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PUTONGHUA TEST: FEASIBILITY OF TAPE-RECORDED MARKING, RELIABILITY AND ECONOMIC EFFICIENCY Chang Lei Hau XitTai Ho Wai-Xit Wen Jian-Bing (De Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong) Wang Yuguang (Yunnan Normal University, Kunming 650092) 2001, 33 (02):  97-103.  Abstract ( 1092 )   This article contains two generaizability studies of the State Putonghua test In the first study, we examined the consistency between the live and tape, recorded assessment of Putonghua. Twenty five examinees participated in the first study. There were eight raters divided into four panels of two each. Five examinees were assigned into one of the four panels. The live assessment in the four panels took Place simultaneously. During the live assessment examinees were tape recorded. Each examinee's tape was later assessed by all eight raters. Standard assessment instrument (prepared by the State Language Commission) was used. For the purpose of this study, all examinees received the same items. The items were rated on a three-point scale where 0 = no credit 1 = partial credit and 2 = full credit. The objects of measurement were examinees (e) who were nested in panels (P). The raters (r) who were also nested in panels were crossed with examinees. Items (i) and mode (m) of assessment (i.e., recorded versus live assessment) were crossed with the rest of the conditions. The G study design was (exr):pxixm. Except for the mode facet which was considered fixed, all other facets and the objects of measurement were assumed random. This special G study focused on determining the consistency between the live and recorded assessment. The results indicated a relatively high degree of consistency. The signal-to-noise ratio reached 0.80, meaning that 80% of the absolute domain status differences in Putonghua were exchangeable between these two modes of assessment. The purpose of the second study was to determine an efficient tape recording assessment procedure to be adopted in the future. The objective was to employ an efficient number of raters and items in measuring Putonghua which will maximize reliablity and minimize costs. The second study adopted a fully crossed design so that unique variance could be estimated. Tapes of 25 examinees were each rated by the same six raters on 50 single-word items. The G study design was exrxi. Among the seven variance components, the largest was associared with the item facet, indicating the importance of samping more items. Using two raters and 100 items will achieve a satisfastory reliability of 0.90 and 0.84 for norm and domain referenced use of the test. Related Articles | Metrics

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FALSE RECOGNITION: AWARENESS, ATTENTION AND STIMULUS QUALITY Geng Haiyan Thu Ying Li Yunfeng (Department of Psychology. Peking University, Beijing 100871) 2001, 33 (02):  104-110.  Abstract ( 1439 )   The goal of this paper was to assess whether there were systematic trade-offs between attention and stimulus quality in determining awareness. The approach was based on the qualitative differences in performance across perception with and without awareness, which had been shown to occur when stimulus quality was varied or the level of attention was varied. Qualitative differences in performance were established across perception with and without awareness, based on a phenomenon: false recognition, which is defined as an "old" response to a new item on an old! new recognition test. This means, the subjects said "old" to new test characters more often on match (context characters were the same as test characters) than nonmatch trials (context characters were different from test characters) when context characters perceived unconsciously, whereas they said "old' to new test characters less often on match than nonmatch trials when context characters perceived consciously. The results of the two experiments showed that there were systematic trade-offs between attention and stimulus quality in determining whether a stimulus was perceived with or without awareness. In Experiment 1, a stimulus that was perceived without awareness when presented with poor quality (short duration), could be perceived with awareness either by increasing stimulus quality (long duration) or by increasing the level of attention; and correspondently, in Experiment 2, a stimulus that was perceived without awareness under a condition of divided-attention, could be perceived with awareness either by focusing attention on it or by increasing stimulus quality. It seemed that attention and stimulus quality can supplement each other in determining whether a stimulus is perceived with or without awareness. Discussion focused on the interrelations between awareness, attention and stimulus quality. Related Articles | Metrics

