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Spatial cognition is fundamental to human behavior, but people differ in how they remember spatial relations, variably using body-based (egocentric) and environment-based (allocentric) spatial reference frames. Despite decades of study, the causes of this variation and flexibility in spatial memory remain unclear. Here we show that people spontaneously use different reference frames on different spatial axes at the same time. When remembering the placement of a target object in a 2-dimensional array, Indigenous Tsimane' adults preferentially used allocentric space to determine lateral placement and egocentric space to determine sagittal placement in the same action. This effect of axis was also significant among US university students, whose overall preference for egocentric space was stronger on the sagittal than lateral axis. These findings support a novel account of spatial cognitive diversity and suggest that people across cultures habitually integrate egocentric and allocentric spatial reference frames into the same action.

While meaning variation in common words across language and culture is well established, only a few studies have explicitly quantified how general such differences are and whether differences reflect slight variations in meaning or could be considered to map onto entirely distinct concepts for different groups. The present study aims to investigate the extent to which common words can be interpreted differently between groups of English-proficient native Chinese speakers and native English speakers. This was done through a free judgment of associative strength (JAS) task using 42 cue English nouns. Our findings revealed language-specific meanings across all 42 cue words, with strong evidence for language-specific meaning in nearly 95\% of nouns. To determine whether these words map onto entirely distinct language-specific concepts, we measured conceptual diversity using Latent Profile Analysis (LPA). The results of the LPA showed that nearly 69% of the cue words could be mapped onto more than one concept across all participants. Importantly, language differences were related to conceptual diversity in nearly 64% of words featuring multiple concepts. In sum, we found robust evidence of word meanings and conceptual variations among individuals across distinct linguistic and cultural backgrounds, even for common English words.

The dominant mental timelines of native Chinese speakers (Exp1) and Mandarin learners of near-native proficiency (Exp2) was examined with the spontaneous gesture task. The results demonstrated that (1) both groups produced horizontal, vertical, sagittal, fused horizontal and vertical, and fused horizontal and sagittal gestures for all kinds of Chinese temporal words, indicating a strong preference for horizontal over vertical gestures. (2) Negligible correlations between immediate spatio-temporal metaphors and the mental timelines were observed, with an almost non-existent difference in gesture distribution across metaphorical types between the two groups. The findings indicate that (1) the horizontal mental timeline is the dominant timeline for two groups; (2) visuospatial experience exerts a greater influence on temporal cognition; (3) mental timelines formed by the long-term effects of language may operate beyond the immediate metaphors, similar to the horizontal gestures. A unified model proposing embodied experience as the mechanism for activating mental timelines is presented.

People from every culture observe the natural world in detail and organise it into categories, and Western biology builds on this universal impulse towards classification. Here we provide a quantitative analysis of factors that shape folk and scientific classification of birds from areas associated with three indigenous languages (Anindilyakwa, Tlingit, and Zapotec). We find that traditional Linnaean taxonomies align better with folk categories than do modern phylogenetic classifications, which suggests that human perception is responsible in part for the correspondence between Linnaean and folk taxonomies. Perceptual similarity is difficult to measure at scale, but we use the recently released AVONET database to develop a proxy for the perceptual similarity between pairs of birds and find that traditional Linnaean taxonomies and perceptual similarity both independently predict folk categories. Our results therefore provide quantitative evidence for the view that perceptual similarity influences both scientific and folk classification.

In this paper, we catalog the rates at which people report spiritual presence events: phenomenal experiences understood by the perceiver to imply the presence of a spiritual being. We draw on four large datasets (total N=3150) collected in the US, Ghana, Thailand, China, and Vanuatu, including participants from a range of religious backgrounds. This yields what is, to our knowledge, an unprecedented “epidemiology” of spiritual presence events across diverse cultural settings. While some events vary dramatically in their rates of endorsement across cultural settings, other events are relatively common across all five settings, and still others are relatively rare across settings. In general, the most common events center on ordinary experiences of one's own inner life, while events that hinge on near-tangible perceptions of presence and hallucination-like events involving outer sensory experiences are relatively rare. In sum, local culture shapes but does not fully determine the architecture of spiritual experience.

