Grammatical gender in German: a case for linguistic relativity?

The "principle of linguistic relativity" holds that, by way of grammatical categorization, language affects the conceptual representations of its speakers. Formal gender systems are a case in point, albeit a particularly controversial one: Previous studies obtained broadly diverging data, thus giving rise to conflicting conclusions. To a large extent, this incoherence is related to task differences and methodological problems. Here, a priming design is presented that avoids previous problems, as it prevents participants from employing gender information in a strategic manner. Four experiments with German native speakers show priming effects of the prime's grammatical gender on animate and nonanimate targets, an effect for the prime's biological gender on animate targets, but no effect for the prime's biological gender on nonanimate targets, and thus speak against an effect of language on thought for German gender.     

Structural priming across cognitive domains: from simple arithmetic to relative-clause attachment

In the two experiments reported here, we uncovered evidence for shared structural representations between arithmetic and language. Specifically, we primed subjects using mathematical equations either with or without parenthetical groupings, such as 80 - (9 + 1) × 5 or 80 - 9 + 1 × 5, and then presented a target sentence fragment, such as "The tourist guide mentioned the bells of the church that . . .," which subjects had to complete. When the mathematical equations were solved correctly, their structure influenced the noun phrase--for example, either "the bells of the church" or "the church," respectively--that subjects chose to attach their sentence completion to. These experiments provide the first demonstration of cross-domain structural priming from mathematics to language. They highlight the importance of global structural representations at a very high level of abstraction and have potentially far-reaching implications regarding the domain generality of structural representations.     

How incidental values from the environment affect decisions about money, risk, and delay

How different are ￡0.50 and ￡1.50, "a small chance" and "a good chance," or "three months" and "nine months"? Our studies show that people behave as if the differences between these values are altered by incidental everyday experiences. Preference for a ￡1.50 lottery rather than a ￡0.50 lottery was stronger among individuals exposed to intermediate supermarket prices than among those exposed to lower or higher prices. Preference for "a good chance" rather than "a small chance" of winning a lottery was stronger among participants who predicted intermediate probabilities of rain than among those who predicted lower or higher chances of rain. Preference for consumption in "three months" rather than "nine months" was stronger among participants who planned for an intermediate birthday than among participants who planned for a sooner or later birthday. These fluctuations directly challenge economic accounts that translate monies, risks, and delays into subjective equivalents with stable functions. The decision-by-sampling model-in which subjective values are rank positions constructed from comparisons with samples-predicts these effects and indicates a primary role for sampling in decision making.     

Contextual modulation of reading rate for direct versus indirect speech quotations

In human communication, direct speech (e.g., Mary said: “I’m hungry”) is perceived to be more vivid than indirect speech (e.g., Mary said [that] she was hungry). However, the processing consequences of this distinction are largely unclear. In two experiments, participants were asked to either orally (Experiment 1) or silently (Experiment 2, eye-tracking) read written stories that contained either a direct speech or an indirect speech quotation. The context preceding those quotations described a situation that implied either a fast-speaking or a slow-speaking quoted protagonist. It was found that this context manipulation affected reading rates (in both oral and silent reading) for direct speech quotations, but not for indirect speech quotations. This suggests that readers are more likely to engage in perceptual simulations of the reported speech act when reading direct speech as opposed to meaning-equivalent indirect speech quotations, as part of a more vivid representation of the former.     

Accounting for successful control of implicit racial bias: the roles of association activation, response monitoring, and overcoming bias

Individuals who are primarily internally motivated to respond without prejudice show less bias on implicit measures than individuals who are externally motivated or unmotivated to respond without prejudice. However, it is not clear why these individuals exhibit less implicit bias than others. We used the Quad model to examine motivation-based individual differences in three processes that have been proposed to account for this effect: activation of associations, overcoming associations, and response monitoring. Participants completed an implicit measure of stereotyping (Study 1) or racial attitudes (Study 2). Modeling of the data revealed that individuals who were internally (but not externally) motivated to respond without prejudice showed enhanced detection and reduced activation of biased associations, suggesting that these processes may be key to achieving unbiased responding.     

