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To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.2006.00483.x Byline: RAlan Walks (*) Keywords: contextual neighborhood effects; electoral geography; political parties; Toronto; voting behavior Abstract: Recent research conducted in both the United States and Canada has found that residents of inner cities and suburbs are diverging in their voting behavior and political attitudes. The mechanisms producing such a divergence, however, have remained unclear. After identifying a set of distinct hypotheses for why one might expect residents of inner cities and suburbs to differ in their political views, this article draws on a survey undertaken by the author in one electoral district in the Toronto region to empirically test the relative contribution of each of the hypothesized mechanisms in explaining the geography of party preferences. This study suggests there is no single explanation for the city-suburban cleavage, and that the mechanisms producing it are complex. Spatial segregation (based on individual attributes such as race, ethnicity, and class) is clearly important; however neighborhood self-selection, local experience, and, to a lesser extent, mode of consumption all have significant independent effects. Particularly important is the self-selection of supporters of political parties on the left into the inner city, stemming either from a search for a 'sense of community' or the desire to link their lifestyle choices to their political convictions, whereas supporters of parties farther to the right are more likely to choose postwar suburban neighborhoods out of a preference for private space. In contrast, there is little evidence that housing tenure or the sharing of political information between neighbors are factors independently producing city-suburban political differences within the study district. Author Affiliation: (*)Department of Geography, University of Toronto Article History: Initial submission, January 2005; revised submission, June 2005; final acceptance September 2005 Article note: Correspondence: Department of Geography, University of Toronto, 3359 Mississauga Road, Mississauga, Ontario, L5L 1C6, Canada, e-mail: awalks@utm.utoronto.ca.

In addition to perceiving the colors, shapes, and motions of objects, observers can perceive higher-level properties of visual events. One such property is causation, as when an observer sees one object cause another object to move by colliding with it. We report a striking new type of contextual effect on the perception of such collision events. Consider an object (A) that moves toward a stationary object (B) until they are adjacent, at which point A stops and B starts moving along the same path. Such 'launches' are perceived in terms beyond these kinematics: As noted in Michotte's classic studies, observers perceive A as being the cause of B's motion. When A and B fully overlap before B's motion, however, observers often see this test event as a completely noncausal 'pass': One object remains stationary while another passes over it. When a distinct launch event occurs nearby, however, the test event is 'captured': It too is now irresistibly seen as causal. For this causal capture to occur, the context event need be present for only 50 ms surrounding the 'impact,' but capture is destroyed by only 200 ms of temporal asynchrony between the two events. We report a study of such cases, and others, that help define the rules that the visual system uses to construct percepts of seemingly high-level properties like causation.

This paper examines the orientations, or frames of reference, of participants in five bank training programmes run by three banks in the United Kingdom. Adopting a symbolic interactionist approach and ethnographic methods of investigation, the paper attempts to elucidate the ways in which both learners and tutors thought about their roles in the learning events and the goals and strategies they adopted in order to cope with their situation. It is suggested that in order to understand the participants' behaviour it is necessary to take into account the contexts in which their actions were constructed. In particular it is proposed that the organizational context of the training programmes, which exposed the participants to the gaze of 'hidden audiences' of organizational superiors, inhibited the potential of the programmes as vehicles for learning. It is also argued that interactionist approaches using ethnographic methods, which enable organizational actors to be studied in situ, have an important contribution to make to the wider study of organizational cognition. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

This study examines the relationship between antecedent organizational characteristics and the pre-succession experience of individuals chosen as chief executive officer (CEO) - relationships that have received limited attention in past research. A sample of 214 CEO selection decisions was used to test hypothesized relationships between the firm characteristics of size, performance, growth, advertising intensity, risk and individual attributes pertaining to the experience of selected CEOs. Results indicate the following relationships: pre-succession profitability, size and advertising intensity are associated with the chosen executives' organizational tenure levels; pre-succession firm size and risk are associated with the age of selected CEOs; and, pre-succession profitability and advertising intensity are associated with type of functional background experience. Findings provide new insights into the relative importance of pre-succession experience associated with different organizational contexts in CEO selection decisions. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

Undergraduate students (N = 207) completed 3 individual difference measures and then evaluated 3 instructors based on scripts depicting interactions between the instructors and students. The first 2 scripts established a context and the third script served as the target stimulus. Comparison ratings were provided by a random context control condition. Contrast effects occurred in ratings of the average target stimulus, and the negative context had a larger impact than did the positive context. Both of these context effects were moderated by the rater's belief in the variability of human nature, but not by the rater's cognitive ability or field independence. Contrast effects also occurred in ratings of the positive target stimulus but not in ratings of the negative target stimulus, and in neither case was the context effect moderated by any of the individual difference variables.

