A tool to act blind? Object-assisted eye-covering as a self-handicapping behavior and social play signal in Balinese long-tailed macaques

Animal Cognition - Self-handicapping behaviors evolved as honest signals that reliably reflect the quality of their performers. In playful activities, self-handicapping is described as...     

Sustainable mobility choices: Exploring the impact of consumers' values,attitudes, perceived behavioural control and subjective norms on the likelihood to choose sustainable mobility options

This study explores consumers' behaviour regarding sustainable mobility options. A mixed-methods approach was adopted to examine the impact of bio-altruistic values, egoistic values, environmental attitudes, attitudes regarding sustainable mobility, perceived behavioural control and subjective norms on the likelihood of choosing sustainable mobility options. To collect the data, an online survey was applied to a sample of 645 Portuguese consumers, which included one single non-mandatory open-ended question to understand which factors could contribute to increase respondents' likelihood to choose more sustainable transport modes. As most studies in the mobility field are quantitative, combining both quantitative and qualitative data provided a greater in-depth analysis with richer findings. Firstly, findings revealed that attitudes towards sustainable mobility, subjective norms, perceived behaviour control, and egoistic values influence the likelihood of choosing sustainable mobility options. However, environmental attitudes, altruistic and biospheric values do not impact this choice. Secondly, consumers highlight that the existence of a broad public transport network, safe bicycle lanes, and accessible prices would contribute to their likelihood of adopting more sustainable mobility behaviours. The content analysis of 402 answers allowed to discover new dimensions that influence sustainable mobility behaviour, such as safety, respect towards bicycle users, mindset adjustment, willpower, and especially physical efforts associated with long distances, bad weather, orography, and the difficulty to transport materials or other people. Based on both quantitative and qualitative findings, the paper provides key recommendations for politicians, urban planners, and transport organisations, that according to respondents, would contribute to increase their use of sustainable mobility.     

Exploratory study of best friendship dissolution characteristics and psychological difficulties during early adolescence

Few studies have evaluated best friendship dissolutions and especially the circumstances surrounding the dissolutions. In this exploratory study of young adolescents (N = 273, M_age = 11.83 years; 51% boys), we investigate young adolescents' experiences with two types of best friendship dissolution (complete dissolutions, downgrade dissolutions) and two characteristics of such experiences: initiation status (self- versus friend-initiation) and emotional reactions (degree of happiness, anger, sadness, and embarrassment). We also consider whether these characteristics of best friendship dissolutions are related to psychological difficulties (loneliness, depressive symptoms). Results indicated that most young adolescents perceive their friends initiated their recent complete and downgrade dissolutions. When young adolescents did initiate their complete dissolutions, however, they reported less negative (anger) and more positive (happiness) emotional responses. Initiation status was not related to psychological difficulties, but variability in several types of emotional responses (e.g., embarrassment) was related to variability in loneliness and depressive symptoms. Findings underscore the importance of considering not only the type of dissolution, but also the circumstances surrounding dissolutions, during early adolescence.     

Pause measures during reading and recall in serial list learning

An investigation is reported into pausing and grouping during the serial learning of letter strings, when presented randomly by length and when presented in ascending order. Mean pause times for the reading and recall of longer lists were significantly greater than for lists of shorter span due to extended pausing at specific list positions. In general, reading rhythms were duplicated during recall. Subjects were highly consistent in maintaining their level of pause duration across lists and responded to additions in list length by increasing their number of groups, not by increasing group size. Triadic sequences were the most popular form of spontaneous organization. Pausing measures are discussed as indices of organizational strategies.     

Auditory evoked brain responses: Intensity functions from bipolar human scalp recordings

Average evoked brain responses were computed from four simultaneous recordings during binaural tone stimulation at 10 intensity levels. Amplitudes and latencies were measured for the prominent components, and linear regression coefficients were computed. The results indicate that the sensitivity of the evoked response to stimulus intensity is dependent upon the selection of the appropriate measure. Linear amplitude functions were demonstrated. Additional research relating these responses to psychophysical measures is suggested.     

Detection of extraneous signals during sentence recognition

In two separate experiments, 40 Ss were presented with recorded sentences during each of which a click occurred. Ss had to depress a key as soon as they heard the click. RTs were f aster when the click was located at the major syntactic break of the sentence compared with RTs to clicks not at a break. This confirmed the hypothesis that processing load is a function of the surface structure of sentences, although the role of minor breaks was not clear. A second finding was that RTs were slower when the click was in the first rather than in the second half of the sentence. This can also be explained in terms of differential processing loads.