Two-category place representations persist over body rotations

We explored a system that constructs environment-centered frames of reference and coordinates memory for the azimuth of an object in an enclosed space. For one group, we provided two environmental cues (doors): one in the front, and one in the rear. For a second group, we provided two object cues: a front and a rear cue. For a third group, we provided no external cues; we assumed that for this group, their reference frames would be determined by the orthogonal geometry of the floor-and-wall junction that divides a space in half or into multiple territories along the horizontal continuum. Using Huttenlocher, Hedges, and Duncan’s (Psychological Review 98: 352-376, 1991) category-adjustment model (cue-based fuzzy boundary version) to fit the data, we observed different reference frames than have been seen in prior studies involving two-dimensional domains. The geometry of the environment affected all three conditions and biased the remembered object locations within a two-category (left vs. right) environmental frame. The influence of the environmental geometry remained observable even after the participants’ heading within the environment changed due to a body rotation, attenuating the effect of the front but not of the rear cue. The door and object cues both appeared to define boundaries of spatial categories when they were used for reorientation. This supports the idea that both types of cues can assist in environment-centered memory formation.     

Distraction shrinks space

Research investigating how people remember the distance of paths they walk has shown two apparently conflicting effects of experience during encoding on subsequent distance judgments. By the feature accumulation effect, discrete path features such as turns, houses, or other landmarks cause an increase in remembered distance. By the distractor effect, performance of a concurrent task during path encoding causes a decrease in remembered distance. In this study, we ask the following: What are the conditions that determine whether the feature accumulation or the distractor effect dominates distortions of space? In two experiments, blindfolded participants were guided along two legs of a right triangle while reciting nonsense syllables. On some trials, one of the two legs contained features: horizontally mounted car antennas (gates) that bent out of the way as participants walked past. At the end of the second leg, participants either indicated the remembered path leg lengths using their hands in a ratio estimation task or attempted to walk, unguided, straight back to the beginning. In addition to response mode, visual access to the paths and time between encoding and response were manipulated to determine whether these factors would affect feature accumulation or distractor effects. Path legs with added features were remembered as shorter than those without, but this result was significant only in the haptic response mode data. This finding suggests that when people form spatial memory representations with the intention of navigating in room-scale spaces, interfering with information accumulation substantially distorts spatial memory.     

Mad and glad: Musically induced emotions have divergent impact on morals

Moral judgments can be positive or negative: we can judge action as good or wrong. Here we show that good judgments and wrong judgments are influenced by incidental emotions. Using instrumental music as an induction method, we show that anger, but not happiness, increases the tendency to judge actions as wrong (Experiment 1). We also show that happiness increases the tendency to praise actions as both good and obligatory, while anger reduces these judgments (Experiment 2). These findings extend the literature on emotions and moral judgment by demonstrating impact of anger and happiness, and by contrasting goodness and wrongness in their emotional valence. The findings also show that music can have a significant impact on moral judgment. This is important because music is a highly prevalent situational variable. The use of instrumental music may have advantages over other induction techniques because it does not carry specific semantic cues that might encourage people to think about morality.     

Real relationship,working alliance,transference/countertransference and outcome in time-limited counseling and psychotherapy

Six client/therapist dyads (three therapists each working with two clients) were studied to determine how the real relationship unfolds over the course of time-limited treatment and how this unfolding relates to the development of the client/therapist working alliance, client transference, and therapist countertransference. We also examined how these indices of the relationship fluctuate as a function of treatment outcome. Results indicate that in general for all six dyads, therapists’ and clients’ ratings of the real relationship and working alliance were strong throughout treatment. However, patterns of real relationship and working alliance over the course of treatment varied between dyads categorized as more vs. less successful. Therapists’ countertransference was low, as was client transference, but differences in ratings were evident when the dyads were classified by outcome.     

A critical review of the “enculturation hypothesis”: the effects of human rearing on great ape social cognition

Numerous investigators have argued that early ontogenetic immersion in sociocultural environments facilitates cognitive developmental change in human-reared great apes more characteristic of Homo sapiens than of their own species. Such revamping of core, species-typical psychological systems might be manifest, according to this argument, in the emergence of mental representational competencies, a set of social cognitive skills theoretically consigned to humans alone. Human-reared great apes capacity to engage in true imitation, in which both the means and ends of demonstrated actions are reproduced with fairly high rates of fidelity, and laboratory great apes failure to do so, has frequently been interpreted as reflecting an emergent understanding of intentionality in the former. Although this epigenetic model of the effects of enculturation on social cognitive systems may be well-founded and theoretically justified in the biological literature, alternative models stressing behavioral as opposed to representational change have been largely overlooked. Here I review some of the controversy surrounding enculturation in great apes, and present an alternative nonmentalistic version of the enculturation hypothesis that can also account for enhanced imitative performance on object-oriented problem-solving tasks in human-reared animals.     

What counts as knowing? The development of conceptual and procedural knowledge of counting from kindergarten through Grade 2

The development of conceptual and procedural knowledge about counting was explored for children in kindergarten, Grade 1, and Grade 2 (N = 255). Conceptual knowledge was assessed by asking children to make judgments about three types of counts modeled by an animated frog: standard (correct) left-to-right counts, incorrect counts, and unusual counts. On incorrect counts, the frog violated the word-object correspondence principle. On unusual counts, the frog violated a conventional but inessential feature of counting, for example, starting in the middle of the array of objects. Procedural knowledge was assessed using speed and accuracy in counting objects. The patterns of change for procedural knowledge and conceptual knowledge were different. Counting speed and accuracy (procedural knowledge) improved with grade. In contrast, there was a curvilinear relation between conceptual knowledge and grade that was further moderated by children's numeration skills (as measured by a standardized test); the most skilled children gradually increased their acceptance of unusual counts over grade, whereas the least skilled children decreased their acceptance of these counts. These results have implications for studying conceptual and procedural knowledge about mathematics.     

The development of afterlife beliefs in religiously and secularly schooled children

Children aged from 4;10 to 12;9 attending either a Catholic school or a public, secular school in an eastern Spanish city observed a puppet show in which a mouse was eaten by an alligator. Children were then asked questions about the dead mouse's biological and psychological functioning. The pattern of results generally replicated that obtained earlier in an American sample, with older children being more apt to state that functions cease after death than younger children (11- to 12-year-olds > 8- to 9-year-olds > 5- to 6-year-olds), and all children being more likely to attribute epistemic, desire, and emotion states to the dead mouse than biological, psychobiological, and perceptual states. Although children attending Catholic school were generally more likely to state that functions continue after death than children attending secular school, the pattern of change with regard to question type did not differ between the Catholic and secular groups. The results were interpreted as reflecting the combined roles of religious instruction/exposure and universal ontogeny of cognitive abilities on the development of children's afterlife beliefs.