We model two patterns related to the acquisition of color terms in Russian and English: children produce overextension errors for some colors but not others, and language-specific distinctions affect color discrimination in a non-linguistic task. Both effects, as well as a reasonable convergence with adult linguistic behavior, are shown by a Self-Organizing Map trained on naturalistic input. We...

Is CEO effort important? Using CEO golf play as a measure of leisure, we observe significant variation in the amount of leisure that golfing CEOs consume. CEOs consume more leisure when they have lower equity-based incentives. Consistent with CEO effort being important and some CEOs shirking their firm responsibilities, we find CEOs that golf frequently are associated with firms that have lower...

Perceptual biases can shape the evolution of signal form. Understanding the origin and direction of such biases is therefore crucial for understanding signal evolution. Many animals learn about species-specific signals. Discrimination learning using simple stimuli varying in one dimension (e.g. amplitude, wavelength) can result in perceptual biases with preferences for specific novel stimuli, d...

Experiments using chimeric faces, where the left and the right hand side of the face are different, have shown that observers tend to bias their responses toward the information on the left. Here we investigate the effects of aging as well as exposure duration on this leftward bias. Forty female and male blended as well as chimeric faces were presented to 24 young and 23 elderly adults in eithe...

To navigate a busy interpersonal landscape, people direct perceptual resources in a motivated fashion that maximizes goals and minimizes threats. While adaptive, these heuristics can also lead to noteworthy biases, including a well-documented memory advantage for ingroup members. Recent research has extended these findings to reveal other motivational biases that emerge early in social percepti...

Infant holding biases of 202 mothers were studied in four French maternity hospitals. The study collected laterality for holding in mother/child dyads as a means of testing the emotional hypothesis (Manning & Chamberlain, 1991). Maternal holding side preferences and handedness were collected through questionnaires. In addition, hemispheric specialization for perceiving visual and auditory emoti...

Bisecting a visually presented stimulus is a sensitive test for attentional and motor biases in both healthy and brain-damaged participants. There are, in addition, perceptual effects on performance and several idiosyncratic biases. Experiments that manipulated the stimulus attributes have suggested that higher-level cognitive processes can also influence bisection accuracy. These observations ...