What’s Going to Happen to Me? Prognosis in the Face of Uncertainty

Topoi - Reasoning in medicine requires the critical use of a clinical methodology whose validity must be evaluated as well as its limits. In the last decade, an increasing amount of evidence has...     

Reducing implicit prejudice towards migrants in fifth grade pupils: efficacy of a multi-faceted school-based program

Social Psychology of Education - This study evaluated the impact of a school-based program designed to reduce implicit prejudice towards migrants in fifth-grade school children. The program used...     

Reorienting with terrain slope and landmarks

Orientation (or reorientation) is the first step in navigation, because establishing a spatial frame of reference is essential for a sense of location and heading direction. Recent research on nonhuman animals has revealed that the vertical component of an environment provides an important source of spatial information, in both terrestrial and aquatic settings. Nonetheless, humans show large individual and sex differences in the ability to use terrain slope for reorientation. To understand why some participants—mainly women—exhibit a difficulty with slope, we tested reorientation in a richer environment than had been used previously, including both a tilted floor and a set of distinct objects that could be used as landmarks. This environment allowed for the use of two different strategies for solving the task, one based on directional cues (slope gradient) and one based on positional cues (landmarks). Overall, rather than using both cues, participants tended to focus on just one. Although men and women did not differ significantly in their encoding of or reliance on the two strategies, men showed greater confidence in solving the reorientation task. These facts suggest that one possible cause of the female difficulty with slope might be a generally lower spatial confidence during reorientation.     

Consequence and Interpolation in ?ukasiewicz Logic

Building on Wójcicki??s work on infinite-valued ?ukasiewicz logic ?_??, we give a self-contained proof of the deductive interpolation theorem for ?_??. This paper aims at introducing the reader to the geometry of ?ukasiewicz logic.     

Songs as an aid for language acquisition

In previous research, Saffran and colleagues [Saffran, J. R., Aslin, R. N., & Newport, E. L. (1996). Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science, 274, 1926-1928; Saffran, J. R., Newport, E. L., & Aslin, R. N. (1996). Word segmentation: The role of distributional cues. Journal of Memory and Language, 35, 606-621.] have shown that adults and infants can use the statistical properties of syllable sequences to extract words from continuous speech. They also showed that a similar learning mechanism operates with musical stimuli [Saffran, J. R., Johnson, R. E. K., Aslin, N., & Newport, E. L. (1999). Abstract Statistical learning of tone sequences by human infants and adults. Cognition, 70, 27-52.]. In this work we combined linguistic and musical information and we compared language learning based on speech sequences to language learning based on sung sequences. We hypothesized that, compared to speech sequences, a consistent mapping of linguistic and musical information would enhance learning. Results confirmed the hypothesis showing a strong learning facilitation of song compared to speech. Most importantly, the present results show that learning a new language, especially in the first learning phase wherein one needs to segment new words, may largely benefit of the motivational and structuring properties of music in song.     

Use of slope and feature cues in pigeon (Columba livia) goal-searching behavior

Terrain slope provides a directional frame of reference for reorientation and navigation, similar to cardinal directions. Previous studies have shown that, in a goal location task, slope is a very salient cue and that pigeons tend to rely on it even if it is not the most informative cue. Such a strong dependence on one type of information, when there are more effective predictors of reward, is a key premise for a modular view of information processing. Here we tested the provocative hypothesis of a "slope module" for reorientation in slanted environments. Pigeons had to solve a goal location task using slope or another, theoretically salient cue: a beacon feature. Overall, searching behavior was controlled almost equally by the two cues. The fact that, for the first time, slope failed to capture most of the associative strength allows us to reject a strong modularity view and suggests instead that there is competition between cues based on salience. As an interesting additional finding, the reliance on slope and the feature was affected by training location (uphill vs. downhill), suggesting the possibility of a modulatory role of effort on the cue-weighting mechanism of reorientation.     

The glare effect does not give rise to a longer-lasting afterimage

The glare effect is an illusion in which a region appears self-luminous when flanked by gradients that decrease in luminance with distance from the region (Zavagno, 1999 Perception 28 835-838). This region also appears brighter than a surface of the same luminance. We investigated, using the paradigm of afterimages, whether a low-level mechanism at the level of the retina or LGN could account for this apparent brighter sensation. We first replicated the result from the literature that brighter and longer-lasting physical stimuli generate longer-lasting afterimages. We then compared the glare-effect stimuli with their counterpart controls, and found that the glare-effect stimuli did not give rise to longer-lasting afterimages. This suggests that the apparent brighter sensation of the glare effect is not due to a retinal or LGN mechanism, but must have a cortical origin.