Narrative Construction, Social Perceptions, and the Situation Model.

This study examined whether the formation of a situation model can be encouraged by a situation‐focused instruction in primary school children. To achieve this, the standard reading‐for‐comprehension instruction was adapted so that it would emphasise the importance of imagination in narrative text comprehension. The results showed that the situational instruction enhanced the situation model construction abilities in good comprehenders in such a way that it improved not only their memory for the situation model but also the ease with which they filled in the gaps in time and space that appeared in the narratives. In poor comprehenders, the situational instruction led to a redistribution of attentional resources allocated to textbase‐ and situation‐level processing. It was suggested that this caused them to go beyond encoding the explicit text and instead construct a situation model from it, and that they did so without enriching the model with general‐knowledge inferences as much as good comprehenders.

abstractPrevious research suggests that situation model construction may be influenced by a reader’s ability to embody the first-person perspective of the protagonist, including character emotions, during online comprehension. This study examined the effect of narrative point-of-view and readers’ own prior personal experience on reading engagement and comprehension. Participants read eighty short story passages on a computer screen, each describing either a familiar or an unfamiliar event. Stories were written in the first or third person, and either featured or did not feature a shift in protagonist emotions in the last sentence of the text. The results indicated that the use of third-person narrative point-of-view had an overall effect on reading engagement and enhanced readers’ ability to monitor changing character emotions. First-person narrative point-of-view, however, promoted protagonist empathy when participants read about unfamiliar events. The results also provide support for the conclusion that readers were more engaged with the story and constructed more effective situation models when they had prior personal experience of story events.

These experiments examined the hypothesis that situation model construction involves perceptual processing--specifically, processing that involves visuospatial information. In this research, a dual-task paradigm was used to demonstrate that tasks that engage visuospatial processes interfere more with the generation of a situation model than tasks that are less likely to involve these processes or tasks that are verbal in nature. Using Albrecht and O'Brien's (1993) contradiction effect as evidence of situation model construction, Experiment 1 demonstrated that participants reading short texts while simultaneously holding high-imagery sentences in memory failed to show a significant contradiction effect in comparison with readers holding low-imagery sentences in memory. In Experiment 2, participants reading texts while retaining a difficult visuospatial memory load showed disrupted comprehension in comparison with readers retaining a verbal memory load.

How Teachers’ Questions Affect Learners’ Construction of Situation Models

Two experiments examined the interplay of consensus information and situational information in shaping trait inferences. Participants read scenarios that described a target person's behavior (e.g., Matt volunteered to clean up after a park tour) and made trait inferences (e.g., perceived helpfulness) about the target and relevant population (e.g., other members of the park tour). We orthogonally manipulated the level of consensus for the target's behavior (high vs. low) and whether or not participants were given specific information that could comprise a viable situational explanation for the behavior (e.g., volunteers were offered an attractive gift certificate). The key prediction was that the two factors would interact in determining trait inferences about the target. As expected, when the specific situational information was mentioned in the scenario, participants used consensus information to modulate trait inferences about the target; when the specific situational information was not mentioned, part...

Is facial width-to-height ratio reliably associated with social inferences?

Using event-related potentials (ERPs), this study examines how trait information inferred from behaviors is associated with person names. In linguistic discourses, person names were associated with descriptions of either positive or negative behaviors. In a subsequent explicit evaluation task, the previously described person names were presented in isolation, and the participants were asked to judge the emotional valence of these names. We found that the names associated with positive descriptions elicited a larger positivity in the ERP than the names associated with negative descriptions. The results indicate that the emotional valence of person names attached to person perception can be dynamically influenced by short descriptions of the target person, probably due to trait inference based on the provided behavioral descriptions.

Spatial situations modeling is an effective means of providing information support for decision-making, including for managing complex dynamic systems while taking into account regional specifics. Geographic information systems are currently a popular tool for modeling spatial situations. Modern systems of this class model situations using electronic maps and also provide users with a set of tools for analyzing spatial data. One of the challenges of this approach is the difficulty of accounting for the semantic properties and relationships of displayed objects, which cannot be directly recorded in the geographic information system database. Another challenge, caused by the approach to modeling situations and the method of data organization, is associated with the addition of new semantic information about already visualized objects. This paper addresses the problem of automated construction of spatial situation models for solving information support problems for decision-making, taking into account the geographic and semantic properties of spatial objects. A method for semantic enrichment of geospatial data based on a knowledge graph is proposed. A brief overview of existing approaches to using knowledge graphs to generate cartographic images is provided. The spatial situation model and the main components of the technology for automated construction of spatial situation models in the form of geosemantic images are described. The results of modeling the spatial situation as a geosemantic image constructed using a cartographic framework and a geospatial knowledge graph are presented.

When reading narrative stories, readers monitor discontinuity of characters, space, time, goals, and causality of events and update their situation models. This study examined how illustrations of narratives influence readers’ ability to monitor story events using a verb-clustering task in which readers were asked to group verbs from a narrative into related pairings. Results showed that readers who read a text-only narrative paired verbs that were continuous in both the character and time dimensions. In contrast, readers who read a narrative with illustrations paired verbs that were continuous not only in the character and time dimensions but also in the causality dimension. These findings suggest that illustrations of narratives function to enrich the contents of situation models. Furthermore, an additional experiment showed that positioning of illustrations within the text impacted the situation model construction. Therefore, the utility of illustrations for promoting the construction of situation models and efficient comprehension of a narrative story are discussed.

