Cross-cultural perspectives on pitch memory

We examined effects of age and culture on children's memory for the pitch level of familiar music. Canadian 9- and 10-year-olds distinguished the original pitch level of familiar television theme songs from foils that were pitch-shifted by one semitone, whereas 5- to 8-year-olds failed to do so (Experiment 1). In contrast, Japanese 5- and 6-year-olds distinguished the pitch-shifted foils from the originals, performing significantly better than same-age Canadian children (Experiment 2). Moreover, Japanese 6-year-olds were more accurate than their 5-year-old counterparts. These findings challenge the prevailing view of enhanced pitch memory during early life. We consider factors that may account for Japanese children's superior performance such as their use of a pitch accent language (Japanese) rather than a stress accent language (English) and their experience with musical pitch labels.     

Last night I had the strangest dream: Varieties of rational thought processes in dream reports

From the neurophysiological perspective, thinking in dreaming and the quality of dream thought have been considered hallucinatory, bizarre, illogical, improbable, or even impossible. This empirical phenomenological research concentrates on testing whether dream thought can be defined as rational in the sense of an intervening mental process between sensory perception and the creation of meaning, leading to a conclusion or to taking action. From 10 individual dream journals of male participants aged 22–59 years and female participants aged 25–49 years, we delimited four dreams per journal and randomly selected five thought units from each dream for scoring. The units provided a base for testing a hypothesis that the thought processes of dream construction are rational. The results support the hypothesis and demonstrate that eight fundamental rational thought processes can be applied to the dreaming process.     

What is the source of cultural differences? -- Examining the influence of thinking style on the attribution process

The present research is intended to find out whether individuals with analytic or holistic thought have different attribution processes. Cross-cultural research has suggested that East Asians, who tend to have a holistic thought pattern, differ in cognitive process from Westerners, who tend to engage in analytic thought. However, studies that found cultural difference in attribution process may have non-equivalence problems that make it hard to interpret the causal relationship between thinking style and attribution process. The present research extends this by measuring participants’ thinking style within a single culture in order to ensure equivalence on potentially confounding variables such as prior knowledge and cognitive capacity. Two experiments demonstrate that both types of thinkers have identical attribution processes and suggest different thinking styles might relate to different tendencies toward situational information, but not to the attribution process itself.     

Reliability and Validity of the Complex Postformal Thought Questionnaire: Assessing Adults’ Cognitive Development

Three studies investigated the psychometric properties of the complex postformal thought (PFT) questionnaire (Sinnott, unpublished scale, 1998; Sinnott and Johnson 1997), which is a measure of adult cognitive development. The scale was found to be moderately reliable (α = .63). To assess construct validity, a comparison of participants’ performance on the PFT scale to their performance on the Need for Cognition scale was conducted, which indicated the PFT scale is valid measure of complex thought. Factor analysis reduced the scale to three factors, which correspond to important components of PFT: Multiple Elements, Subjective Choice, and Underlying Complexities. Implications for understanding the nature of adult cognitive development and the usefulness of this new measure for research in this area are discussed.     

Plasticity of human spatial cognition: spatial language and cognition covary across cultures

The present paper explores cross-cultural variation in spatial cognition by comparing spatial reconstruction tasks by Dutch and Namibian elementary school children. These two communities differ in the way they predominantly express spatial relations in language. Four experiments investigate cognitive strategy preferences across different levels of task-complexity and instruction. Data show a correlation between dominant linguistic spatial frames of reference and performance patterns in non-linguistic spatial memory tasks. This correlation is shown to be stable across an increase of complexity in the spatial array. When instructed to use their respective non-habitual cognitive strategy, participants were not easily able to switch between strategies and their attempts to do so impaired their performance. These results indicate a difference not only in preference but also in competence and suggest that spatial language and non-linguistic preferences and competences in spatial cognition are systematically aligned across human populations.     

Development and yearning: Cognitive aspects of spiritual development

Spirituality is important to humans but gets little attention in experimental studies of life span cognitive development. One way to integrate such studies is to examine cognitive aspects of spiritual development using complex postformal Piagetian models. Four possible points of interface within postformal models are: developmental stages; elements of emotion and will; multiperson cognition; and forms taken by the processes used. Testable hypotheses are outlined and some possible difficulties to be expected within such research are discussed.     

Anti-equality: Social comparison in young children

Young children dislike getting less than others, which might suggest a general preference for equal outcomes. However, young children are typically not averse to others receiving less than themselves. These results are consistent with two alternatives: young children might not have any preferences about others receiving less than themselves, or they might have preferences for others receiving less than themselves. We test these alternatives with 5- to 10-year-old children. We replicate previous findings that children will take a cost to avoid being at a relative disadvantage, but also find that 5- and 6-year-olds will spitefully take a cost to ensure that another’s welfare falls below their own. This result suggests that the development of fairness includes overcoming an initial social comparison preference for others to get less relative to oneself.     