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COMPARISON OF ASSOCIATIVE PRIMING AND PERCEPTUAL PRIMING EFFECTS Yang Jiongjiong Weng Xuchu Guan Linchu Kuang Peizi ( Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijng 100101) ( Department of Psychology, Peking University, Beijing 100871) 2001, 33 (02):  111-116.  Abstract ( 1077 )   Recent studies have shown that human memory consists of several memory systems. One of them is perceptual representation system (PRS). It supports perceptual priming effect, which is unaffected by the level of processing. But when the modality or the characteristics of the stimuli (e. g., form, color) changes, the priming effect becomes lower. However, some unsolved issues remain on priming for new associations or associative priming. For example, whether PRS alone supports associative priming; whether level of processing affects associative priming; and whether there is some relations between conscious retrieval and associative priming. In order to understand the nature of priming for new associations, this study compared associative priming and perceptual priming, by exploring the effects of level of processing on forming memory for new associations with speeded naming tasks. In experiment 1, after studying a series of colored words under deep or shallow condition, subjects were asked to perform color naming task and recognition task. The procedure of experiment 2 was the same except that the color naming task was replaced by word naming task. Awareness Questionnaire was asked to fill in to avoid the conscious retrieval subjects. Experiment 1 showed that under both encoding conditions subjects could form priming for new associations. They named the old color words quicker than the recombined color words. But the scores of recognition were lower under shallow condition than that under deep condition, with the dissociation of associative priming and recognition task. Experiment 2 had similar results with the dissociation of perceptual priming and recognition task. Both associative priming and perceptual priming were unaffected by level of processing in this study. However, there was some difference in conscious retrieval between word naming and color naming tasks. More subjects noticed the relation between the study and the test in color naming task than in word naming task. The results suggested that perceptual representation system alone could not support associative priming. Priming for new associations may need the interaction between PRS and other memory systems. Related Articles | Metrics

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LEXICAL ACCESS TO CHINESE COORDINATIVE WORDS Wang Wenbin (International College of Ningbo University, Ningbo 315211) 2001, 33 (02):  117-122.  Abstract ( 1227 )   Many studies suggest that affixed words, or at least suffixed words, are stored in their base form in the lexicon (Kintsch, 1972; Gibson & Guinet, 1971). Taft & Foster (1975) found that in a lexical judgement task, prefixed words were analyzed into their constituent morphemes before lexical access took place. Taft & Foster (1976) did their research a step furthur by running five experiments on lexical storage and retrieval of polymorphemic and polysyllabic words. The conclusions they reached were as follows: (1) Polysyllabic polymorphemic words and polysyllabic monomorphemic words were accessed in the same way; (2) The search target in a compound was the first constituent and the second one was irrelevant In order to test these conclusions cross-linguistically, Zhang & Peng (1992) conducted an experiment on Chinese compound words. Their results suggested that representations of Chinese compound words were stored in morphologically decomposed form. However, although the lexical decision performance for coordinative words was affected by the morphological decomposition, the first and the second elements were similar in importance. There are three different subtypes of coordinative words in the Chinese language. Our experiment investigated these three subtypes of coordinative words to see in lexical access if the first constituent is always decisive as proposed by Taft & Foster (1976) and whether the two constituents are equal in importance as advanced by Zhang & Peng (1992). The hypothesis in this experiment was that the process of word recognition of these coordinative words depended upon the idiosyncratic property of word compositionality. 30 native Chinese speakers participated in the experiment The test was composed of 64 Chinese coordinative words, 64 compound fillers and 100 compound nonwords. Of the 64 coordinative words, there were 24 words belonging to Subtype 1, such as "dao-lu" (road-road, meaning ‘road') and "sheng-yin" (sound-sound, meaning ‘sound'); 24 belonging to Subtype 2, such as "gu-rou" (bone-flesh, meaning ‘kindred') and "ling-xiu" (collar-sleeve, meaning 'leader'); 16 belonging to Subtype 3, such as "guo-jia" (country-family, meaning ‘country') and "shi-guang" (time-light, meaning ‘time'). By using Psyscope 1.1 run on Power Macintosh, the experiment revealed that the first constituent was not always decisive in the lexical decision. Besides, the two constituents in coordinative words were not always equally important in lexical recognition. It concluded that although morphological decomposition did take place in lexical judgement of Chinese coordinative words, semantic transparencies played a crucial role in lexical access. Moreover, it found that the lexical access to Chinese coordinative words called for a Confirmation Principle in mental lexicon. Related Articles | Metrics

