Identification des facteurs liés à la consommation de cigarettes,d'alcool et de drogues à l'adolescence

The goal of this study was to identify protective and risk factors linked to substance use during adolescence. A sample of 1000 subjects participated in a four‐wave data collection. Results showed that precocious substance use is likely to be persistent. Moreover, school inadaptation, lack of parental supervision and positive self‐perception in relationships with peers have been identified as risk factors predictive of cigarette, alcohol and drug use. Protective factors were associated with high moral qualities and negative reaction to mother's use of cigarettes and alcohol. Findings are discussed in terms of developmental trajectories which might lead to substance use and abuse through adult life.     

The effect of alcohol administration on human timing: a comparison of prospective timing, retrospective timing and passage of time judgements

Previous research suggests that human timing may be affected by alcohol administration. The current study aimed to expand on previous research by examining the effect of alcohol on prospective timing, retrospective timing and passage of time judgements. A blind between-subjects design was employed in which participants were either administered 0 g of alcohol per kilogramme of body weight (placebo), 0.4 g/kg (low dose) or 0.6 g/kg (high dose). Participants completed four types of temporal task; verbal estimation and temporal generalisation, a retrospective timing task and a passage of time judgement task. A high dose of alcohol resulted in overestimations of duration relative to the low dose and placebo group in the verbal estimation task. A high dose of alcohol was also associated with time passing more quickly than normal. Alcohol had no effect on retrospective judgements. The results suggest that a high dose of alcohol increases internal clock speed leading to over-estimations of duration on prospective timing tasks, and the sensation of time passing more quickly than normal. The absence of an effect of alcohol on retrospective timing supports the suggestion that retrospective judgements are not based on the output of an internal clock.     

Happy Like a Fish in Water? The Role of Personality–Situation Fit for Momentary Happiness in Social Interactions across the Adult Lifespan

Growing research on personality–relationship dynamics demonstrates that people's personality and their (enjoyment of) social relationships are closely intertwined. Using experience sampling data from 136 adults (aged 18–89 years) who reported on more than 50 000 social interactions, we zoom into everyday real‐world social interactions to examine how Big Five personality traits and social context characteristics shape people's happiness in social encounters across the adult lifespan. Results revealed that interactions that were social (vs. task‐oriented) and with close (vs. less close) others were associated with higher momentary happiness as were higher levels of the target person's extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness, and lower neuroticism. Of the 10 personality × situation interactions tested, only one reached significance (with p = .041): Individuals with higher levels of neuroticism benefitted more from interactions with friends than did individuals low in neuroticism. The role of social context characteristics for momentary happiness changed with age, but the role of personality or personality × social context did not, suggesting that personality effects on happiness in social context manifest in similar ways across the adult lifespan. We discuss implications for personality–situation research and the understanding of affective dynamics in everyday social interactions. © 2019 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Effects of Grammatical Categories on Letter Detection in Continuous Text

The present study focuses on the interplay between the linguistic principles and the psycholinguistic processes involved in reading. Results from 56 participants on a letter detection task reveal that readers do not process all function words in the same manner. Omission rates were highest for function words occupying the head of maximal projections such as complementizers and determiners. Prepositions were shown to occupy an intermediary position between content and function words, with omission rates varying depending on their semantic load. Together these results appear to bolster and offer a finer grained picture of the role of function words within the framework of both the Guidance Organization (Greenberg et al. in Psychon Bull Rev 11(3):428–433, 2004) and Attentional Disengagement (Roy-Charland et al. in Percept Psychophys 69(3):324–337, 2007) reading models. The results of the present study are discussed using an X-bar theory approach with the goal of refining the structural account of letter detection errors.     

Incomplete understanding of complex numbers Girolamo Cardano: a case study in the acquisition of mathematical concepts

In this paper, I present the case of the discovery of complex numbers by Girolamo Cardano. Cardano acquires the concepts of (specific) complex numbers, complex addition, and complex multiplication. His understanding of these concepts is incomplete. I show that his acquisition of these concepts cannot be explained on the basis of Christopher Peacocke’s Conceptual Role Theory of concept possession. I argue that Strong Conceptual Role Theories that are committed to specifying a set of transitions that is both necessary and sufficient for possession of mathematical concepts will always face counterexamples of the kind illustrated by Cardano. I close by suggesting that we should rely more heavily on resources of Anti-Individualism as a framework for understanding the acquisition and possession of concepts of abstract subject matters.     

The effect of visual complexity and word frequency on eye movements during Chinese reading

Eye movements of native Chinese readers were monitored when they read sentences containing single-character target words orthogonally manipulated for frequency and visual complexity (number of strokes). Both factors yielded strong main effects on skipping probability but no interaction, with readers skipping visually simple and high frequency words more often. However, an interaction between frequency and complexity was observed on the fixation times on the target words with longer fixations for the low frequency, visually complex words. The results demonstrate that visual complexity and frequency have independent influences on saccadic targeting behaviour during Chinese reading but jointly influence fixation durations and that these two factors differently impact fixation durations and saccade targeting during reading.     

Updating and feature overwriting in short-term memory for timbre

Previous research has demonstrated a potent, stimulus-specific form of interference in short-term auditory memory. This effect has been interpreted in terms of interitem confusion and grouping, but the present experiments suggested that interference might be a feature-specific phenomenon. Participants compared standard and comparison tones over a 10-sec interval and were required to determine whether they differed in timbre. A single interfering distractor tone was presented either 50 msec or 8 sec after the offset of the standard (Experiment 1) or 2 sec prior to its onset (Experiment 2). The distractor varied in the number of features it shared with the standard and comparison, and this proved critical, since performance on the task was greatly impaired when the distractor either consisted of novel, unshared features (Experiment 1) or contained the distinguishing feature of the comparison tone (Experiments 1 and 2). These findings were incompatible with earlier accounts of forgetting but were fully explicable by the recent timbre memory model, which associates interference in short-term auditory memory with an "updating" process and feature overwriting. These results suggest similarities with the mechanisms that underlie forgetting in verbal short-term memory.     

The perceptual origins of the abstract same/different concept in human infants

Very few experiments have studied the two item same/different relation in young human infants. This contrasts with an extensive animal literature. We tested young infants with two novel tasks designed specifically to provide convergent comparative measures. Each infant completed both tasks allowing an assessment of their understanding of the abstract concept rather than task-specific abilities. In a looking time task with photographic stimuli, we found that 8-month-olds are sensitive to the relation but 4-month-olds are not. The second task used an anticipatory eye movement paradigm with simple geometric stimuli. On each trial, two colored shapes appear and moved upwards behind an occluder. They reappeared on either the upper left or right depending on the relation between them. Infants at both ages learned and generalized the dependency but only for the different relation. These results show that human infants can learn the same/different concept but that, in strong continuity with animal results, their abilities are firmly grounded in perception.