1,721,046 research outputs found
Cognitive styles: Errors in directional judgments
No full textPrevious studies on spatial memory have shown that, in judging direction, participants are more accurate and faster when a map is aligned with the perspective of the spatial layout they had learned (alignment effect). Rossano and Warren (1989 Perception 18 215-229) have shown that when participants have to do a contra-aligned judgment they can either answer correctly, or make alignment or mirror-image errors. We think that the kind of response depends on the different way in which people acquire environmental knowledge: landmark, route, and survey. We hypothesise that landmark and route participants show alignment effects and make, respectively, alignment errors and mirror-image errors, whereas survey participants do not show an alignment effect. An experiment is reported in which participants performed three tasks in order to distinguish their cognitive style. We selected thirty landmark, thirty route, and twenty-eight survey participants. They were then submitted to directional judgment tasks to verify whether the alignment effect was present and to observe the kind of responses. The results revealed that survey participants did not show an alignment effect, and that the kind of errors could depend on the directional judgment task participants had to do, and not only on the cognitive style
Personality, decision-making styles and investments
No full textThree hundred and sixty-two participants completed the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire and the General Decision-Making Styles Inventory, together with a survey considering investment perceptions and decisions. The results showed that anxious people tended to save money and avoid investments, perceiving high risks and low control and returns, whereas individuals with high Extroversion, Independence and Self-Control were more likely to make investments. Finally, rational and avoidant decision-making styles mediated, respectively, the influence of Self-Control and Anxiety on the decision to invest. These findings extend the knowledge of the relationship between individual differences in personality and decisional styles and investment perceptions and decisions
Object localisation and frames of reference
No full textIn this paper, we explore which spatial frames of reference, egocentric or allocentric, are used to locate
objects either in relation to ourselves (i.e. subject to-object localisation) or to other objects (i.e. object to-
object localisation). In particular, we wanted to know whether the same or different frames of reference are
used in these two different kinds of localisation after learning the environment in an egocentric way. Egocentric
frames of reference are determined by the position of the person in relation to the spatial layout, whereas allocentric frames of reference are centred on the environment or on objects, independent of a person’s
position. We hypothesised that subject-to-object localization is based on egocentric spatial representations,
whereas object-to-object localisation is based on allocentric spatial representations. Participants were asked
to study eight common objects, placed in a circle. Next, half of the participants had to point to an object in
relation to their imagined position (egocentric condition) and the other half to an object in relation to another
object (allocentric condition). The overall results show no difference between subject-to-object and object-to object localisation. In both cases, access to positions corresponding to the front/back body axis was facilitated,
in terms of both latency and error. Moreover, participants were able to retrieve objects’ positions better
from the perspective from which they had learned the spatial array than from new perspectives. These results
support the conclusion that egocentric coordinates, which are selected on the basis of our body-centred
experience of the environment, define spatial representations underlying both subject-to-object and object-to object localisation
Meta-imagery: conceptualization of mental imagery and its relationship with cognitive behavior
No full textdeas people have about visual imagery functioning have been studied especially within the hypothesis that tacit knowledge affects cognitive behaviour and makes it similar to expectations based on the assumption of an analogy between perception and imagery. The contrasting results of these studies seem partially due to differences in the adopted methodology. The present research considers imagery knowledge to be an ill-defined unstable domain which can lead to different way of understanding what imagery is, depending on the Questionnaire used. We submitted a version of a metacognitive Questionnaire devised by Denis and Carfantan (1985) to groups of young adults. Their ideas seemed to reflect the typical results of imagery experiments more closely than in the original research. In particular, the question presented together with an example produced different responses as compared with the responses of a group asked the same question without an example (Exp.1). The scanning time question, which appeared critical in both experiments, was further considered in two other experiments. These showed that people could change their mind across time, depending on question form, that their opinions before the experimental task predicted the actual behaviour shown during the test (Exp.2) and that different pre-experiment information is able to variously change the pattern of data (Exp.3).
Results can be interpreted not only in the light of the tacit assumption criticism, but also by considering imagery a strategic controlled process which, in this case, can be affected by metacognitive knowledge
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