The "shape bias" -- the bias to generalize new nouns by their shape rather than other features such as color or texture -- has been argued to facilitate early noun learning for children. However, there is conflicting evidence about the magnitude and nature of this bias, as well as how it changes developmentally and how it varies across cultures. In this paper, we synthesize evidence about the shape bias using meta-analysis and meta-regression. We find strong overall evidence for the shape bias, but the literature is dominated by studies of English-speaking children, making it difficult to assess cross-cultural differences. Large between-study heterogeneity also highlights procedural variation in the literature. Overall, publication bias, heterogeneity, and data sparsity may limit the ability to distinguish theoretical accounts of the shape bias.

Proficient speakers of a second language (L2) show similar processing of affective content as native speakers, but reduced magnitude, later latency, and a less differentiated emotional neural response (e.g., Hsu et al., 2015). Because language and culture are intertwined, this study examined whether cultural relevance of short stories affects immersion during reading, independent of language proficiency. Hong Kong (HK) and Mainland Chinese (MLC) readers were exposed to identical short stories featuring events and traditions related to either culture. Their level of attention, transportation and emotional engagement after each story was measured using the Story World Absorption Scale (Kuijpers et al., 2014). Preliminary results show that HK participants were significantly more immersed in HK cultural stories than in MLC stories, especially when they described modern events. Instead, MLC participants showed no difference in immersion. The results will be discussed considering historical common origins and modern stark distinction between the two cultures.

Early abstract reasoning follows qualitatively different developmental trajectories in the US and China (Carstensen et al., 2019), but the causal mechanisms for these differences are unknown. Existing accounts implicate several potential factors that differ between the US and China, including language (Hoyos et al., 2016), executive function (Richland et al., 2010), visual attention (Christie et al., 2020), and social reasoning (Jurkat et al., 2022). While there is extensive work documenting both language and executive function in US and Chinese children, much less is known about the development of cross-cultural differences in visual attention and social reasoning. We document abstract reasoning about relations (Ambiguous cRMTS, Carstensen et al., 2019) alongside the potential moderating factors of visual attention (Free Description; Imada et al., 2013), and social reasoning (Causal Attribution, Seiver et al., 2013; Uniqueness Preference, Kim & Markus, 1999) in a cross-sectional sample of 240 3-12-year-olds, and observe both similarities and differences.

Abstract reasoning in early childhood is often described as following a "relational shift," over which children become increasingly sensitive to relations. However, recent work has challenged the generality of this account, showing that children in the US and China follow distinct trajectories in a relational match-to-sample task (Carstensen et al., 2019). This difference aligns with multiple cultural and linguistic factors implicated in relational reasoning, in which English speakers in the US and Mandarin speakers in China appear at opposite ends of a continuum spanning from a focus on objects (US) to relations (CN). We explore early relational reasoning in a context that represents a cultural middle ground with a key linguistic similarity (noun spurts) to the US: Korean-learning children in South Korea. In two experiments with 262 Korean children, we document relational reasoning in this novel cultural context, revealing similarities and differences to developmental trajectories in the US and China.

We use data on a cultural fitness landscape, recently inferred from a large-scale cross-cultural survey of religious practices (6000+ years, 407 cultures), to provide new insights into the dynamics of cultural macroevolution. We report three main results. First, we observe an emergent distinction between the long-run fitness of a religious practice, and its short-term stability: in particular, some low-fitness practices are nonetheless highly stable. Second, despite the exponentially large size of the landscape, we find a small number of cultural attractors, and 70% of all observed configurations flow into just four, which we label "monastic", "evangelical", "indigenous", and "pre-Axial". Finally, we find large variation in the evolvability of different traits, with some (such as a belief in punishing gods) strongly fixed by context, and others (such as belief in reincarnation) much more fluid.

