Spontaneous use of tools as straws in great apes

Great apes can use multiple tools to extract food embedded in substrates and can invent new ways to exploit those resources. We tested five bonobos, five chimpanzees, and six orangutans in a task in which they had to use (and modify) a tool as a straw to drink the juice located inside a container. Experiment 1 showed that four orangutans and one chimpanzee invented the use of a piece of electric cable to get the juice. Experiment 2 investigated whether subjects could transform a non-functional hose into a functional one by removing blockages that impeded the free flow of juice. Orangutans outperformed chimpanzees and bonobos by differentially removing those blockages that prevented the flow of juice, often doing so before attempting to extract the juice. In Experiment 3, we presented chimpanzees and orangutans with four 3-tool sets (each tool set contained a single straw-like tool) and allowed them to select one tool. Unlike chimpanzees, orangutans succeeded in selecting the straw-like tool above chance levels without having to physically manipulate it. We suggest that orangutans’ superior performance is related to their greater reliance on mouth actions during foraging. Experiment 4 investigated whether orangutans were also capable of selecting the suitable tool not by its appearance, but by the effects that it produced. After witnessing the experimenter blow bubbles or absorb liquid with a functional tool but fail to accomplish the same thing with the non-functional tool, orangutans failed to select the functional tool above chance levels.     

Tool choice on the basis of rigidity in capuchin monkeys

Wild capuchin monkeys select stone tools to crack open nuts on the basis of their weight and friability, two non-visual functional properties. Here, we investigated whether they would select new stick-like tools on the basis of their rigidity. In Experiment 1, subjects faced an out-of-reach reward and a choice of three unfamiliar tools differing in color, diameter, material, and rigidity. In order to retrieve the reward, capuchins needed to select the rigid tool exemplar. Capuchins gathered information regarding tools’ pliability either by (1) manipulating the tools themselves (manipulation condition), (2) observing a human demonstrator repeatedly bending the tools (observation condition), or (3) seeing the tools placed on a platform without any manipulation taking place (visual static condition). Subjects selected the rigid tool above chance levels in both the manipulation and observation conditions, but not in the visual static condition. In Experiment 2, subjects needed to select and use a flexible tool to access a liquid reward (as opposed to the rigid tool, as in previous experiment). Again, capuchins selected above chance levels the appropriate tool (i.e., flexible), thus demonstrating a good appreciation of the relation between the tool properties and the task requirements.     

When does mimicry affect evaluative judgment?

We investigated the effect of subliminally presented happy or angry faces on evaluative judgments when the facial muscles of participants were free to mimic or blocked. We hypothesized and showed that subliminally presented happy expressions lead to more positive judgments of cartoons compared to angry expressions only when facial muscles were not blocked. These results reveal the influence of socially driven embodied processes on affective judgments and have also potential implications for phenomena such as emotional contagion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved).     

Why do you play? The development of the motives for online gaming questionnaire (MOGQ)

Although the majority of research focuses on the risks and disadvantages of online gaming, the present authors suggest that online games also represent new ways of satisfying basic human needs within the conditions of modern society. The aim of our present study was to reveal and operationalize the components of the motivational basis of online gaming. A total 3,818 persons (90.6% males; mean age 20.9 years, SD = 5.81) were recruited through websites providing online games. A combined method of exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis was applied. The results confirmed our preliminary model as we identified seven motivational factors (social, escape, competition, coping, skill development, fantasy, and recreation), which were used to develop the 27-item Motives for Online Gaming Questionnaire (MOGQ). The seven dimensions identified seem to cover the full range of possible motives for gaming, and the MOGQ proved to be an adequate measurement tool to assess these motives.     

The modulation of spatial congruency by object-based attention: analysing the "locus" of the modulation

Earlier studies have demonstrated that spatial cueing differentially reduces stimulus-stimulus congruency (e.g., spatial Stroop) interference but not stimulus-response congruency (e.g., Simon; e.g., Lupiá?ez & Funes, 2005). This spatial cueing modulation over spatial Stroop seems to be entirely attributable to object-based attention (e.g., Luo, Lupiá?ez, Funes, & Fu, 2010). In the present study, two experiments were conducted to further explore whether the cueing modulation of spatial Stroop is object based and/or space based and to analyse the "locus" of this modulation. In Experiment 1, we found that the cueing modulation over spatial Stroop is entirely object based, independent of stimulus-response congruency. In Experiment 2, we observed that the modulation of object-based attention over the spatial Stroop only occurred at a short cue-target interval (i.e., stimulus onset asynchrony; SOA), whereas the stimulus-response congruency effect was not modulated either by object-based or by location-based attentional cueing. The overall pattern of results suggests that the spatial cueing modulation over spatial Stroop arises from object-based attention and occurs at the perceptual stage of processing.     

Animacy in the adjunction of Spanish RCs to complex NPs

The present paper focuses on the role of animacy in the processing of relative clauses (RCs) after complex NPs. We follow research by the Desmet et al. team on Dutch in exploring the role of animacy in Spanish RCs. We present data from a corpus study and two self-paced experiments and we compare the three studies and the Dutch and Spanish results. Our main objective is to fill important gaps in past research on the processing of adjunction ties in Spanish and to offer a more detailed exploration of grain effects in exposure-based accounts. In particular, we have sought both to analyse the match between corpus studies and online processing in Spanish much more closely than it has been until now and to see whether animacy could revert the well-established tendency of Spanish RCs to attach high inside the complex noun phrase.     

Maternal Trauma and Children’s Functioning: The Role of Kinship Social Support

Although research has documented the detrimental effects of maternal trauma on child behavior (Lambert, Holzer, & Hasbun, 2014), the role of extended family support in potentially mitigating the effects of intergenerational transmission of trauma is not clearly understood. With a diverse community sample of 52 trauma-exposed mothers and their children between the ages of 7 and 12, we investigated relationships between kinship social support, maternal trauma exposure severity, maternal posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptom severity, and child behavioral problems. Results showed that kinship social support was negatively related to maternal trauma exposure severity, maternal PTSD symptom severity, child internalizing behaviors, and child externalizing behaviors. Additionally, kinship social support moderated the relationship between maternal trauma exposure severity and child internalizing behaviors. These results have implications in the implementation of interventions aimed at supporting diverse families facing trauma that incorporate extended family networks.     

Schema and deviation effects in remembering repeated unfamiliar stories

In today's globalized world, we frequently encounter unfamiliar events that we may have difficulty comprehending – and in turn remembering – due to a lack of appropriate schemata. This research investigated schema effects in a situation where participants established a complex new schema for an unfamiliar type of story through exposure to four variations. We found that immediate recall increased across subsequent stories and that distortions occurred less frequently – participants built on the emerging schema and gradually established representations of parts of the story that were initially transformed. In recall with delays increasing up to 1 month, quantitative measures indicated forgetting while distortions increased. The second focus of this research was on content and order deviation effects on recall. The content deviation, in contrast with previous repeated-event research, was not remembered well and was associated with lower recall; the order deviation had a similar (but expected) effect. We discuss discrepancies between results of this study and previous literature, which had focused on schemata for familiar events, in relation to stages of schema development: it seems that in unfamiliar repeated events, a complex new schema is in the early stages of formation, where the lack of attentional resources limits active processing of deviations.