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STIJDYING PERCEPTUAL BOUNDARY EFFECTS WITH CONNECTIONIST MODEL Yu Jiayuan (Department of Psychology,Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing 210097) 2001, 33 (02):  123-126.  Abstract ( 993 )   The perceptual boundary effects were investigated with connectionist model simulation. The relationship of perceptual boundary effects and knowledge structure was studied. The perceptual boundary effects of continuous XOR were studied with cascade correlation model of connectionism. 25 patterns which were distributed uniformly at the XOR plane were to be learned at the training stage. Three groups of other patterns were used at the test stage. There were 8 patterns in each group. These patterns had different distances to the boundaries. The test errors were recorded and compared for the different groups of patterns. For investigating the different knowledge structure, the contribution of each hidden node was recorded and studied by principal component analysis. The perceptual boundary effects of neural networks which represented different knowledge structure were compared. The results showed that the connectionist model could simulate the perceptual boundary effects, there was no significant difference between neural networks which had different knowledge structures for continuous XOR Related Articles | Metrics

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RESEARCH ON THE EFFECTS OF STRUCTURE LIMITATION AND INFORMATION INTERFERENCE ON DUAL-TASK PERFORMANCE Huang Lin Ge Liezhong (Department of Psychology, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310028) 2001, 33 (02):  127-131.  Abstract ( 1000 )   Many experiments had been made for interpreting the cause of dual-task performance decrease, but findings were beginning to provide different answers. Three of the most influential classes of explanations were structure limitation (bottlenecks), resourse competition and outcome conflict (information interference). Based on previous experiments, this research attempted to combine structure limitation with outcome conflict and explore new explanations for dual-task performance decrease. 16 subjects (8 females and 8 males, aged 20- 23 years) were seated in front of a computer screen to complete two searching tasks with two hands simultaneously. Both stimuli were separately displayed on the left and right side of the screen one by one. Subjects were asked to search target words from a series of stimuli, which were made up of figure words, orientation words and strokes of Chinese character words. The target words of one task were figure words, another were orientation words. The SOA(stimulus onset asynchrony) between two tasks were 0 ins, 300 ms and 500 ins. All subjects took part in three SOA condition tasks. The results of the data analysis supported the following conclusions: (1) The SOA between two tasks is a major factor that affected dual-task performance. The longer the SOA, the better the dual-task performance. When SOA was 500 ins, the performance of dual-task was the best. This result confirmed structure theory. (2) The interference between information-processing of the two tasks is another factor that affected dual-task performance. The higher the interference, the worse the dual-task performance. In particularly, when a word was presented for one task that required a "no" response, but was a target for another task, the latency of response time increased. Thus the stimuli for both tasks were not processed independently. This result supported outcome conflict proposition. (3) Although the SOA between two tasks had been prolonged, it couldn't avoid the interference between two tasks. The SOA between two tasks is independent of the effect of information interference. Based on this experiment and previous experiments, a three-factor hypothesis was proposed. Structure limitation, information interference and resourse competition all influenced dual-task performance. Related Articles | Metrics

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COMPARISON BETWEEN CUE-S COMPATIBILITY AND CUE-R COMPATIBILITY Liu Yanfang Zhang Kan (Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101) 2001, 33 (02):  132-136.  Abstract ( 1073 )   In this study, the differences between Cue-Stimulus Compatibility (CSC) and Cue-Response Compatibility (CRC) were investigated within a precueing paradigm when the experimental task was inconsistent color naming. 18 college students participated in the experiment voluntarily and were paid after the experiment The results showed that the CSC was stronger than CRC when they conflicted. So only the CSC effects were found in the experiment. Results were the same as found in previous studies, the CSC was influenced by the time duration between cue and stimulus and the probability of the cues. The serial researches on cue compatibility, including the CSC, the CRC and the comparison between them supplied evidences to prove the efficiency of DOM, in which the compatibility is a basic feature of information processing Related Articles | Metrics