In Indonesia, religious education is compulsory in schools. How do scientific values and reasoning—being willing and able to change one’s beliefs in the face of new evidence—emerge in this context? We recruited Indonesian children (N=240, Ages 6-14) from majority Muslim (Jakarta) or Hindu (Bali) schools. As part of a larger battery of tasks, we asked participants a set of scientific values questions (e.g., “How important is it to think carefully about people, ideas, and events instead of relying on gut feelings or emotions?”), scientific reasoning questions (e.g., “How can Sarah best convince Michael that plants are alive?”), and questions about their religiosity. We will report age- and site-related patterns for each variable, and explore the relationships between religiosity, scientific values, and scientific reasoning performance. The findings will be discussed in terms of the development of scientific and religious thinking in cultural contexts.

Due to the hybrid nature of CogSci 2023, we plan to live-stream portions of the conference and record the entire program. Recorded videos may be used for CogSci educational events, by members of the community and for the general public to view. Scientific content is still the property of the presenters, but the usage of the video is at the discretion of the Cognitive Science Society. Presenters may revoke permission to share the video at any time with written communication to the Society.

Cultural background may shape how people attend to different emotional cues. Emotions can be perceived from both visual and auditory channels. This cross-cultural study investigated individuals’ attention to emotional cues in facial expressions and spoken words. The final sample consisted of 99 Singaporean Chinese and 81 German adults (Mage = 24.03 years, SDage = 6.29 years). In this online study, participants completed two tasks in which they were presented with emotional facial expressions and spoken words simultaneously. They were asked to judge the pleasantness of word meanings (Word task) or facial expressions (Face task) while ignoring the other aspect. Singaporean participants’ accuracies were significantly influenced by the word content while judging the pleasantness of facial expressions in the Face task. However, for German participants, there was no significant interference effect in either the Face or Word task.

How do children’s conceptualizations of natural and supernatural entities develop in religious and cultural contexts? We explored this question in Indonesia—a Muslim-majority country in which religious affiliation is mandatory—as part of a larger multi-site collaborative project (The Developing Belief Network; Weisman et al., under review). Indonesian children (N=100, Ages 5-10) from Muslim or Christian families were asked about the properties and behaviors of different kinds of agents: (1) religious (e.g., God), (2) non-religious supernatural (e.g., ghosts), (3) fictional (e.g., fairies), and (4) natural/scientific (e.g., germs). We also measured each child’s religious identification and involvement. We will compare how children of different religions conceptualize these agents, and how these beliefs vary with the child’s age and religious identity. Our findings will shed new light on the interplay between religion, culture, and children’s theories about the world.

Is “cow” more closely related to “grass” or to “chicken”? Speakers of different languages judge similarity in this context differently, but why? One possibility is that cultures covarying with these languages induce differences in conceptualizations of similarity. Specifically, East Asian cultures may promote reasoning about thematic similarity, by which cow and grass are more related, whereasWestern cultures may bias judgments toward taxonomic relations, like cow and chicken. We measure similarity judgments across the US, China, and Vietnam and replicate US-China differences, but do not find that responding in Vietnam patterns with China. Instead, similarity judgments in Vietnam are intermediate between the US and China. We also show that word embedding models (fastText models for each language) are related to judgments within each country, suggesting a possible alternative interpretation of cross cultural differences. Perhaps notions of similarity are similar across contexts, but the statistics of the linguistic environment vary.

Grammatical gender (GG) affects object categorization (e.g., Samuel et al., 2019). This study is among the first to examine the extent of this effect using both implicit and explicit tasks. Speakers of French (GG language) and Turkish (genderless) completed an Implicit Association Test (IAT) about classifying faces based on their gender (female/male) and objects conceptually associated with a specific gender (e.g., necktie) based on a criterion unrelated to gender (tool/clothing item). Participants also completed an explicit task of attributing gender to those objects and a survey assessing sexist attitudes. Turkish speakers were only affected by conceptual gender (CG) whereas French speakers showed the effect of CG in their explicit gender attributions and of both GG and CG in their IAT responses. These effects were stronger for participants who were high in their sexist attitudes. Thus, GG implicitly interferes with object categorization, and individual differences in attitudes may modulate this effect.

