Process-based Account Research Articles

Time pressure and deliberation affect moral punishment

The deliberate-morality account implies that moral punishment should be decreased with time pressure and increased with deliberation while the intuitive-morality account predicts the opposite. In three experiments, moral punishment was examined in a simultaneous one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma game with a costly punishment option. The players cooperated or defected and then decided whether or not to punish their partners. In Experiment 1, the punishment decisions were made without or with time pressure. In Experiment 2, the punishment decisions were immediate or delayed by pauses in which participants deliberated their decisions. In Experiment 3, participants were asked to deliberate self-interest or fairness before deciding whether to punish their partners. Different types of punishment were distinguished using the cooperation-and-punishment model. In Experiment 1, time pressure decreased moral punishment. In Experiment 2, deliberation increased moral punishment. So far, the evidence supports the deliberate-morality account. Experiment 3 demonstrates that the effect of deliberation depends on what is deliberated. When participants deliberated self-interest rather than fairness, moral punishment was decreased. The results suggest that unguided deliberation increases moral punishment, but the effects of deliberation are modulated by the type of deliberation that takes place. These results strengthen a process-based account of punishment which offers a more nuanced understanding of the context-specific effect of deliberation on moral punishment than the deliberate-morality account.

A process model account of the role of dopamine in intertemporal choice.

Theoretical accounts disagree on the role of dopamine in intertemporal choice and assume that dopamine either promotes delay of gratification by increasing the preference for larger rewards or that dopamine reduces patience by enhancing the sensitivity to waiting costs. Here, we reconcile these conflicting accounts by providing empirical support for a novel process model according to which dopamine contributes to two dissociable components of the decision process, evidence accumulation and starting bias. We re-analyzed a previously published data set where intertemporal decisions were made either under the D2 antagonist amisulpride or under placebo by fitting a hierarchical drift diffusion model that distinguishes between dopaminergic effects on the speed of evidence accumulation and the starting point of the accumulation process. Blocking dopaminergic neurotransmission not only strengthened the sensitivity to whether a reward is perceived as worth the delay costs during evidence accumulation (drift rate) but also attenuated the impact of waiting costs on the starting point of the evidence accumulation process (bias). In contrast, re-analyzing data from a D1 agonist study provided no evidence for a causal involvement of D1R activation in intertemporal choices. Taken together, our findings support a novel, process-based account of the role of dopamine for cost-benefit decision making, highlight the potential benefits of process-informed analyses, and advance our understanding of dopaminergic contributions to decision making.

School-based screening for childhood anxiety problems and intervention delivery: a codesign approach

ObjectivesA very small proportion of children with anxiety problems receive evidence-based treatment. Barriers to access include difficulties with problem identification, concerns about stigma and a lack of clarity about how...

Pre-Reflective Self-Consciousness: A Meta-Causal Approach

I present considerations surrounding pre-reflective self-consciousness (PRSC), arising in work I am conducting on a new physicalist, process-based account of [phenomenal] consciousness. The account is called the meta-causal account (MCA) because it identifies consciousness with a certain type of arrangement of meta-causation. Meta-causation is causation where a cause or effect is itself an instance of causation (e.g., A’s-causing-B causes C). The proposed type of arrangement involves a sort of time-spanning, internal reflexivity of the overall meta-causation. I argue that, as a result of the account, any conscious process has PRSC. Hence, PRSC does not need to be taken as a stipulation or argued for on purely phenomenological grounds or as a necessary support for reflective consciousness. I also show how it is natural to the account that PRSC is not an additional, peripheral, sort of consciousness, but is intrinsic to all consciousness, thereby fitting claims about self-intimation and co-constitution by various authors, and also being amenable to an adverbial account. As part of this, consciousness of an external object is just the form that current self-consciousness takes, the meta-causal constitution of it being inextricably modulated by the causal relationship with the object. The article also discusses how MCA helps explore issues of for-me-ness, transparency of perceptual consciousness, and possible immediacy and non-relationality of self-consciousness.

