Evidence for distinct magnitude systems for symbolic and non-symbolic number

Psychological Research - Cognitive models of magnitude representation are mostly based on the results of studies that use a magnitude comparison task. These studies show similar distance or ratio...     

Tactual, visual, and cross-modal transfer of texture in 5- and 8-year-old children

Children's tactual, visual, and cross-modal transfer abilities for texture were investigated in a delayed matching-to-sample paradigm. Transfer performance from vision to touch was found to increase between 5 and 8 years of age, whereas transfer performance from touch to vision did not vary with age and matched touch-to-touch performance. Asymmetrical cross-modal abilities were observed at the age of 8 years, vision-to-touch transfer performance being higher than touch-to-vision transfer performance (experiment 2). This developmental pattern could not be attributed to limitations in the tactual or visual discriminability of the textures or to differences in tactual or visual memory between the two age groups (experiment 1). It is suggested that the increase with age in vision-to-touch performance may be related to the intervention of more efficient top-down perceptual processes in the older children.     

Approximate quantification in young,healthy older adults’, and Alzheimer patients

Forty young adults, 40 healthy older adults, and 39 probable AD patients were asked to estimate small (e.g., 25) and large (e.g., 60) collections of dots in a choice condition and in two no-choice conditions. Participants could choose between benchmark and anchoring strategies on each collection of dots in the choice condition and were required to use either benchmark or anchoring on all configurations in the no-choice conditions (one per strategy). The benchmark strategy involves visual estimation processes whereas the anchoring strategy involves both enumeration and estimation processes. Results showed that strategy use was influenced by collection, participant, and strategy characteristics. Age-related and dementia-related differences were found in both strategy use and strategy execution. The findings have implications for our understanding of aging effects in approximate quantification, strategic variations in Alzheimer’s patients, and sources of cognitive decline during early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.     

La théorie de la privation relative et les réactions au handicap: Le rôle des comparaisons intrapersonnelles dans la gestion de l'estime de soi

Relative deprivation (RD) theory usually distinguishes between interpersonal and intergroup comparisons, but neglects intrapersonal comparisons. This research reveals that the comparisons between the actual and the future selves lead to relative gratification (RG) feelings which in turn are related to self‐esteem. A first study (N = 581) confirms that intrapersonal RG positively contributes to self‐esteem. A second study, involving students with a disability (n = 31) and without (n = 50), reveals that if disabled students exhibit a higher level of self‐esteem than nondisabled ones, this preservation is only explained by intrapersonal RG. Finally, intergroup RD and intrapersonal RG are two distinct predictors of militancy in favour of disabled people These results testify to the importance of differentiating comparison levels.     

Food rejection and the development of food category-based induction in 2–6 years old children

We studied children’s inductive inferences within the domain of food categories. There has so far been little research on inductive reasoning about food among children, despite the theoretical and practical importance of knowing what knowledge children bring to the table and how they use it. We tested the hypotheses that children’s food category-based induction performances and their food rejection are negatively correlated, and that these performances are influenced by the colour typicality of the food items. We recruited 126 children aged 2–6 years, and administered a category-based induction task. Participants were successively shown 8 sets of three pictures containing one target picture (a vegetable) and two test pictures (a vegetable dissimilar in colour to the target picture and a fruit similar in colour to the target picture). For each set, participants were told a novel property about the target picture and asked to generalise this property to one of the two test pictures. Additionally, the parents of each child filled out a questionnaire about his or her food rejection tendencies. Results on accuracy (i.e. if participants generalised the properties according to category membership, not perceptual similarity) provided the first empirical evidence in favour of a negative relationship between children’s food rejection and food category-based induction.     

Continuous mapping from sound to meaning in spoken-language comprehension: immediate effects of verb-based thematic constraints

The authors used 2 "visual-world" eye-tracking experiments to examine lexical access using Dutch constructions in which the verb did or did not place semantic constraints on its subsequent subject noun phrase. In Experiment 1, fixations to the picture of a cohort competitor (overlapping with the onset of the referent's name, the subject) did not differ from fixations to a distractor in the constraining-verb condition. In Experiment 2, cross-splicing introduced phonetic information that temporarily biased the input toward the cohort competitor. Fixations to the cohort competitor temporarily increased in both the neutral and constraining conditions. These results favor models in which mapping from the input onto meaning is continuous over models in which contextual effects follow access of an initial form-based competitor set.     

The role of prosodic boundaries in the resolution of lexical embedding in speech comprehension

Participants' eye movements were monitored as they heard sentences and saw four pictured objects on a computer screen. Participants were instructed to click on the object mentioned in the sentence. There were more transitory fixations to pictures representing monosyllabic words (e.g. ham) when the first syllable of the target word (e.g. hamster) had been replaced by a recording of the monosyllabic word than when it came from a different recording of the target word. This demonstrates that a phonemically identical sequence can contain cues that modulate its lexical interpretation. This effect was governed by the duration of the sequence, rather than by its origin (i.e. which type of word it came from). The longer the sequence, the more monosyllabic-word interpretations it generated. We argue that cues to lexical-embedding disambiguation, such as segmental lengthening, result from the realization of a prosodic boundary that often but not always follows monosyllabic words, and that lexical candidates whose word boundaries are aligned with prosodic boundaries are favored in the word-recognition process.     

The gender marking effect in spoken word recognition: The case of bilinguals

It has been known for some time that the recognition of a noun is affected by the gender marking, such as masculine or feminine, that is carried by a preceding word. In this study, we used auditory naming to examine how early and late English-French bilinguals react to gender marking when processing French. The early bilinguals showed clear facilitation and inhibition effects, but the late bilinguals were totally insensitive to gender marking, whether congruent or incongruent. The results are discussed in terms of current accounts of gender processing as well as age of acquisition and regular use of the gender-marking language.     

Effects of prosodically modulated sub-phonetic variation on lexical competition

Eye movements were monitored as participants followed spoken instructions to manipulate one of four objects pictured on a computer screen. Target words occurred in utterance-medial (e.g., Put the cap next to the square) or utterance-final position (e.g., Now click on the cap). Displays consisted of the target picture (e.g., a cap), a monosyllabic competitor picture (e.g., a cat), a polysyllabic competitor picture (e.g., a captain) and a distractor (e.g., a beaker). The relative proportion of fixations to the two types of competitor pictures changed as a function of the position of the target word in the utterance, demonstrating that lexical competition is modulated by prosodically conditioned phonetic variation.