People's Mental Representations Research Articles

ENHANCING THE PERCEPTION OF AN URBAN AREA - A CASE STUDY OF BATALA CITY

The city image defines how people see and recall aspects in urban environments. The most distinguishing components of urban landscape, classified as pathways, nodes, boundaries, districts, and landmarks, form people's mental representations of the city. Because to urbanisation, India's historic cities are in grave danger. The heritage zones are essential components of the city's fabric, contributing to the city's image. Apart from possessing magnificent examples of traditional architecture, these heritage neighbourhoods serve as cultural and social hubs for the city, providing citizens with a sense of worth. The development process over the last few decades has had such an impact on historic towns that evidence of their historic worth is being destroyed forever. This historical zone is plagued by numerous concerns and problems. People come to Batala to enjoy the city's Punjabi culture and traditions. Maximum tourist visit to the city during "BABE DA VIVAH". This cultural zone is a one-of-a-kind place where the ambiance blends both old and modern architecture, and it is a multifunctional area offering a mix of history, educational, entertainment, residential, culinary, and so on. This area has a rich history, as evidenced by the presence of four major ancient monuments: Shamsher Khan Tomb, Jal Mahal, Baring Chaple, and Maharaj Sher Singh Palace. During the British Raj, this region was also frequented by British people. This cultural district has a number of issues, including a lack of a pedestrian area, criminal activity, a change in space use, changes in scale and land use, and so on. Furthermore, Batala city has no space for social interaction or recreation; there is only 0.81% of recreational area in the city, which is almost negligible; thus, there is an urgent need to create one cultural district in the city, which will not only help the city's residents socialise but will also attract tourists, resulting in the preservation of heritage monuments and increased revenue for the city.

Drawing as a tool for investigating the nature of imagery representations of blind people: The case of the canonical size phenomenon.

Several studies have shown that blind people, including those with congenital blindness, can use raised-line drawings, both for "reading" tactile graphics and for drawing unassisted. However, research on drawings produced by blind people has mainly been qualitative. The current experimental study was designed to investigate the under-researched issue of the size of drawings created by people with blindness. Participants (N = 59) varied in their visual status. Adventitiously blind people had previous visual experience and might use visual representations (e.g., when visualising objects in imagery/working memory). Congenitally blind people did not have any visual experience. The participant's task was to draw from memory common objects that vary in size in the real world. The findings revealed that both groups of participants produced larger drawings of objects that have larger actual sizes. This means that the size of familiar objects is a property of blind people's mental representations, regardless of their visual status. Our research also sheds light on the nature of the phenomenon of canonical size. Since we have found the canonical size effect in a group of people who are blind from birth, the assumption of the visual nature of this phenomenon - caused by the ocular-centric biases present in studies on drawing performance - should be revised.

A multi-scale unified model of human mobility in urban agglomerations

Understanding human mobility patterns is vital for the coordinated development of cities in urban agglomerations. Existing mobility models can capture single-scale travel behavior within or between cities, but the unified modeling of multi-scale human mobility in urban agglomerations is still analytically and computationally intractable. In this study, by simulating people's mental representations of physical space, we decompose and model the human travel choice process as a cascaded multi-class classification problem. Our multi-scale unified model, built upon cascaded deep neural networks, can predict human mobility in world-class urban agglomerations with thousands of regions. By incorporating individual memory features and population attractiveness features extracted by a graph generative adversarial network, our model can simultaneously predict multi-scale individual and population mobility patterns within urban agglomerations. Our model serves as an exemplar framework for reproducing universal-scale laws of human mobility across various spatial scales, providing vital decision support for urban settings of urban agglomerations.

Black + White = Prototypically Black: Visualizing Black and White People's Mental Representations of Black-White Biracial People.

Utilizing reverse correlation, we investigated Black and White participants' mental representations of Black-White Biracial people. Across 200 trails, Black and White participants chose which of two faces best fit specific social categories. Using these decisions, we visually estimated Black and White people's mental representations of Biracial people by generating classification images (CIs). Independent raters blind to condition determined that White CI generators' Biracial CI was prototypically Blacker (i.e., more Afrocentric facial features and darker skin tone) than Black CI generators' Biracial CI (Study 1a/b). Furthermore, independent raters could not distinguish between White CI generators' Black and Biracial CIs, a bias not exhibited by Black CI generators (Study 2). A separate task demonstrated that prejudiced White participants allocated fewer imaginary funds to the more prototypically Black Biracial CI (Study 3), providing converging evidence. How phenotypicality bias, the outgroup homogeneity effect, and hypodescent influences people's mental images of ingroup/outgroup members is discussed.