Opponent Colors Theory advances that four colors have special status and are yoked in opponent fashion (yellow-versus-blue, and red-versus-green). Classic hue cancelation studies provide evidence for this theory: people readily pick out colors that are neither red nor green, usually yellow. Here we conducted a version of a hue-cancelation experiment with the Tsimane’ people, a non-industrialized culture in the Amazon. Tsimane’ speakers readily identified reddish and greenish color chips, but they showed idiosyncratic choices when asked to identify a color that is neither reddish nor greenish, unlike English speakers who consistently select focal yellow. The Tsimane’ participants who also spoke Spanish and had a consistent label for English “yellow” (“amarillo”), performed similarly to the Tsimane’ monolinguals, suggesting that simply having a label for “yellow” is not sufficient to explain the consistency of English speakers. The results add to a growing body of evidence that does not support Opponent Colors Theory.

Many non-geographic factors influence spatial judgments, which implies that spatial representations are not metrically veridical. We investigated the influence of social and political factors in the geopolitical context of Cyprus–an island divided since 1974 into the Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot communities in the north and south, respectively. Participants (249 Greek Cypriots, 322 Turkish Cypriots) indicated their familiarity with 19 towns, estimated town locations, and the straight-line distance between those towns. They also rated their attitudes toward the other community. Cypriots underestimated distances and contracted the placement of towns within the other community more so than within their own community. Moreover, those more willing to live together with Cypriots from the other community underestimated distances between towns, whereas those less willing to live together overestimated distances. The results support the notion that representations of global-scale environments have multi-faceted origins, including sociopolitical factors not usually associated with spatial representations.

The extent to which people can infer new mathematical concepts in the absence of cultural support is not clear. We test such learning with a simple math concept: additive commutativity. Experimental work with children in industrialized cultures suggests that cultural support is necessary, since children take time to learn commutativity and ultimately show signs of knowing it after entering school. However, children are at a disadvantage in learning because they are not yet cognitively mature. Moreover, they have only had a short time to experience the world and possibly learn principles like commutativity on their own. Unschooled adults, on the other hand, may be in a better position to have inferred commutativity on their own. We test indigneous Amazonians with variable levels of math cultural supports, and find that those with low cultural supports do not show signs of knowing additive commutativity.

We investigated the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on young people’s value temporal focus, religiosity, and time spatialization. Samples of young participants from eight cultures (Americans, Spaniards, Serbs, Bosniaks, Croats, Moroccans, Turks, and Chinese) collected before the pandemic (N = 497, mean age = 21.09) were matched with samples collected during the first confinement period (N = 497, mean age = 20.96). Our results in study 1 showed that during the pandemic, young adults were less religious, more future-focused, and placed the future in front to of them in a greater extent. In study 2, using the whole sample collected during the pandemic (N = 893, mean age = 21.94), we observed that the more affected the participants were by the pandemic, the greater their future focus, the lower their religiosity, and the greater their tendency to locate the future in front. These pattern of results held in most cultures.

This paper describes some epistemic cultural considerations which shape the uses of psychology. I argue the study of mind is bound by the metaphysical background of the given locale and era in which it is practiced. The epistemic setting in which psychology takes place will shape what is worth observing, how it is to be studied, how the data is to be interpreted, and the nature of the ultimate explanatory units. I argue epistemic constraints shape the praxes that arise from structural study of the mind. In order to illustrate this notion of epistemic cultural constraint, I discuss Soviet Psychology and provide a contrast between practical uses of psychoanalysis in India, Egypt, and rural Ghana. In response to these conceptual and practical epistemic limitations, psychology could adapt methods drawn from history and anthropology towards an interdisciplinary psychology.

