Sabrina Golonka

Thematic Relations Affect Similarity Via Commonalities

Thematic relations are an important source of perceived similarity. For instance, the rowing theme of boats and oars increases their perceived similarity. The mechanism of this effect, however, has not been specified previously. The authors investigated whether thematic relations affect similarity by increasing commonalities or by decreasing differences. In Experiment 1, thematic relations affected similarity more than difference, thereby producing a noninversion of similarity and difference. Experiment 2 revealed substantial individual variability in the preference for thematic relations and, consequently, in the noninversion of ratings. In sum, the experiments demonstrated a noninversion of similarity and difference that was caused by thematic relations and exhibited primarily by a subgroup of participants. These results indicate that thematic relations affect perceived similarity by increasing the contribution of commonalities rather than by decreasing the contribution of differences.

Different influences on lexical priming for integrative, thematic, and taxonomic relations

Word pairs may be integrative (i.e., combination of two concepts into one meaningful entity; e.g., fruit—cake), thematically related (i.e., connected in time and place; e.g., party—cake), and/or taxonomically related (i.e., shared features and category co-members; e.g., muffin—cake). Using participant ratings and computational measures, we demonstrated distinct patterns across measures of similarity and co-occurrence, and familiarity for each relational construct in two different item sets. In a standard lexical decision task (LDT) with various delays between prime and target presentation (SOAs), target RTs and priming magnitudes were consistent across the three relations for both item sets. However, across the SOAs, there were distinct patterns among the three relations on some of the underlying measures influencing target word recognition (LSA, Google, and BEAGLE). These distinct patterns suggest different mechanisms of lexical priming and further demonstrate that integrative relations are distinct from thematic and taxonomic relations.

How Moving Together Brings Us Together: When Coordinated Rhythmic Movement Affects Cooperation

Although it is well established that rhythmically coordinating with a social partner can increase cooperation, it is as yet unclear when and why intentional coordination has such effects. We distinguish three dimensions along which explanations might vary. First, pro-social effects might require in-phase synchrony or simply coordination. Second, the effects of rhythmic movements on cooperation might be direct or mediated by an intervening variable. Third, the pro-social effects might occur in proportion to the quality of the coordination, or occur once some threshold amount of coordination has occurred. We report an experiment and two follow-ups which sought to identify which classes of models are required to account for the positive effects of coordinated rhythmic movement on cooperation. Across the studies, we found evidence (1) that coordination, and not just synchrony, can have pro-social consequences (so long as the social nature of the task is perceived), (2) that the effects of intentional coordination are direct, not mediated, and (3) that the degree of the coordination did not predict the degree of cooperation. The fact of inter-personal coordination (moving together in time and in a social context) is all thats required for pro-social effects. We suggest that future research should use the kind of carefully controllable experimental task used here to continue to develop explanations for when and why coordination affects pro-social behaviors.

Laws and Conventions in Language-Related Behaviors

The goal of this article is to look at language-related behaviors in light of a strict definition of direct perception. I highlight a key dimension, conventionality, which discriminates between behaviors that are coordinated with respect to law-based information and those that are not (and, therefore, do not qualify as direct perception according to the definition used in this article). The difference between conventional and law-based information does not break down clearly along obvious lines such as natural versus human-made, social versus nonsocial, or linguistic versus nonlinguistic. Therefore, it is necessary to take a task-specific approach to deciding whether a behavior is organized with respect to conventional or law-based information. A tacit assumption in ecological psychology seems to be that anything that has an effect on behavior must be grounded in the perception of an affordance and, therefore, must be guided by law-based information. In this article, I question this assumption. I suggest, instead, that ecological information can be based on both laws and conventions. This move allows us to maintain rigorous definitions of affordances and direct perception, suitable for underpinning action-control, while still expanding the ecological study of behaviors into those that rely on conventional information.

Imagined steps: Mental simulation of coordinated rhythmic movements effects on pro-sociality

Rhythmically coordinating with a partner can increase pro-sociality, but pro-sociality does not appear to change in proportion to coordination success, or particular classes of coordination. Pro-social benefits may have more to do with simply coordinating in a social context than the details of the actual coordination (Cross et al., 2016). This begs the question, how stripped down can a coordination task be and still affect pro-sociality? Would it be sufficient simply to imagine coordinating with others? Imagining a social interaction can lead to many of the same effects as actual interaction (Crisp and Turner, 2009). We report the first experiments to explore whether imagined coordination affects pro-sociality similarly to actual coordination. Across two experiments and over 450 participants, mentally simulated coordination is shown to promote some, but not all, of the pro-social consequences of actual coordination. Imagined coordination significantly increased group cohesion and de-individuation, but did not consistently affect cooperation.

Task Dynamics & the (Ecological) Information They Create

Embodied cognition is the hypothesis that behavior is not simply caused by the brain. Instead, behavior emerges from the interactions between brains in particular kinds of bodies embedded in environments that provide certain kinds of opportunities for activity. Theories of embodied cognition require a mechanism to support how these distributed resources can remain in contact with one another so that they can be assembled into task-specific solutions to problems. These theories of embodied cognition, especially the nonrepresentational kinds, typically rely on James J. Gibson’s (1979) notion of ecological information as the relevant mechanism, and there is extensive empirical support for the claim that this information both exists and is used by organisms to coordinate and control their activity.