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EXPERIMENTAL STUDY ON COMPARING THE DEVELOPMENT OF JUDGEMENT OF‘RETROSPECTIVE MONITORY' AND‘PROSPECTIVE MONITORY' Liu Xiping (Tianjin Normal University College of Educational Science, Tianjin 300073) 2001, 33 (02):  137-141.  Abstract ( 1096 )   The experimental study aimed at comparing the development of judgement of ‘retrospective monitory' and ‘prospective monitory' 3 × 3 × 2 (age, material, sex) three factors mixed experimental design was adopted. In terms of the performance of learning (good, medium, not good) were selected at random, the subjects were from second grade elementary school, junior high school and college. There were 18 subjects in every grade (9 males and 9 females). There were 3 groups (6 sheets) of word tables being diversed word couples, verb-noun word couples, and artifical built word couples. There were 3 sheets containing 15 couples each, as formal word couples, and other 3 sheets containing 5 couples each for exercise. The materials were all selected from Chinese books which the subjects of elementary school had studied. Using the memory equipment to assume the materials, the subjects reported the number of memory before and after the materials had been assumed, then reported the word couples which had been memorized, and assessed the degree of confidence. The experiment adopted alternative method to appoint the subjects. The development of judgement of ‘retrospective monitory' (assessing the degree of confidence) and ‘prospective monitory' (the number before and after the materiales had been assumed) was compared. The results; (1) The number of judgement in learning easiness, elementary school was 2.1389, junior high school was 0.6549, junior college was 0.3346; the number of recall readiness assessment, elementary school was 1.6225, junior high school was 0.4096, junior college was 0.2007; the number of retrospective monitory, elementary school was 0.1827, junior high school was 0.0734, junior college was 0.1163. (2) The level of difference conspicuous of 3 materiales, easiness of learning judgement was < 0.01, recall readiness assessment was > 0.05, retrospective monitory was > 0.05. (3) The level of difference conspicuous of sex was >0.05. (4) The correlation between achievement of memory and memory monitory, easiness of learning judgement was 0.7691, recall readiness assessment was 0.6199, retrospective monitory was 0.1306. The conclusion: (1) The rates of development of 3 monitories were different. The development of retrospective monitory was first. The second was recall readiness assessment. The development of easiness of learning judgement was third. (2) The effect of material was different in the development of the 3 monitories. (3) Sex difference was not obvious. (4) There was higher positive correlation between the level of prospective monitory and the performance of memory and lower correlation between the level of retrospective monitory and the performance of memory. Related Articles | Metrics

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GLOBAL PRECEDENCE OF HIERARCHICAL FIGURE PERCEPTION IN CHILDREN Yan Xiaofei Su Yanjie (Department of Psychology, Peking University, Beijing 100871) 2001, 33 (02):  142-147.  Abstract ( 1072 )   In the present study global precedence was investigated in children. Navon' s hierarchical pattern stimuli and intervene paradigm were used to test 4～6-year-old children. The relationship between global and local feature in the hierarchical pattern included consistent, irrelevant and conflict. For every subject, there were 3 sessions including free attention, attention to global feature and attention to local feature. The free attention experiment was to find out if the ability children form their strategies spontaneously reacted according to the global feature or local feature developed by age. The result showed that most of the subjects formed the strategy of reacting according to the global feature, and the rate increased as age increased. In different ages, children' s correct reactions in global and local attention conditions were compared. Interference effect between global and local processing showed the tendency cf interaction to independence to global precedence. The results suggested that children' s selective attention to global feature might develop as they grew older and had more visual experiences. Related Articles | Metrics