Testing of a hierarchical model of self-knowledge indicates that subjects retrieve abstract information while describing their personality attributes, independent of context. However, subjects retrieve contextual behavioral events while describing themselves in specific context. Hierarchical model suggests that people simultaneously hold multiple representation of themselves, differing in their context specificity and in the type of knowledge content.

Context effects (assimilation and contrast) are examined in relation to accuracy in judgments of stimuli. Context effects are distinguished from context errors. This is shown to depend on one's definition of true scores, rarer tendencies (leniency-severity) relative to true scores, and the direction and magnitude of observed context effects. The framework is illustrated empirically in a study of contrast effects involving performance judgments. Implications for reliability, validity, and agreement of behavior judgments in practice are explored.

This study presents a test of the influence of social context on training outcomes. Specifically, the effects of labeling microcomputer usage as an opportunity were examined on computer anxiety, computer efficacy beliefs, and learning. Nonacademic university employees enrolled in an introductory microcomputer training class were assigned to a session in which mircrocomputer usage was randomly established as an opportunity or neutral. Two studies were conducted. Study 1 (N=84) identified the issue characteristics of opportunities and threats as a basis to establish context. Study 2 (N=79) reported the results of the training. Results indicated that, after controlling for pretraining expectations about microcomputer usage, trainees in the opportunity condition exhibited higher computer efficacy and learning, as well as lower computer anxiety, than trainees in the neutral condition. These findings suggest that labeling the context can be a relatively powerful training intervention. Implications for practice and future research are discussed. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

A more direct method of studying the effect of context on acoustic perception is designed using a new paradigm called 'matching in scaling.' Results show that context has a significant effect on loudness perception both when judging a single tone and when comparing two tones. The same findings were reached in an experiment where no numerical judgments were involved. All these suggest that the said process is largely contextual in nature.

Risks with better outcomes are preferred under identical circumstances. Violations of this theory of monotonicity have been demonstrated by studies using judgment of values. A study was conducted to test whether the same results would be yielded using subjects' choices instead of judgments. The effect of varying amounts of distributions on certainty equivalents was also tested. Results indicated that using the method of choice also led to violations. The significance of context was also confirmed.

Participants attempted to perform two tasks concurrently during simulated driving. In the choice task, they responded either manually or vocally to the number of times a visual or auditory stimulus occurred; in the braking task, they depressed a brake pedal in response to the lead car's brake lights. The time delay between the onset of the tasks' stimuli, or stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), was varied. The tasks were differentially affected by the manipulations. Brake reaction times increased as SOA was reduced, showing the psychological refractory period effect, whereas the choice task showed large effects of the stimulus and response modalities but only a small effect of SOA. These results demonstrate that a well-practiced 'simple' task such as vehicle braking is subject to dual-task slowing and extend the generality of the central-bottleneck model.

Decisions are often temporally separated from their outcomes. Using theories of structural alignment and temporal construal, we examined how temporal distance and the associated shift in decision processes moderate susceptibility to context effects. Specifically, in two experiments (one hypothetical, one with real outcomes), we demonstrated that people attend more to nonalignable differences when the outcome of the decision is in the distant future than when it is in the near future. This shift in decision processes was found in preference and choice data, as well as coded written protocols. We further show that this temporal shift cannot be explained by differential involvement with the decision or by the feasibility and desirability of the attributes. Our findings establish temporal distance as an important moderator of structural alignment effects and also extend the implications of temporal construal theory beyond the nature of the attributes to the structural relationships among attributes.

Does placing females in environments in which they have contact with males cause deficits in their problem-solving performance? Is a situational cue, such as gender composition, sufficient for creating a threatening intellectual environment for females--an environment that elicits performance-impinging stereotypes? Two studies explored these questions. Participants completed a difficult math or verbal test in 3-person groups, each of which included 2 additional people of the same sex as the participant (same-sex condition) or of the opposite sex (minority condition). Female participants in the minority condition experienced performance deficits in the math test only, whereas males performed equally well on the math test in the two conditions. Further investigation showed that females' deficits were proportional to the number of males in their group. Even females who were placed in a mixed-sex majority condition (2 females and 1 male) experienced moderate but significant deficits. Findings are discussed in relation to theories of distinctiveness, stereotype threat, and tokenism.