Models Of Context Effects Research Articles

Supplemental Material for What’s in a Response Time?: On the Importance of Response Time Measures in Constraining Models of Context Effects

Supplemental Material for What’s in a Response Time?: On the Importance of Response Time Measures in Constraining Models of Context Effects

Using Spanish Surname to Estimate Hispanic Voting Population in Voting Rights Litigation: A Model of Context Effects Using Bayes' Theorem

Abstract We offer a simple use of Bayes' Theorem to model the relationship between surname and ethnicity in order to improve present expert witness practices in voting rights litigation. Our aim is to show how to better estimate the overall Hispanic share of the electorate to determine realistic opportunity to elect candidates of choice. We show that there is no such thing as the proportion of bearers of a given name who are Hispanic. How “Hispanic” any given name turns out to be is a function of the overall Hispanicity of the population, which affects both the distribution of names and the conditional probability that the possessor of any given name will be Hispanic. Because of this, the number of names on a surname list (say that of registered voters) that should be counted as Hispanic is not fixed, but rather varies by demographic context. We show how to identify the optimal size of a surname list by balancing false positives and false negatives. We also provide some “quick and dirty” approximation met...

CONTRAST AND ASSIMILATION PROCESSES IN CONSUMERS' EVALUATIONS OF DUAL BRANDS

This study extends the branding literature by examining the psychological processes by which consumers evaluate brand alliances. The theoretical basis for this study is the development of models of context effects in brand evaluations (Meyers-Levy & Sternthal 1993 and Levin & Levin 2000). Of particular interest is how dual branding (two restaurant brands with shared features) influences transfer of affect between brands. Although there was a contrast effect in both the separate and dual brand conditions, this contrast effect was significantly reduced in the dual brand condition. Marketing implications of forming brand alliances are discussed.

Modeling the Role of Brand Alliances in the Assimilation of Product Evaluations

A model of context effects in product evaluations is tested in which brand alliances play a key role. This three‐part study examined the extent to which evaluations of two restaurants are assimilated by virtue of their dual‐branding strategic linkage. Key factors in the assimilation process are thought to be the ambiguity of the target restaurant's description and the degree of linkage between the target and the context as operationally defined by varying the shared features of the dual brands. Results support a model in which inferences about the qualities of an incompletely described target product arise from the assumed similarity between target and context, which is directly related to the degree of linkage between the two brands. These inferences include both specific attribute values and global evaluations of quality.

Bringing Context into Effective Schools Research: Urban-Suburban Differences

This study extends a long line of research on factors that promote or undermine school effectiveness. Taking as the criteria two dimensions of effective internal organization, teacher community and principal leadership, the article examines effects of school context variables generally excluded from prior research. It further explores the possibility that models of context effects on internal school conditions differ for urban, suburban, and rural schools, given substantial differences in their social and organizational environments. The findings show distinct patterns for schools in urban, suburban, and rural settings and challenge researchers to take into account the diversity among U.S. schools in their research

Testing a semistochastic variant of the interactive activation model in different word recognition experiments.

A semistochastic variant of the interactive activation (IA) model of context effects in letter perception (McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981) was used to simulate response time distributions and means in different experiments investigating the effects of word frequency, neighborhood size and frequency, and orthographic priming in visual word recognition. The results provide evidence in favor of the connectivity assumption underlying the model but question the necessity of the interactivity assumption for simulating latencies in word recognition tasks. Together with those of a recent study by McClelland (1991), the present results suggest that 10 years after its appearance, the IA model's potential for testing hypotheses about the structure and dynamics of basic phenomena of human information processing in a variety of perceptual and cognitive tasks is not yet fully exploited.

Infection, frequency, and the word superiority effect.

It has been known for nearly 100 years that single words presented tachistoscopically are better recognized than arbitrary letter strings. The present experiments investigate the impact of the morphological structure of words and of word frequency on the word superiority effect. It has been shown that inflected word forms show higher reaction time and error scores in the lexical decision task and higher error scores in the Reicher-Wheeler paradigm. Word frequency also determines lexical decision time. However, no frequency effect in the Reicher-Wheeler paradigm could be found. The results are discussed in the framework of McClelland and Rumelhart's (1981) model of context effects in letter search.