to better characterize decision-making in approach-avoidance conflicts, the present study utilized a novel task to examine neural activation in contexts involving both positive reward and negative punishment as well as positive punishment and negative reward by manipulating physical proximity of affective cues. Neuroimaging results indicated that EXT was associated with deficits related to cue prioritization based on salience, suggesting that failure to differentiate relevant from less relevant information contributes to poor decision-making among individuals with EXT.

The Influence of Close Ties on Depression: Does Network Religiosity Matter?

AbstractDespite a growing body of the literature on how features of social networks influence well‐being, we know little of how the religiosity of social networks matter. This study addresses three types of religious social network ties and their association with mental health: same (non)‐religious ties, religious discussion ties, and ties offering prayers on an individual's behalf. Using ego‐centric network data from the 2006 Portraits of American Life Study (N = 2,223), multivariate regression results suggest that a greater number of ties that discuss religion and pray for the respondent are detrimental to the mental health of those of a low religious salience. Taken together, this study demonstrates that religious dimensions of social networks exact an important influence on mental health and highlights the importance of identifying specific features of religion among core network ties.

Assessing cognitive inhibition in emotional and neutral contexts in children

Different studies indicate that emotions can interfere with the efficacy of inhibitory control. However, understanding this impact requires considering that inhibition is not a unitary construct. Cognitive inhibition is the process responsible for attenuating and resisting the interference of thoughts, representations, and memories that are irrelevant to the task at hand. Due to the relevance of emotional stimuli for survival, different studies have indicated that the performance of cognitive inhibition can vary depending on the context, that is, whether in neutral or emotionally salient contexts. During the interval between 8 and 12 years old, the importance of this skill is rooted in the need for controlling reactions and stimuli that could be disruptive for learning. In this study, 395 children aged 8–12 years performed a 1-back visual task with emotional and neutral stimuli in order to assess cognitive inhibition in contexts with high and low emotional salience. The results support the validity of the task for the evaluation of cognitive inhibition. However, no significant differences were found, depending on the context, as expected. It is emphasised that these results constitute an approach to the problem of emotional content interference in children that considers the multidimensional approach of inhibition.

Ordoliberalism as Early Ideational Influence on European Economic Integration

Ordoliberalism was the socio-economic theory which guided economic developments in Germany and the establishment of its social market economy after the Second World War. There is some evidence that ordoliberal principles also influenced the formation of the European Economic Community (EEC). This study investigates how far ordoliberal notions informed the establishment and further development of the EEC. This especially concerns the creation of a legal-institutional framework for the EEC, at the center of which is competition law, and the low salience of social policy for the project of European integration.

Low Take-Up and Financial Inclusion:Experimental Evidence from Argentina’s Cash Transfers

Cash transfer and other social protection programs have greatly expanded in developing countries in the last two decades, but their coverage varies greatly, even among eligible individuals. We studied the low take-up of benefits by means of a field experiment involving 400,000 beneficiaries of Argentina’s largest conditional cash-transfer program (with 2.2 million beneficiaries who are the parents of four million children, 40% of the country’s 0-17 year olds). Beneficiaries are assigned a bank account and a debit card. By using their debit card to spend the allowance, rather than withdrawing cash from ATMs, they can receive a rebate of 15% of their expenditures. However, they systematically fail to claim this benefit: only about 25% of beneficiaries receive this transfer. Our experiment provided information about the effectiveness of an information campaign conducted via text messages or through on-screen messages at ATM machines. The campaign increased take-up (i.e., purchases with debit cards and subsequent rebates) significantly but not substantially. The results indicated that the benefit had low salience, that beneficiaries lacked information about the debit-card program, that frictions existed related to financial inclusion and lack of infrastructure, and that limited information and salience were important but second-order factors.

Ethnic-racial identity, relatedness, and school belonging for adolescent New Zealanders: does student gender make a difference?

