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The problem of self-control has been an old preoccupation since the time of Greek philosophers. In modern psychology, self-control and related concepts, such as conscientiousness, ego resilience, willpower, or the human agency, have been of longstanding interest to theorists yielding to invaluable insights into people's abilities and difficulties to cope with self-control concerns. However, an overarching conception that would guide our understanding of self-control phenomena is still in great need. The purpose of the present chapter is to organize the most recent theorizing and empirical research on self-control and to sketch the contours of such a framework around two main issues: 1) the essential “ingredients” of the self-control problem (saliency of seemingly incompatible objectives, and their relative value); 2) the basic ways of responding to the self-control problem (goal-choice, and multifinality quest).

Chapter 2 presents a series of hypotheses about how centre–periphery party competition occurs based on a combination of the spatial and saliency models of party behaviour. One of the two main theses of the book is introduced, namely that peripheral and state parties compete strategically for votes by partly assimilating each other’s programmatic agenda. Therefore, the chapter discusses the conditions under which state parties are likely to engage in the defence of pro-periphery policies and the reaction of peripheral parties to the pro-periphery strategies of state parties. Unlike what most authors in the literature assume, it is argued that peripheral parties are not single-issue parties and that they can and do emphasize issues beyond the centre–periphery conflict in order to compete more effectively against their state adversaries.

This chapter looks into the electoral moves of the main left-wing and right-wing state parties in Belgium, Italy, Spain, and the UK during the period of emergence and growth of peripheral party challengers, before the first devolution reform had taken place. First, the chapter shows how widespread the pro-periphery convergence move was among threatened state parties; and how effective this tactic was in bringing down the vote shares of peripheral parties. Second, the chapter explains the first devolution reform as an attempt to make pro-periphery convergence moves more credible and, therefore, more effective in making life difficult for peripheral parties.

This chapter presents a case vignette involving a hospital negotiator that touches on aspects of identifying and curbing waste. It shows that a successful negotiator is very aware of the other stakeholders in the game and of the power they hold in any given situation. Some managers use stakeholder mapping as a saliency tool that allows them to realize fully the power and possible influence other parties have on any given decision or situation, before it reaches a contentious standoff. The chapter also discusses how stakeholder saliency mapping can steer strategic decision making.

This chapter gives a full account of the theoretical development and experimental investigations of the hypothesis that the primary visual cortex (V1) creates a bottom-up saliency map to guide visual attention exogenously. The chapter details the background motivations, theoretical formulation, and experimental tests of the hypothesis, as well as a neural circuit model of the primary visual cortex for the underlying neural mechanisms. The hypothesis links two bodies of data: one is of physiological data on intracortical interactions in V1 and the consequent contextual influences in V1 neural responses; the other is of behavioral data on attention capture, visual search, and visual segmentation. In light of the saliency map in V1, the chapter additionally discusses the roles of the extrastriate visual cortices, contrasts the roles of the central and peripheral visual fields, and reflects on the dissociation between attention capture and perceptual awareness.

Cognition does not work without attention. Attention enables us to focus on particular tasks and particular aspects in the environment. Psychological insights show that attention exhibits bottom-up and top-down components. Attention is attracted from the bottom-up towards unusual, exceptional, and unexpected sensory information. Top-down attention, on the other hand, filters information dependent on the current task-oriented expectations, which depend on the available generative models. This computational interpretation enables the explanation of conjunctive and disjunctive search. Different models of attention emphasize the importance of the unfolding interaction processes and a processing bottleneck can be detected. As a result, attention can be viewed as a dynamic control process that unfolds in redundant, neural fields, in which the selection of one interpretation and thus the processing bottleneck is strongest at the current focus of attention. The actual focus of attention itself is determined by the current behavioral and cognitive goals.

This chapter examines one of nine critical forces behind purchase decisions that make mobile advertising so powerful: saliency. Today's consumers may find advertising annoying, but they fear missing out and would prefer not to waste time in the trial-and-error process of searching for what they need. They want choice and freedom, but they also get easily overwhelmed. Imagine an ideal world where we don't need to scroll down and squint to find what we want. We don't need to refine and repeat our search or make a tough call. We always get the “best right answer” with the least possible effort. This is referred as saliency or the position effect. Consumers want to see the best right answer stand out on their screens. Advertisers, retailers, and other marketers want their message to be that “best right answer.”

The traditional thinking was that the brain somehow ‘sees’ the image, but increasing evidence suggests that most of vision is the result of driven tests that are ordered up to serve a cognitive agenda, so much so that even interrupts may be modulated by an agenda-driven context. Much of this change of perspective has been driven by the primate visual system’s retinal organization, which has a pronounced high-resolution foveal region at the center of a low-resolution periphery. This architecture sends a very compressed coded version of the image to the Thalamus, which uses extensive cortical feedback for its interpretation. The foveal architecture also demands that a collection high-speed eye movements are used to stabilize gaze on important targets. Studies of such movements show that they are exquisitely programmed to facilitate the extraction of task-centric information from the image quickly.

Although it is said that the way in which voters make up their mind is getting more complex, the characteristics of the parties only rarely come into view when studying voting behavior. The main approaches of electoral behavior seem to assume that all voters use the same criteria to assess all parties. In contrast, this chapter builds on the literature challenging that view of ‘evaluation homogeneity’ by focusing on party-specific vote functions. Comparative analyses and an in-depth study of the 2009 German election show that the causes of party choice are not identical for different parties. Instead, party size and extremity of party positions, for example, shape the relevance of different voting motives: Leader evaluations are more important for larger parties and issue positions are more important for more extreme parties. The results support the claim that the factors shaping electoral behavior have a significantly different magnitude of influence for different parties.

This chapter describes the close relationship between the mental faculty of attention and the physical faculty of orienting, and the importance of this relationship to the construction of artificial biomimetic systems. It reviews the importance of physical orienting to natural motor behavior, which places attention management at the core of all behaviors (“orienting is acting”), and the concomitant social role of physical orienting both in expressing and revealing the focus of a mind. The article highlights the efficiency of top-down and bottom-up processing for behavioral control, using map-based saliency processing as a model, and the suitability of map-based algorithms for parallel or bespoke computation. Given this, and the similar nature of the challenges faced by artificial and natural sensorimotor systems, it is argued that attention management may be a, if not the, key component of future artificial motor control systems.

Chapter 2 develops a theoretical framework for the analysis of law and order policies from a partisan politics perspective. It argues that understanding law and order policy making involves two main steps that can be conceptually distinguished: agenda-setting and decision-making. For the agenda-setting phase, the chapter builds on the assumption that issues related to law and order are valence-loaden and generate issue competition between political parties. Therefore, issue owners are particularly likely to get tough on law and order. For decision-making, the theoretical argument relates to theories of comparative public policy analysis, according to which the preferences do translate into public policies, but only if the institutional context allows. Finally, this theoretical chapter discusses how law and order turns may shape the future policy path through positive policy feedback. All expectations are summarized in seven hypotheses to guide the empirical analysis.