Infants' reasoning about opaque and transparent occluders in an individuation task

There has been some debate about whether infants 10 months and younger can use featural information to individuate objects. The present research tested the hypothesis that negative results obtained with younger infants reflect limitations in information processing capacities rather than the inability to individuate objects based on featural differences. Infants aged 9.5 months saw one object (i.e. a ball) or two objects (i.e. a box and a ball) emerge successively to opposite sides of an opaque occluder. Infants then saw a single ball either behind a transparent occluder or without an occluder. Only the infants who saw the ball behind the transparent occluder correctly judged that the one-ball display was inconsistent with the box-ball sequence. These results suggest that: (a) infants categorize events involving opaque and transparent occluders as the same kind of physical situation (i.e. occlusion) and (b) support the notion that infants are more likely to give evidence of object individuation when they need to reason about one kind of event (i.e. occlusion) than when they must retrieve and compare categorically distinct events (i.e. occlusion and no-occlusion).     

A Dollar Is a Dollar Is a Dollar,or Is It? Insights From Children's Reasoning About “Dirty Money”

Money can take many forms—a coin or a bill, a payment for an automobile or a prize for an award, a piece from the 1989 series or the 2019 series, and so on—but despite this, money is designed to represent an amount and only that. Thus, a dollar is a dollar, in the sense that money is fungible. But when adults ordinarily think about money, they think about it in terms of its source, and in particular, its moral source (e.g., dirty money). Here we investigate the development of the belief that money carries traces of its moral history. We study children ages 5–6 and 8–9, who are sensitive to both object history and morality, and thus possess the component pieces needed to think that a dollar may not be like any other. Across three principal studies (and three additional studies in Appendix S1 ; N = 327; 219 five- and six-year-olds; 108 eight- and nine-year-olds), we find that children are less likely to want money with negative moral history, a pattern that was stronger and more consistent among 8- and 9-year-olds than 5- and 6-year-olds. These findings highlight pressing directions for future research that could help shed light on the mechanisms that contribute to the belief that money carries traces of its moral history.     

Analytic thinking reduces belief in conspiracy theories

Belief in conspiracy theories has been associated with a range of negative health, civic, and social outcomes, requiring reliable methods of reducing such belief. Thinking dispositions have been highlighted as one possible factor associated with belief in conspiracy theories, but actual relationships have only been infrequently studied. In Study 1, we examined associations between belief in conspiracy theories and a range of measures of thinking dispositions in a British sample (N = 990). Results indicated that a stronger belief in conspiracy theories was significantly associated with lower analytic thinking and open-mindedness and greater intuitive thinking. In Studies 2–4, we examined the causational role played by analytic thinking in relation to conspiracist ideation. In Study 2 (N = 112), we showed that a verbal fluency task that elicited analytic thinking reduced belief in conspiracy theories. In Study 3 (N = 189), we found that an alternative method of eliciting analytic thinking, which related to cognitive disfluency, was effective at reducing conspiracist ideation in a student sample. In Study 4, we replicated the results of Study 3 among a general population sample (N = 140) in relation to generic conspiracist ideation and belief in conspiracy theories about the July 7, 2005, bombings in London. Our results highlight the potential utility of supporting attempts to promote analytic thinking as a means of countering the widespread acceptance of conspiracy theories.     

Great apes’ capacities to recognize relational similarity

Recognizing relational similarity relies on the ability to understand that defining object properties might not lie in the objects individually, but in the relations of the properties of various object to each other. This aptitude is highly relevant for many important human skills such as language, reasoning, categorization and understanding analogy and metaphor. In the current study, we investigated the ability to recognize relational similarities by testing five species of great apes, including human children in a spatial task. We found that all species performed better if related elements are connected by logico-causal as opposed to non-causal relations. Further, we find that only children above 4 years of age, bonobos and chimpanzees, unlike younger children, gorillas and orangutans display some mastery of reasoning by non-causal relational similarity. We conclude that recognizing relational similarity is not in its entirety unique to the human species. The lack of a capability for language does not prohibit recognition of simple relational similarities. The data are discussed in the light of the phylogenetic tree of relatedness of the great apes.     

Cognitive Developmental Theory and Spiritual Development

Traditional conceptions of cognitive development have failed to account for changes in adult cognition as well as more subjective and intuitive features of human experience. This paper reviews recent theories and research in cognitive development and spirituality with the aim of providing connections between the two domains. Neo-Piagetian and postformal theories of cognitive development suggest that advances in cognition are domain-specific, dependent on individual experience, and can occur at any point in the lifespan. However, theories of spiritual development have not adequately addressed these points. Thus, a novel account of spiritual development is presented that addresses these features with respect to individuals' changing conceptions of their relation to an External Power.     

Do 12.5-month-old infants consider what objects others can see when interpreting their actions?

The present research examined whether 12.5-month-old infants take into account what objects an agent knows to be present in a scene when interpreting the agent's actions. In two experiments, the infants watched a female human agent repeatedly reach for and grasp object-A as opposed to object-B on an apparatus floor. Object-B was either (1) visible to the agent through a transparent screen; (2) hidden from the agent (but not the infants) by an opaque screen; or (3) placed by the agent herself behind the opaque screen, so that even though she could no longer see object-B, she knew of its presence there. The infants interpreted the agent's repeated actions toward object-A as revealing a preference for object-A over object-B only when she could see object-B (1) or was aware of its presence in the scene (3). These results indicate that, when watching an agent act on objects in a scene, 12.5-month-old infants keep track of the agent's representation of the physical setting in which these actions occur. If the agent's representation is incomplete, because the agent is ignorant about some aspect of the setting, infants use the agent's representation, rather than their own more complete representation, to interpret the agent's actions.