Toward a Science of Effective Cognitive Training

A long-standing question in the behavioral sciences is whether cognitive functions can be improved through dedicated training. It is uncontested that training programs can lead to near transfer, meaning increased performance on untrained tasks involving similar cognitive functions. However, whether training also leads to far transfer, meaning increased performance on loosely related untrained tasks or even activities of daily living, is still hotly debated. Here, we review the extant literature and, in particular, the most recent meta-analytic evidence and argue that the ongoing crisis in the field of cognitive-training research may benefit from taking a more mechanistic approach to studying the effectiveness of training. We propose that (a) adopting a more rigorous theoretical framework that builds on a process-based account of training and transfer, (b) considering the role of individual differences in the responsiveness to training, and (c) drawing on Bayesian models of development may help to solve controversial issues in the field and lead the way to designing and implementing more effective training protocols.

Evaluating process-based and crew- centred approaches to procedure design in aviation: workload and performance changes in go-around manoeuvres

In this article, we compare and evaluate two methods of procedure design using an aircraft go-around (GA) as a test scenario. We contrast the manufacturer specified, crew-centric procedure with a redesigned process-centred perspective. We test the claim that the process-centred design can take into account situational factors more effectively and generate less workload. We report a heuristic assessment of the new procedure against design guidelines and an evaluation in a full-flight simulator at the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) using qualified airline pilots to assess workload and performance. Both the manufacturer specified and new procedure were employed in three GA scenarios representative of increasing operational complexity. Results demonstrate an advantage for the new procedure design in the most complex scenario. The new, process-based procedure can reduce reported crew workload and improve response flexibility in more complex scenarios, improving rated performance. This study suggests that the process-based account in procedure design has advantages when compared to the flight crew-centric approach. These advantages include enhanced flexibility, robustness and improved crew performance during GA.

A Mechanistic Account of Stress-Induced Performance Degradation

Stress-induced performance degradation in high-pressure situations has been documented empirically and generated different explanations. The existing theories often assume the distinction between implicit and explicit processing but speculate differently on the impact that high-pressure situations have on their interaction. Although few attempts have been made so far at clarifying these underlying processes mechanistically (e.g., computationally), this paper proposes a detailed, mechanistic, and process-based account based on the Clarion cognitive architecture. This account incorporates facets of existing theories, but explores motivation, metacognition, and their effects on performance degradation. This account has been applied to different tasks that have previously suggested different explanations. These tasks were simulated within the Clarion cognitive architecture and results matched well with human data. Utilizing data from different tasks, we come up with a unified model of stress-induced performance degradation in high-pressure situations, which shows a unified, motivation-based, mechanistic account of these phenomena is possible, thus shedding light on the phenomena and pointing to mechanistic explanations of other related phenomena.

Distinguishing between cognitive explanations of the problem size effect in mental arithmetic via representational similarity analysis of fMRI data

Not all researchers interested in human behavior remain convinced that modern neuroimaging techniques have much to contribute to distinguishing between competing cognitive models for explaining human behavior, especially if one removes reverse inference from the table. Here, we took up this challenge in an attempt to distinguish between two competing accounts of the problem size effect (PSE), a robust finding in investigations of mathematical cognition. The PSE occurs when people solve arithmetic problems and indicates that numerically large problems are solved more slowly and erroneously than small problems. Neurocognitive explanations for the PSE can be categorized into representation-based and process-based views. Behavioral and traditional univariate neural measures have struggled to distinguish between these accounts. By contrast, a representational similarity analysis (RSA) approach with fMRI data provides competing hypotheses that can distinguish between accounts without recourse to reverse inference. To that end, our RSA (but not univariate) results provided clear evidence in favor of the representation-based over the process-based account of the PSE in multiplication; for addition, the results were less clear. Post-hoc similarity analysis distinguished still further between competing representation-based theoretical accounts. Namely, data favored the notion that individual multiplication problems are stored as individual memory traces sensitive to input frequency over a strictly magnitude-based account of memory encoding. Together, these results provide an example of how human neuroimaging evidence can directly inform cognitive-level explanations of a common behavioral phenomenon, the problem size effect. More broadly, these data may expand our understanding of calculation and memory systems in general.