This study explored white lie-telling behaviour in 3- to 6-year-old children from three cultural groups: Anglo Canadian (n = 49), Chinese Canadian (n = 45), and Eastern-European Canadian (n = 11). In a video-conferencing setup, a female researcher expressed a misconception about her artwork and asked participants for their opinion, in the presence versus absence of a stated social consequence (i.e., two conditions). Parental measures of collectivism and parenting styles were also collected. The results indicated that the likelihood of children telling a white lie (versus challenging the researcher’s misconception) did not differ significantly across cultural groups or conditions and was not predicted by parental collectivism, authoritativeness, or authoritarianism. However, the effect of authoritativeness on white lie telling did approach significance. These findings are discussed in relation to possible factors that might have accounted for the lack of cultural differences.

We study pension planning and financial wealth of natives and immigrants (N=1177) in the Netherlands, in relation to their temporal values (past/future-focused), financial knowledge, IQ, and other individual characteristics. We find that, compared to natives, immigrants are less financially literate and rely more on the government for their retirement income, but are more future-focused and think more about their retirement. Second, controlling for financial knowledge, IQ, saving intention, self-control and demographic factors, temporal values help to predict many aspects of pension planning: how much people think about retirement, their desired retirement age, whether they develop a plan to save for retirement, perceived saving adequacy, and home ownership. Furthermore, temporal values predict savings, risky assets and financial wealth in 2016 and 2020, even after controlling for the financial situation in 2016. Our results have strong implications for policies related to pension communication and contribute to the theory on relationships between economic decisions, time and cognition.

Threatening stimuli capture visual attention more rapidly than benign stimuli. The canonical interpretation of this robust finding is that the brain evolved a “fear module” enabling rapid detection of threats common at the time of mammalian evolution, such as snakes and spiders. This rapid attentional capture is thought to enable prioritized processing of threatening stimuli, providing a survival advantage, and is assumed to be universal. However, these findings have been documented almost entirely in WEIRD (white, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) populations. Here, we address this gap by examining threat detection in a remote African culture, the Himba. Using a touch screen visual search task, we found that both evolutionary-relevant (snakes and spiders) and modern threats (knives and syringes) captured attention more rapidly than benign stimuli. To our knowledge, this is the first study showing that the same kind of threats that rapidly capture visual attention in the West also rapidly capture visual attention in the Himba.

According to Rozenblit & Keil (2002), attempting a mechanistic explanation of a concrete phenomenon results in reduced self-reported knowledge, suggesting that the latter is normally overestimated (Illusion of Explanatory Depth or IoED). Fernbach and Sloman (2013) demonstrated the effect in sociopolitical issues, finding that causal explanation results in short-term moderation of belief extremity. While the effect of explanation on knowledge self-estimation has been robustly replicated, debates about the impact on extremity continue. Here, we replicate both effects in an online sample of Iranians (N=100 and p

Object-centric interactions provide rich learning moments for young children, including opportunities to discover word meanings. Children’s first-person object handling experiences, in particular, form a key source of input—one that varies across cultures and across development. Using daylong photo streams from child-worn cameras, we analyze >17k images to identify the frequency and targets of child object handling across the first four years in two small-scale subsistence farming communities on opposite sides of the globe (Rossel Papuan and Tseltal Mayan). Overall, we see general consistency in the distribution of object categories (e.g., consumables, mealtime tools, natural objects, etc.) handled by children across cultures and age, likely reflecting stable properties of children’s physical environments and day-to-day routines. However, the exact objects available to children vary both within and across communities and diversify with age. These various distributions of handling patterns are discussed in their relation to potential consequences for early learning.

