Perceptual Conditioning Research Articles

Travel choice behaviour under uncertainty in real-market settings: A source-dependent utility approach

In this study, we present evidence on the source-preference difference between two natural sources of uncertainty with mode-specific travel time variability (public transport vs private car), while accounting for the role of experiential information in shaping the revealed ambiguity seeking in the context of travel mode choice. The proposed structural model jointly accounts for time-money trade-offs, diminishing sensitivity towards travel outcomes, perceptual conditioning, beliefs and ambiguity attitudes. We find that in the loss domain with possible travel time outcomes, decision makers may prefer more volatile travel time variability embedded in public transport systems, and with more experiential information, this preference would become stronger.

Heterogeneity in individual beliefs and its implication for valuing willingness to pay

This study conducts an experimental analysis of risky travel choice behaviour, while accounting for the trade-off between attributes, nonlinearity in utility specification and perceptual conditioning. The focus is on empirically measuring between individual heterogeneity in beliefs, and a key finding is that the sampled decision makers are associated with different levels of pessimism. The accommodation of individual beliefs in modelling risky decisions contributes significantly to the explanation of the choice data, relative to the normative Expected Utility Theoretical model which directly uses the probabilities of outcomes and implicitly assumes belief neutrality. The implication of pessimistic beliefs for valuing willingness to pay is illustrated at the individual level.

Imitation, conscious will and social conditioning

This essay aims to explore imitation in social contexts. The argument that summarizes my claim is that the perception of other people’s behaviour conditions the agent in imitating that behaviour, as evidence from social psychology holds (Bargh and Chartrand in J Pers Soc Psychol 76(6):893–910, 1999; Bargh and Ferguson in Psychol Bull 126(6):925–945, 2000; Bargh and Ferguson in Trends Cogn Sci 8(1):33–39, 2004), but what the agent perceives and experiences becomes potential motives for her actions only through her identification with a particular way of being and acting. Therefore, although the agent’s actions are conditioned by perceptual stimuli, the latter are not the cause of the actions. The agent is the ultimate cause. That is, a convergence between perceptual stimuli and conscious will. I take this latter conclusion to suggest a compatibilist approach whereby action in a social situation would require the perceptual conditioning as much as the freedom and consciousness of the agent.

How to better represent preferences in choice models: The contributions to preference heterogeneity attributable to the presence of process heterogeneity

Discrete choice studies, with rare exception, commonly assume that agents act as if sources of observed utility are captured through a linear in parameters and additive in attributes (LPAA) form, with some interactions. A growing number of transport (and other) choice studies have investigated one or more alternative processing rules adopted by agents in arriving at a choice, raising interest in how best to represent the utility expressions in a joint process and outcome choice model. Given the popular and appealing random parameter treatment of LPAA in mixed logit as a way of identifying non-systematic preference heterogeneity in a sample, this paper considers the possibility that we might be able to interact specific process heuristics with LPAA to uncover sources of systematic preference heterogeneity hidden in the standard LPAA form, and hence establish a link between the LPAA form and candidate process heuristics, offering a way to embellish and hence clarify the contributions to preference heterogeneity attributable to the presence of process heterogeneity. Specifically, we are interested in the extent to which there is a systematic relationship between the simple LPAA form and the more complex (albeit behaviourally realistic) process heuristics emerging in the transport literature which we call conditioning by random process heterogeneity (CRPH). In this paper, in addition to LPAA, we consider two process heuristics - Value Learning, and Relative Advantage Maximisation - with an overlay to account for risk attitudes, perceptual conditioning, and overt experience. The findings, using two data sets, suggest that empirically there exists a significant attribute-specific relationship between preference heterogeneity identified through specific process heuristics and through the LPAA assumption.