Mediation Centrality in Adversarial Policy Networks

Conflict resolution often involves mediators who understand the issues central to both sides of an argument. Mediators in complex networks represent key nodes that are connected to other key nodes in opposing subgraphs. Here we introduce a new metric, mediation centrality, for identifying good mediators in adversarial policy networks, such as the connections between individuals and their reasons for and against the support of controversial topics (e.g., state‐financed abortion). Using a process‐based account of reason mediation we construct bipartite adversarial policy networks and show how mediation defined over subgraph projections constrained to reasons representing opposing sides can be used to produce a measure of mediation centrality that is superior to centrality computed on the full network. We then empirically illustrate and test mediation centrality in a “policy fluency task,” where participants generated reasons for or against eight controversial policy issues (state‐subsidized abortion, bank bailouts, forced CO2 reduction, cannabis legalization, shortened naturalization, surrogate motherhood legalization, public smoking ban, and euthanasia legalization). We discuss how mediation centrality can be extended to adversarial policy networks with more than two positions and to other centrality measures.

Situated anticipation

In cognitive science, long-term anticipation, such as when planning to do something next year, is typically seen as a form of ‘higher’ cognition, requiring a different account than the more basic activities that can be understood in terms of responsiveness to ‘affordances,’ i.e. to possibilities for action. Starting from architects that anticipate the possibility to make an architectural installation over the course of many months, in this paper we develop a process-based account of affordances that includes long-term anticipation within its scope. We present a framework in which situations and their affordances unfold, and can be thought of as continuing a history of practices into a current situational activity. In this activity affordances invite skilled participants to act further. Via these invitations one situation develops into the other; an unfolding process that sets up the conditions for its own continuation. Central to our process account of affordances is the idea that engaged individuals can be responsive to the direction of the process to which their actions contribute. Anticipation, at any temporal scale, is then part and parcel of keeping attuned to the movement of the unfolding situations to which an individual contributes. We concretize our account by returning to the example of anticipation observed in architectural practice. This account of anticipation opens the door to considering a wide array of human activities traditionally characterized as ‘higher’ cognition in terms of engaging with affordances.

Dynamic competition account of men’s perceptions of women’s sexual interest

This work applies a dynamic competition framework of decision making to the domain of sexual perception, which is linked theoretically and empirically to college men’s risk for exhibiting sexual coercion and aggression toward female acquaintances. Within a mouse-tracking paradigm, 152 undergraduate men viewed full-body photographs of women who varied in affect (sexual interest or rejection), clothing style (provocative or conservative), and attractiveness, and decided whether each woman currently felt sexually interested or rejecting. Participants’ mouse movements were recorded to capture competition dynamics during online processing (throughout the decisional process), and as an index of the final categorical decision (endpoint of the decisional process). Participants completed a measure of Rape-Supportive Attitudes (RSA), a well-established correlate of male-initiated sexual aggression toward female acquaintances. Mixed-effects analyses revealed greater curvature toward the incorrect response on conceptually incongruent trials (e.g., rejecting and dressed provocatively) than on congruent trials (e.g., rejecting and dressed conservatively). This suggests that the two decision alternatives are simultaneously active and compete continuously over time, consistent with a dynamic competition account. Congruence effects also emerged at the decisional endpoint; accuracy was typically lower when stimulus features were incongruent, rather than congruent. RSA potentiated online congruence effects (intermediate states of behavior) but not offline congruence effects (endpoint states of behavior). In a hierarchical regression analysis, online processing indices accounted for unique variability in RSA above and beyond offline accuracy rates. The process-based account of men’s sexual-interest judgments ultimately may point to novel targets for prevention strategies designed to reduce acquaintance-initiated sexual aggression on college campuses.

A Role for Reasoning in a Dialogic Approach to Critical Thinking

We note the development of the widely employed but loosely defined construct of critical thinking from its earliest instantiations as a measure of individual ability to its current status, marked by efforts to better connect the construct to the socially-situated thinking demands of real life. Inquiry and argument are identified as key dimensions in a process-based account of critical thinking. Argument is identified as a social practice, rather than a strictly individual competency. Yet, new empirical evidence is presented documenting a role for individual reasoning competencies in supporting the effectiveness of argumentive discourse. A successful curriculum is described for employing extended engagement in dialogic argumentation as a pathway to development of individual argumentive skill.

