Context Effects

A critical issue in perception is the manner in which top-down expectancies guide lower level perceptual processes. In speech, a common paradigm is to construct continua ranging between two phonetic endpoints and to determine how higher level lexical context influences the perceived boundary. We applied this approach to music, presenting participants with major/minor triad continua after brief musical contexts. Two experiments yielded results that differed from classic results in speech perception. In speech, context generally expands the category of the expected stimuli. We found the opposite in music: The major/minor boundary shifted toward the expected category, contracting it. Together, these experiments support the hypothesis that musical expectancy can feed back to affect lower-level perceptual processes. However, it may do so in a way that differs fundamentally from what has been seen in other domains.

When people choose between multiple alternatives it has been observed that the probability of choosing one option over another often depends on the additional options available. For instance, one's preference for a high-end notebook computer over a cheaper midrange model can reverse when a third, low price, but bulkier, computer is also considered. Importantly, such context effects violate fundamental choice axioms of most standard economic choice theories. To account for these effects various computational models have been proposed. The present work examines two prominent models that have been proposed to simultaneously account for the similarity, compromise, and attraction effects: multialternative decision field theory (MDFT; Roe, Busemeyer, & Townsend, 2001) and the multiattribute linear ballistic accumulator (MLBA; True-blood, Brown, & Heathcote, 2014). Because the models imply quite different psychological processes, we focus our comparison on the various mechanisms the models use to produce each effect. We test the models using data from a large within-subjects consumer choice experiment in which all three effects occurred. Overall, we find that both MLBA and MDFT have valuable mechanisms for understanding multialternative context effects. When considering each context effect in isolation MDFT gave the better account of the similarity and attraction effects, while MLBA better described the compromise effect. We conclude that three mechanisms—attention switching and distance-dependent inhibition from MDFT and extremeness aversion from MLBA— appear crucial. These results provide insights into the psychological mechanisms underlying human decision making and should be considered in further development of decision theories.

Frederick, Lee, and Baskin (2014) and Yang and Lynn (2014) argue that the conditions for obtaining the attraction effect are so restrictive that the practical validity of the attraction effect should be questioned. In this commentary, the authors first ground the attraction (asymmetric dominance) effect in its historical context as a test of an important theoretical assumption from rational choice theory. Drawing on the research reported by scholars from many fields of study, the authors argue that the finding of an asymmetric dominance effect remains robust because it holds when the conditions of the study are essentially replicated. Next, the authors identify some of the factors that mitigate (and amplify) the attraction effect and then position the effect into a larger theoretical debate involving the extent to which preferences are constructed versus merely revealed. The authors conclude by arguing that researchers who try to measure values as well as choice architects who attem...

When people are choosing among different options, context seems to play a vital role. For instance, adding a third option can increase the probability of choosing a similar dominating option. This attraction effect is one of the most widely studied phenomena in decision-making research. Its prevalence, however, has been challenged recently by the tainting hypothesis, according to which the inferior option contaminates the attribute space in which it is located, leading to a repulsion effect. In an attempt to test the tainting hypothesis and explore the conditions under which dominated options make dominating options look bad, we conducted four preregistered perceptual decision-making studies with a total of 301 participants. We identified two factors influencing individuals’ behavior: stimulus display and stimulus design. Our results contribute to a growing body of literature showing how presentation format influences behavior in preferential and perceptual decision-making tasks.

In most studies, mother-infant interactional attunement is observed in either one or two contexts or in brief, unstructured sessions at home. We thus do not know whether the observed levels of interactional attunement are influenced by the context, whether context influences the ...

Which cognitive processes are reflected by the N400 in ERPs is still controversial. Various recent articles (Lau et al., 2008; Brouwer et al., 2012) have revived the idea that only lexical pre-activation processes (such as automatic spreading activation, ASA) are strongly supported, while post-lexical integrative processes are not. Challenging this view, the present ERP study replicates a behavioral study by McKoon and Ratcliff (1995) who demonstrated that a prime-target pair such as finger − hand shows stronger priming when a ma- jority of other pairs in the list share the analogous semantic relationship (here: part-whole), even at short stim- ulus onset asynchronies (250 ms). We created lists with four different types of semantic relationship (syn- onyms, part-whole, category-member, and opposites) and compared priming for pairs in a consistent list with those in an inconsistent list as well as unrelated items. Highly significant N400 reductions were found for both relatedness priming (unrelated vs. inconsistent) and relational priming (inconsistent vs. consistent). These data are taken as strong evidence that N400 priming effects are not exclusively carried by ASA-like mechanisms during lexical retrieval but also include post-lexical integration in working memory. We link the present find- ings to a neurocomputational model for relational reasoning (Knowlton et al., 2012) and to recent discussions of context-dependent conceptual activations (Yee and Thompson-Schill, 2016).

