Becoming a written word: Eye movements reveal order of acquisition effects following incidental exposure to new words during silent reading

We know that from mid-childhood onwards most new words are learned implicitly via reading; however, most word learning studies have taught novel items explicitly. We examined incidental word learning during reading by focusing on the well-documented finding that words which are acquired early in life are processed more quickly than those acquired later. Novel words were embedded in meaningful sentences and were presented to adult readers early (day 1) or later (day 2) during a five-day exposure phase. At test adults read the novel words in semantically neutral sentences. Participants’ eye movements were monitored throughout exposure and test. Adults also completed a surprise memory test in which they had to match each novel word with its definition. Results showed a decrease in reading times for all novel words over exposure, and significantly longer total reading times at test for early than late novel words. Early-presented novel words were also remembered better in the offline test. Our results show that order of presentation influences processing time early in the course of acquiring a new word, consistent with partial and incremental growth in knowledge occurring as a function of an individual’s experience with each word.     

Age-Related Effects in Prospective Memory are Modulated by Ongoing Task Complexity and Relation to Target Cue

ABSTRACT

Two experiments examined the puzzling variation in the age-related patterns for event-based prospective memory tasks. Both experiments involved a famous faces ongoing task with a feature of the famous face as the target for the prospective memory task. In Experiment 1, a substantial age deficit was found on the prospective memory task when the cue was nonfocal (wearing glasses) to the ongoing task, replicating previous research, but this deficit was significantly reduced with a focal cue (first name John). In Experiment 2, the prospective memory cue (wearing glasses) was held constant and the demands of the ongoing task of naming faces were varied. The substantial age differences found with a nonfocal cue were eliminated when the ongoing task was made less challenging. The findings help reconcile the divergent age-related findings reported in the literature.     

An integrated process model of stereotype threat effects on performance

Research showing that activation of negative stereotypes can impair the performance of stigmatized individuals on a wide variety of tasks has proliferated. However, a complete understanding of the processes underlying these stereotype threat effects on behavior is still lacking. The authors examine stereotype threat in the context of research on stress arousal, vigilance, working memory, and self-regulation to develop a process model of how negative stereotypes impair performance on cognitive and social tasks that require controlled processing, as well as sensorimotor tasks that require automatic processing. The authors argue that stereotype threat disrupts performance via 3 distinct, yet interrelated, mechanisms: (a) a physiological stress response that directly impairs prefrontal processing, (b) a tendency to actively monitor performance, and (c) efforts to suppress negative thoughts and emotions in the service of self-regulation. These mechanisms combine to consume executive resources needed to perform well on cognitive and social tasks. The active monitoring mechanism disrupts performance on sensorimotor tasks directly. Empirical evidence for these assertions is reviewed, and implications for interventions designed to alleviate stereotype threat are discussed.     

The Growing-Block: just one thing after another?

In this article, we consider two independently appealing theories—the Growing-Block view and Humean Supervenience—and argue that at least one is false. The Growing-Block view is a theory about the nature of time. It says that (a) past and present things exist, while future things do not, and (b) the passage of time consists in new things coming into existence. Humean Supervenience is a theory about the nature of entities like laws, nomological possibility, counterfactuals, dispositions, causation, and chance. It says that none of these entities are fundamental, since if they were, this would entail the existence of irreducible necessary connections between matters of fact. Instead, these entities supervene on a fundamental, non-nomological ‘Humean mosaic’ of property instances at spacetime points. We will further explain and motivate the Growing-Block view and Humean Supervenience in Sects. 2 and 3, but first, we turn to our master argument.     

A Relational Approach to Genetic Counseling for Hereditary Breast and Ovarian Cancer

Ethical issues arise for genetic counselors when a client fails to disclose a genetic diagnosis of hereditary disease to family: they must consider the rights of the individual client to privacy and confidentiality as well as the rights of the family to know their genetic risk. Although considerable work has addressed issues of non-disclosure from the client’s perspective, there is a lack of qualitative research into how genetic counselors address this issue in practice. In this study, a qualitative approach was taken to investigate whether genetic counselors in Australia use a relational approach to encourage the disclosure of genetic information from hereditary breast and ovarian cancer (HBOC) clients among family members; and if so, how they use it. Semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with 16 genetic counselors from selected states across Australia. Data collection and analysis were guided by a basic iterative approach incorporating a hybrid methodology to thematic analysis. The findings provide indicative evidence of genetic counselors employing a relational approach in three escalating stages––covert, overt and authoritative––to encourage the disclosure of genetic information. The findings lend credence to the notion that genetic counselors envision a form of relational autonomy for their clients in the context of sharing genetic information, and they depart from individualistic conceptions of care/solely client-centered counseling when addressing the needs of other family members to know their genetic status.     

Relationships among individualism--collectivism, gender, and ingroup/outgroup status, and responses to conflict: a study in China and the United States

Responses to conflict were studied in samples of college students from a highly collectivistic society (China, n = 207) and a highly individualistic society (United States n = 209). As predicted, the collectivistic society reported more conflict-reducing behaviors and less verbal or physical aggression. However, the effect of individualism/collectivism was moderated by both the ingroup/outgroup status of the target and gender of the participant. Chinese and US women did not differ on any measure. However, of the four groups, Chinese men reported the most conflict-reducing behaviors and the least physical aggression, whereas US men reported the fewest conflict-reducing behaviors and the greatest physical aggression. As predicted, conflict-reducing behaviors were more common in the ingroup condition and both verbal and physical aggression was more common in the outgroup condition. However, the latter were moderated by gender of the participant. US men reported greater physical aggression than any other group. Neither gender nor society had any effect on the level of indirect aggression. There were no gender or individualism/collectivism effects on indirect aggression. Observed gender effects were attributed to differences in how collectivistic and individualistic societies conceptualize masculinity. The effect sizes associated with the ingroup/outgroup condition were consistently and substantially larger than effect sizes associated with individualism/collectivism or gender.     

Toddlers' attention to intentions-in-action in learning novel action words.

Toddlers' ability to use cues such as eye gaze and gestures to infer the meaning of novel action words was examined. In Experiment 1, 21- and 27-month-olds were taught labels for pairs of videotaped actions that were either similar or dissimilar in appearance. Similar actions differed mainly in the presence of behavioral cues related to the agents' intentions (e.g., extended arms). Only the older children were able to learn the labels for the similar actions. In Experiment 2, 3 new pairs of labels (2 similar, 1 dissimilar) were taught to children in the same age range. Eye gaze and gestures were the main features distinguishing the similar events. The same developmental effect was observed, with only the older children showing learning of both types of verbs and the younger children being impeded by the appearance of the actions. The results show that by the middle of the 2nd year, children begin to consider intentions-in-action when acquiring the meaning of novel action verbs.     

When language affects cognition and when it does not: an analysis of grammatical gender and classification

The focus of this work was on the relation between grammatical gender and categorization. In one set of studies, monolingual English-, Spanish-, French-, and German-speaking children and adults assigned male and female voices to inanimate objects. Results from Spanish and French speakers indicated effects of grammatical gender on classification; results from German speakers did not. A connectionist model simulated the contradicting findings. The connectionist networks were also used to investigate which aspect of grammatical gender was responsible for the different pattern of findings. The predictions from the connectionist simulations were supported by the results from an artificial language-learning task. The results from this work demonstrate how connectionist networks can be used to identify the differences between languages that affect categorization.