Cognitive processes involved in blame and blame-like judgments and in forgiveness and forgiveness-like judgments

Experiment 1 compared the cognitive processes involved in blame and forgiveness judgments under identical experimental conditions. Experiment 2 was a replication of Experiment 1 with 4 judgment scales: willingness to prosecute, willingness to avenge, resentment level, and willingness to make up. Participants were presented with 32 scenarios in which a doctor made a medical error. These situations contained 5 items: the degree of proximity with the doctor (e.g., a family doctor known since childhood), the degree of negligence, the severity of consequences, apologies or contrition, and cancellation of consequences. Functional cognitive analysis grouped judgments into 2 categories: blame-like judgments (blame, prosecution, and revenge) and forgiveness-like judgments (resentment, forgiveness, and reconciliation). Blame-like judgments were characterized by additive integration rules, with negligence followed by apologies as the 2 main cues. Forgiveness-like judgments were characterized by an interactive integration rule, with apologies followed by negligence as the 2 main cues.     

Mutation at the TrkB PLC{gamma}-docking site affects hippocampal LTP and associative learning in conscious mice

Previous in vitro studies have characterized the electrophysiological properties and molecular events associated with long-term potentiation (LTP), but as yet there are no in vivo data from molecular-level dissection that directly identify LTP as the biological substrate for learning and memory. Understanding whether the molecular pathways required for learning are also those generating LTP when measured directly on the relevant circuit of a learning animal is clearly important, although so far has proved technically difficult. Here, for the first time, we combine highly defined genetic mouse models with behavior and in vivo recordings. We recorded the activity-dependent changes taking place at the CA3-CA1 synapses during the acquisition and extinction of a simple form of an associative learning task in mice carrying point mutations on specific docking sites of TrkB receptors (trkB(SHC), trkB(PLC)). The learning task consisted of a classical eyeblink conditioning using a trace paradigm. The conditioned stimulus (CS) consisted of a tone and was followed by a periorbital electrical shock as an unconditioned stimulus (US). The US started 500 msec after the end of the CS. We show that a single pulse presented to the Schaffer collateral-commissural pathway during the CS-US interval evoked a monosynaptic field excitatory postsynaptic potential (fEPSP) at the CA1 pyramidal cells, with a slope linearly related to learning evolution in controls and trkB(SHC) mutants, but the relationship was impaired in trkB(PLC) mice. These data support a link between the PLCgamma-docking site downstream of TrkB and the activity-dependent synaptic changes evoked at the CA3-CA1 synapses during associative learning in conscious mice, and indicate that TrkB PLCgamma-site-activated molecular pathway(s) underlie both associative learning and LTP triggered at the CA3-CA1 synapse.     

Psychological mechanisms underlying the Köhler motivation gain

Sometimes group work conditions lead to motivation gains rather than to social loafing. Two theoretical explanations for the K?hler motivation gain effect are identified, one stressing social comparison and a second stressing the indispensability of one's effort to the group. The results of three new experiments are reported. Experiment 1 suggested that both explanations are valid and contribute to the K?hler effect. Prior studies suggested that there might be gender differences in the relative importance of these two explanatory processes. Experiment 2 confirmed this suggestion. In Experiment 3, the gender difference was eliminated by priming women with a goal (viz., competition) presumed to be chronically more important to men. It is argued that the relative importance of these two motivational processes will depend on the immediate and chronic importance attached to more personal (viz., to achieve a favorable social comparison) versus collective (viz., to contribute to one's group) goals.     

The moderating effect of passion on the relation between activity engagement and positive affect

The present diary study investigates the moderating effect of passion on the relation between activity engagement and daily positive affect. In line with past research (Vallerand et al. 2003, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85, 756) it is suggested that people with an obsessive passion have more difficulties putting their passion aside to invest themselves in other activities, to a point where they fail to experience positive affect during these activities. A sample of 154 college students reported their daily activity engagement and positive affect over a 2-week period. HLM analyses show that the more people have an obsessive passion the more they experience accentuated decreases in positive affect during days when they do not engage in their passion compared to days when they do. In contrast, harmonious passion predicts daily positive affect on days when people engage in their activity. These results are discussed in light of previous research on passion and positive affect.

