Assessing Preferences Among Behavioral Interventions With Japanese Parents of Children With Developmental Disabilities

As the cultural dynamic continues to become increasingly complex, it is critical to assess cultural factors that influence practice. The present study considers the treatment preferences of Japanese mothers of children with developmental disabilities. After answering demographic questions, each participant was given four scenarios and asked how they would respond by choosing one of four interventions (differential reinforcement, ignoring, reprimanding, and time-out). Overall, we found that parents preferred differential reinforcement strategies the most. Moreover, parents who reported that their children had a history of involvement with applied behavior analysis were especially likely to choose differential reinforcement. Implications for future research and practice are provided.     

Numerical competence in rats (Rattus norvegicus): Davis and Bradford (1986) extended

The task of rats (Rattus norvegicus) was to enter 1 box of a defined ordinal number among an array of boxes. In Experiments 1 and 2, the rats correctly chose the 4th box from arrays of 6 and 12 boxes, respectively. In Experiments 3 and 4, in which the ordinal number of the correct box was increased in a graduated fashion, they were able to select the correct box even when its position was higher than 10th among 12 and 18 boxes, respectively. In Experiment 5, the possibility that the rats had used cues to the openability of the box doors was ruled out. In Experiments 6 and 7, the rats succeeded in the task even when the total number of boxes was varied from trial to trial. In Experiment 8, both small- and large-sized boxes were used to control for the possibility of using the cumulative length of the boxes as a cue. Overall, the results suggest that performance was based on numerical cues. Intentional acts were occasionally observed but appeared not to be essential for solving the task.     

The influence of adults' actions on children's inferences about word meanings

This article first establishes the effect of adults' actions on children's inferences about the shape and material of solid objects, based on data from Japanese 2-, 4-, and 6-year-olds. Japanese 2-year-olds are already sensitive to adults' actions in making inferences, and children become more adept at this as they become older. The invariance of the phenomenon of the effect of actions is then discussed in terms of three of its aspects: across age groups, across languages (the universality of the effect), and across tasks in lexical development. It is suggested that while specific linguistic characteristics (e.g., the means of individuation of entities), and complexity of object shape probably influence the effect of actions, action effects may have a potentially invariant/universal aspect.     

Enhanced memory for the wolf in sheep’s clothing:: Facial trustworthiness modulates face-trait associative memory

Our decision about whether to trust and cooperate with someone is influenced by the individual’s facial appearance despite its limited predictive power. Thus, remembering trustworthy-looking cheaters is more important than remembering untrustworthy-looking cheaters because we are more likely to trust and cooperate with the former, resulting in a higher risk of unreciprocated cooperation. The present study investigated whether our mind adaptively copes with this problem by enhancing memory for trustworthy-looking cheaters. Participants played a debt game, wherein they learned to discriminate among good, neutral, and bad lenders, who respectively charged no, moderate, and high interest on the debt. Each lender had either a trustworthy- or untrustworthy-looking face. A subsequent memory test revealed that participants remembered the bad traits of trustworthy-looking lenders more accurately than those of untrustworthy-looking lenders. The results demonstrate enhanced memory for trustworthy-looking cheaters, or wolves in sheep’s clothing, implying that humans are equipped with protective mechanisms against disguised, unfaithful signs of trustworthiness.     

Baby arithmetic: one object plus one tone

Recent studies using a violation-of-expectation task suggest that preverbal infants are capable of recognizing basic arithmetical operations involving visual objects. There is still debate, however, over whether their performance is based on any expectation of the arithmetical operations, or on a general perceptual tendency to prefer visually familiar and complex displays. Here we provide new evidence that 5-month-old infants recognize basic arithmetic operations across sensory modalities. Using a violation-of-expectation task that eliminated the possibility of the familiarity and complexity preference, 5-month-old infants were presented alternatively with two types of arithmetical events: the expected, correct outcomes of operations (1 object+1 tone=2 objects and 1 object+2 tones=3 objects) and the unexpected, incorrect ones (1 object+2 tones=2 objects and 1 object+1 tone=3 objects). Results showed that subjects looked significantly longer at the unexpected events than at the expected events, suggesting that infants are able to recognize basic arithmetic operations across sensory modalities.     

Interference from irrelevant features on visual discrimination by macaques (Macaca fuscata): a behavioral analogue of the human Stroop effect

To study the operation of selective attention in a conflict situation with automatic processes, we trained 4 Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) extensively on a manual go/no-go task. The monkey had to discriminate either the color, shape, motion direction, or location of a visual stimulus. In each trial, the behavioral meaning of the relevant feature (go or no-go) could either be congruent or incongruent with irrelevant features of the same stimulus. Reaction times were slowed, and error rates increased when irrelevant stimulus features were incongruent with the required response. The effects were obtained when the monkey attended to the color, shape, or motion direction, but not when it attended to the location of the stimulus. The effects were cumulative so that the interference from 1 incongruent feature was smaller than that from 2 incongruent features. We propose that the present paradigm provides a behavioral analogue of the human Stroop effect.     

Do infants recognize the Arcimboldo images as faces? Behavioral and near-infrared spectroscopic study

Arcimboldo images induce the perception of faces when shown upright despite the fact that only nonfacial objects such as vegetables and fruits are painted. In the current study, we examined whether infants recognize a face in the Arcimboldo images by using the preferential looking technique and near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). In the first experiment, we measured looking preference between upright and inverted Arcimboldo images among 5- and 6-month-olds and 7- and 8-month-olds. We hypothesized that if infants perceive the Arcimboldo images as faces, they would prefer the upright images to the inverted ones. We found that only 7- and 8-month-olds significantly preferred upright images, suggesting that they could perceive the Arcimboldo images as faces. In the second experiment, we measured hemodynamic responses using NIRS. Based on the behavioral data, we hypothesized that 7- and 8-month-olds would show different neural activity for upright and inverted Arcimboldo images, as do adults. Therefore, we measured hemodynamic responses in 7- and 8-month-olds while they were looking at upright and inverted Arcimboldo images. Their responses were then compared with the baseline activation during the presentation of individual vegetables. We found that the concentration of oxyhemoglobin increased in the left temporal area during the presentation of the upright images compared with the baseline during the presentation of vegetables. The results of the two experiments suggest that (a) the ability to recognize the upright Arcimboldo images as faces develops at around 7 or 8 months of age and (b) processing of the upright Arcimboldo images is related to the left temporal area of the brain.