Local temporal distinctiveness does not benefit auditory verbal and spatial serial recall

In the present study, we examined the role of randomly arranged temporal intervals preceding and following items (pre- and postitem intervals, respectively) in auditory verbal and spatial recall tasks. The duration of the pre- and postitem intervals did not affect serial recall performance. This finding calls into question (1) the suggestion that the interval following an item permits the consolidation of information in memory, even in a relatively demanding spatial task, and (2) the prediction that temporal distinctiveness should improve performance. The latter was explored further by showing that in contrast to our empirical data, a relative temporal distinctiveness model produced significant increases in recall performance when pre- and postitem intervals increased. The results are discussed with regard to recent studies revisiting the role of temporal isolation in short-term serial memory.     

A behavioral study of distraction by vibrotactile novelty

Past research has demonstrated that the occurrence of unexpected task-irrelevant changes in the auditory or visual sensory channels captured attention in an obligatory fashion, hindering behavioral performance in ongoing auditory or visual categorization tasks and generating orientation and re-orientation electrophysiological responses. We report the first experiment extending the behavioral study of cross-modal distraction to tactile novelty. Using a vibrotactile-visual cross-modal oddball task and a bespoke hand-arm vibration device, we found that participants were significantly slower at categorizing the parity of visually presented digits following a rare and unexpected change in vibrotactile stimulation (novelty distraction), and that this effect extended to the subsequent trial (postnovelty distraction). These results are in line with past research on auditory and visual novelty and fit the proposition of common and amodal cognitive mechanisms for the involuntary detection of change.     

Why are auditory novels distracting? Contrasting the roles of novelty, violation of expectation and stimulus change

Past studies show that novel auditory stimuli, presented in the context of an otherwise repeated sound, capture participants’ attention away from a focal task, resulting in measurable behavioral distraction. Novel sounds are traditionally defined as rare and unexpected but past studies have not sought to disentangle these concepts directly. Using a cross-modal oddball task, we contrasted these aspects orthogonally by manipulating the base rate and conditional probabilities of sound events. We report for the first time that behavioral distraction does not result from a sound’s novelty per se but from the violation of the cognitive system’s expectation based on the learning of conditional probabilities and, to some extent, the occurrence of a perceptual change from one sound to another.     

The power of well-connected arguments: early sensitivity to the connective because

Connectives, such as because, are routinely used by parents when addressing their children, yet we do not know to what extent children are sensitive to their use. Given children's early developing abilities to evaluate testimony and produce arguments containing connectives, it was hypothesized that young children would show an appropriate reaction to the presence of connectives. Three experiments were conducted to test this hypothesis. In each, two informants gave contradicting statements regarding the location of an object and justified their positions by using a similar argument. Only one of the informants used the connective because to link his argument to the statement. In each experiment, the 3-year-olds performed at chance in selecting choices containing the connective because, but the 4- and 5-year-olds performed above chance. Moreover, in Experiments 2 and 3, the 4-year-olds, 5-year-olds, and adults performed significantly better than the 3-year-olds. These findings show that 4-year-olds, 5-year-olds, and adults are sensitive to the presence of connectives. An interpretation of the difference in performance between the 3-year-olds and the 4- and 5-year-olds in terms of metarepresentational skills is suggested.     

Disruption of verbal-spatial serial memory by extraneous air-traffic speech

The disruptive impact of task-extraneous air-traffic radio speech on a task involving the serial-recall of combined verbal and spatial stimuli (7 letters and their locations) that were broadly analogous to information about aircraft callsigns and movements was examined. Regardless of the dimension to be recalled (identity or spatial location), accuracy was significantly disrupted by the air-traffic speech. Prior knowledge as to which dimension to recall did not affect accuracy and did not interact with the disruptive effect of air-traffic speech, but did extend the time to initiate a response to the first item. The results are discussed with reference to theories of the irrelevant sound effect and stimulus-dimension binding in short-term memory. The vulnerability of cognitive processing related to air-traffic management and similar work environments is also discussed.     

Publication Ethics from the Perspective of PhD Students of Health Sciences: A Limited Experience

Publication ethics, an important subtopic of science ethics, deals with determination of the misconducts of science in performing research or in the dissemination of ideas, data and products. Science, the main features of which are secure, reliable and ethically obtained data, plays a major role in shaping the society. As long as science maintains its quality by being based on reliable and ethically obtained data, it will be possible to maintain its role in shaping the society. This article is devoted to the presentation of opinions of PhD candidate students in health sciences in Ankara concerning publication ethics. The data obtained from 143 PhD students from the fields of medicine, dentistry, pharmacy and veterinary reveal limited but unique experiences. It also shows that plagiarism is one of the worst issues in the publication ethics from the perspective of these young academics.     

Horses discriminate between human facial and vocal expressions of sadness and joy

Animal Cognition - Communication of emotions plays a key role in intraspecific social interactions and likely in interspecific interactions. Several studies have shown that animals perceive human...