Self-anchoring scales were first mentioned by Kilpatrick and Cantril (J Indiv Psychol 16:158–170, 1960) and Cantril (The pattern of human concerns, 1965) as rating instruments in which the end anchors are defined by the respondent himself, basing on his own assumptions, perceptions, goals and values. The uses of these scales are legion and they have shown to be very useful in reducing measurement bias in cross-cultural research (Cantril, The pattern of human concerns, 1965; Bernheim et al. J. Happiness Stud. 7:227–250, 2006). The first part of the current study investigates whether context effects can be lessened or eliminated by using self-anchoring scales. For this purpose, an experiment similar to the ones by Couper et al. (Public Opin Q 71:623–634, 2004, Public Opin Q 68:255–266, 2007), in which they manipulated images that figured in a web survey, was conducted. The hypothesis that self-anchoring scales can reduce contextual bias, is not supported by our data. The second part of the study investigates if and how self-anchoring scales affect drop-out during the filling-out of questionnaires. It is found that, compared to a regular rating scale, a larger proportion of respondents drop-out. Moreover, subjective preferences for the one or the other scale do not seem to differ.

En dos experimentos se analizan los efectos de distancia, de congruencia semántica y de contexto comunmente hallados en un tipo de tareas que requieren efectuar una serie de juicios comparativos. En los dos experimentos se manipulaba el nivel de procesamiento de los estímulos. En el primer experimento, se instruyó a los sujetos a que compararan una serie de animales entre sí atendiendo al tamaño de los dibujos o de las palabras mediante las que se presentaban. En el segundo experimento, se pidió a los sujetos que compararan esta misma serie de animales de acuerdo con su tamaño real. Los modelos analógicos -los modelos de revisión y comparación, de punto de referencia y de expectativa- suponen que los efectos de contexto y de congruencia se producen por las expectativas que el sujeto forma durante la tarea dependiendo de la modalidad de los estímulos, de las instrucciones y de las alternativas de respuesta. Los modelos proposicionales -específicamente, el modelo de codificación semántica- suponen que estos efectos se producen al modificar las representaciones mentales de forma que se correspondan los códigos de las instrucciones con los de los estímulos. Se confirma que el modelo de codificación semántica explica mejor el efecto de congruencia tal como se presenta, pero no explica el efecto de contexto al menos tal y como se define en estos experimentos. Por el contrario, el modelo de expectativa explica mejor el efecto de contexto -de hecho, un efecto de interferencia-, pero no justifica el efecto de congruencia. Ambos modelos son, pues, incompletos.

In two experiments, participants were presented with narratives in which a target entity (e.g., water) was introduced. The final sentences affirmed or negated that a particular property held for the target entity (e.g., The water was (not) warm). The linguistic context was manipulated. In Experiment 1, reading times for the negative target sentences (but not those for the affirmative ones) were affected by the context manipulation, with shorter reading times in conditions in which the negated proposition had been explicitly mentioned in the prior text. Experiment 2 demonstrated a similar facilitation effect with respect to inferred propositions. The results of the two experiments support pragmatic considerations concerning the context dependency of the processing difficulty associated with negative sentences.

This paper revisited Gregory Bateson’s theory of hierarchical learning through an experiment testing the existence of context effect and learning spill-over in two following games: a coordination game and a two-step battle-of-the sexes. The first part of the experiment is seen as a kind of training period. The different treatments of the coordination game are, in fact, designed so to reinforce different representations of the games, requiring to look at different aspects of a series of images shown in the screen. The second game allows testing if differences in training determine different behaviors in a same situation. Our experiment suggests that the preliminary training influences how the second game is perceived. While the incentive structure of the battle-of-the sexes is not identical to the coordination game, the presence of an image determines a different kind of context similarity with the previous one.

Which cognitive processes are reflected by the N400 in ERPs is still controversial. Various recent articles (Lau et al., 2008; Brouwer et al., 2012) have revived the idea that only lexical pre-activation processes (such as automatic spreading activation, ASA) are strongly supported, while post-lexical integrative processes are not. Challenging this view, the present ERP study replicates a behavioral study by McKoon and Ratcliff (1995) who demonstrated that a prime-target pair such as finger - hand shows stronger priming when a majority of other pairs in the list share the analogous semantic relationship (here: part-whole), even at short stimulus onset asynchronies (250ms). We created lists with four different types of semantic relationship (synonyms, part-whole, category-member, and opposites) and compared priming for pairs in a consistent list with those in an inconsistent list as well as unrelated items. Highly significant N400 reductions were found for both relatedness priming (u...

We report an experiment exploring sequential context effects on strategy choices in one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) game. Rapoport and Chammah (1965) have shown that some PDs are cooperative and lead to high cooperation rate, whereas others are uncooperative. Participants played very cooperative and very uncooperative games, against anonymous partners. The order in which these games were played affected their cooperation rate by producing perceptual contrast, which appeared only between the trials, but not between two separate sequences of games. These findings suggest that people may not have stable perceptions of absolute cooperativeness. Instead, they judge the cooperativeness of each fresh game only in relation to the previous game. The observed effects suggest that the principles underlying judgments about highly abstract magnitudes such as cooperativeness may be similar to principles governing the perception of sensory magnitudes.

We examine occurrences of categorical assimi-lation (neutralizations) in French, the perception of voiced and unvoiced word-final obstruents in dif-ferent phonological contexts. We first show the categorical nature of the alternation (Exp. 1), sup-ported in Exp. 2 by perceptual categorization data. In Exp. 3, the interpretation of this first percept appears to be corrected in certain contexts, induc-ing compensation. We argue that context effects are phonological in this case, rather than auditory or phonetic. We conclude that linguistic knowl-edge of alternations is necessary in compensation for categorical assimilation.