RETURNING now to the United States for a consideration of research developments there during the late fifties and early sixties. In reviewing the major publications of the time, one can see that the whole approach to the question of accident proneness was still one of openminded inquiry. Despite a certain amount of despondency over the lack of statistical evidence to support the concept (especi...

Must an agent use attention in order to guide its purposive bodily movements? Or, to put it more simply, is attention necessary for action? Wayne Wu presents an argument for the claim that attention is necessary for action in Wu 2008, 2011 and 2014. The argument is this: since action requires a solution to the Many–Many Problem, and since only attention can solve the Many–Many Problem, attentio...

The discovery of a creative solution occasionally corresponds to the sudden attainment of a mental insight. Our purpose is to formally describe this phenomenon and the cognitive mechanisms that lead to it. The approach is based on the replicability of just such an insight which underlies the solution to a well known puzzle: the nine-dot puzzle. The insight coincides with the realization that th...

2 Taxonomy is always a contentious issue because the world does not come to us in neat little packages (S. Personality has been conceptualized from a variety of theoretical perspectives, and at various levels of Each of these levels has made unique contributions to our understanding of individual differences in behavior and experience. However, the number of personality traits, and scales desig...

Multiple attributes of a visual array are often more efficiently processed when they are attributes of a single object than when they are attributes of different objects—a pattern reflecting the limitations of object attention. This study used psychophysical methods to evaluate the object attention limitations in the report of attributes (orientation and phase) computed early in visual analysis...

An extensive literature has documented the cognitive benefits that accrue from a categorical conception of others. While informative, this work has overlooked the fact that, prior to the application of categorical thinking as an economizing cognitive tool, perceivers must first extract category-triggering information from available facial cues. What this suggests is that an impetus to construe ...

Cognitive control is pervasive in human behavior. No matter what task one is performing, control of the sequence of one’s actions seems indispensable to accomplish the task. Therefore, control is one of the key issues in understanding human behavior. Moreover, knowledge about how control is exerted in humans may potentially help in designing improved artificial systems, since the control perfor...

For the past two decades the person-situation debate has dominated personality psychology and had important repercussions in clinical, social, and organizational psychology. This controversy strikes to the heart of each of these disciplines because it puts on trial the central assumption that internal dispositions have an important influence on behavior. According to emerging views of scientifi...

Social influence in groups was a major focus of the emerging field of social psychology at the turn of the 20th century. This focus was evident in early interest in such phenomena as sympathy, imitation, suggestion, the crowd, and the group mind. It also was reflected in the first experimental problem in social psychology: “What change in an individual’s normal solitary performance occurs when ...