Heterogeneity in decision processes: Embedding extremeness aversion, risk attitude and perceptual conditioning in multiple process rules choice making

There is an increasing interest, in the discrete choice modelling literature, in alternative behavioural paradigms that represent ways in which individuals make choices when faced with a choice set of alternatives. We see an increasing number of studies using process heuristics such as attribute non-attendance, relative advantage maximisation, extremeness aversion and value learning. With some exceptions, the study of each heuristic has been undertaken in isolation from other candidate heuristics; the exceptions being joint investigation into a fully compensatory model defined by a linear additive in attributes and parameters specification and one process heuristic, commonly using latent class models. This paper investigates the role that two behaviourally appealing decision rules play jointly in explaining choice making, both of which reflect risk attitude in different ways. We jointly estimate a model that accounts for extremeness aversion and an extended expected utility transformation for an attribute that accounts for risk attitude and perceptual conditioning under fully compensatory attributes. We use a stated choice experiment associated with a car choice between tolled and non-tolled roads in Australia. The findings suggest that the mean VTTS from the multiple-rule model is higher than the mean estimates obtained from each of the stand-alone models.

Do familiarity and awareness influence voting intention: The case of road pricing reform?

The choices that individuals make are influenced by the attributes defining alternatives from which to choose as well as their socioeconomic characteristics and beliefs. The literature on choice modelling which informs the decision making process implicitly assumes that individuals are both aware of and familiar with the alternatives being assessed. As far as we are aware, there is limited experience of the role that familiarity and awareness play in conditioning the choice behaviour of individuals. This paper investigates the role of awareness and familiarity in a context of growing interest, namely road pricing reform. Specifically, we analyse how the level of familiarity with the road pricing debate and the awareness of what road pricing means might influence the preferences of individuals for cordon-based and distance-based charging regimes, in contrast to the status quo. Familiarity and awareness are introduced into a choice model that allows for risk attitude, source preference and perceptual conditioning from the attribute level’s variation over repeated occurrences, as well as the perceived acceptability of the proposed scenarios. The data was collected in Sydney using a survey that contrasted the current road pricing situation with cordon-based and distance-based charging regimes. The model structure considers familiarity and awareness as endogenous variables. The final model identifies statistically significant roles for user charging fees and how revenue raised is to be spent. The endogenous consideration of awareness and familiarity together with risk attitude and perceptual conditioning through beliefs, provide significant information in improving our understanding of how individuals respond through preference revelation to a number of road pricing reforms.

Integrating attribute non-attendance and value learning with risk attitudes and perceptual conditioning

This study integrates multiple decision process strategies (Attribute Non-Attendance and Value Learning) with risk attitudes, perceptual conditioning and overt experience, which, to the best of our knowledge, has not been done before. We propose a way to include multiple heuristics as an alternative to current dominant paradigms, which supports a behavioural view that more than one heuristic simultaneously is at play in attribute and alternative processing. Our results show that including multiple decision process strategies, and integrating of all these components, significantly improves the model’s performance and enhances our understanding of how preferences are made.

“Union Regimes”: Discipline and Punish in Three Indian Maritime Trade Unions

This critical study stands at the intersection of two prominent themes within the studies of industrial relations and the sociology of labour respectively, namely, the decline, renewal, and transformation of trade unionism in the context of neoliberal globalization on the one hand, and labour process theories pertaining specifically to labour discipline/control on the other. Illustrated with ethnographic snapshots of three prominent maritime trade unions in India, this paper conceptualizes the “union regime”—a labour disciplinary regime based on the trade union's perceptual and attitudinal conditioning of its members, which ends chiefly in benefiting the employers and the unions. Furthermore, the paper describes the specific mechanisms of union disciplining from a Foucauldian theoretical perspective. The complicity of trade unions in the “discipline and punish” of the very workers that they represent leads to the alarming speculation that, at the perplexing crossroads of transformation, trade unionism is at the risk of becoming an extension of the ideological arsenal of global capitalism.

Choosing Public Transport—Incorporating Richer Behavioural Elements in Modal Choice Models

The development of behaviourally richer representations of the role of well-established and increasingly important influences on modal choice, such as trip time reliability and accounting for risk attitude and process rules, has moved forward at a fast pace in the context of automobile travel. In the public transport setting, such contributions have, with rare exception, not been considered. In this paper, we discuss and empirically illustrate the merits of advanced modelling developments aimed at improving our understanding of public transport choice, namely the inclusion of reliability in extended expected utility theoretic forms, to recognize risk attitude and perceptual conditioning, the consideration of passenger crowding and its inclusion in linear additive models, and the role of multiple heuristics in representing attribute processing as a way of conditioning modal choice. We illustrate the mechanics of introducing these behaviourally appealing extensions using a modal choice data set collected in Sydney.