Staging Nancy Cunard: The Question of Persona in Dramatizing her Life and Work

Nancy Cunard presents us with one of modernism’s most concentrated examples of the role of persona in shaping the reception of a literary figure. A writer, publisher, and activist, Cunard was firmly entrenched in the working world, an attachment that she makes clear in her varied autobiographical writings. By contrast, the tabloid press, other modernists, and critics have deployed various versions of Cunard – a series of personas marked by their variety (racist vs. race reformer; dilettante vs. pioneering intellectual); the intensity of the debate as to which one constitutes the ‘real’ Nancy Cunard; and, frequently, the marked exclusion of many of Cunard’s working activities. In this process-based account, the author considers the range and scope of the personas that have circulated around Cunard, Cunard’s establishment of a working counter-persona in her autobiographical writing, and the processes of working with these competing iterations in her play about Cunard’s life and work, These Were the Hours.

The emergent executive: a dynamic field theory of the development of executive function.

Executive function (EF) is a central aspect of cognition that undergoes significant changes in early childhood. Changes in EF in early childhood are robustly predictive of academic achievement and general quality of life measures later in adulthood. We present a dynamic neural field (DNF) model that provides a process-based account of behavior and developmental change in a key task used to probe the early development of executive function—the Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS) task. In the DCCS, children must flexibly switch from sorting cards either by shape or color to sorting by the other dimension. Typically, 3-year-olds, but not 5-year-olds, lack the flexibility to do so and perseverate on the first set of rules when instructed to switch. Using the DNF model, we demonstrate how rule-use and behavioral flexibility come about through a form of dimensional attention. Further, developmental change is captured by increasing the robustness and precision of dimensional attention. Note that although this enables the model to effectively switch tasks, the dimensional attention system does not “know” the details of task-specific performance. Rather, correct performance emerges as a property of system–wide interactions. We show how this captures children’s behavior in quantitative detail across 14 versions of the DCCS task. Moreover, we successfully test a set of novel predictions with 3-year-old children from a version of the task not explained by other theories.

Visualizing cross sections: Training spatial thinking using interactive animations and virtual objects

In two experiments, we investigated the efficacy of a brief intervention that used interactive animation to train students to infer the two-dimensional cross section of a virtual three-dimensional geometric figure. Undergraduates with poor spatial ability were assigned to receive the intervention or to a control group. Compared to the control group, trained participants improved significantly on stimuli viewed during the intervention and demonstrated transfer to untrained stimuli. Results were considered with respect to two accounts of performance gains and transfer after spatial visualization training, an instance-based account and a process-based account. The instance-based account attributes performance gains to a larger store of memories and predicts no transfer to new stimuli or new spatial processes. The process-based account attributes performance gains to increased efficiency of mental processes and predicts transfer to new stimuli and tasks that share the same mental processes. The results of these experiments cannot be accounted for by an instance-based account alone. Performance gains and transfer in these experiments suggest that interactive animation and virtual solids are promising tools for training spatial thinking in undergraduates.

A phonetic explanation of pronunciation variant effects

Effects of word-level phonetic variation on the recognition of words with different pronunciation variants (e.g., center produced with/(out) [t]) are investigated via the semantic- and pseudoword-priming paradigms. A bias favoring clearly articulated words with canonical variants ([nt]) is found. By reducing the bias, words with different variants show robust and equivalent lexical activation. The equivalence of different word forms highlights a snag for frequency-based theories of lexical access: How are words and word productions with vastly different frequencies recognized equally well by listeners? A process-based account is proposed, suggesting that careful speech induces bottom-up processing and casual speech induces top-down processing.