Mental models, cognitive maps, and the challenge of quantitative analysis of their network representations

AbstractCognitive maps, or mental maps, are externalized portrayals of mental models—people's mental representations of reality and their presumptions about how the world works. They are often used as the intermediary step toward uncovering individuals' presumptions of the outside world. Yet, the next step is often vague: once one's understanding of the real world is mapped, how can we systematically evaluate the maps and compare and contrast them? In this note, we review several common approaches to analyzing cognitive maps, some rooted in network theories, and apply them to a dataset of 30 graduate students who analyzed a complex socioenvironmental problem. Our analysis shows that these methods provide inconsistent results and often fall short of capturing variations in mental models. The analysis points to a lack of effective methods for examining such maps and helps articulate a major research problem for systems‐thinking scholars. © 2023 System Dynamics Society.

Using children's drawings as implicit measurements in future Alzheimer's research for the detection and alteration of negative stereotyping.

Many children have grandparents with dementia. These direct confrontations with decline are reinforced by one-sided, negative portrayal in the media making youngsters internalize harmful images about old age and dementia. It is vital for the well-being of future generations that education and research join forces to clearly map and transform these toxic mental representations in children about old age and dementia. We developed a novel educational trajectory for children regarding healthy ageing and dementia in Belgium and The Netherlands. Participating youngsters (n = 70) made sketches of the elderly before and after the positive interventions. Our innovative research resulted in materials for artistic expositions of children's drawings (n = 560). The visual representations provide a unique insight into the hidden mental landscape of children and can thus function as a starting point for conversation in educational trajectories about positive aging. These deliverables are a source of inspiration for teachers, journalists, researchers, health professionals and the broader public. Children's drawings are one of the most efficient ways to capture young people's mental representations about old age and dementia. Children's drawings are implicit measurements that circumvent social desirability. Children's drawings are an underused instrument in Alzheimer's research to gain insight into the content of destructive stereotyping and the possibilities for change of these mental representations.

The perception of food products in adolescents, lay adults, and experts: A psychometric approach.

Almost 40% of global mortality is attributable to an unhealthy diet, and adolescents and young adults are particularly affected by growing obesity rates. How do (young) people conceptualize and judge the healthiness of foods and how are the judgments embedded in people's mental representations of the food ecology? We asked respondents to rate a large range of common food products on a diverse set of characteristics and then applied the psychometric paradigm to identify the dimensions structuring people's mental representations of the foods. Respondents were also asked to rate each food in terms of its healthiness, and we used the foods' scores on the extracted dimensions to predict the healthiness judgments. We compared three groups of respondents: adolescents, lay adults, and nutrition experts. Naturalness levels (e.g., processing, artificial additives) and cholesterol and protein content emerged as the two central dimensions structuring respondents' mental representations of the foods. Relative to the other two groups, the adolescents' representations were less differentiated. Judged food healthiness was determined by multiple factors, but naturalness was the strongest predictor across all groups. Overall, the adolescents' responses showed considerable heterogeneity, suggesting a lack of solid food knowledge and the need for tailored nutrition education on specific food products and content characteristics. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Spatial generalization in sketch maps: A systematic classification

Sketch maps are one of the most commonly used instruments to study people's perception of the environment. While previous research has focused on analyzing sketch maps with respect to their accuracy, completeness, or distortion, there is little study focusing on generalization (the level of geometric details of the depicted features) in sketch maps. Furthermore, when investigating people's mental representations of space, researchers compute the accuracy or completeness of sketch maps via a one-to-one comparison of sketched features with features in metric map data. The task of one-to-one comparison becomes problematic because features in sketch map often represent many features in a metric map. This paper identifies the frequently occurring generalizations in 108 sketch maps of small urban area by manually extracting generalized features such as streets and buildings and classifying them based on similarities. We found three generalization types in streets, two in junctions and four in buildings. To evaluate our classification, we created 10 sketch maps by systematically introducing the nine identified generalizations. A study was conducted wherein five raters were briefed about the different generalization types. Each of them classified the features in sketch maps as generalized and non-generalized. We found a high inter-rater agreement, implying the comprehensibility and clarity of the identified generalization types. We propose that such systematic view on the generalization in sketch maps would standardize the process of comparing them with metric map data as well as enable a new way of analyzing sketch maps with respect to generalization.

A multimethod approach to measuring mental representations of threatening others.

