Fitting objects into holes: on the development of spatial cognition skills

The authors examined 14- to 26-month-old infants' understanding of the spatial relationships between objects and apertures in an object manipulation task. The task was to insert objects with various cross-sections (circular, square, rectangular, ellipsoid, and triangular) into fitting apertures. A successful solution required the infant to mentally rotate the object to be fit into the aperture and use that information to plan the action. The object was presented standing up in half of the trials; in the other half, it was lying down. The results showed that infants solved the problem consistently from age 22 months and that a successful solution was associated with appropriate preadjustments before the hand arrived with the block to the aperture. No sex differences were found.     

Predictive tracking over occlusions by 4-month-old infants

Two experiments investigated how 16-20-week-old infants visually tracked an object that oscillated on a horizontal trajectory with a centrally placed occluder. To determine the principles underlying infants' tendency to shift gaze to the exiting side before the object arrives, occluder width, oscillation frequency, and motion amplitude were manipulated resulting in occlusion durations between 0.20 and 1.66 s. Through these manipulations, we were able to distinguish between several possible modes of behavior underlying 'predictive' actions at occluders. Four such modes were tested. First, if passage-of-time determines when saccades are made, the tendency to shift gaze over the occluder is expected to be a function of time since disappearance. Second, if visual salience of the exiting occluder edge determines when saccades are made, occluder width would determine the pre-reappearance gaze shifts but not oscillation frequency, amplitude, or velocity. Third, if memory of the duration of the previous occlusion determines when the subjects shift gaze over the occluder, it is expected that the gaze will shift after the same latency at the next occlusion irrespective of whether occlusion duration is changed or not. Finally, if infants base their pre-reappearance gaze shifts on their ability to represent object motion (cognitive mode), it is expected that the latency of the gaze shifts over the occluder is scaled to occlusion duration. Eye and head movements as well as object motion were measured at 240 Hz. In 49% of the passages, the infants shifted gaze to the opposite side of the occluder before the object arrived there. The tendency to make such gaze shifts could not be explained by the passage of time since disappearance. Neither could it be fully explained in terms of visual information present during occlusion, i.e. occluder width. On the contrary, it was found that the latency of the pre-reappearance gaze shifts was determined by the time of object reappearance and that it was a function of all three factors manipulated. The results suggest that object velocity is represented during occlusion and that infants track the object behind the occluder in their 'mind's eye'.     

Action in development

It is argued that cognitive development has to be understood in the functional perspective provided by actions. Actions reflect all aspects of cognitive development including the motives of the child, the problems to be solved, and the constraints and possibilities of the child's body and sensorimotor system. Actions are directed into the future and their control is based on knowledge of what is going to happen next. Such knowledge is available because events are governed by rules and regularities. The planning of actions also requires knowledge of the affordances of objects and events. An important aspect of cognitive development is about how the child acquires such knowledge.     

"I've also experienced loss and fear": Effects of prior similar experience on empathy

Although it is frequently argued that empathy is increased by similar experiences, this idea has rarely been tested. This study investigated the relationship between empathy and prior similar experience. Participants read four different stories and rated the degree of empathy they felt. They also reported the extent to which they had prior similar experience of the events in the stories. We found that these self-reports of prior similar experience increased empathy for the persons in the stories. Similar experience may be an important situational antecedent for feeling empathy for another person. Pointing out similarities among experiences may be a fruitful means of training empathy.     

The Experiences of Guilt and Shame: A Phenomenological–Psychological Study

This study aims at discovering the essential constituents involved in the experiences of guilt and shame. Guilt concerns a subject’s action or omission of action and has a clear temporal unfolding entailing a moment in which the subject lives in a care-free way. Afterwards, this moment undergoes a reconstruction, in the moment of guilt, which constitutes the moment of negligence. The reconstruction is a comprehensive transformation of one’s attitude with respect to one’s ego; one’s action; the object of guilt and the temporal-existential experience. The main constituents concerning shame are its anchorage in the situation to which it refers; its public side involving the experience of being perceptually objectified; the exclusion of social community; the bodily experience; the revelation of an undesired self; and the genesis of shame in terms of a history of frozen now-ness. The article ends with a comparison between guilt and shame.     

Combined eyetracking and keystroke-logging methods for studying cognitive processes in text production

Writers typically spend a certain proportion of time looking back over the text that they have written. This is likely to serve a number of different functions, which are currently poorly understood. In this article, we present two systems, ScriptLog+TimeLine and EyeWrite, that adopt different and complementary approaches to exploring this activity by collecting and analyzing combined eye movement and keystroke data from writers composing extended texts. ScriptLog+TimeLine is a system that is based on an existing keystroke-logging program and uses heuristic, pattern-matching methods to identify reading episodes within eye movement data. EyeWrite is an integrated editor and analysis system that permits identification of the words that the writer fixates and their location within the developing text. We demonstrate how the methods instantiated within these systems can be used to make sense of the large amount of data generated by eyetracking and keystroke logging in order to inform understanding of the cognitive processes that underlie written text production.     

Mood and belief-value correlation

This is an investigation of belief-value distortion as measured by the correlation between sets of beliefs and values for a given attitude object. Correlations were computed for each subject separately. Initial mood levels and mood changes subsequent to ratings of attitudes to nuclear power were investigated in the first two studies. In Study 1 mood changes were positively correlated with attitude. In Study 2, mood levels were positively correlated both with attitude, optimism, and tendency towards extreme belief-value correlations (belief-value distortion). In a third study, attitudes were studied both towards nuclear power and alcohol. There were no clear relations between the two fields of contents. Mood changes were small and inconsistent. However, tendency to act correlated with both optimism and belief-value distortion, also with the level of attitude kept constant. A model relating mood, optimism, belief-value distortion, and action is suggested.     

The power distance reduction hypothesis on a level of reality

An experiment and a replication were conducted, testing the hypothesis that the smaller the actual power distance between a subject and a more powerful other, the stronger the tendency to reduce the power distance between them. Power distance was created by placing the subject in a group of three people plus a supervisor. In the condition of large power distance, the three workers had identical functions. Small power distance was induced by placing the subject at an intermediary power level, above the two workers, but below the supervisor. Two other conditions of small power distance were manipulated in order to assess the effects of the timing of power promotion and the perception of the promotion as caused by the subject's task competence. During the course of the experiment, the supervisor left unexpectedly and the subject had the option of taking over the supervisory role or letting one of his co-workers assume it. In the first experiment, subjects who were at a large power distance chose to replace the supervisor significantly less frequently than subjects in the three small power-distance conditions. The small power-distance conditions did not differ from each other. The replication with two small power-distances conditions produced the same results. Both experiments took place in a natural setting.