ENVISIONING ONESELF AS A LEADER: COMPARISONS OF WOMEN AND MEN IN SPAIN AND THE UNITED STATES

In an examination of aspirations for leadership in the United States and Spain, male and female students envisioned themselves as a chief executive officer, vice president, or mid-level manager in an industry with a feminine image (clothing manufacturing) or a masculine image (auto manufacturing). Although men and women perceived these roles as equally positive, women perceived them as less possible and less facilitative of close relationships and gender relationships. Other gender effects included more positive perceptions of the roles by women in the feminine industry and by men in the masculine industry. Cross-nationally men perceived the roles as more positive than women did only in Spain, and U.S. students perceived the roles as more possible than Spanish students did.     

Achievement Arousal Inhibits Helping Behavior Only in Males

The experiment reported here tested the hypothesis that achievement arousal inhibits the helping behavior of males but not females. Subjects were given 20 minutes to work on a task while faced with an opportunity to help a graduate student by stapling questionnaires. Performance on the task was described in the high-achievement-arousal condition as assessing intelligence and leadership ability, and in the no-achievement-arousal condition as merely yielding research data on processing verbal information. Males proved significantly more likely to help in the no-achievement-arousal condition than in the high-arousal condition, whereas females'helping was not affected by achievement-arousal. Yet, consistent with other research on helping, the majority of both male and female subjects did not help at all.     

Face recognition algorithms and the other‐race effect: computational mechanisms for a developmental contact hypothesis

People recognize faces of their own race more accurately than faces of other races. The “contact” hypothesis suggests that this “other‐race effect” occurs as a result of the greater experience we have with own‐ versus other‐race faces. The computational mechanisms that may underlie different versions of the contact hypothesis were explored in this study. We replicated the other‐race effect with human participants and evaluated four classes of computational face recognition algorithms for the presence of an other‐race effect. Consistent with the predictions of a developmental contact hypothesis, “experience‐based models” demonstrated an other‐race effect only when the representational system was developed through experience that warped the perceptual space in a way that was sensitive to the overall structure of the model's experience with faces of different races. When the model's representation relied on a feature set optimized to encode the information in the learned faces, experience‐based algorithms recognized minority‐race faces more accurately than majority‐race faces. The results suggest a developmental learning process that warps the perceptual space to enhance the encoding of distinctions relevant for own‐race faces. This feature space limits the quality of face representations for other‐race faces.     

A COMPARISON OF THE FOCAL ATTENTION AND CONTEXTUAL THEORIES AS THEY RELATE TO THE GRAPHIC SIMILARITY AND THE LEVEL OF FREQUENCY OF THE WORDS TAUGHT

Two theories which have been advanced for the purpose of explaining word recognition learning through visual exposure are the focal attention and contextual theories. Previous research has not provided a clear‐cut answer as to which theory best explains this type of word learning. The present study was undertaken to examine the effect of the message level of the context in which the word was presented on the immediate and delayed recall of first graders. The subjects were 160 first graders from three schools randomly assigned to one of four varying instructional methods. The four words taught were presented in lists which varied in graphic similarity and in frequency. A three‐way analysis of variance was performed on the words learned and on the words remembered. The results indicated that only frequency and graphic similarity had a significant effect on immediate recall and only graphic similarity significantly affected the delayed recall. It was concluded that neither the focal attention or contextual theory offered a powerful explanation for words learned through visual exposure.     

Highs and Lows in Motor Control Development

Abstract

Motor control is classically described as relying on two components: anticipatory control (feedforward processing) and online control (feedback processing). Here we aimed to unveil the developmental steps of both feedback and feedforward control in 5–10 years old children, using a simple and ecological task. We manipulated object’s weight in a reach-to-displace paradigm. When the weight was known before lifting it, anticipatory processes were quantifiable during the reaching phase. Conversely, an unknown weight triggered online corrections during the displacing phase. Movement kinematics revealed that children anticipate this objet property as young as 5 y-o. This anticipation becomes adequate around 7 y-o and is paralleled by poor online corrections. This simple yet relevant paradigm should allow quantifying deviations from neurotypical patterns in disorders of motor control.