A novel indirect method for capturing involuntary musical imagery under varying cognitive load

Involuntary musical imagery (INMI), i.e the internal experience of a repetitive musical fragment, is one of the most ubiquitous forms of spontaneous cognition. Findings regarding the relationship between INMI and cognitive load are conflicting. In the present study, 200 participants watched and evaluated two non-dialogue, music-only film trailers. Subsequently, they either closed their eyes for 5 min (baseline), or engaged in one of three dot tasks of varying challenge and attentional demand (low, medium, and high cognitive load). Finally, they completed a novel “Mind Activity Questionnaire”, which allows for indirect INMI sampling rather than direct questioning. The same questionnaire was completed 24 hours later. Overall, a significant negative linear trend was found. At baseline, 65% of people reported experiencing INMI. This rate decreased to 32.5% in the low load condition with further reductions observed in the medium and high conditions, which did not differ significantly from each other. INMI frequency and duration followed the same pattern as the induction rates. In the 24-hour follow-up, 21% of participants reported INMI experiences. This study supports the hypothesis that INMI occurrence, frequency, and duration relate to spare cognitive capacity and demonstrates an ecologically valid laboratory paradigm for covertly inducing and documenting INMI experiences.     

Lifestyle traits as predictors of driving behaviour in urban areas of Greece

The aim of this study was to examine possible links between different lifestyle patterns and aberrant driver’s behaviour. Personal interviews were conducted in a representative sample of 324 adults (18–65), all residents of Crete. Aberrant driver’s behaviour was assessed by the ‘driver behaviour questionnaire’ (DBQ). Also to measure different dimensions of lifestyle, first, a 26-items questionnaire was used, and second, three questions measuring ‘driving without destination’, related in previous findings with road accident risk. Four lifestyle patterns: ‘religion/tradition’, ‘driving aimlessly’, ‘sports’ and ‘culture’ are significant predictors of ordinary violations. ‘Driving without destination’ has a significant effect all three DBQ factors (b positive). ‘Religion/tradition’ was related only to ordinary violations (b negative) and ‘sports’ has a positive impact on ordinary violations and a negative impact on ‘errors’. Two lifestyle factors are related to more dangerous driving: ‘Driving without destination’ and/or pursuing a more ‘athletic way of living’. Road safety campaigns must teach the first group to use other hobbies and activities to vent their feelings and the second, not to overestimate their abilities, while driving.     

Self-Regulation in the Classroom: A Perspective on Assessment and Intervention

Il n’y a pas de définition simple et univoque du concept d’apprentissage autorégulé. Des théoriciens de psychologie de l’éducation ont réduit l’éventail des aptitudes des élèves à s’autoréguler en se focalisant sur le versant scolaire de l’éducation, à savoir l’acquisition des connaissances et les objectifs de réussite. Toutefois, le monde complexe de l’étude en classe engendre une situation où différents buts entrent en concurrence aux yeux des élèves. Le modèle d’autorégulation à double processus de Bookaerts montre que les deux objectifs que sont l’étude et le bien‐être interagissent. Nous estimons que lorsque les élèves ont accès à des stratégies autonomes bien au point se traduisant par de bonnes habitudes de travail, ils ont une plus grande probabilité de se motiver pour les études et de sauvegarder leur bien‐être quand une source de stress bloque l’apprentissage. There is no simple and straightforward definition of the construct of self‐regulated learning. Theorists in educational psychology have narrowed the scope of students’ capability to self‐regulate through a focus on the academic side of education, namely on learning and achievement goals. However, the messy world of classroom learning creates a situation in which different goals compete for students’ attention. Boekaerts’ dual processing self‐regulation model describes how learning goals interact with well‐being goals. We propose that when students have access to well‐refined volitional strategies manifested as good work habits, they are more likely to invest effort in learning and get off the well‐being track when a stressor blocks learning. Shifting definitions of SRL have led to changing measurement procedures; researchers moved away from decontextualised measures of SRL to domain‐specific measures and then on to context‐sensitive measures. The validity and reliability of the first generation of SR assessment has been limited and several issues remain. Recently, researchers have designed assessment packages including new instruments that better capture self‐regulation as a process (including for example traces of mental events, situational manipulations, and records of student work strategies). A combination of instruments is preferable over a single instrument for assessing self‐regulation as a process and the effects of interventions to improve students’ self‐regulatory capacity. At present, many sound SRL interventions exist and some general lessons can be learned about classroom intervention research.     