Social norms—rules governing which behaviors are deemed appropriate or inappropriate within a given community—are typically taken to be uniquely human. Recently, this position has been challenged (Andrews 2020; Danón 2019; Fitzpatrick 2020; Kappeler et al. 2019; von Rohr et al. 2011). The view that norms are human unique stems from commitments regarding the psychological capacities required for having them, and skepticism that animals possess these prerequisites (Birch 2020; Rakoczy and Schmidt 2019; Schlingoff and Moore 2017; Tomasello 2016). However, among norm cognition researchers there is little agreement about the cognitive architecture that underpins social norms in humans. To move forward, we draw inspiration from the progress made in the animal culture research, develop an operationalized account of social norms as *a socially maintained pattern of behavioral conformity within a community* (Westra and Andrews, in preparation), and offer methods for studying social norms in wild and captive primate populations.

Despite the variability of music worldwide, some types of human songs share basic acoustic characteristics. For example, dance songs tend to be loud and rhythmic, whereas lullabies tend to be quiet and melodious. Prior studies with western English-speaking participants have shown that this enables listeners to infer aspects of a singer’s behavior, despite being unfamiliar with the singer’s culture and language. Here, we test whether these intuitions are shared across a diversity of languages and human societies, with 5524 people from 49 industrialised countries comprising 28 languages, and 116 people in 3 small-scale societies with limited access to global media. Each made inferences about the behavioral contexts of 118 songs from 86 societies. Both groups reliably identified the behavioral functions of dance songs, lullabies, and healing songs. Linguistic and geographical proximity between listeners and singers was minimally predictive of accuracy, demonstrating a degree of cultural invariance in music perception.

When judging the relative difficulty of impossible actions within the context of a magical world like that of Harry Potter, individuals honor real-world causal principles (e.g., assuming that heavier objects would be harder to levitate than lighter ones even though levitation itself is impossible; Shtulman & Morgan, 2017). We examined whether this effect persists when events are presented outside of this context. U.S. (Studies 1 and 2) and Chinese (Study 2) adults were asked to rate the relative difficulty of two impossible events that varied according to an irrelevant causal principle in one of three contexts: present science, future science, or magical. Though Chinese and U.S. adults honored irrelevant causal principles to a similar degree across the three contexts, Chinese adults’ confidence in their judgments varied by context. Additionally, individual differences in cognitive reflection (U.S.) and fantasy engagement (Chinese) related to judgments. Findings indicate that adults honor irrelevant causal constraints when reasoning about the impossible across multiple contexts, though subtle differences exist at both the cultural and individual level.

When a group member commits wrongdoing, people sometimes assign responsibility and blame not only to the wrongdoer but also to other members of the same group. We examined such assignment of collective responsibility in the context of exploitation of one family by another. Participants were recruited from the United States and South Korea, which are known to vary in cultural norms and endorsement of collectivistic values. Participants in both countries rated the degree to which an agent (grandson) should be held responsible for his grandfather’s exploitation of a victimized family, while varying the closeness of familial connection. Participants’ responsibility judgments showed sensitivity to whether the grandson received financial benefit from the wrongdoer and to the perceived closeness between the grandson and the wrongdoer. Korean participants imposed greater responsibility on the agent than did American participants. Implications for understanding the influence of social norms on moral judgments are discussed.

The qualitative method of phenomenology provides a theoretical tool for educational research as it allows researchers to engage in flexible activities that can describe and help to understand complex phenomena, such as various aspects of human social experience. This article explains how to apply the framework of phenomenological qualitative analysis to educational research. The discussion within this article is relevant to those researchers interested in doing cross-cultural qualitative research and in adapting phenomenological investigations to understand students’ cross-cultural lived experiences in different social educational contexts.

