Learning from text benefits from enactment

Classical studies on enactment have highlighted the beneficial effects of gestures performed in the encoding phase on memory for words and sentences, for both adults and children. In the present investigation, we focused on the role of enactment for learning from scientific texts among primary-school children. We assumed that enactment would favor the construction of a mental model of the text, and we verified the derived predictions that gestures at the time of encoding would result in greater numbers of correct recollections and discourse-based inferences at recall, as compared to no gestures (Exp. 1), and in a bias to confound paraphrases of the original text with the verbatim text in a recognition test (Exp. 2). The predictions were confirmed; hence, we argue in favor of a theoretical framework that accounts for the beneficial effects of enactment on memory for texts.     

Meaning from syntax: Evidence from 2-year-olds

When toddlers view an event while hearing a novel verb, the verb’s syntactic context has been shown to help them identify its meaning. The current work takes this finding one step further to reveal that even in the absence of an accompanying event, syntactic information supports toddlers’ identification of verb meaning. Two-year-olds were first introduced to dialogues incorporating novel verbs either in transitive or intransitive sentences, but in the absence of any relevant referent scenes (see Yuan & Fisher, 2009). Next, toddlers viewed two candidate scenes: (a) two participants performing synchronous actions, (b) two participants performing a causative action. When asked to “find mooping”, toddlers who had heard transitive sentences chose the causative scene; those who had heard intransitive sentences did not. These results demonstrate that 2-year-olds infer important components of meaning from syntactic structure alone, using it to direct their subsequent search for a referent in a visual scene.     

Rising from the ashes: Recovery from physical trauma

A counsellor describes her trauma accompanying an accidental physical injury, and the course of psychological recovery during the following 6 weeks. The style of self-analysis which was used during this period reflects the transpersonal approach, using imagery and the intuitive function to increase self-awareness, with moments of therapeutic insight ('release' experiences) at the landmarks en route to a healthy state of re-integration. The implications of the whole experience are discussed in terms both of post-traumatic stress and of personal growth.     

Recovery from hemialexia

Hemialexia is believed to be caused by the lesion of the splenium of the corpus callosum. However, no previous reports conclusively demonstrated that the hemialexic had the splenial lesion. A right-handed male with hemialexia who was presumed to have the splenium sectioned for a partial removal of a pineal tumor was examined with magnetic resonance imaging. The sagittal and coronal imagings clearly showed that his splenium was not present. The hemialexic had partially recovered at 9 years after the onset. The patient was 76% correct in Japanese phonogram words and 92% correct in ideogram words in an interfield same-different judgment, that is, judging whether 2 one-letter words, one in the left hemifield and the other in the right, were the same or different. Consequently, the possible mechanism for the recovery is that the transfer of visual word information from the right hemisphere to the left has been partially achieved by commissural fibers other than those of the splenium. Information from phonogram words in the right hemisphere is probably less transferred to the left hemisphere than that from ideogram words. The results also suggested that when the transfer of word information in the right hemisphere to the left is interfered with, the left hemisphere tends to mistake the same pair of words for the different pair.     

Reasoning from Suppositions

Two experiments investigated inferences based on suppositions. In Experiment 1, the subjects decided whether suppositions about individuals' veracity were consistent with their assertions—for example, whether the supposition “Ann is telling the truth and Beth is telling a lie”, is consistent with the premises: “Ann asserts: I am telling the truth and Beth is telling the truth. Beth asserts: Ann is telling the truth”. It showed that these inferences are more difficult than ones based on factual premises: “Ann asserts: I live in Dublin and Beth lives in Dublin”. There was no difference between problems about truthtellers and liars, who always told the truth or always lied, and normals, who sometimes told the truth and sometimes lied. In Experiment 2, the subjects made inferences about factual matters set in three contexts: a truth-inducing context in which friends confided their personality characteristics, a lie-inducing context in which business rivals advertised their products, and a neutral context in which computers printed their program characteristics. Given the supposition that the individuals were lying, it was more difficult to make inferences in a truth-inducing context than in the other two contexts. We discuss the implications of our results for everyday reasoning from suppositions, and for theories of reasoning based on models or inference rules.     