Accommodating perceptual conditioning in the valuation of expected travel time savings for cars and public transport

Travel time variability (i.e., random variations in travel time) leads to a travel time distribution for a repeated trip from a fixed origin to destination (e.g., from home to work). To represent travel time variability, a series of possible travel times per alternative (departure time, route or mode) are often used in stated choice experiments. In the traditional models, the probabilities associated with different travel scenarios (e.g., arriving early, on time and late) shown in the experiments are directly used as weights. However, evidence from psychology suggests that the shown probabilities may be transformed (underweighted or overweighted) by respondents. To account for this transformation of probabilities, this study incorporates perceptual conditioning through a non-linear probability weighting function into a utility maximisation framework, within which the empirical estimate of the value of expected travel time savings is estimated. The key advantage of this framework is that the estimated willingness to pay value can be directly linked to the source of utility (i.e., the probability distribution of travel time), while taking into account the perceptual transformation of probabilities.

Embedding risk attitude and decision weights in non-linear logit to accommodate time variability in the value of expected travel time savings

In recent years we have seen important extensions of logit models in behavioural research such as incorporation of preference and scale heterogeneity, attribute processing heuristics, and estimation of willingness to pay (WTP) in WTP space. With rare exception, however, a non-linear treatment of the parameter set to allow for behavioural reality, such as embedded risk attitude and perceptual conditioning of occurrence probabilities attached to specific attributes, is absent. This is especially relevant to the recent focus in travel behaviour research on identifying the willingness to pay for reduced travel time variability, which is the source of estimates of the value of trip reliability that has been shown to take on an increasingly important role in project appraisal. This paper incorporates, in a generalised non-linear (in parameters) logit model, alternative functional forms for perceptual conditioning (known as probability weighting) and risk attitude in the utility function to account for travel time variability, and then derives an empirical estimate of the willingness to pay for trip time variability-embedded travel time savings as an alternative to separate estimates of time savings and trip time reliability. We illustrate the richness of the approach using a stated choice data set for commuter choice between unlabelled attribute packages. Statistically significant risk attitude parameters and parameters underlying decision weights are estimated for multinomial logit and mixed multinomial logit models, along with values of expected travel time savings.

Decoding Stimulus-Reward Pairing From Local Field Potentials Recorded From Monkey Visual Cortex

Single-trial decoding of brain recordings is a real challenge, since it pushes the signal-to-noise ratio issue to the limit. In this paper, we concentrate on the single-trial decoding of stimulus-reward pairing from local field potentials (LFPs) recorded chronically in the visual cortical area V4 of monkeys during a perceptual conditioning task. We developed a set of physiologically meaningful features that can classify and monitor the monkey's training performance. One of these features is based on the recently discovered propagation of waves of LFPs in the visual cortex. Time-frequency features together with spatial features (phase synchrony and wave propagation) yield, after applying a feature selection procedure, an exceptionally good single-trial classification performance, even when using a linear classifier.

Experimental approaches to phonology (review)