Developmental dyslexia: the visual attention span deficit hypothesis

The visual attention (VA) span is defined as the amount of distinct visual elements which can be processed in parallel in a multi-element array. Both recent empirical data and theoretical accounts suggest that a VA span deficit might contribute to developmental dyslexia, independently of a phonological disorder. In this study, this hypothesis was assessed in two large samples of French and British dyslexic children whose performance was compared to that of chronological-age matched control children. Results of the French study show that the VA span capacities account for a substantial amount of unique variance in reading, as do phonological skills. The British study replicates this finding and further reveals that the contribution of the VA span to reading performance remains even after controlling IQ, verbal fluency, vocabulary and single letter identification skills, in addition to phoneme awareness. In both studies, most dyslexic children exhibit a selective phonological or VA span disorder. Overall, these findings support a multi-factorial view of developmental dyslexia. In many cases, developmental reading disorders do not seem to be due to phonological disorders. We propose that a VA span deficit is a likely alternative underlying cognitive deficit in dyslexia.     

Levels of processing with free and cued recall and unilateral temporal lobe epilepsy

This study investigates the role of the temporal lobes in levels-of-processing tasks (phonetic and semantic encoding) according to the nature of recall tasks (free and cued recall). These tasks were administered to 48 patients with unilateral temporal epilepsy (right "RTLE"=24; left "LTLE"=24) and a normal group (n=24). The results indicated that LTLE patients were impaired for semantic processing (free and cued recall) and for phonetic processing (free and cued recall), while for RTLE patients deficits appeared in free recall with semantic processing. It is suggested that the left temporal lobe is involved in all aspects of verbal memory, and that the right temporal lobe is specialized in semantic processing. Moreover, our data seem to indicate that RTLE patients present a retrieval processing impairment (semantic condition), whereas the LTLE group is characterized by encoding difficulties in the phonetic and semantic condition.     

Time intervals production in tapping and oscillatory motion

We applied spectral analysis on series of time intervals produced in a synchronization-continuation experiment. In the first condition intervals were produced by finger tapping, and in the second by an oscillatory motion of the hand. Results obtained in tapping were consistent with a discrete, event-based timing model. In the oscillatory condition, the spectra suggested a continuous, dynamic timing mechanism, based on the regulation of effector stiffness. It is concluded that the oscillatory character of movement can offer an important resource for timing control. The use of an event-based timing control such as postulated in the Wing-Kristoffersson model could be restricted to a quite limited class of rhythmic tasks, characterized by the concatenation of discrete events.     

Exemplars, prototypes, and the flexibility of classification models

J. P. Minda and J. D. Smith (2001) showed that a prototype model outperforms an exemplar model, especially in larger categories or categories that contained more complex stimuli. R. M. Nosofsky and S. R. Zaki (2002) showed that an exemplar model with a response-scaling mechanism outperforms a prototype model. The authors of the current study investigated whether excessive model flexibility could explain these results. Using cross-validation, the authors demonstrated that both the prototype model and the exemplar model with a response-scaling mechanism suffered from overfilling in the linearly separable category structure. The results illustrate the need to make sure that the best-fitting model is not chasing error variance instead of variance attributed to the cognitive process it is supposed to model.     

The nature of the syllabic neighbourhood effect in French

We investigated whether and how sublexical units such as phonological syllables mediate access to the lexicon in French visual word recognition. To do so, two lexical decision task (LDT) experiments examined the nature of the syllabic neighbourhood effect. In Experiments 1a and b, the number of higher frequency syllabic neighbours was manipulated while controlling for the first bigram. The results failed to show a pure syllabic neighbourhood effect. In Experiments 2a and b, syllabic neighbourhood and bigram frequency were factorially manipulated. The interaction showed that the syllabic neighbourhood effect was inhibitory when bigram frequency was high, whereas it was facilitatory when bigram frequency was low. Similar patterns of results were found in both the yes/no (Experiments 1a and 2a) and go/no-go LDTs (Experiments 1b and 2b), so varying task requirements of the lexical decision did not influence the effect. These findings are discussed in the context of parallel distributed processing and interactive-activation models, and suggest that orthographic redundancy properties contribute to the influence of phonological syllables.