The impact of novel labels on visual processing during infancy

The impact of novel labels on visual processing was investigated across two experiments with infants aged between 9 and 21 months. Infants viewed pairs of images across a series of preferential looking trials. On each trial, one image was novel, and the other image had previously been viewed by the infant. Some infants viewed images in silence; other infants viewed images accompanied by novel labels. The pattern of fixations both across and within trials revealed that infants in the labelling condition took longer to develop a novelty preference than infants in the silent condition. Our findings contrast with prior research by Robinson and Sloutsky (e.g., Robinson & Sloutsky, 2007a ; Sloutsky & Robinson, 2008 ) who found that novel labels did not disrupt visual processing for infants aged over a year. Provided that overall task demands are sufficiently high, it appears that labels can disrupt visual processing for infants during the developmental period of establishing a lexicon. The results suggest that when infants are processing labels and objects, attentional resources are shared across modalities.     

Pregnancy-specific stress, prenatal health behaviors, and birth outcomes

OBJECTIVE: Stress in pregnancy predicts earlier birth and lower birth weight. The authors investigated whether pregnancy-specific stress contributes uniquely to birth outcomes compared with general stress, and whether prenatal health behaviors explain this association. DESIGN: Three structured prenatal interviews (N = 279) assessing state anxiety, perceived stress, life events, pregnancy-specific stress, and health behaviors. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Gestational age at delivery, birth weight, preterm delivery (<37 weeks), and low birth weight (<2,500 g). RESULTS: A latent pregnancy-specific stress factor predicted birth outcomes better than latent factors representing state anxiety, perceived stress, or life event stress, and than a latent factor constructed from all stress measures. Controlling for obstetric risk, pregnancy-specific stress was associated with smoking, caffeine consumption, and unhealthy eating, and inversely associated with healthy eating, vitamin use, exercise, and gestational age at delivery. Cigarette smoking predicted lower birth weight. Clinically-defined birth outcomes were predicted by cigarette smoking and pregnancy-specific stress. CONCLUSION: Pregnancy-specific stress contributed directly to preterm delivery and indirectly to low birth weight through its association with smoking. Pregnancy-specific stress may be a more powerful contributor to birth outcomes than general stress.     

Learning Consistent,Interactive, and Meaningful Task-Action Mappings: A Computational Model

Within the field of human-computer interaction, the study of the interaction between people and computers has revealed many phenomena. For example, highly interactive devices, such as the Apple Macintosh, are often easier to learn and use than keyboard-based devices such as Unix. Similarly, consistent interfaces are easier to learn and use than inconsistent ones. This article describes an integrated cognitive model designed to exhibit a range of these phenomena while learning task-action mappings: action sequences for achieving simple goals, such as opening a file in a word processor. The model, called TAL, is of a user who is familiar with the basic operations of a keyboard and mouse, but unfamiliar with the particular menu structures, words, and actions required to use the device. The model is constructed in Soar and employs a single set of architectural mechanisms. It exhibits behavior that captures human preference for consistent, interactive, and meaningful task-action mappings.     

Equity, justice, and altruism

According to traditional equity theory, justice is motivated by selfishness. However, critics of equity have argued that it is only one rule of justice that people can apply, and that sometimes other rules of justice are used, such as equality and need, that appear to be altruistically based; that is, they involve sharing and caring in a way that ignores contributions or “inputs” and the probability of receiving outcomes in return. Disagreements have arisen, however, as to the status of these alternative rules as elements of justice, the roles of altruism and selfishness within them, and the relative status of altruism and justice as moral principles. The main aim of this article is to help resolve some of these difficulties by examining the relationship between altruism and justice from the perspective of Wagstaff s theory of Equity as Desert (EAD). This theory integrates a number of allocation rules (including those related to the treatment of offenders) with the concepts of equal opportunity and personal responsibility. One of the advantages of this position is that it enables a conceptual and an empirical distinction to be made between helping and responsiveness to need as altruistic norms, and helping and responsiveness to need as justice norms. It is concluded that there may be something to be gained from viewing core rules of justice in the form of EAD as the sophisticated descendants of the sociobiological concept of reciprocal altruism, that is, a set of algorithms designed to limit both unbridled selfishness and indiscrimi-nate altruism.     

Facilitated Communication as an Ideomotor Response

Forty college students were taught facilitated communication via a commercially available training videotape. They were then asked to facilitate the communication of a confederate, who was described as developmentally disabled and unable to speak. All 40 participants produced responses that they attributed at least partially to the confederate, and most attributed all of the communication entirely to her. Eighty-nine percent produced responses corresponding to information they had received, most of which was unknown to the confederate. Responding was significantly correlated with simple ideomotor responses with a pendulum and was not affected by information about the controversy surrounding facilitated communication. These data support the hypothesis that facilitated communication is an instance of automatic writing, akin to that observed in hypothesis and with Ouija boards, and that the ability to produce automatic writing is more common than previously thought.     

Evaluative Conditioning: Arti-fact or -fiction?-A Reply to Baeyens, De Houwer, Vansteenwegen, and Eelen (1998)

Baeyenset al.(1998) claim that Field and Davey's (1997) controversial study of conceptual conditioning offers little threat to current conceptions of evaluative conditioning. This article addresses some of the questions posed by Baeyenset al.First, some criticisms of the conceptual conditioning study appear to be based on a misunderstanding of the procedure. Second, we address the issues surrounding the so-called Type-X procedure. Specifically, we begin by reviewing the status of studies that have used a procedure different from the Type-X procedure. It is then argued that, although the Type-X procedure has been used in only a portion of EC research, it has been used primarily in those studies whose outcome has been used to argue that evaluative conditioning (EC) is functionally distinct from autonomic conditioning. We then review the evidence from non-Type-X procedures that EC is a distinct form of learning. Finally, an attempt is made to explain why between-subject controls should be used as a matter of course in this field of research.