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4 As part of the more general issue of whether culture can affect perception, the present paper addresses the Whorfian question of whether the language available to describe perceptual experience can influence the experience itself. It investigated the effect of vocabulary on perceptual classification by the study of a remote culture (Himba) which possesses a poor colour vocabulary but a rich vocabulary of animal pattern terms. Thus, the present study examined Categorical Perception (CP) with a type of visual stimulus not previously used to assess the effect of labels on perceptual judgments. For the animal patterns, the Whorfian view predicted that it would only be the Himba who showed superiority for cross-category decisions as only they have the appropriate labels. The Whorfian view was upheld and confirmed previous findings that linked perceptual differences to labelling differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shared mental models theory normally takes the individual as its unit of analysis. This paper proposes a theoretical framework for studying shared mental models in which the model is considered to be distributed amongst the team. From this framework a cognitive process is predicted which describes how shared mental models are run. A team reasoning task requiring planning was used to illustrate this framework and test predictions derived from it. Two aspects of sharing mental models were studied; the degree of overlap between team members' mental models and the organization of the division of the model between team members. Experimental results showed that the cognitive processes used were distributed amongst the team and support was found for most, but not all, aspects of the proposed process of running a shared mental model. The organization of sharing was found to influence this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]