Testing a direct mapping versus competition account of response dynamics in number comparison†

Tracking hand movements during number tasks has become a powerful method for disentangling competing models of numerical representation. In two experiments, participants used a computer mouse to choose whether presented numbers were greater than or less than 5. In Experiment 1, trajectories became more curved towards the incorrect response as targets approached the standard 5, indicating increasing response competition. However, trajectories showed a rightward bias modulated by numerical distance and target size, indicating a direct mapping between hand movement and an ordered, spatial number representation. In Experiment 2, I changed the direction of mouse movements bottom-to-top orientation to left-to-right. Trajectories again became more curved towards the incorrect response as targets approached 5, but this time, there was no modulation of trajectory bias by target size or distance. The results call into question a direct mapping account and instead lend support to a competition model of response dynamics in number comparison.     

The skill of seeing: beyond the sensorimotor account?

How crucial a role do reason, memory and planning play alongside lower-level sensorimotor skills in our visual activity? Andy Clark has recently proposed a new skill-based account of seeing. This suggests there is more to perception than only the mastery of sensorimotor contingencies, as O'Regan, No? and others have stressed in recent influential papers.     

Are children's faces really more appealing than those of adults? Testing the baby schema hypothesis beyond infancy

This study examined adults’ evaluations of likeability and attractiveness of children’s faces from infancy to early childhood. We tested whether Lorenz’s baby schema hypothesis (Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie (1943), Vol. 5, pp. 235-409) is applicable not only to infant faces but also to faces of children at older ages. Adult participants were asked to evaluate children’s faces from early infancy to 6 years of age in terms of their likeability and attractiveness, and these judgments were compared with those of adult faces. It was revealed that adults judged faces of younger children as more likeable and attractive than faces of older children, which were in turn judged as more likeable and attractive than adult faces. However, after approximately 4.5 years of age, the baby schema no longer affected adults’ judgments of children’s facial likeability and attractiveness. These findings suggest that the baby schema affects adults’ judgments of not only infant faces but also young children’s faces. This influence beyond infancy is likely due to the fact that facial cranial growth is gradual during early childhood and certain crucial infantile facial cues remain readily available during this period. Future studies need to identify these specific cues to better understand why adults generally show positive responses to infantile faces and how such positive responses influence the establishment and maintenance of social relationships between young children and adults.     

The impact of identity leadership on team functioning and well-being in team sport: Is psychological safety the missing link?

The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of psychological safety in explaining the impact of identity leadership on team performance and athlete well-being. Adopting a cross-sectional survey design, 289 handball players rated the identity leadership skills of their coach, their captain, and the informal leaders in the team, as well as various performance- and well-being-related measures. Structural equation modelling (controlling for the nested structure of our data) revealed that by demonstrating identity leadership, coaches, captains, and in particular informal athlete leaders, all had a unique contribution in strengthening their team members’ identification with their team. By this shared sense of ‘us’, athletes felt psychologically safe in their team to speak up, provide input, and take risks. In line with our hypotheses, this sense of psychological safety acted as a mediator between identity leadership and two subsequent pathways: (1) a team-oriented pathway in which psychological safety inspired good teamwork, which fostered team resilience and, in turn, enhanced athletes’ satisfaction with their team’s performance; and (2) an individual-oriented pathway wherein psychological safety buffered against athletes’ burnout, thereby enhancing their health. In addition to these pathways mediated by psychological safety, the informal leaders directly influenced the performance pathway (with total effect sizes being 10 times larger than those of coaches and team captains), whereas coaches had a direct influence on the health pathway (with total effect sizes being three times larger than those of informal leaders and captains). Given the often-underestimated importance of the informal leaders, sport teams can be recommended to adopt a structure of shared leadership in which team members are encouraged to engage in identity leadership. In conclusion, we found that by nurturing a shared sense of ‘we’ and ‘us’ within the team, leaders are able to foster a psychologically safe environment, which in turn paves the way for an optimal team functioning and a healthier team.     

Empathic development during adolescence: religiosity,the missing link?

While theories regarding the development of empathy hypothesise increased empathy scores during adolescence, data among adolescent samples tend not to find such a relationship. The present paper proposes religiosity as the missing link to account for this discrepancy between theory and findings, on the theory that decreasing religiosity during adolescence is likely to depress empathy scores at precisely the same time as increasing cognitive skills are likely to enhance empathy development. Data from 569 school children, aged 11–17 years, who completed both the Junior I₆ Empathy Scale and the Attitude towards Religion Scale ASC4B, demonstrate that, while there is no direct correlation in the sample between age and empathy, there is a significant positive correlation between age and empathy after controlling for differences in levels of religiosity.     

Constraint-evading surrogacy: the missing piece in Radical Embodied Cognition’s non-representationalist account of intentionality?

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - Radical Embodied Cognition (REC) is an anti-representationalist approach to the nature of basic cognition proposed by Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin. While...     

A teleological account of Cartesian sensations?

Alison Simmons, in Simmons (1999), argues that Descartes in Meditation Six offered a teleological account of sensory representation. According to Simmons, Descartes’ view is that the biological function of sensations explains both why sensations represent what they do (i.e., their referential content) and why they represent their objects the way they do (i.e., their presentational content). Moreover, Simmons claims that her account has several advantages over other currently available interpretations of Cartesian sensations. In this paper, I argue that Simmons’ teleological account cannot be sustained for both theoretical and textual reasons and that it does not have the advantages it is claimed to have.     