How do people mentally represent distinct interpersonal threats? Across human history, interpersonal threats such as infectious disease and violence have posed powerful selection pressures. Such pressures selected for psychological systems that help identify and reduce threats posed by other people. In the case of infectious disease, psychology researchers have found that such systems respond to a variety of infection cues (e.g., rashes, swelling) as well as cues that merely resemble infection cues (e.g., birthmarks, obesity). Are such cues part of people's mental representations, and if so, are those cues unique to infection representations or are they included in representations of other threats? Using a multimethod approach, we find that when participants listed traits or drew mental representations of threat, they perceived infected and violent others to differ along threat-specific features. However, when using a data-driven, reverse correlation method that restricted participants from deliberating on and editing their representations, participants generated mental images that were similar on many of the features that both researchers and laypeople expect to distinguish infection and violence threats. These findings suggest that our understanding of threat processing may suffer from a potential disconnect between the threat cues derived from the expectations of researchers and those revealed when expectations are constrained. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Perspectivism

AbstractConsider the sentence “Lois knows that Superman flies, but she doesn't know that Clark flies”. In this paper we defend a Millian contextualist semantics for propositional attitude ascriptions, according to which ordinary uses of this sentence are true but involve a mid‐sentence shift in context. Absent any constraints on the relevant parameters of context sensitivity, such a semantics would be untenable: it would undermine the good standing of systematic theorizing about the propositional attitudes, trivializing many of the central questions of epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of action. In response to this problem, we prove a series of tenability results. We show that, given certain constraints on the parameters of context sensitivity, there is a broad class of principles of propositional attitude psychology whose good standing follows from corresponding claims about people's mental representations. But these constraints also have some surprising consequences: they are jointly incompatible with coarse‐grained theories of propositions, and they are in tension with a natural picture of how speakers and hearers coordinate on the interpretation of attitude ascriptions. In light of these consequences we explore different ways in which the contextualist picture might be developed, and argue that our preferred way compares favorably with Fregeanism and neo‐Russellianism.

Who's holding the moral higher ground: Religiosity and the vertical conception of morality

Across languages, “morality” is associated with “up” and “immorality” with “down”. The relationship between morality and verticality found in linguistic metaphors can also be found in people's non-linguistic mental representations of morality. However, recent lines of work have demonstrated that personality differences may moderate the embodied effect of moral concepts on a vertical dimension. Based on these findings, we predicted that, by virtue of its facilitating role in encouraging moral thinking and behavior, religiosity may contribute to a stronger embodied effect of moral concepts. We found convergent support for this hypothesis across two studies using correlational (Study 1) and experimental data (Study 2). The findings suggest that there are individual differences in the metaphorical representation of moral concepts.

Neural correlates of verbal joint action: ERPs reveal common perception and action systems in a shared-Stroop task

Recent social-cognitive research suggests that the anticipation of co-actors' actions influences people's mental representations. However, the precise nature of such representations is still unclear. In this study we investigated verbal joint representations in a delayed Stroop paradigm, where each participant responded to one color after a short delay. Participants either performed the task as a single actor (single-action, Experiment 1), or they performed it together (joint-action, Experiment 2). We investigated effects of co-actors' actions on the ERP components associated with perceptual conflict (Go N2) and response selection (P3b). Compared to single-action, joint-action reduced the N2 amplitude congruency effect when participants had to respond (Go trials), indicating that representing a co-actor's utterance helped to dissociate action codes and attenuated perceptual conflict for the responding participant. Yet, on NoGo trials the centro-parietal P3 (P3b) component amplitude increased for joint-action, suggesting that participants mapped the stimuli onto the co-actor's upcoming response as if it were their own response. We conclude that people represent others' utterances similarly to the way they represent their own utterances, and that shared perception-action codes for self and others can sometimes reduce, rather than enhance, perceptual conflict.

Overlap between Mental Representations of Self and Brand

People's mental representations of self overlap with those of significant others and in-groups. We extend this finding to show that people's mental representations of self also overlap with inanimate, seemingly impersonal, marketplace entities: consumer brands. Our study follows the “including others in the self” paradigm set forth by Aron and colleagues. We use response times to find that characteristics on which the self and a loved brand are similar are relatively more accessible than dissimilar characteristics, indicating self–brand overlap. These findings suggest that self–other overlap extends beyond individuals and in-groups. Psychological implications of the inclusion of brands in the self are discussed.

Mind games: The mental representation of conflict.