Reviewed by: Experimental approaches to phonology Marie Huffman Experimental approaches to phonology. Ed. by Maria-Josep Solé, Patrice Speeter Beddor, and Manjari Ohala. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. 465. ISBN 0199296820. $65. This book is a satisfyingly diverse and interesting collection of papers on experimental approaches to phonology. As a de facto festschrift for John J. Ohala, the book is intended to reflect [End Page 950] his influence on ‘the empirical methods that shape phonological inquiry’ (xi). Since Ohala has been consistently involved in big ideas, his influence ranges widely and there are many types of experimental inquiries that have been influenced by him. This book is a thoughtfully planned and organized collection of papers on a diverse set of topics. The papers are divided into five parts, under loosely organizing titles that strain at times to capture the diverse character of the papers they represent. Due to practical space limits the book cannot present a comprehensive view of the wide range of fields it touches on, leaving coverage feeling a bit uneven at times. However, it is a rich and stimulating collection of papers worth reading. Part 1, ‘Theory and background’, begins with the conceptual introduction to the book, given in ‘Methods in phonology’ by John J. Ohala, a very short sketch of critical questions and principles that should guide experimental investigations of these questions. Ohala remains neutral on these matters, resisting any urge to nudge the field toward one or the other direction (or method) of inquiry. ‘Elicitation as experimental phonology’, by Larry Hyman, is an elegant demonstration of a complex set of tonal patterns in Thlantlang Lai, which can be found through systematic investigation of noun paradigms. The chapter demonstrates what is possible with one-to-one linguist/consultant ‘field’ (or office) work, at least when the linguist is a particularly talented practitioner of this analysis method. ‘Decisions and mechanisms in exemplar-based phonology’, by Keith Johnson, discusses the grounding of exemplar-based theories in cognitive psychology and presents varied illustrations of how such representations could account for systematic and/or abstract generalizations about language. ‘Beyond laboratory phonology’ by Klaus Kohler uses examples of F0 alignment with articulation to argue that if (communicative) function, time, and the listener are given a central place in the study of speech, a more rational set of descriptive and theoretical constructs will emerge. ‘Area functions and articulatory modeling as a tool for investigating the articulatory, acoustic and perceptual properties of sounds across languages’, by Jacqueline Vaissière, illustrates application of Shinji Maeda’s articulatory model to fine acoustic and articulatory details of French. The discussion relies on a new phonetic notation system, a proposed alternative to the IPA, which, though provocative, is likely to be unfamiliar to many readers and as such slows one’s ability to assimilate the material. The paper is a solid reminder of the vast extent of language-specific differences even in sounds that we might comfortably transcribe with the same symbol. Part 2, ‘Phonological universals’, consists of a varied collection of papers exploring phonetic evidence for phonological universals. ‘Phonological universals and the control and regulation of speech production’, by Didier Demolin, reports on a detailed analysis of physiological data—measurements of both intraoral and subglottal pressure—arguing for the independence of control mechanisms for the two. This independence suggests new explanations for common patterns in tonal declination and segment lenition. ‘Issues of phonological complexity’, by Ian Maddieson, is a brief illustration of how a language database like UPSID can be applied to questions about patterns within language inventories, specifically questions of compensation in phonological complexity. ‘Linking dispersion-focalization theory and the maximum utilization of the available distinctive features principle in a perception-for-action-control theory’, by Jean-Luc Schwartz, Louis-Jean Boë, and Christian Abry, adds a notion of local salience to a computational approach to perceptual conditioning of the crosslinguistic distribution of vowels and consonants in phonetic space. Part 3, ‘Phonetic variation and phonological change’, is in some ways the conceptual heart of the book and is the best single collection...

Active Sensing of Visual and Tactile Stimuli by Brain-based Devices

We describe the construction and performance of `brain-based devices? (BBDs), physical devices whose behaviour is controlled by simulated nervous systems modelled on vertebrate neuroanatomy and neurophysiology, that carry out perceptual categorization and selective conditioning to visual and textural stimuli. BBDs take input from the environment through on-board sensors including cameras, microphones and artificial whiskers, and take action based on experiential learning. BBDs have a large-scale neural simulation, a phenotype, a body plan, and the means to learn through autonomous exploration. Key neural mechanisms in the present BBDs include synaptic plasticity, reward or value systems, reentrant connectivity, the dynamic synchronization of neuronal activity, and neuronal units with spatiotemporal response properties. With our BBDs, as with animals, it is the interaction of these neural mechanisms with the sensorimotor correlations generated by active sensing and self motion that is responsible for adaptive behaviour. BBDs permit analysis of activity at all levels of the nervous system during behaviour, and as such they provide a rich source of heuristics for generating hypotheses regarding brain function. Moreover, by taking inspiration from systems neuroscience, BBDs provide a novel architecture for the design of neuromorphic systems.

Floral constancy in bumble bees: handling efficiency or perceptual conditioning?