The effect of feedback on children’s metacognitive judgments: a heuristic account

In three experiments, we investigated whether the feedback effect on the accuracy of children’s metacognitive judgments results from an improvement in monitoring processes or the use of the Anchoring-and-Adjustment heuristic. Experiment 1 revealed that adding feedback increased the accuracy of young children’s (aged 4, 6, and 8 years) memory prediction. In Experiment 2, the influence of an external anchor on children’s metacognitive judgment was established. Finally, in Experiment 3, two memory tasks that differed in terms of difficulty were administered. Participants were randomly assigned to an anchoring (high/low/no anchor) and a feedback (feedback/no feedback) condition. Results demonstrated that children in the feedback condition adjusted their predictions toward the feedback, regardless of the task’s difficulty. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that external information provided by feedback is used as an anchor for judgment. This interpretation is strengthened by the correlation found between the two scores computed to assess participants’ susceptibility to anchoring and feedback effects, which indicates that children who are more sensitive to the anchoring effect are also more sensitive to the feedback effect.     

The choreography of everyday life—a missing brick in the general evolution theory

The “choreography of everyday life refers to the existence of rules of daily life, correspondingly to those of dances: the rules impose order upon individual behavior beyond the level of pure improvisation. The fact that acts of everyday life repeat themselves supports the idea that there exist some mechanisms generating order to daily practices. The replicative model of evolution is a candidate to explain this process of routinization. At the beginning of a replicative cycle behavioral patterns might change radically. In the course of time integrative and competitive selective forces start working. Finally some established rules, choreography, determining daily practices will emerge. In this mature phase identical replication takes place.     

Shape constancy and theory of mind: is there a link?

In three experiments, children aged between 4 and 7 years viewed a circular disc oriented at a slant. The disc was made of luminous material and situated in a darkened chamber. Children of all ages exaggerated the circularity of the disc when they knew that the object was really a circle (the circle task), and the effect was greatest in the younger members of the sample. Crucially, however, a group of children in Experiment 3 who viewed an identical shape that they knew emanated from an actual ellipse did not exaggerate circularity. In the second experiment, children tackled three standard theory of mind tasks in addition to the circle task mentioned above. A significant correlation emerged (even with age partialed) between the extent of exaggeration made by those who knew that the shape was a circle and ability to pass the theory of mind tests. It seems knowledge of reality contaminates judgements of appearance in the circle task. This might be the same bias that features in realist errors in theory of mind tasks.     

Framework for a new dialogue between psychoanalysis and neurosciences: is the combined neuro-psychoanalytic approach the missing link?

Freud's legacy deriving from his work The project for a scientific psychology (1895) could give a new impetus to the dialogue between psychoanalysis and neurosciences. A rapproachment phase is warrented. Based on the work of psychoanalysts who are themselves neuroscientists (such as Mauro Mancia, Martha Koukkou and Harold Shevrin) or have a long term dialogue with neuroscientists (Arnold Modell), three points of epistemological congruence are described:

1. dualism is no longer a satisfactory solution
2. cautions for the centrality of interpretation (hermeneutics)
3. the self-criticism of neuroscientists

     

Can a temporal processing deficit account for dyslexia?

In this comment, we argue that although Farmer and Klein (1995) have provided a valuable review relating deficits in nonreading tasks and dyslexia, their basic claim that a “temporal processing deficit” is one possible cause of dyslexia is somewhat vague. We argue that “temporal processing deficit” is never clearly defined. Furthermore, we question some of their assumptions concerning an auditory temporal processing deficit related to dyslexia, and we present arguments and data that seem inconsistent with their claims regarding how a visual temporal processing deficit would manifest itself in dyslexic readers. While we agree that some dyslexics have visual problems, we conclude that problems with reading caused by the visual mechanisms that Farmer and Klein postulate are quite rare.     

Against a “mindless” account of perceptual expertise

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - According to Hubert Dreyfus’s famous claim that expertise is fundamentally “mindless,” experts in any domain perform most effectively...     

Does Television Kill? Testing a Period-Characteristic Model

This study examined whether historical percentages of U.S. households with television predict homicide arrest rates from 1960 through 2000. Controlling for age and birth cohort, increased television penetration 15 years earlier predicted greater arrest rates. This possible effect appeared to decline among older age groups. Two interpretations are discussed. First, increased penetration may have coincided with the causes of crime. Second, television may increase homicide arrests. Also examined is the possible confounding or mediating influence of marriage-divorce ratios and unemployment rates. Controls for these did not eliminate all evidence of a television-arrest rate association.     

Do humans prefer altruistic mates? Testing a link between sexual selection and altruism towards non‐relatives

Humans are often seen as unusual in displaying altruistic behaviour towards non‐relatives. Here we outline and test a hypothesis that human altruistic traits evolved as a result of sexual selection. We develop a psychometric scale to measure mate preference towards altruistic traits (the MPAT scale). We then seek evidence of whether mate choice on the basis of altruistic traits is present and find it in one study (N=170 couples). We also predict that a stronger female MPAT, as measured by responses to the MPAT scale, will be expressed – a result found in all three studies (Ns=380, 340, and 398). Both sets of results are consistent with the hypothesized link between human altruism towards non‐relatives and sexual selection.     

Lexicality and phonological similarity: a challenge for the retrieval-based account of serial recall?

The retrieval-based account of serial recall (Saint-Aubin & Poirier, 2000) attributes lexicality, phonological similarity, and articulatory suppression effects to a process where long-term representations are used to reconstruct degraded phonological traces. Two experiments tested this assumption by manipulating these factors in the recall of four- and five-item lists of words and non-words. Lexicality enhanced item recall (IR), but only affected position accuracy (PA) for five-item lists under suppression. Phonological similarity influenced both words and non-words, and produced impaired PA in silent and suppressed conditions. Consistent with the retrieval-based account, words and non-words of high word-likeness appear subject to redintegration. However, some findings, like suppression not reducing the phonological similarity impairment in suppressed conditions, present challenges for the retrieval-based account and other models of serial recall.