无均值结构的潜变量交互效应模型的标准化估计

潜变量交互效应建模研究近年来有两项重要进展, 一是提出了潜变量交互效应模型的标准化估计及其计算公式; 二是发现无均值结构模型可以取代传统的有均值结构模型, 建模大为简化。但标准化估计是在传统的有均值结构模型中建立的, 在简化的模型中同样适用吗？本文在无均值结构模型的框架内, 给出了潜变量交互效应模型的标准化形式、计算公式和建模步骤, 并通过模拟研究比较了极大似然和广义最小二乘两种估计方法、配对乘积指标和全部乘积指标两种指标类型, 结果表明, 在计算交互效应的标准化估计时, 应当使用配对乘积指标建模, 并且首选极大似然估计。     

Contributing to Discourse

For people to contribute to discourse, they must do more than utter the right sentence at the right time. The basic requirement is that they add to their common ground in an orderly way. To do this, we argue, they try to establish for each utterance the mutual belief that the addressees have understood what the speaker meant well enough for current purposes. This is accomplished by the collective actions of the current contributor and his or her partners, and these result in units of conversation called contributions. We present a model of contributions and show how it accounts for a variety of features of everyday conversations.     

Determiner Primes as Facilitators of Lexical Retrieval in English

Gender priming studies have demonstrated facilitation of noun production following pre-activation of a target noun??s grammatical gender. Findings provide support for models in which syntactic information relating to words is stored within the lexicon and activated during lexical retrieval. Priming effects are observed in the context of determiner plus noun phrase production. Few studies demonstrate gender priming effects in bare noun production (i.e., nouns in isolation). We investigated the effects of English determiner primes on bare mass and count noun production. In two experiments, participants named pictures after exposure to primes involving congruent, incongruent and neutral determiners. Facilitation of noun production by congruent and neutral determiner primes was found in both experiments. The results suggest that noun phrase syntax is activated in lexical retrieval, even when not explicitly required for production. Post hoc analysis of the relative frequency of congruent and incongruent prime-target pairs provides support for a frequency-based interpretation of the data.     

The role of the human extrastriate visual cortex in mirror symmetry discrimination: a TMS-adaptation study

The human visual system is able to efficiently extract symmetry information from the visual environment. Prior neuroimaging evidence has revealed symmetry-preferring neuronal representations in the dorsolateral extrastriate visual cortex; the objective of the present study was to investigate the necessity of these representations in symmetry discrimination. This was accomplished by the use of state-dependent transcranial magnetic stimulation, which combines the fine resolution of adaptation paradigms with the assessment of causality. Subjects were presented with adapters and targets consisting of dot configurations that could be symmetric along either the vertical or horizontal axis (or they could be non-symmetric), and they were asked to perform a symmetry discrimination task on the targets while fixating the center of the screen. TMS was applied during the delay between the adapter and the test stimulus over one of four different sites: Left or Right V1/V2, or left or right dorsolateral extrastriate cortex (DLO). TMS over both Left and Right DLO reduced the adaptation effect in detecting vertical and horizontal symmetry, although the Left DLO effect on horizontal symmetry and the Right DLO effect on both vertical and horizontal symmetry were present only when considering subjects who showed a behavioral adaptation effect in the baseline No-TMS condition. Application of TMS over the Left or Right V1/V2 did not modulate the adaptation effect. Overall, these data suggest that both the Left and Right DLO contain neuronal representations tuned to mirror symmetry which play a causal role in symmetry discrimination.     

Conscious awareness of action potentiates sensorimotor learning

Many everyday skills are unconsciously learned through repetitions of the same behaviour by binding independent motor acts into unified sets of actions. However, our ability to be consciously aware of producing newly and highly trained motor skills raises the question of the role played by conscious awareness of action upon skill acquisition. In this study we strengthened conscious awareness of self-produced sequential finger movements by way of asking participants to judge their performance in terms of maximal fluency after each trial. Control conditions in which participants did not make any judgment or performance-unrelated judgments were also included. Findings indicate that conscious awareness of action, enhanced via subjective appraisal of motor efficiency, potentiates sensorimotor learning and skilful motor production in optimising the processing and sequencing of action units, as compared to the control groups. The current work lends support to the claim that the learning and skilful expression of sensorimotor behaviours might be grounded upon our ability to be consciously aware of our own motor capability and efficiency.     

