Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Interactions within institutional setting regularly involve participants with asymmetrical claims to internationally relevant knowledge. These claims are legitimated through the institution of social hierarchies that determine the privileges of members to certain situated knowledges. Contrary to many perspectives that presume these hierarchies to exist a priori to the interactional context, this study demonstrates the achievement of hierarchies within the interactions on the popular television series “Antiques Roadshow.” I first show that appraisers use strategically designed questions to situate their knowledge of objects and the general market beyond that of lay audiences. Secondly it is shown how participants engage in modified perspective display series within the interaction whereby the owners’ ideas of the objects are brought into alignment with the knowledge appraisers. This occurs through a negotiation of the knowledge relevant to assessing an adequate valuation of the object. These interactional processes work to reify the roles of appraiser/expert and owner/lay-person. Findings from this study point to further research opportunities concerning the development of markets from everyday interaction.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper reports on an experiment designed to assess viewer responses to the nonverbal behavior of the president in the context of compelling news events. Subjects were shown a series of four news story-presidential reaction audio-visual sequences that varied by story topic, level of emotion, and degree of appropriateness. Cognitive, emotional, and physiological measures were used to assess subject responses to news story-presidential reaction message sequences, including heart rate, skin conductance, the Self-Assessment Manikin affect scale, recognition memory, and facial EMG (electromyography) indexing smile and frowning muscle activation. Results indicate that evaluations of the display’s appropriateness seems to moderate how much attention is given to the display, the affective direction of viewers’ facial muscle activation, and the level of autonomic activation, or arousal. The EMG data showed that viewers frowned in response to positive expressive displays that followed intense or positive news. Smiling activation correspondingly decreased for positive displays that followed intense news. These counterempathic results shed new light on the capacity of leader displays to influence viewers of political news. While much EMG and physiological research has focused on emotional congruent processes, e.g. positive reactions in response to positive facial displays, this study demonstrates the effects of incongruency in political display behavior. A political leader’s smile is no guarantee of a positive evaluation. If deemed inappropriate to the news context, negative consequences arise from what is viewed as a clear violation of nonverbal expectations. Recognition memory for verbal information in the news narrative also suffers such that encoding of factual knowledge is impaired. It is argued that leader displays that violate viewer expectations remain a likely source of voter doubt.

Publication Type: Session Paper
Abstract: Exemplification theory claims that media coverage of issues contains two basic types of information: Base rate information describes an issue or problem in a summary-type fashion (statistical data, frequency of occurrences, distribution of opinions, etc.). Exemplar information is based on the individual expression of opinions or the de-scription of an individual fate. The body of empirical research shows that exemplars are more powerful in influencing recipients’ own judgments and perceptions. Rea-sons for the marginal impact of base rate information might be (1) a general difficulty in processing the meaning of figures and (2) the pallid nature of this kind of informa-tion. Therefore, the present study – instead of using numeric information – visualizes base rates through continuous response measurement displays (CRM) showing a fictitious average assessment of “others who have watched the video before”. In a two-factorial design, we manipulated the tendency of the CRM graphs (positive vs. negative; base rates) and the tendency of individuals reporting positive or negative judgments towards the video (exemplars). Contrary to previous results, the data show that both exemplars and CRM graphs have an almost equal capability to influ-ence viewers’ judgments and perceptions. Based on these findings, consequences for a broader theory of exemplification effects are outlined.

Publication Type: Individual Poster
Abstract: Background & Aims: Perceptual experience plays an important role in the way that adults perceive the world around them. For example, Zemel et al. (2002) demonstrated that when adults are given brief exposure to novel, odd shapes, they subsequently link the visible fragments of a partly occluded object in a way that is consistent with the novel shape, even when this interpretation violates the typical perceptual grouping principles that govern adult perception. In this study, we investigate whether infants’ early experiences with certain object categories can impact their perceptual interpretation of partly occluded displays, specifically when generic perceptual grouping principles are in conflict with infants’ conceptual knowledge about the object in the display.

Methods: We investigated infants’ perception of a novel object from a category that is familiar to young infants: key rings. In our first experiment, we presented 8.5-month-old infants with a partially occluded key ring display in which the keys and ring moved together as one rigid unit (Move-together event) or the ring moved but the keys remained stationary throughout the event (Move-apart event). Based on previous research, our rationale was that infants would look longer at the event that violated their interpretation of the display as one connected unit or two separate units. Next, we performed parallel experiments with 8.5-month-old infants using modified key ring displays in which we removed the distinctive features of the keys and/or ring. In one experiment, we covered the individual keys in the display with a striped box and, in another experiment, we covered the ring with a spotted circle. Lastly, we tested 7-month-old infants with the standard key ring display to determine whether younger infants interpret the visible portions of the key ring using generic object parsing principles instead of object knowledge.

Results: 8.5-month-old infants perceived the keys and ring as connected despite their attribute differences, and their perception of object unity diminished as the distinctive attributes of the key ring were removed. When all of the distinctive attributes of the key ring were removed, the 8.5-month-old infants perceived the display as two separate objects, which is how younger infants (7-month-olds) perceived the key ring display with all its distinctive attributes unaltered.

Conclusion: On the basis of typical experience with an object category, infants expect novel exemplars of that category to possess category-typical attributes. Further, by 8.5 months of age, infants rely on perceptual experience to interpret visual scenes when their object knowledge conflicts with generic perceptual grouping principles.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Since 9/11 and the beginning of the war in Iraq, several museums across the country have displayed visions of American “freedoms” that conspicuously celebrate U.S. imperialism and militarism. Consonant—if not complicit—with neoconservative foreign policy, such patriotic displays provide cultural legitimacy to a war now widely discredited as an unnecessary mistake, as well as to the use of unilateral military force to spread American “freedom” transnationally. This paper will explore this recent phenomenon by interrogating the interrelationships between public space and historical memory, conceptions of neoliberal citizenship, and the gendered discourse of imperial subjectivity.

The paper will consider and compare three prominent examples of these post-9/11 politics of display: The Price of Freedom: Americans at War military history exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, which opened on Veteran’s Day 2004 during the U.S. attack on Fallujah; the National Museum of American Patriotism in Atlanta, which opened on Independence Day 2004; and the McCormick-Tribune Freedom Museum in Chicago, which will open its doors on Michigan Avenue in the spring of 2006.

Examining how these three prominent museum spaces are marked by their strikingly similar narratives of American heroism, sacrifice and achievement reveals an acute moment of danger in the pubic representations of U.S. history, when a critical pedagogy is desperately needed to counter the hegemonic histories that promote the fulfillment of American style manifest destiny. Furthermore, these particular histories—including the Smithsonian’s—are underwritten by private donors, providing evidence for how post-culture wars neoliberal economic policies—which cut federal funding for cultural institutions—conveniently coalesce with neoconservative visions of the U.S. role on the global stage.