Early electro-cortical correlates of inspection time task performance

The concept of general intelligence (g) summarizes the well established finding that scores on separate cognitive tasks are positively correlated, indicating a trait common to many aspects of information processing. Inspection time is a well-established correlate of IQ, where those of a higher IQ can correctly identify a briefly presented stimulus with a greater level of accuracy than those of a lower IQ. This study used two age-matched samples, selected on the basis of their scores on Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices from the undergraduate population of Bangor University. In order to address the confound of inspection time and IQ of previous ITT-ERP research, each participant of the presented study performed an IT task with the same five levels of stimulus duration while undergoing 64-channel EEG recording. The high IQ group made significantly fewer errors at each level of stimulus duration and exhibited a significantly larger N1 response. N1 latency and other ERP components did not distinguish the two IQ groups. Given the specificity of ERP group differences to the N1, the results of the present study suggest that the link between IT performance and g is attributable to individual differences in directing attention to a spatial region.     

Truth Approximation, Social Epistemology, and Opinion Dynamics

This paper highlights some connections between work on truth approximation and work in social epistemology, in particular work on peer disagreement. In some of the literature on truth approximation, questions have been addressed concerning the efficiency of research strategies for approximating the truth. So far, social aspects of research strategies have not received any attention in this context. Recent findings in the field of opinion dynamics suggest that this is a mistake. How scientists exchange and take into account information about each others’ beliefs may greatly influence the accuracy and speed with which the scientific community as a whole approximates the truth. On the other hand, social epistemologists concerned with peer disagreement have so far neglected the question of how practices of responding to disagreements with peers fare with respect to the goal of approximating the truth. Again, work on opinion dynamics shows that this may be a mistake, and that how we ought to respond to disagreements with our peers may depend on the specific purposes of our investigations.     

On the stability of instability: Optimising the reliability of intra-subject variability of reaction times

While reaction times have been traditionally aggregated using measures of central tendency, interest in higher moments of the reaction time distribution, particularly intra-subject variability (ISV), has grown in recent years. However it is unclear to what extent individual differences in these higher moments are stable across time, reflecting trait-like features. The present study compares the reliability of a number of metrics for higher moments of the reaction time distribution on a battery of speeded tasks, and supplements these analyses with a Monte Carlo analysis of the go no-go task. The reliability of ISV is shown to be dependent on both the metric used and the number of trials used to calculate them. However, when using sufficient trials and appropriate metrics, ISV shows good test-retest and odd-even reliability. This study has important practical implications for the design and analysis of studies into ISV, as well as theoretical importance for the trait concept of ISV.     

The chronic psychosocial stress paradigm in male tree shrews: evaluation of a novel animal model for depressive disorders

To improve our knowledge of the causal mechanisms of stress-related disorders such as depression, we need animal models that mirror the situation in patients. One promising model is the chronic psychosocial stress paradigm in male tree shrews, which is based on the territorial behaviour of these animals that can be used to establish naturally occurring challenging situations under experimental control in the laboratory. Co-existence of two males in visual and olfactory contact leads to a stable dominant-subordinate relationship, with subordinates showing distinct stress-induced behavioural and neuroendocrine alterations that are comparable to the symptoms observed during episodes of depression in patients such as constantly elevated circulating glucocorticoid hormones due to a chronic hyperactivity of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. To elucidate whether the chronic psychosocial stress model in tree shrews besides its "face validity" for depression also has "predictive validity", we treated subordinate tree shrews with the tricyclic antidepressant clomipramine and found a time-dependent restoration of both endocrine and behavioural parameters. In contrast, the anxiolytic diazepam was ineffective. Although the chronic psychosocial stress model in tree shrews requires further validation, it has sufficient face, predictive, and construct validity to become an interesting non-rodent model for research on the etiology and pathophysiology of depression.