Shape from shadows

The colors, textures, and shapes of shadows are physically constrained in several ways in natural scenes. The visual system appears to ignore these constraints, however, and to accept many patterns as shadows even though they could not occur naturally. In the stimuli that we have studied, the only requirements for the perception of depth due to shadows were that shadow regions be darker than the surrounding, nonshadow regions and that there be consistent contrast polarity along the shadow border. Three-dimensional shape due to shadows was perceived when shadow areas were filled with colors or textures that could not occur in natural scenes, when shadow and nonshadow regions had textures that moved in different directions, or when they were presented on different depth planes. The results suggest that the interpretation of shadows begins with the identification of acceptable shadow borders by a cooperative process that requires consistent contrast polarity across a range of scales at each point along the border. Finally, we discuss how the identification of a shadow region can help the visual system to patch together areas that are separated by shadow boundaries, to identify directions of surface curvature, and to select a preferred three-dimensional interpretation while rejecting others.     

Pleasure and displeasure from the body: Perspectives from exercise

We investigated some types of triggers of embarrassment and their personality correlates. A total of 161 undergraduates indicated how embarrassed they would be in a variety of situations classified a priori into three types. The types were based on the kind of trigger they embodied and were derived in part from current theories of embarrassment. Several analytic techniques, including factor analysis, suggested that there are at least three sorts of situations people find embarrassing: committing a faux pas, being the centre of attention, and threatening another's social identity. We created a subscale for each subtype of trigger. Embarrassibility on each subscale was correlated with embarrassibility on the others, but the reliabilities of the subscales substantially exceeded their intercorrelations. Some personality variables, for example, Neuroticism (Eysenck & Eysenck, 1975) correlated with all subscales, whereas other personality variables correlated differentially, for example, Revised Self-Monitoring (Lennox & Wolf, 1984), Interaction Anxiousness (Leary, 1983), and Rejection Sensitivity (Downey & Feldman, 1996). We believe, contrary to previous suggestions (Edelmann & McCusker, 1986), that there are subtypes of triggers of embarrassment and they they roughly correspond to the different causes of embarrassment as proposed by various theorists. We discuss the implications of our results for theories of embarrassment.     

Determination from Above

There are many historical concerns about freedom that have come to be deemphasized in the free will literature itself—for instance, worries around the tyranny of government or the alienation of capitalism. It is hard to see how the current free will literature respects these, or indeed how they could even find expression. This paper seeks to show how these and other concerns can be reintegrated into the debate by appealing to a levels ontology. Recently, Christian List and others have considered how the notion of levels could be relevant to the free will debate. Invariably, however, the focus is on the significance of facts at lower levels. The threats come from below, from fundamental physics or neuroscience. Here, I aim to show how we can frame many interesting concerns about free will in terms of threats from above. After arguing that determination from above is no less threatening, I catalogue such concerns that might constitute threats to our freedom. Doing this not only allows us to show how these concerns relate to those standardly discussed, but it pushes us to expand our conception of freedom.     

Discriminating constant from variable angular velocities in structure from motion

We investigated accuracy in discriminating between constant and variable angular velocities for orthographic projections of three-dimensional rotating objects. The reported judgments of “constant” or “variable” angular velocity were only slightly influenced by the projected angular velocities, but they were greatly affected by the variations of the deformation, a first-order component of the optic flow. When viewing either a rotating ellipsoidal volume or a planar surface that accelerated and decelerated over the course of rotation, observers’ tendencies to report a variable angular velocity were increased when the temporal phase of the acceleration pattern increased the range of variation of the median deformation; the tendencies were decreased when the same acceleration pattern was used to decrease the range of variation of the median deformation. These results provide evidence contrary to the hypothesis that the visual system performs a mathematically correct analysis of the optic flow.     