Perception and misperception play a pivotal role in conflict and negotiation. We introduce a framework that explains how people think about their outcome interdependence in conflict and negotiation and how their views shape their behavior. Seven studies show that people's mental representations of conflict are predictably constrained to a small set of possibilities with important behavioral and social consequences. Studies 1 and 2 found that, when prompted to represent a conflict in matrix form, more than 70% of the people created 1 of 4 archetypal mixed-motive games (out of 576 possibilities): Maximizing Difference, Assurance, Chicken, and Prisoner's Dilemma. Study 3 demonstrated that these mental representations relate in predictable ways to negotiators' fixed-pie perceptions. Studies 4-6 showed that these mental representations shape individuals' behavior and interactions with others, including cooperation, perspective taking, and use of deception in negotiation, and through them, conflict's outcomes. Study 7 found that the games that people think they are playing influence how their counterparts see them, as well as their counterparts' negotiation expectations. Overall, the findings document noteworthy regularities in people's mental representations of outcome interdependence in conflict and illustrate that 4 archetypal games can encapsulate fundamental psychological processes that emerge repeatedly in conflict and negotiation.

Testing the Efficiency of Markov Chain Monte Carlo With People Using Facial Affect Categories

Exploring how people represent natural categories is a key step toward developing a better understanding of how people learn, form memories, and make decisions. Much research on categorization has focused on artificial categories that are created in the laboratory, since studying natural categories defined on high-dimensional stimuli such as images is methodologically challenging. Recent work has produced methods for identifying these representations from observed behavior, such as reverse correlation (RC). We compare RC against an alternative method for inferring the structure of natural categories called Markov chain Monte Carlo with People (MCMCP). Based on an algorithm used in computer science and statistics, MCMCP provides a way to sample from the set of stimuli associated with a natural category. We apply MCMCP and RC to the problem of recovering natural categories that correspond to two kinds of facial affect (happy and sad) from realistic images of faces. Our results show that MCMCP requires fewer trials to obtain a higher quality estimate of people's mental representations of these two categories.

Locating attractiveness in the face space: Faces are more attractive when closer to their group prototype

Face attractiveness relates positively to the mathematical averageness of a face, but how close attractive faces of varying groups are to their own and to other-group prototypes in the face space remains unclear. In two studies, we modeled the locations of attractive and unattractive Caucasian, Asian, and African faces in participants' face space using multidimensional scaling analysis. In all three sets of faces, facial attractiveness significantly increased with the absolute proximity of a face to its group prototype. In the case of Caucasian and African faces (Study 1), facial attractiveness also tended to increase with the absolute proximity of a face to the other-group prototype. However, this association was at best marginal, and it became clearly nonsignificant when distance to the own-group prototype was controlled for. Thus, the present research provides original evidence that average features of faces contribute to increasing their attractiveness, but only when these features are average to the group to which a face belongs. The present research also offers further support to face space models of people's mental representations of faces.

Seeing the Forest Beyond the Trees: A Construal‐Level Approach to Self‐Control

AbstractSelf‐control failure is a ubiquitous and troubling problem people face. This article reviews psychological models of self‐control and describes a new integrative approach based on construal level theory (e.g., Trope & Liberman, 2003). This construal‐level perspective proposes that people's subjective mental construals or representations of events impacts self‐control. Specifically, more abstract, global (high‐level) construals promote self‐control success, whereas more concrete, local (low‐level) construals tend to lead to self‐control failure. That is, self‐control is promoted when people see the proverbial forest beyond the trees. This article surveys research findings that demonstrate that construing events at high‐level versus low‐level construals promotes self‐control. This article also discusses how a construal‐level perspective promotes understanding of self‐control failures.

Editorial: Implicit representations and personality

People's mental representations of their world, including others and themselves, are major building blocks of their personality, and therefore it is a long‐standing tradition in personality psychol...

Verbal effects of visual programs: Information type, structure and error in program summaries

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On the genesis of confidence.

Confidence in personality impressions is proposed to stem from the richness of people's mental representations of others. Representational richness produces confidence because it enhances the fluency with which people can make judgments, and it increases confidence even when it does not result in more accurate impressions. Results of 3 experiments support these propositions. A 4th experiment suggests that representational richness is increased by both pseudorelevant and relevant information, but not by irrelevant information. A 5th experiment suggests that representational richness has effects on confidence above and beyond the effects of metainformation (i.e., extracontent aspects of information ). The implications of these findings for evaluating evidence of error in person perception and for reducing stereotyping and prejudice are discussed.