Publications

Previous research has shown that the mere categorization of individuals into minimal groups will evoke in-group favoritism. The current study combines the minimal group paradigm with an ERP-experiment of spontaneous trait inferences using an expectancy-violation paradigm. 53 subjects first performed a fake reaction-time (RT) task to allow social categorization (in-group/out-group). One group of subjects (SoCat) all received the same group label ...

Social Television constitutes a fundamental shift in how people interact and socialize around television content. Websites are starting to combine streaming services with social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Media software like Boxee allows users to recommend and share favorite television programs, and friends can jointly watch television remotely as demonstrated by Motorola's Social TV. The purpose of this paper is to provide a ...

This paper introduces a connectionist Agent-Based Model (cABM) that incorporates detailed, micro-level understanding of social influence processes derived from laboratory studies and that aims to contextualize these processes in such a way that it becomes possible to model multidirectional, dynamic influences in extended social networks. At the micro-level, agent processes are simulated by recurrent auto-associative networks, an architecture ...

The present research investigates how people’s general epistemic motives may inspire essentialist beliefs about racial groups and racism. In three studies, we focus particularly on essentialist entitativity (EE, referring to beliefs about the uniformity, informativeness, and inherent core of racial groups), probing into its relationships with epistemic Need for Closure (NFC) and prejudice. In Study 1, we develop an EE scale, empirically ...

This paper suggests a conceptual shift in the way we approach information sharing by foregrounding the role of categorization. We argue that the establishment of professional categories, while being central to institutional intervention, is contingent on the complexities of everyday inter-professional encounters. It is important therefore to analyse situations in professionals report on the negotiation of categories as well as how professionals ...

Previous research has suggested the presence of a reduced preference to report and spontaneously interpret the global properties of a scene picture in adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Contrary to what is seen in typically developing (TD) participants, gist perception in ASD seems to occur mostly in a more explicit manner with focused attention. The current study used a set of non-social and social ultra-rapid categorization tasks to ...

In comparison to typically developing (TD) individuals, people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) appear to be worse in the fast extraction of the global meaning of a situation or picture. Ultra-rapid categorization [paradigm developed by Thorpe et al. (Nature 381:520–522, 1996)] involves such global information processing. We therefore tested a group of adults with and without ASD, without intellectual disability, on a set of ultra-rapid ...

A contrast category effect on categorization occurs when the decision to apply a category term to an entity not only involves a comparison between the entity and the target category but is also influenced by a comparison of the entity with 1 or more alternative categories from the same domain as the target. Establishing a contrast category effect on categorization in natural language categories has proven to be laborious, especially when the ...

Membership in many natural categories is considered all-or-none, while membership in most artifact categories is found to be graded. We introduce an alternative for the prevailing view that this domain difference in categorization results from representational differences. The context variety account posits that an item's gradedness reflects the variety of contexts it appears in. Items that feature in a variety of contexts are assumed to be more ...