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UNDERSTANDING CREATIVITY AND CREATIVE PEOPLE IN CHINESE SOCIETY: A COMPARATIVE STUDY AMONG UNIVERSITY STUDENTS IN BEIJING, GUANGZHOU, HONG KONG AND TAIPEI Yue Xiaodong (Department of Applied Social Studies, City University of Hong Kong) 2001, 33 (02):  148-154.  Abstract ( 1345 )   This study was intended to examine how much Chinese people in Beijing, Guangzhou, Taipei and HK might share or differ on their view creativity or creative figures. Specifically, it examined the implicit conception of creativity and creative people among a sample of 451 undergraduates in Beijing, Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Taipei. A Likert style questionnaire consisting of 60 adjectives was administered to the undergraduates and in addition, each respondent was required to nominate up to three most creative historical and modem figures in China as well. The results showed that (a) the core characteristics of creativity identical in all the samples were: originality, innovativeness, thinking and observational skills, flexibility, willingness to tty, self confidence, and "imagination"; (b) the Taipei sample, unlike the other three samples, do not associates wisdom, assertiveness, and individualism with creativity; (c) in all Chinese populations the three factors labeled innovative, dynamic, and intellectual were distinguishable in the concept of creativity; (d) a number of specifically Chinese personality traits were identified as not beneficial for creativity; (e) artistic and humorous were consistently missing in the Chinese perception of creativity. In short, the respondents in the four cities shared much more than they differed in their implicit conception of creativity. Additionally, politicians were unanimously nominated by all four samples as being the most creative people in the past and at present. Scientists and inventors ranked second in position. Taken together, they occupy over 90 percent of the total number of nominations. Thus, it may be concluded that the Chinese young people are heavily inclined to associate creativity with political and scientific accomplishments. The paper ends with a discussion on the practical implications of the present findings on educational reforms in China as well as some methodological concerns for further studies on the issue. Related Articles | Metrics

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CHARACTERISTICS AND FACTOR ANALYSIS OF TEST-DURATION STRESS FOR COLLEGE STUDENTS Zhang Zhijun Huo Yan (School of Psychology and Behavior Science, Xixi Campus, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310028) 2001, 33 (02):  155-159.  Abstract ( 1354 )   Test-Duration Stress (TDS) is a popular phenomenon for college students during term exams and often make some detrimental impacts on performances and health of college students. Therefore, it is very important to examine the characteristics of Test-Duration Stress and explore the possible factors it resulted from. Two questionnaires, the Scale for Characteristics of Test-Duration Stress (SCTDS) and Scale for Factors of Test-Duration Stress (SFTDS), were specially designed and employed in the present study. Two hundred and sixty-one college students, 152 males and 109 females, were selected as subjects, who were 18 to 26 years of age including all four grade students. From the results of SCTDS evaluation, it was surprisedly found that totally one hundred and twenty-five subjects (high as 47.89 percent) showed some significant symptoms of Test-Duration Stress. The sleeping symptom was especially seen among them, and there were very significant differences in sleepless scores between the TDS group (4.932 ± 2.374) and the normal group (3.563 ± 2.431). There were also some great differences in other symptoms such as digestion, cognitive capacity, headache and immunity, which were all significant statistically. But all the symptoms were rarely affected by such variables as sex, specialty, grade, roles and personality except sex difference in headache symptom. Moreover, it was found that the Test-Duration Stress had some markedly time features. Fifty-two percent of TDS subjects had indicated obvious TDS symptoms early in the beginning of the test duration. This value had reached up to 78.4 percent in the middle of the test duration. Subjects emerged TDS symptoms at the end of the test duration occupied only 16.8 percent. Meanwhile, TDS symptoms had disappeared for 95.2 percent of TDS subjects soon after all exams ended, and only 4.8 percent of TDS subjects maintained their TDS symptoms more than one day after all the tests. Based on the factor analysis of SFTDS evaluation results, it was believed that the major factors resulted in the Test-Duration Stress were very complex, and could be attributed to three aspects. Vu-st was the college student' s cognition of the purpose of the test, which referred to fame, scholarship, job chance, expectations from family and teachers, and so on. Second was the college student' s cognition of content of the test, which involved with the use and difficulty of test contents. Third was life and learning environment. It was concluded that the Test-Duration Stress was common to college students, that it displayed significant sleepless symptoms and regular time features, and that it could be evoked by multiple causes. Related Articles | Metrics

