Using figure drawings (E. Fallon & P. Rozin, 1985), 120 male and female U.S. college students--African American, Hispanic, and Caucasian--indicated their current and ideal figures, the figures that they considered most attractive to the opposite sex, and the opposite-sex figures most attractive to themselves. Dissatisfaction with body shape was greater among the women regardless of ethnicity. Both the men and the women misjudged which shapes the opposite sex would rate as most attractive: The women guessed that the men preferred shapes thinner than those that they actually reported. The African American women had the most accurate perceptions of what the men found attractive, whereas the Caucasian women had the most distorted views. The men guessed that the women preferred shapes bulkier than those that they actually indicated. These findings may be relevant to the lower incidence of eating disorders among African American women and the higher incidence of such disorders among Caucasian women.

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Using figure drawings, perception of body shape was evaluated by underweight, average, and overweight men and women. Body-shape dissatisfaction was greatest for 60 overweight women, and about the same in 151 average weight women as it was for 102 overweight men. Average weight men (n = 107) and underweight women (n = 31) were fairly satisfied with their current shapes. Both men and women had distorted views of the shape the opposite sex found most attractive. Women guessed that men would prefer a thinner shape than they actually did, and men guessed that women would prefer a larger shape than they actually did. The distortion was larger for men as their own size increased but not for women.

Search is a serial exploration of alternatives. Efficient search involves the ability to minimize costs (i.e., time/energy) and to keep track of alternatives already explored. The search abilities of 4 capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) were evaluated by means of an apparatus featuring a set of suspended baited containers. The experiment featured conditions with different spatial configurations of the search space. Results show that the monkeys were able to search exhaustively 9 containers spatially distributed either as a 3 × 3 matrix or as 3 "patches" of 3 containers each. Search efficiency was higher in a search space suitable to organization in clusters or spatial chunks. In this condition, evidence for principled organization of search trajectories, as opposed to a random walk through the search space, emerges clearly and parallels search efficiency. This suggests that monkeys impose a structure over the search space and, by doing so, reduce the memory demands of the task. In cognitive science, search is defined as the problem of what to do next in situations that require an exploration of multiple alternatives (Stillings et al., 1987). Implicit in this definition is the serial nature of search. The search space can be formed either by exteroceptive stimuli or by representations of objects, events, or problem states. Whatever the material on which it operates, the search process becomes a challenge for the cognitive system when the space of alternatives is large. In this regard, the vast variety of tasks, so often used in animal studies, featuring binary choices may be considered to be a trivial search problem (De Lillo, in press). In a binary situation, a random choice followed by a default strategy warrants the exhaustive exploration of the search space. By contrast, the serial exploration of a large number of alternatives requires the ability to keep track of the moves that the system is performing to avoid spending time and energy in reconsidering alternatives already explored. An obvious implementation of a nontrivial search task in the realm of animal behavior are tasks in which an animal has to explore a large set of loci, one after the other, in order to find items of food. Following the pioneering work by Olton and Samuelson (1976), a vast amount of research has been conducted on rats running the radial maze. In a search space that affords strong spatial constraints, such as a radial maze, it is possible for the subject to deploy an algorithmic strategy consisting , for example, of visiting in succession adjacent arms following a particular direction of travel. This strategy would allow very efficient (no revisits) exhaustive searches