Perceptions of others’ social characteristics are essential for guiding social behaviour and decision making. Recent research has demonstrated that increased facial redness facilitates both positive (e.g. health, attractiveness, happiness) and negative (e.g. dominance, anger) social evaluations. Given that similar facial colouration can lead to diverging evaluations, it is unclear how people integrate these cues to inform social decisions (e.g. approach-avoidance). We suggest that the influence of facial redness on social perceptions and decisions depends on contextual information, including facial-muscular emotion expressions. We test this hypothesis across two studies where participants view faces either increasing or decreasing redness, evaluate them on a range of social characteristics (i.e. aggressiveness, attractiveness, health, friendliness, dominance) and decide whether to approach or avoid them. Increased facial redness facilitated, and decreased redness impeded (to a greater extent), perceptions of each social characteristic. However, the extent of this influence was moderated by the muscular expression (i.e. neutral, happy, angry). Further, we found that the influence of facial redness on approach-avoidance was largely mediated by evaluations of attractiveness and health. Altogether, the current work provides nuanced insights into facial colouration’s role as a social signal that informs social perception and decision making.

Reprint of “Biological motion perception links diverse facets of theory of mind during middle childhood”

Social cognition has been argued to rely on automatic mechanisms, but little is known about how automatically the processing of body shapes is linked to other social processes, such as trait inference. In three pre-registered experiments, we tested the automaticity of links between body shape perception and trait inference by manipulating cognitive load during a response-competition task. In Experiment 1 (N = 52), participants categorised body shapes in the context of compatible or incompatible trait words, under high and low cognitive load. Bayesian multi-level modelling of reaction times indicated that interference caused by the compatibility of trait cues was insensitive to concurrent demands placed on working memory resources. These findings indicate that the linking of body shapes and traits is resource-light and more “automatic” in this sense. In Experiment 2 (N = 39) and 3 (N = 70), we asked participants to categorise trait words in the context of task-irrelevant body shapes. Under these conditions, no evidence of interference was found, regardless of concurrent load. These results suggest that while body shapes and trait concepts can be linked in an automatic manner, such processes are sensitive to wider contextual factors, such as the order in which information is presented.

Jones and Thibaut (1958) argue that information gleaned from social interaction depends on the perceiver's current objectives. Five experiments examined how narrative construction and impression formation objectives influenced interpretation of social behaviors. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants read a series of sentences describing persons performing various behaviors and indicated the cause of the behaviors. Results indicated a reliable tendency for all participants to explain behaviors using situational attributions rather than chronic dispositions; however, this tendency was enhanced for participants instructed to construct a narrative using the behaviors. Experiments 3 and 4 found that participants given impression formation objectives were more likely than those with narrative construction objectives to generalize observed behaviors to future situations. Experiment 5 examined how attributions were rendered without explicit processing goals. Implications for social perception and judgment are discussed.

Introduction. The use of various types of models for solving linguodidactic problems as a crucial object of analysis in linguistics and linguodidactics is considered by modern scientists from various points of view. The aim of the study is to identify and substantiate the potential of cognitive modeling in the construction of an idealized cognitive model (using the example of a prototypical scenario of risk situation) and to analyze the didactic potential of cognitive modeling in order to optimize strategies for mastering a foreign language, in particular, phraseological corpus Materials and methods. The integration of theoretical and empirical components predetermined the methodology used, including the method of continuous sampling of material (French idioms of risk) from authentic sources, the method of interpretation, the method of comparative analysis. Research results. A prototypical scenario of risk situation is proposed and formalized by means of an idealized cognitive model. Each subframe is illustrated by a cluster of relevant idioms, the list of which is open. The authors describe the idealized cognitive model of risk situation developed by them through the prism of its didactic potential. Using the example of a fragment of the corpus of French phraseology, it is shown that cognitive modeling contributes to optimization of the study of vocabulary, in particular, phraseology. The specific tasks proposed demonstrate the implementation of the constructive modeling functions of the suggested scheme with a focus on the correlation of the formal and substantive aspects of the language material. Conclusion. The novelty of the proposed approach lies in the integration of the theoretical concept – the proposed idealized cognitive model – and the practical strategy of its application in linguodidactics and, in a broader perspective, in humanitarian education in general. The open nature of the model makes it possible to use it for other fragments of the lexical fund of both French and other foreign languages.

Social categorization appears to be an automatic process that occurs during person perception. Understanding social categorization better is important because mere categorization can lead to stereotype activation and, in turn, to discrimination. In the present study we used a novel approach to examine event-related potentials (ERPs) of gender categorization in the “Who said what?” memory paradigm, thus allowing for a more in-depth understanding of the specific mechanisms underlying identity versus categorization processing. After observing video clips showing a “discussion” among female and male targets, participants were shown individual statements, each accompanied by one of the discussants’ faces. While we measured ERPs, participants had to decide whether or not a given statement had previously been made by the person with the accompanying face. In same-person trials, statements were paired with the correct person, whereas in the distractor trials, either a same-gender or a different-gender distractor was shown. As expected, participants were able to reject different-gender distractors faster than same-gender distractors, and they were more likely to falsely choose yes for a same-gender than for a different-gender distractor. Both findings indicate gender-based categorization. ERPs, analyzed in a 300- to 400-ms time window at occipito-temporal channels, indicated more negative amplitudes for yes responses both for the same person and for same-gender distractors, relative to different-gender distractors. Overall, these results show gender-based categorization even when the task was to assess the identifying information in a gender-neutral context. These findings are interpreted as showing that gender categorization occurs automatically during person perception, but later than race- or age-based categorization.