The relationship between adolescents' social support from parents and from peers

This study investigated the relationship between adolescents' social support from parents and from peers. Three hypotheses were tested. The first hypothesis was that adolescents who experience little parental support will compensate with support from peers. A negative correlation would thus be expected between perception of parental support on the one hand, and support from peers on the other. The second hypothesis was that lack of parental support will not be compensated by peer support, because such compensation is impossible. Thus, there would be no correlation. The third hypothesis was that adolescents in these circumstances lack the opportunity or ability to gain social support from anyone, including peers. A positive correlation would therefore be expected. These hypotheses were tested in a sample of 1,528 urban Dutch secondary school students (aged 14-16 years) who were in the third year of an intermediate educational stream. Analysis indicated that Hypothesis 1 was not substantiated. The results also argued against Hypothesis 3 and in favor of Hypothesis 2.     

Moral Beliefs,Isolation from Peers,and Abstention from Delinquency

Criminological research has established that the vast majority of young people engage in some level of delinquency and drug use during the period of adolescence. Thus young people who completely refrain from delinquency and drug use are atypical and, as such, are deserving of scientific scrutiny. Perhaps because they have been impressed by the statistical abnormality of delinquency abstention, some researchers have explained this behavior in terms of the characterological abnormality of abstainers, arguing that abstention may be less the result of positive characteristics (such as strong moral beliefs) than the result of pathological traits that serve to isolate abstainers from their peers. In this study, data from a large survey of adolescents are used to help assess the respective roles of moral beliefs and peer isolation in delinquency abstention. The findings challenge certain previous interpretations of delinquency abstention and shed additional light on the forces that help to sustain adolescent conformity. The findings also raise intriguing questions about the stigma attached to delinquency abstainers.     

Variations in the Journey from Crime: Examples from Tiger Kidnapping

The current paper explores the journey offenders make after their offence through a series of tiger kidnap offences from the north and south of Ireland. Tiger kidnap is the abduction of a person of importance to a victim (generally a bank manager) in which that person is used as collateral until the victim complies with the requests of the offenders. Data were provided by the Police Service of Northern Ireland and An Garda Siochana. Three stages of the offences were highlighted: (1) the journey from the abduction location to the hostage location; (2) the abduction location to the robbery location; and (3) the robbery location to the money exchange location. Analysis found significant difference between offences in the north and south for stages 1 and 2 but not for stage 3. This is due to the type of offenders committing the offence, for example, offences in the north being committed by ex‐paramilitary offenders. Further study should focus on understanding complex tiger kidnap offences. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Sparing from the attentional blink is not spared from structural limitations

When a series of three successive to-be-reported items (targets) is displayed in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream of distractors, it has been shown that no attentional blink—a marked impairment in the report of the second of two targets, typically observed when the targets appear within 200–600 ms of one another—occurs in target accuracy. The present study examines three recently introduced computational models that provide different explanations of this protracted sparing effect. Using a standard RSVP design and these models, we provide empirical data and simulations that illustrate that structural limitations affect the processing of successive targets. In addition, we compare the candidate mechanisms that might underlie these limitations.     

Stuttering acquired from subcortical pathologies and its alleviation from thalamic perturbation

Acquired stuttering subsequent to subcortical pathology of mesothalamus was observed in four neurosurgical subjects. The patients suffered from chronic pain, seizures, and somatosensory disorders. They also exhibited unpredictable and uncontrollable speech, spasmodic blocks which were devoid of accessory features, and adaptation effect. Therapeutic mesothalamic stimulation, used as a treatment of last resort to relieve the pain and associated symptoms, also had an ameliorating effect on the stuttering. Spontaneously occurring focal abnormal EEG discharges were anatomically delineated and used as a guide for therapeutic stimulation electrode placement. Attentuation of the abnormal discharges was followed by alleviation of symptoms. This investigation examines the clinical characteristics of stuttering in four neurosurgical patients and suggests an electropathologic basis for their mesothalamic-generated speech dysfluencies. The cooccurrence of pain, seizures, somatosensory disorders, and stuttering, and their concurrent amelioration, suggests that both chronic pain and stuttering may be implicated by similar or related reticular electropathologic generators, couched in overlapping reticular networks extending from the brain stem to the thalamus, and that the acquired stuttering may be recruited as one component of a larger syndrome complex.     