Attitudes toward ethnic and racial identity have been linked to both wellbeing and maladaptive outcomes that affect belonging at school. Further, relatedness (or connectedness) as an indicator of school belonging has been positively associated with adaptive forms of motivation, acceptance of school, protection against risk factors, and scholastic success. Feelings of school belonging have varied among individuals from different ethnic-racial group and genders. In the current study, we employed cluster analysis to investigate how New Zealand Adolescents’ ethnic-racial attitudinal profiles were associated with school relatedness for clusters overall, and among and within clusters by student gender. Differences were found for school belonging among the ethnic-racial cluster overall, with a notable advantage indicated for Multiculturalists (those accepting a diversity of cultural oeuvres). Notably, the adaptive role of identifying with at least one ethnic-racial identity and optimally, embracing other cultural outlooks too, was evidenced to enhance school belonging. Conversely, at least in the New Zealand context, eschewing ethnic-racial identity placed participants at risk of disengaging with school. In terms of within-cluster gender difference, in the Low Race Salience cluster (identified as maladaptive), males demonstrated a markedly lower sense of school belonging than females. Such findings have implications for teaching and learning, and future research to implement interventions enhancing school belonging.

The Role of Political Ideology in Public Opinion toward Enumerated Antibullying Policies in Public Schools

AbstractAll 50 U.S. states now have some type of Antibullying law on the books, and since the initial passage of these bills, many states are now moving into the next phase of policy implementation by reforming and updating their initial legislation. While the initial adoption phase in most states was of low salience and noncontroversial for the public, there is now a more politically divisive debate surrounding the topic: enumerating the laws to protect specific groups. We discuss the use of Antibullying policies around the country along with the political debate over enumeration. Empirically, we examine public attitudes toward adding enumerated protections to existing Antibullying laws for various groups. Using a survey experiment from the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we find that public support for enumeration depends on both the group characteristics considered for protection and individuals' ideology.Related ArticlesGarner, Andrew. 2013. “Ambivalence, the Intergroup Contact Hypothesis, and Attitudes about Gay Rights.” Politics & Policy 41 (2): 241‐266. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12010Nevbahar, Ertas. 2015. “Policy Narratives and Public Opinion Concerning Charter Schools.” Politics & Policy 43 (3): 426‐451. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12120Smith‐Walter, Aaron, Holly L. Peterson, Michael D. Jones, Ashley Nicole, and Reynolds Marshall. 2016. “Gun Stories: How Evidence Shapes Firearm Policy in the United States.” Politics & Policy 44 (6): 1053‐1088. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12187

Categorical perception of lexical tone contrasts and gradient perception of the statement–question intonation contrast in Zhumadian Mandarin

ABSTRACTWe intended to establish if two lexical tone contrasts in Zhumadian Mandarin, one between early and late aligned falls and another between early and late aligned rises, are perceived categorically, while the difference between declarative and interrogative pronunciations of these four tones is perceived gradiently. Presenting stimuli from 7-point acoustic continua between tones and between intonations, we used an identification task and a discrimination task with an experimental group of native listeners and a control group of Indonesian listeners, whose language employs none of the differences within either the falling or the rising pitch contours in its phonology. Only the lexical condition as perceived by the experimental group yielded sigmoid identification functions and a heightened discriminatory sensitivity around the midpoint of continua. The intonational condition in the native group and both conditions in the control group yielded gradient identification functions and smaller, reverse effects of the continuum midpoints in the discrimination task. The results are interpreted to mean that sentence modality contrasts can be expressed gradiently, but that lexical tone differences are represented phonologically, and hence are perceived categorically, despite low phonetic salience of the contrast. This conclusion challenges assumptions about the relation between linguistic functions and linguistic structures.

How family-supportive supervisor affect Chinese construction workers’ work-family conflict and turnover intention: investigating the moderating role of work and family identity salience

Work-family conflict and high turnover intention of construction workers have been and will continue to be significant concerns in the construction industry. To explore antecedents of work-family conflict and identify which workers are more likely to exit their organisations when they experience work-family conflict, this study examines how family-supportive supervisor (FSS) affects construction workers’ work-family conflict and turnover intention, and how identity salience moderates the relationship between work-family conflict and turnover intention. Data were collected from a sample of 271 construction workers. The results revealed that family-supportive supervisor reduced work-to-family conflict (WFC) and family-to-work conflict (FWC), which in turn predicted turnover intention. The results further suggested that construction workers with low work identity salience or high family identity salience were more likely to exit their organisation when they experienced WFC. Moreover, workers with high work identity salience reported a greater level of turnover intention when they experienced FWC. Findings will help managers in construction organisations deepen their understanding of work-family conflict.