Regulatory Fit Improves Fitness for People With Low Exercise Experience.

Considering only 20.8% of American adults meet current physical activity recommendations, it is important to examine the psychological processes that affect exercise motivation and behavior. Drawing from regulatory fit theory, this study examined how manipulating regulatory focus and reward structures would affect exercise performance, with a specific interest in investigating whether exercise experience would moderate regulatory fit effects.

Stereotype Fit Effects for Golf Putting Nonexperts.

Research has connected stereotype threat and regulatory fit by showing improved performance for individuals with negative stereotypes when they focused on minimizing potential losses. In the current study, non-Black participants, who were non-experts at golf putting, were told that a golf-putting task was diagnostic of natural athletic ability (i.e.

Psychology of knowledge representation.

Unlabelled: Every cognitive enterprise involves some form of knowledge representation. Humans represent information about the external world and internal mental states, like beliefs and desires, and use this information to meet goals (e.g.

Priming interdependence affects processing of context information in causal inference--but not how you might think.

Cultural mindset is related to performance on a variety of cognitive tasks. In particular, studies of both chronic and situationally-primed mindsets show that individuals with a relatively interdependent mindset (i.e.

Differential impact of relevant and irrelevant dimension primes on rule-based and information-integration category learning.

Research has identified multiple category-learning systems with each being "tuned" for learning categories with different task demands and each governed by different neurobiological systems. Rule-based (RB) classification involves testing verbalizable rules for category membership while information-integration (II) classification requires the implicit learning of stimulus-response mappings. In the first study to directly test rule priming with RB and II category learning, we investigated the influence of the availability of information presented at the beginning of the task.

End-of-semester syndrome: How situational regulatory fit affects test performance over an academic semester.

Psychology researchers often avoid running participants from subject pools at the end of the semester because they are "unmotivated". We suggest that the end of the semester induces a situational prevention focus (i.e.

Determining transformation distance in similarity: Considerations for assessing representational changes a priori.

The Representational Distortion (RD) approach to similarity (e.g., Hahn, Chater, & Richardson, 2003) proposes that similarity is computed using the transformation distance between two entities.

Priming insight in groups: facilitating and inhibiting solving an ambiguously worded insight problem.

We extend research on the priming of insight by studying group problem solving. Groups of 2-4 participants tried to solve an ambiguously worded problem in the presence of a prime that reinforced the dominant but incorrect interpretation of the problem, a prime that reinforced the uncommon but correct interpretation, or no prime. The paradigm involved participants asking questions of the experimenter that could only be answered "yes" or "no.

The optimal level of fuzz: Case studies in a methodology for psychological research.

Cognitive Science research is hard to conduct, because researchers must take phenomena from the world and turn them into laboratory tasks for which a reasonable level of experimental control can be achieved. Consequently, research necessarily makes tradeoffs between internal validity (experimental control) and external validity (the degree to which a task represents behavior outside of the lab). Researchers are thus seeking the best possible tradeoff between these constraints, which we refer to as the optimal level of fuzz.

Differential Effects of Regulatory Fit on Category Learning.

Motivation affects the degree to which people engage in tasks as well as the processes that they bring to bear. We explore the proposal that a fit between a person's situationally-induced self-regulatory focus and the reward structure of the task that they are pursuing supports greater flexibility in processing than does a mismatch between regulatory focus and reward structure. In two experiments, we prime regulatory focus and manipulate task reward structure.

Stereotype threat reinterpreted as a regulatory mismatch.

This research documents performance decrements resulting from the activation of a negative task-relevant stereotype. The authors combine a number of strands of work to identify causes of stereotype threat in a way that allows them to reverse the effects and improve the performance of individuals with negative task-relevant stereotypes. The authors draw on prior work suggesting that negative stereotypes induce a prevention focus and on other research suggesting that people exhibit greater flexibility when their regulatory focus matches the reward structure of the task.

Self-construal and the processing of covariation information in causal reasoning.

Causal induction provides a nice test domain for examining the influence of individual-difference factors on cognition. The phenomena of both conditionalization and discounting reflect attention to multiple potential causes when people infer what caused an effect. We explored the hypothesis that individuals with an independent self-construal are relatively less sensitive to context (other causes) than are individuals with an interdependent self-construal in this domain.