Psychophysiological responses to appraisal dimensions in a computer game

A computer game was used to study psychophysiological reactions to emotion-relevant events. Two dimensions proposed by Scherer (1984a, 1984b) in his appraisal theory, the intrinsic pleasantness and goal conduciveness of game events, were studied in a factorial design. The relative level at which a player performed at the moment of an event was also taken into account. A total of 33 participants played the game while cardiac activity, skin conductance, skin temperature, and muscle activity as well as emotion self-reports were assessed. The self-reports indicate that game events altered levels of pride, joy, anger, and surprise. Goal conduciveness had little effect on muscle activity but was associated with significant autonomic effects, including changes to interbeat interval, pulse transit time, skin conductance, and finger temperature. The manipulation of intrinsic pleasantness had little impact on physiological responses. The results show the utility of attempting to manipulate emotion-constituent appraisals and measure their peripheral physiological signatures.

Modeling infant speech sound discrimination using simple associative networks

Infants' responses in speech sound discrimination tasks can be nonmonotonic over time. Stager and Werker (1997) reported such data in a bimodal habituation task. In this task, 8-month-old infants were capable of discriminations that involved minimal contrast pairs, whereas 14-month-old infants were not. It was argued that the older infants' attenuated performance was linked to their processing of the stimuli for meaning. The authors suggested that these data are diagnostic of a qualitative shift in infant cognition. We describe an associative connectionist model showing a similar decrement in discrimination without any qualitative shift in processing. The model suggests that responses to phonemic contrasts may be a nonmonotonic function of experience with language. The implications of this idea are discussed. The model also provides a formal framework for studying habituation-dishabituation behaviors in infancy.

KQQKQQ and the Kasparov-World Game

The 1999 Kasparov-World game for the first time enabled anyone to join a team playing against a World Chess Champion via the web. It included a surprise in the opening, complex middle-game strategy and a deep ending. As the game headed for its mysterious finale, the World Team re-quested a KQQKQQ endgame table and was provided with two by the authors. This paper describes their work, compares the methods used, examines the issues raised and summarises the concepts involved for the benefit of future workers in the endgame field. It also notes the contribution of this endgame to chess itself.