Individual bees often prefer flowers of the same species that they are already foraging on, and other individual bees prefer other flowers. This "floral constancy" has classically been explained as a learned behavior by which bees avoid wasting time switching between handling techniques. Choice trails were given to Bombus vagans workers that were freely foraging in mixed and pure fields of Trifolium pratense, T. repens, Viccia cracca, and Prunella vulgaris. Contrary to expectation, (1) bees showed if anything a stronger preference for their flower type in pure fields where they lacked experience than in a mixed field where they had had the opportunity to learn, (2) there was greater constancy in a mixed field of the two morphologically similar Trifolium species than in a mixed field of the morphologically disparate T. pratense and P. vulgaris, and (3) bees were more willing to switch between flowers of distinct morphologies when the colors were similar than between flowers of distinct colors when the morphologies were similar. We suggest that constancy is due to some form of perceptual conditioning whereby individual bees become temporarily sensitized to one or a few floral cues.

Ideational Conditioning: Bridging the Cognitive-Behaviourist Divide

Classical conditioning has traditionally been referred to as a 'dumb form of learning'; however, psychological activity can be redefined in terms of the conditioned reflex by considering other more complex forms of conditioning, i.e., configural or semantic conditioning. In this paper it is argued that conditioning may underpin both human perception and consciousness and previous experiments involving perceptual conditioning are outlined. Recent experiments which involve a new paradigm of ideational conditioning have shown that cognitions can play a part in conditioning processes. It is shown here that ideational conditioning demonstrates unequivocally that thoughts alone are adequate stimuli for acquisition of behavioural responses and that these experiments may help to bridge the cognitive-behaviourist divide.

IDEATIONAL CONDITIONING: BRIDGING THE COGNITIVE-BEHAVIOURIST DIVIDE

Classical conditioning has traditionally been referred to as a ‘dumb form of learning’; however, psychological activity can be redefined in terms of the conditioned reflex by considering other more complex forms of conditioning, i.e., configural or semantic conditioning. In this paper it is argued that conditioning may underpin both human perception and consciousness and previous experiments involving perceptual conditioning are outlined. Recent experiments which involve a new paradigm of ideational conditioning have shown that cognitions can play a part in conditioning processes. It is shown here that ideational conditioning demonstrates unequivocally that thoughts alone are adequate stimuli for acquisition of behavioural responses and that these experiments may help to bridge the cognitive-behaviourist divide.

Locus of Control Orientation and Perception of "Hurricane" in Fifth Graders.

The effects of a natural aversive stimulus (Hurricane Eloise in 1975) on locus of control and perception of the concept "hurricane" were investigated among 463 fifth graders from Title I schools in two coastal cities along Florida's Panhandle. Although both cities were threatened, only one was hit. Of the 269 Ss in the city hit, 184 had fourth grade locus of control scores. The hypotheses were (a) children in the city hit would not show the expected age-related increase in internality; (b) children in the city hit would be more external than children in the city not hit; and (c) children in the city hit would perceive the concept "hurricane" more positively than children in the city not hit, largely because of the effect of the positive view of internals in the city hit. The third hypothesis was supported. The results were interpreted from perceptual defense and aversive conditioning viewpoints. The lack of support for the first two hypotheses is consistent with recent disaster literature on the lack of negative reaction of populations in the aftermath of natural disasters.

Delayed one-trial extinction of the McCollough effect.

Initial tests of the McCollough effect were made on separate groups at delays of 4, 24 or 96 h after induction, with little apparent decrement. Subsequent tests were made at 4, 24 and 96 h after each initial test delay, again using separate subject groups in order to avoid test-induced extinction. All tests consisted of magentagreen nulling of the aftereffect. A single test session, whenever administered, seems to initiate a decay or extinction process lasting several days, resembling the time course shown by repeated testing. These results are difficult to reconcile with a perceptual conditioning model of the McCollough effect.

A correlational analysis of the relationships between personality and perceptual variables and discriminant GSR conditioning.

A correlational analysis of the relationships between personality and perceptual variables and discriminant GSR conditioning.