Observing Behavior Topography in Delayed Matching to Multiple Samples

The Psychological Record - This study examined relations between eye movements and accuracy scores in a delayed matching-to-sample procedure with multiple sample stimuli. Four adult humans...     

Information structure expectations in sentence comprehension

In English, new information typically appears late in the sentence, as does primary accent. Because of this tendency, perceivers might expect the final constituent or constituents of a sentence to contain informational focus. This expectation should in turn affect how they comprehend focus-sensitive constructions such as ellipsis sentences. Results from four experiments on sluicing sentences (e.g., The mobster implicated the thug, but we can't find out who else) suggest that perceivers do prefer to place focus late in the sentence, though that preference can be mitigated by prosodic information (pitch accents, Experiment 2) or syntactic information (clefted sentences, Experiment 3) indicating that focus is located elsewhere. Furthermore, it is not necessarily the direct object, but the informationally focused constituent that is the preferred antecedent (Experiment 4). Expectations regarding the information structure of a sentence, which are only partly cancellable by means of overt focus markers, may explain persistent biases in ellipsis resolution.     

Nonlocal effects of prosodic boundaries

Placing a prosodic boundary before a phrase may influence its syntactic analysis. However, the boundary’s effect depends on the presence, size, and position of other, earlier, prosodic boundaries. In three experiments, we extend previous results about the effect of the position of the early boundary. In sentences in which a final phrase may modify either a local verb or an earlier verb, a boundary immediately after the first verb leads to more first-verb attachments than when the earlier boundary appears in another position between the two verbs (Experiments 1 and 2). This effect cannot be attributed to weaker effects of more distant boundaries (Experiment 2), but is likely due to the first verb being more prominent when a boundary immediately follows it, since similar effects are observed when the verb is accented (Experiment 3). The results support the informative boundary hypothesis and show that the impact of earlier, nonlocal boundaries is not fully uniform.     

The use of operant technology to measure behavioral priorities in captive animals

Addressing the behavioral priorities of captive animals and the development of practical, objective measures of the value of environmental resources is a principal objective of animal welfare science. In theory, consumer demand approaches derivedfrom human microeconomics should provide validmeasures of the value of environmental resources. In practice, however, a number of empirical and theoretical problems have rendered these measures difficult to interpret in studies with animals. A common approach has been to impose a cost on access to resources and to use time with each resource as a measure of consumption to construct demand curves. This can be recorded easily by automatic means, but in a number of studies, it has been found that animals compensate for increased cost of access with longer visit time. Furthermore, direct observation of the test animals’ behavior has shown that resource interaction is more intense once the animals have overcome higher costs. As a consequence, measures based on time with the resource may underestimate resource consumption at higher access costs, and demand curves derived from these measures may not be a true reflection of the value of different resources. An alternative approach to demand curves isreservation price, which is the maximum price individual animals are prepared to pay to gain access to resources. In studies using this approach, farmed mink (Mustela vison) paid higher prices for food and swimming water than for resources such as tunnels, water bowls, pet toys, and empty compartments. This indicates that the mink placed a higher value on food and swimming water than on other resources.     

Effects of hierarchical organization on children's judgments of distance and direction

The impact of the hierarchical organization of a space on judgments of direction and distance was assessed in two studies using two-dimensional models analogous to those used by A. Stevens and P. Coupe (1978, Cognitive Psychology, 10, 422–437). In each study the models contained two stars and were divided into two parts by a curved boundary line. In the Homogeneous condition the stars were located in the same subsection. In the Congruent condition the leftmost star was in the left subsection and the rightmost star was in the right subsection. In the Incongruent condition the rightmost star was in the left subsection and the leftmost star was in the right subsection. In Experiment 1 first graders, third graders, and college students were required to remember the location of the stars. Results indicated that the first and third graders tended to use the relationship between the subsections as a clue to the relationship between the sites within them, thus extending the results of Stevens and Coupe (1978) to children. In Experiment 2 preschoolers, first, and third graders were asked to judge with the materials directly in front of them, which of the two stars was closer to a site located in one of the subsections. Results indicated that the Incongruent condition led to errors among the preschoolers and first graders but not the third graders, thus indicating that these groups tended to judge as closer the site within the same subsection even though it was really farther away. The results of both studies are discussed as indicative of a tendency among young children to impose organization on information encoded in memory and in relation to increases in metric accuracy, decentration, and efficient scanning which enable them to more accurately evaluate when such organization is and is not appropriate. Implications for behavior in large-scale environments are also discussed, with particular reference to the effect of barriers on perceptions of distance and direction.