Judgments of Monkey’s (Macaca mulatta) Facial Expressions by Humans: Does Housing Condition “Affect” Countenance?

The Psychological Record - The ability to interpret facial expressions of others is one of the more important abilities possessed by humans. However, is it possible for humans to interpret the...     

The Importance of Context in the Genetic Transmission of U.S. Party Identification

In this study, we discuss one example where behavior genetic findings vary greatly across political contexts. We present original findings on how party identification is heritable around the 2008 election on a sample of twins from Minnesota. As this is in contrast with findings from the late 1980s and with how a mid‐2000 study interpreted their results, we explain how the increasing partisan ideological polarization could be responsible for these seemingly contradictory findings. In the Minnesota sample, we show a genetic correlation between party identification and ideology, a finding consistent in the political science literature. We highlight how heritability of political characteristics, like all others, is population specific and highly context dependent stressing its nondeterministic nature.     

The Role of Surface Similarity in Analogical Retrieval: Bridging the Gap Between the Naturalistic and the Experimental Traditions

Blanchette and Dunbar (2000) have claimed that when participants are allowed to draw on their own source analogs in the service of analogical argumentation, retrieval is less constrained by surface similarity than traditional experiments suggest. In two studies, we adapted this production paradigm to control for the potentially distorting effects of analogy fabrication and uneven availability of close and distant sources in memory. Experiment 1 assessed whether participants were reminded of central episodes from popular movies while generating analogies for superficially similar versus superficially dissimilar target situations. In Experiment 2, we modified this procedure to assess the retrieval of autobiographic memories, more familiar to participants than fictional episodes. Both studies revealed a strong effect of surface similarity on the retrieval of participants' own sources, thus suggesting that the superficial bias typically observed in experimental studies—and simulated by most computational models—does not originate in a lack of ecological validity.     

Development of Different Forms of Skill Learning Throughout the Lifespan

The acquisition of complex motor, cognitive, and social skills, like playing a musical instrument or mastering sports or a language, is generally associated with implicit skill learning (SL). Although it is a general view that SL is most effective in childhood, and such skills are best acquired if learning starts early, this idea has rarely been tested by systematic empirical studies on the developmental pathways of SL from childhood to old age. In this paper, we challenge the view that childhood and early school years are the prime time for skill learning by tracking age‐related changes in performance in three different paradigms of SL. We collected data from participants between 7 and 87 years for (1) a Serial Reaction Time Task (SRT) testing the learning of motor sequences, (2) an Artificial Grammar Learning (AGL) task testing the extraction of regularities from auditory sequences, and (3) Probabilistic Category Learning in the Weather Prediction task (WP), a non‐sequential categorization task. Results on all three tasks show that adolescence and adulthood are the most efficient periods for skill learning, since instead of becoming less and less effective with age, SL improves from childhood into adulthood and then later declines with aging.     

Student-produced representations as a means for interrupting the flow of an interview / Representaciones producidas por una alumna para interrumpir el flujo de una entrevista

Abstract

This work provides evidence that children as young as six years old successfully leverage written representations to their own purposes. During a modified clinical interview, Maggie created an idiosyncratic written representation to negotiate understanding of the interview task. In this move, Maggie shifted her role in the interview from sharing her own thinking to understanding the interviewer’s thinking. Her representations were not strictly for communication but also for control. This fleeting but illuminating episode points to young children’s intuitive perspective on written representations as a cultural tool.     

A first grade student’s exploration of variable and variable notation / Una alumna de primer grado explora las variables y su notación

Abstract

This paper presents a case study of a first grade student to illustrate the diversity of her understandings related to variables and variable notation. While prior research has documented secondary school students’ difficulties with variables and variable notation, we identify many productive understandings in this much younger student, leading us to question the prevailing argument that students might have difficulties with variables due mostly to their own limitations. We draw our data from a teaching experiment that explored functional relationships. Individual interviews were carried out with a subset of the students in the experiment prior to, as well as mid-way through and at the end of the experiment. This paper focuses on a set of three interviews with one of the first grade students. We illustrate the shifts that occurred in the student’s understandings about variables and variable notation across as well as within each of the three interviews.     

Money talks in attention bias modification: Reward in a dot-probe task affects attentional biases

Attention bias modification (ABM) aimed at correcting dysfunctional biases in anxiety patients has met with only mild success. Inspired by recent studies showing large effects of financial reward upon attention shifts, we contrasted effects of traditional dot-probe ABM and reward upon attention biases in a between-subject 2 × 2 design. Twenty-seven participants in group cognitive behavioural therapy (GCBT) for social anxiety disorder (SAD) were randomly assigned to undergo six sessions of a dot-probe task consisting of ABM or placebo ABM along with random or high reward following neutral stimuli. There was no influence of ABM on participants' attention bias over and above the influence of GCBT. Reward, however, had a strong influence on attention bias. Neither ABM nor reward reduced SAD symptoms over and above the effects of GCBT. The results add to the growing evidence that benefits of ABM through dot-probe training are unreliable but suggest on the other hand that rewarding attention may strongly influence dysfunctional attention biases.