A Procedural, Pragmatist Account of Ethical Objectivity

This article offers a procedural, pragmatist account of objectivity in the domain of the good that is inspired by pragmatic and feminist critiques of objectivity in philosophy of science and epistemology. I begin by asking first what we want to capture--or ought to want to capture--with a notion of ethical objectivity and in answer to this question I identify four "points" to ethical objectivity: undergirding the possibility of mistakenness, making genuine disagreement possible, making sense of our appreciation of the ethical perspectives of others, and making possible a sense of ethical improvement or learning. I then lay out a process-based account of objectivity in ethics that makes good on the four points I have identified. Finally, I consider worries related to convergence, bias, and ontology and defend the procedural, pragmatist account in light of those potential objections.

Process-based account for the effects of perceptual attention and executive attention on fluid intelligence: An integrative approach

Perceptual attention and executive attention represent two higher-order types of attention and associate with distinctly different ways of information processing. It is hypothesized that these two types of attention implicate different cognitive processes, which are assumed to account for the differential effects of perceptual attention and executive attention on fluid intelligence. Specifically, an encoding process is assumed to be crucial in completing the tasks of perceptual attention while two executive processes, updating and shifting, are stimulated in completing the tasks of executive attention. The proposed hypothesis was tested by means of an integrative approach combining experimental manipulations and psychometric modeling. In a sample of 210 participants the encoding process has proven indispensable in completing the tasks of perceptual attention, and this process accounted for a considerable part of fluid intelligence that was assessed by two figural reasoning tests. In contrast, the two executive processes, updating and shifting, turned out to be necessary in performance according to the tasks of executive attention and these processes accounted for a larger part of the variance in fluid intelligence than that of the processes underlying perceptual attention.

Rethinking Conceptually-Based Inference — Grounding Representation in Task and Behavioral Dynamics: Commentary on “Fifteen-month-old infants attend to shape over other perceptual properties in an induction task,” by S. Graham and G. Diesendruck, and “Form follows function: Learning about function helps children learn about shape,” by E. Ware and A. Booth

The question of what representations underlie young children’s categorizations and early word learning has an extensive history. Answers have been shaped by several longstanding debates, including the conceptual/perceptual debate raised by Graham and Diesendruck (G&D) in their article in this issue. Their contribution to this debate is an experiment examining 15-month-old infants’ attention to shape, color and texture in an inductive inference task. Infants were presented with a novel object that possessed a nonobvious property demonstrated by acting on the object (e.g., the object squeaked when squeezed). They were then presented test objects that matched the exemplar in shape, color or texture and their attempts to produce the demonstrated properties observed. G&D found that infants performed the demonstrated actions most often with the shape-matching test objects. Furthermore, the number of actions infants performed was significantly related to the intercorrelated variables of vocabulary size, number of count nouns known, and age.The data presented by G&D make an important contribution to our understanding of infants’ performance in inductive inference tasks. In particular, no previous studies have examined infants’ differential attention to particular dimensions in these tasks, or related performance to vocabulary development. However, we disagree regarding the nature and implications of this contribution. We believe that this disagreement, to a large extent, stems from a more fundamental disagreement regarding the conceptual/perceptual debate. We first present our take on that debate. Briefly, we believe it is not so easy to separate perceptual and conceptual bases for children’s categorizations. Rather, we argue for a process-based account of categorization grounded in developmental accounts of perception, action, learning, attention and memory. We then illustrate how our take leads to a different interpretation of G&D’s data and thus a different conclusion regarding its implications.

The Effects of Cognitive Appraisal and Emotion on Social Motive and Negotiation Behavior: The Critical Role of Agency of Negotiator Emotion

This study presents an emotion-based model of the negotiation process and validates it using data from a dyadic negotiation simulation. We propose that cognitive appraisal of the situation generates one of four emotions (pride–achievement, gratitude, guilt–shame, and anger), depending on the valence and agency of the emotion. We also hypothesize that the effect of negotiator emotion on negotiation behavior is mediated by social motive. Structural equation modeling analyses of the data obtained from 322 participants supported most of the relationships hypothesized in the proposed model. Surprisingly, emotions with the same valence (positive or negative) exhibited contrasting relationships with collaborative and competitive motives, depending on their agency (caused by the self or the other). These findings highlight the importance of considering agency in any examination of the roles of distinct emotions in a negotiation setting. This study also offers a process-based account of how emotion is elicited and how it influences behavior in a negotiation situation.