A Normative Database and Determinants of Lexical Retrieval for 186 Arabic Nouns: Effects of Psycholinguistic and Morpho-Syntactic Variables on Naming Latency

Research into lexical retrieval requires pictorial stimuli standardised for key psycholinguistic variables. Such databases exist in a number of languages but not in Arabic. In addition there are few studies of the effects of psycholinguistic and morpho-syntactic variables on Arabic lexical retrieval. The current study identified a set of culturally and linguistically appropriate concept labels, and corresponding photographic representations for Levantine Arabic. The set included masculine and feminine nouns, nouns from both types of plural formation (sound and broken), and both rational and irrational nouns. Levantine Arabic speakers provided norms for visual complexity, imageability, age of acquisition, naming latency and name agreement. This delivered a normative database for a set of 186 Arabic nouns. The effects of the morpho-syntactic and the psycholinguistic variables on lexical retrieval were explored using the database. Imageability and age of acquisition were the only significant determinants of successful lexical retrieval in Arabic. None of the other variables, including all the linguistic variables, had any effect on production time. The normative database is available for the use of clinicians and researchers in the Arab world in the domains of speech and language pathology, neurolinguistics and psycholinguistics. The database and the photographic representations will be soon available for free download from the first author’s personal webpage or via email.     

Psychological Comparison Processes and Self-Concept in Relation to Five Distinct Frame-of-Reference Effects: Pan-Human Cross-Cultural Generalizability over 68 Countries

The concept of self is central to personhood, but personality research has largely ignored the relevance of recent advances in self-concept theory: multidimensionality of self-concept (focusing instead on self-esteem, an implicit unidimensional approach), domain specificity (generalizability of trait manifestations over different domains), and multilevel perspectives in which social-cognitive processes and contextual effects drive self-perceptions at different levels (individual, group/institution, and country) aligned to Bronfenbrenner's ecological model. Here, we provide theoretical and empirical support for psychological comparison processes that influence self-perceptions and their relation to distal outcomes. Our meta-theoretical integration of social and dimensional comparison theories synthesizes five seemingly paradoxical frame-of-reference and contextual effects in self-concept formation that occur at different levels. The effects were tested with a sample of 485,490 fifteen-year-old students (68 countries/regions, 18,292 schools). Consistent with the dimensional comparison theory, the effects on math self-concept were positive for math achievement but negative for verbal achievement. Consistent with the social comparison theory, the effects on math self-concept were negative for school-average math achievement (big-fish-little-pond effect), country-average achievement (paradoxical cross-cultural effect), and being young relative to year in school but positive for school-average verbal achievement (big-fish-little-pond effect—compensatory effect). We demonstrate cross-cultural generalizability/universality of support for predictions and discuss implications for personality research. © 2020 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Mental representations of magnitude and order: A dissociation by sensorimotor learning

Numbers and spatially directed actions share cognitive representations. This assertion is derived from studies that have demonstrated that the processing of small- and large-magnitude numbers facilitates motor behaviors that are directed to the left and right, respectively. However, little is known about the role of sensorimotor learning for such number–action associations. In this study, we show that sensorimotor learning in a serial reaction-time task can modify the associations between number magnitudes and spatially directed movements. Experiments 1 and 3 revealed that this effect is present only for the learned sequence and does not transfer to a novel unpracticed sequence. Experiments 2 and 4 showed that the modification of stimulus–action associations by sensorimotor learning does not occur for other sets of ordered stimuli such as letters of the alphabet. These results strongly suggest that numbers and actions share a common magnitude representation that differs from the common order representation shared by letters and spatially directed actions. Only the magnitude representation, but not the order representation, can be modified episodically by sensorimotor learning.