TESTING THE ACTIVATION OF SEMANTIC FRAMES IN A LEXICAL DECISION TASK AND A CATEGORIZATION TASK

Situated in the wider framework of frame semantics, the paper employs an experimental approach involving a reaction time study to test the activation of semantic frames via semantic priming. Experiment 1 deals with the frame of journey and employs a lexical decision task in a reaction time paradigm, while Experiment 2 deals with the frame of conflict and uses a categorization task, also in a reaction time paradigm. Both experiments were designed in Open Sesame. Target stimuli were in Serbian, selected through a norming procedure involving prototypicality ratings on Likert scales. Additionally, identical filler items were included in both experiments. Priming was performed using lexical materials modified to facilitate the activation of the respective frames. The obtained results showed that there was no facilitation in the experimental group in Experiment 1 compared to the control group; however, in Experiment 2, we were able to identify facilitation in the experimental group in the main task, licensed by the initial priming. These results suggest that the lexical decision task has a reduced cognitive load compared to the categorization task, thereby overriding the priming condition. In effect, categorization task appears to be a more suitable procedure for testing semantic frame activation.

Testing the similarity-projection hypothesis using the reaction time paradigm: Anchoring and adjustment in social judgments

It has long been argued that people use their own mental states to infer those of others who they perceive as similar to themselves. Tamir and Mitchell (2013) examined this hypothesis through the reaction time paradigm and demonstrated a positive relationship between the reaction time of other’s mental state judgments and the distance of judgments from the participants’ mental states as an evidence of using projection. However, their methodology was limited, and the robustness of the paradigm was not well examined. We conducted a series of studies employing different types of tasks and target persons based on Tamir and Mitchell’s (2013) study. The results of Studies 1 and 2 were consistent with the hypothesis, that is, a long reaction time in judging the preferences of a target predicted inconsistency between the judgments for the target and participants’ own selves only when the former was perceived to be similar to the latter. Although, when this relationship was observed in Study 3, the target person was perceived not only as similar but also as dissimilar. In this paper, we discuss that projection may more likely be used when information about targets is scarce, irrespective of the perceived similarity to the target person.

The Moral Landscape of War RR JESP Watkins & Brandt 2018

Mental representations of possibility in everyday contexts incorporate descriptive and prescriptive norms. People intuitively think that Mr X cannot perform an immoral action; even when upon deliberation they realise that the immoral action is in fact possible (Phillips & Cushman, 2017). We replicate this “moral-possibility constraint”, providing further support for the notion that default representations of possibility are - at first pass - limited to moral alternatives. We also test how context affects representations of possibility by asking whether the same findings hold in a war context. This context has different prescriptive norms (e.g., it is permissible to kill combatants, but not non-combatants), and we use Phillips and Cushman’s (2017) reaction-time paradigm to test whether these prescriptive norms shape people’s representations of what is possible in war. We find that the moral-possibility constraint is sensitive to variation in degree of immorality (e.g., killing a person vs. torturing a child); however the war context did not influence the constraint in the way we expected. The results further advance our understanding of the relationship between morality and domain-general cognition, and provide insight into the moral landscape of war.