I estimate the effects of collaborative and adversarial intergroup contact. I randomly assigned Indian men from different castes to participate in cricket leagues or to serve as a control group. League players faced variation in collaborative contact, through random assignment to homogeneous-caste or mixed-caste teams, and adversarial contact, through random assignment of opponents. Collaborative contact increases cross-caste friendships and efficiency in trade, and reduces own-caste favoritism. In contrast, adversarial contact generally reduces cross-caste interaction and efficiency. League participation reduces intergroup differences, suggesting that the positive aspects of intergroup contact more than offset the negative aspects in this setting. (JEL C93, D83, D91, J15, O15, Z13, Z21)

No abstract

How and what we attend to is foundational in determining the content of our experience, thus differences in attention contribute significantly to how we perceive the world, learn, and develop. Personality also plays a role in constraining how we learn to perceive the world and it is conceivable that some facets of personality interact with visual attention; however, the relationship between these two constitutional aspects of psychology remains unclear. To address this interplay between cognition and personality, we looked at how the Big Five personality traits relate to the spatial scope of attention, as indexed by the spatial distribution of Inhibition of Return (IOR). IOR is marked by a decrement in reaction time when a target appears at a cued location, more than 200 ms after that cue. As the cue/target distance increases there is a release from inhibition, providing a measure of the spatial distribution of IOR and reflecting the spatial scope of attention. The results presented here show personality does predict the distribution of IOR. Specifically, higher trait Openness is associated with a broader distribution of IOR and attention. This finding suggests there is an intimate connection between personality, particularly Openness, and the spatial allocation of attention.

Humans have the ability to make sense of the world around them in only a single glance. This astonishing feat requires the visual system to extract information from our environment with remarkable speed. How quickly does this process unfold across time, and what visual information contributes to our understanding of the visual world? We address these questions by directly measuring the temporal dynamics of the perception of colour photographs and line drawings of scenes with electroencephalography (EEG) during a scene-memorization task. Within a fraction of a second, event-related potentials (ERPs) show dissociable response patterns for global scene properties of content (natural versus manmade) and layout (open versus closed). Subsequent detailed analyses of within-category versus between-category discriminations found significant dissociations of basic-level scene categories (e.g., forest; city) within the first 100 msec of perception. The similarity of this neural activity with feature-based discriminations suggests low-level image statistics may be foundational for this rapid categorization. Interestingly, our results also suggest that the structure preserved in line drawings may form a primary and necessary basis for visual processing, whereas surface information may further enhance category selectivity in later-stage processing. Critically, these findings provide evidence that the distinction of both basic-level categories and global properties of scenes from neural signals occurs within 100 msec.

Multiple cortical regions are crucial for perceiving the visual world, yet the processes shaping representations in these regions are unclear. To address this issue, we must elucidate how perceptual features shape representations of the environment. Here, we explore how the weighting of different visual features affects neural representations of objects and scenes, focusing on the scene-selective parahippocampal place area (PPA), but additionally including the retrosplenial complex (RSC), occipital place area (OPA), lateral occipital (LO) area, fusiform face area (FFA) and occipital face area (OFA). Across three experiments, we examined functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) activity while human observers viewed scenes and objects that varied in geometry (shape/layout) and surface properties (texture/material). Interestingly, we found equal sensitivity in the PPA for these properties within a scene, revealing that spatial-selectivity alone does not drive activation within this cortical region. We also observed sensitivity to object texture in PPA, but not to the same degree as scene texture, and representations in PPA varied when objects were placed within scenes. We conclude that PPA may process surface properties in a domain-specific manner, and that the processing of scene texture and geometry is equally-weighted in PPA and may be mediated by similar underlying neuronal mechanisms.