Learning from experience in nonlinear environments: Evidence from a competition scenario

We test people’s ability to learn to estimate a criterion (probability of success in a competition scenario) that requires aggregating information in a nonlinear manner. The learning environments faced by experimental participants are kind in that they are characterized by immediate, accurate feedback involving either naturalistic outcomes (information on winning and/or ranking) or the normatively correct probabilities. We find no evidence of learning from the former and modest learning from the latter, except that a group of participants endowed with a memory aid performed substantially better. However, when the task is restructured such that information should be aggregated in a linear fashion, participants learn to make more accurate assessments. Our experiments highlight the important role played by prior beliefs in learning tasks, the default status of linear aggregation in many inferential judgments, and the difficulty of learning in nonlinear environments even in the presence of veridical feedback.     

Motor activation from visible speech: evidence from stimulus response compatibility

In speech perception, phonetic information can be acquired optically as well as acoustically. The motor theory of speech perception holds that motor control structures are involved in the processing of visible speech, whereas perceptual accounts do not make this assumption. Motor involvement in speech perception was examined by showing participants response-irrelevant movies of a mouth articulating /ba/ or /da/ and asking them to verbally respond with either the same or a different syllable. The letters "Ba" and "Da" appeared on the speaker's mouth to indicate which response was to be performed. A reliable interference effect was observed. In subsequent experiments, perceptual interference was ruled out by using response-unrelated imperative stimuli and by preexposing the relevant stimulus information. Further, it was demonstrated that simple directional features (opening and closing) do not account for the effect. Rather, the present study provides evidence for the view that visible speech is processed up to a late, response-related processing stage, as predicted by the motor theory of speech perception.     

Listeners judge talker sex more efficiently from male than from female vowels

Speech routinely provides cues as to the sex of the talker, in voiced sounds, these cues mainly reflect dimorphism in vocal anatomy. This dimorphism is not symmetrical, however, since during adolescent development, males specifically diverge from a previously shared trajectory with females. We therefore predicted that listeners would show a corresponding perceptual advantage for male sounds in talker-sex discrimination, a hypothesis tested using very brief, one- to eight-cycle vowel segments. The expected performance asymmetry was observed in threshold-like tests of multiple different vowels in Experiments 1-3, and a signal detection design in Experiment 4 helped rule out possible response bias effects. In confirming our counterintuitive prediction, the present study illustrates that a biological and evolutionary perspective can be helpful in understanding indexical cuing in speech.     

Arguments from Ostension

My purpose here is to describe a type of argument characterized by the fact that one of its premises is a directive—i.e. what is expressed by a directive sentence: a general instruction how to proceed or act. This directive premise brings an ostensive mechanism for the inclusion of visual or multimodal elements in an argument. If an argument is an invitation to inference (Robert Pinto), by using such a directive utterance the addresser is inviting the addressee to make an inference from an image, not from a proposition. Hence I will call them arguments from ostension or from deixis.     

Object-based selection from spatially-invariant representations: evidence from a feature-report task

Attention selects objects as well as locations. When attention selects an object's features, observers identify two features from a single object more accurately than two features from two different objects (object-based effect of attention; e.g., Duncan, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 113, 501-517, 1984). Several studies have demonstrated that object-based attention can operate at a late visual processing stage that is independent of objects' spatial information (Awh, Dhaliwal, Christensen, & Matsukura, Psychological Science, 12, 329-334, 2001; Matsukura & Vecera, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 16, 529-536, 2009; Vecera, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 126, 14-18, 1997; Vecera & Farah, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 123, 146-160, 1994). In the present study, we asked two questions regarding this late object-based selection mechanism. In Part I, we investigated how observers' foreknowledge of to-be-reported features allows attention to select objects, as opposed to individual features. Using a feature-report task, a significant object-based effect was observed when to-be-reported features were known in advance but not when this advance knowledge was absent. In Part II, we examined what drives attention to select objects rather than individual features in the absence of observers' foreknowledge of to-be-reported features. Results suggested that, when there was no opportunity for observers to direct their attention to objects that possess to-be-reported features at the time of stimulus presentation, these stimuli must retain strong perceptual cues to establish themselves as separate objects.