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A STUDY ON THE DEVELOPMENT CHARACTERISTICS OF ACHIEVEMENT MOTIVATION IN ADOLESCENTS Wo Jianzhong Huang Huazhen Lin Chongde (Development Psychology Institute, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875) 2001, 33 (02):  160-169.  Abstract ( 1469 )   This research was designed to aim at exploring the development characteristics of hierarchical achievement motivations and the structure models using 4 measurements of academic achievement attribution, autonomic motivation, fancy self-efficacy and learning goals among 652 student subjects from two high schools, the results were as follows: 1 There was stable development of internal and controllable efforts and external uncontrollable task difficulties with the increase of school grades; students attribute their academic achievements to their abilities increase, but decreases at Grade 3, then it increases again at Grade 4,5 & 6; about luck-attribution, there are two highpoints at Grade 2 & 4, the rest goes according to the same direction; on the whole, at the time of high school, the student' s academic achievement attributions are in the following order: internal and controllable efforts, internal uncontrollable abilities, external uncontrollable task difficulties and luck. 2 Autonomic motivation factors keep stable basically in the development direction at the whole high school period; but there are different development levels at different dimensionalities, at the choice of task difficulties, the students in Grade 3 & 6 intend to choose easy tasks, and the rest for the opposite; about their ambitions, the level is unstable: in Grade 2 & 6 it is at the highest point, in Grade 3, near to the point and Grade 5, is at the lowest point; as to emotion, Grade 1, 3 & 6 are at the highest level, but Grade 2 & 5, at the lowest level; gender main domino effects are not salient at the 4 dimensionalities; The affected functions of grade and gender are only lying in emotion. 3 It is basically stable that the development of efficacy goes; but with the increase of school grades, it gradually decreases from Grade 1 to 4, and from Grade 4, it increases again; the level of creative efficacy in 6 years is not high, from the change of grade, it decreases from grade I to 3, but increases at Grade 4, it decreases again to Grade 6; the boys are superior to the girls at the sections of learning & creative efficacies. 4 Master goals keep stable basically in the development direction during the whole high school period; but there are different development levels at different dimensionalities: in intellectual view, the students of Grade 1, 4 & 6 are inclined to take intelligence for the development through practice, but the others think differently; in the valuation view, Grade 1 & 4, intend to admire learning efforts, but Grade 2, enjoy their abilities; on success, Grade 4 is preponderated over others; on defeat, Grade 2 & 5, more take it for denying ability and effort; performance goals change with grade, the valuation view increases from Grade 1 & 2, but decreases from Grade 2 to 4, again going upward from Grade 4 to 6; success view is high at Grade 3; gender effect is not salient. Related Articles | Metrics

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EFFECTS OF WORKED EXAMPLES AND EXERCISE TIME ON PROBLEM-SOLVING TRANSFER Zhang Chunli (Institute for Education Research, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875) 2001, 33 (02):  170-175.  Abstract ( 1175 )   Mathematical problem solving as a complex cognitive function requires the interplay of a number of effect factors. That involves: first, mathematical problem solving is a cognitive function, which means, from the point of view of the information-processing system, it can' t be studied by simple S-R theory. On the contrary, it is the product of an information-processing system, which can be represented as R = f (S × M), where M represents mental representation. Second, the information-processing of mathematical problem solving is effected by a number of factors. Third, procedure knowledge as well as declarative knowledge determines what interpretation will be given of the context of the problem. Finally, Each effect factor such as worked examples and Exercise time interactively develops the ability of problem solving. However, phychologists seldom understand the respective contribution of each effect factor and their interaction, So we carried Out an experiment in which we used mathematical problem to investigate the effects of worked examples and exercise time on skill learning and transfer. The subjects were 96 seventh grade students from a junior middle school. There were eight groups of 12 subjects each. They were part of a complete factorial experimental design based on the three independent variables of ability (high vs. low), practice( short vs. long exercise time), and teaching method (worked examples vs. conventional problem solving during acquisition). The experiment concludes four phases: acquisition phase, similar test phase, transfer test and post-test phase. The results indicated that errors on each phase problems were almost significantly lower for each of the worked-example groups over the equivalent conventional-problem groups; But the differences between the long exercise time groups and the short exercise time groups varied according to the ability of the subjects, the teaching method and the type of errors. Based on the results, we can conclude that subjects trained with worked examples were better able to solve both similar and transfer problems than those subjects trained without worked examples. Exercise time did not ensure to facilitate the skill acquisition and transfer. There were at least three factors effecting its efficiency: guide or feedback; the nature of the task; the IQ and cognitive ability of the subjects. Related Articles | Metrics