Religion and spirituality (R/S) serve as coping mechanisms for circumstances that threaten people’s psychological well-being. However, using R/S inappropriately to deal with difficulties and problems in daily life may include the practice of Spiritual Bypass (SB). SB refers to avoiding addressing emotional problems and trauma, rather than healing and learning from them. On the other hand, coping strategies may be determined by the cultural context. This study aims to describe the presence of SB in individuals who may have experienced stressful situations and to understand the influence of culture on SB by comparing SB in two culturally different groups. The sample consists of a total of 435 people, 262 of Honduran nationality and 173 of Spanish nationality. Both groups are approximately equivalent in age and gender. The degree of SB, stressful events, perception of social support and spiritual well-being are examined, respectively, through the Spiritual Bypass Scale, and specific items and subscales from the Social Readjustment Rating Scale, Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support, and the Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Therapy - Spiritual Wellbeing. The results showed a higher spiritual well-being and use of SB in the Honduran sample as compared to the Spanish sample, but similar social support and stressful events. Furthermore, some of the factors predicting SB were different between the two samples. While age and a greater number of R/S practices were important in both samples, for the Honduran sample the variables that best explained SB were being a Christian, having greater social support, fewer stressful events, and greater attendance at church or temple. For the Spanish sample, however, the variable that best explained SB was studying R/S texts. Therefore, SB must be understood within the culture in which it develops, since in different cultural contexts it appears to relate to differing factors. Thus, SB becomes a possible functional or dysfunctional coping strategy depending on the social context.

Despite general scepticism from care professionals, social robotics research is providing evidence of successful application in education and rehabilitation in clinical psychology practice. In this article, we investigate the cultural influences of English and Italian psychology students in the perception of usefulness and intention to use a robot as an instrument for future clinical practice and, secondly, the modality of presentation of the robot by comparing oral vs. video presentation. To this end, we surveyed 158 Italian and British-English psychology students after an interactive demonstration using a humanoid robot to evaluate the social robot’s acceptance and use. The Italians were positive, while the English were negative toward the perceived usefulness and intention to use the robot in psychological practice in the near future. However, most English and Italian respondents felt they did not have the necessary abilities to make good use of the robot. We concluded that it is necessary to provide psychology students with further knowledge and practical skills regarding social robotics, which could facilitate the adoption and use of this technology in clinical settings.

The author comments on the potential of integrative data analysis (IDA) as a new methodological activity and on some of the topics that were discussed in the 5 articles in this special issue. One topic is the extent to which IDA will be used to provide conclusive summaries regarding the strength of evidence for well-specified questions versus to provide new information that goes beyond the simple sum of individual studies. Another is the meaning of variances of effects that are observed over studies and sample strata. A 3rd is the potential to enhance understanding of construct validity by fitting measurement models described in the special issue. The author concludes by recommending critical examination of model-based inferences from IDA through sensitivity analyses and by noting that IDA can promote collaboration and networks that yield data that are more amenable to integrated analyses in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do people decide what category an artifact belongs to? Previous studies have suggested that adults and, to some degree, children, categorize artifacts in accordance with the design stance, a categorization system which privileges the designer's original intent in making categorization judgments. However, these studies have all been conducted in Western, technologically advanced societies, where artifacts are mass produced. In this study, we examined intuitions about artifact categorization among the Shuar, a hunter-horticulturalist society in the Amazon region of Ecuador. We used a forced-choice method similar to previous studies, but unlike these studies, our scenarios involved artifacts that would be familiar to the Shuar. We also incorporated a community condition to examine the possible effect of community consensus on how artifacts are categorized. The same scenarios were presented to university student participants in the UK. Across populations and conditions, participants tended to categorize artifacts in terms of a creator's intent as opposed to a differing current use. This lends support to the view that the design stance may be a universal feature of human cognition. However, we conclude with some thoughts on the limitations of the present method for studying artifact concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hunt and Vitell's General Theory (1992) is used in a cross-cultural comparison of U.S. and Taiwanese business practitioners. Results indicate that Taiwanese practitioners exhibit lower perceptions of an ethical issue in a scenario based on bribery, as well as milder deontological evaluations and ethical judgments relative to their U.S. counterparts. In addition, Taiwan respondents showed higher likelihood of making the payment. Several of the paths between variables in the theory are confirmed in both U.S. and Taiwan samples, with summary data suggesting the Hunt and Vitell theory performs well in both U.S. and Taiwan. Some unanticipated linkages within the model were uncovered in the samples. Results and implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]