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ALLAIS PARADOX: A BEHAVIORAL EXPLANATION Li Shu (Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798) 2001, 33 (02):  176-181.  Abstract ( 1530 )   Background-Objective: Allais paradox (Allais, 1953) demonstrated behavior in contradiction to the independence axiom of expected utility theory and was then considered as a lever that moved EU. To date numerous revamped theories have been proposed in an attempt to resolve Allais' paradox without discarding the expectation rule, and most of them were based on the assumption that the utilities of outcomes were no longer multiplied by linear probabilities, but by nonlinear decision weights which did not necessarily conform to the rules of mathematical probability. The risky choice behavior was, however, simply seen by the equate-to- differentiate model as a choice between the best possible outcomes or a choice between the worst possible outcomes. The paradox arose because the final choice was not consistently based on a single fixed dimension (either the best possible or the worst possible outcome dimension) in each pair of choices. Method: In searching for evidence of whether decision-makers were indeed guided by the equate-to- differentiate rule in making their choices when faced with the Allais' problems, a so-called "judging" task was designed in the present study to help test the equate-to-differentiate account in further detail. Operationally, the outcomes of prospects on both the best and the worst possible outcome dimensions were paired in the present task. Subjects were then asked to choose the pair with outcomes which were, for them, the most different. If the equate-to-differentiate one-dimensional difference account was correct, then the knowledge of the chosen pair would permit explanation or prediction of option preference. The Allais' two pairs of choice problems, coupled with the judging task, were presented in questionnaire form to business students from the Nanyang Business School of Nanyang Technological University. Results: It was shown in the present experiment that the effect (phi squared) that the judging data were able to account for the variance in choice in relation to the Allais paradox was significant. Conclusion: The results therefore raised doubts about whether people behaved as if they were trying to maximize "something" and added to the evidence that whether the final selection was consistently based on a single fixed dimension was the cause which was most likely to be responsible for a violation of Savage' s sure-thing principle. Though expected utility theory was known to be wrong through the Allais paradox, to rescue it by proposing nonlinear decision weights was very likely to do nothing but hide an old mistake under a new one. Related Articles | Metrics

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SPECIAL NEURAL SUBSTRATE OF FACE PROCESSING Zhang Weiwei Chen Yucui Shen Zheng (Laboratory on Cognitive Neuroscience of Psychology Department and National laboratory on Machine Perception, Peking University, Beijing, 100871) 2001, 33 (02):  182-188.  Abstract ( 1436 )   Being a special kind of visual stimulus, face is the most distinguishable index to discern an identity. Face is used to differentiate and recognize different individuals. Compared with object recognition, face stimuli and its processing is specified on the behavioral, ecological and cognitive levels. The evidences from selective damage in face recognition, the special phylogeny and individual development and the sensitivity to the orientation show that these two kinds of stimuli differ remarkably. Brain module is one of the central concerns of visual neuroscience and even the whole cognitive neuroscience. Interdisciplinary studies on both sides are reviewed in this article, and growing evidences demonstrate that specificity exists in face processing. Specialized module of face processing is supposed to be best support of modularity hypothesis of the cognitive architecture. However there are a lot of common aspects between face perception and object recognition, which argues against the specificity on behavioral and cellular levels. The anatomical overlap between face and object recognition lies in fusiform gyms and Inferior temporal cortex. Module is an important concept in the field of cognitive neuroscience. Modularity hypothesis of visual processing cannot fully explain the complex mechanisms underlying face perception. However, it is defined by superimposed mosaics rather than universal modular subunits. Functional brain imaging cannot elucidate the specific mechanism of face processing. The mosaic cytoarchitecture in visual cortex exists on the low level of the visual processing, it is also the basic mechanism underlying the specific face perception even the whole visual perception. Related Articles | Metrics