CAUSAL ATTRIBUTIONS BY JAPANESE AND AMERICAN MOTHERS AND CHILDREN ABOUT PERFORMANCE IN MATHEMATICS*

In this study we examined the possibility that causal inferences about performance may help explain the relatively superior achievement of Japanese students in mathematics. Data from mothers and children in Japan and the U.S. were examined for (a) attributions about causes of performance in math; (b) intra-family transmission of beliefs; and (c) effect of sex of child on attributions. Results showed that Japanese mothers and children emphasized effort, particularly for low performance, while American mothers and children emphasized ability. Beliefs of mothers and children were similar within country but not within family, suggesting that transmission is diffuse. Differences in attributions about performance of boys and girls did not appear in Japan and in the U.S. appeared for mothers only. The emphasis placed on attributions to effort seems to offer a highly motivating context for Japanese students.     

THE SEMANTICS OF FACIAL EXPRESSIONS AND THE PREDICTION OF THE MEANINGS OF STEREOSCOPICALLY FUSED FACIAL EXPRESSIONS

Two experiments were concerned with scaling affective meanings of posed facial expressions using a specially devised form of semantic differential and with determining the extent to which the meaning of stereoscopically fused facial expressions could be predicted. Both experiments provided evidence for at least three dimensions. High reliability for scaling the affective meanings of facial expressions was demonstrated. Two methods were employed for predicting the meaning of a composite expression. The results indicated that the predictions based on the congruity principle do no better than those based on a simple algebraic mean of the two components.     

BINOCULAR RIVALRY AS A FUNCTION OF INCONGRUITY IN MEANING

This is the third of a series of three papers dealing with semantics of facial expressions. The purpose of this experiment was to determine whether the ratings of two stimulus inputs on semantic differential scales would predict the experience of binocular rivalry. The stimuli used were five full-face photographs of a man expressing different emotions. These stimuli were rated on the semantic differential and all possible pairs of these stimuli were used as stereograms. It was hypothesized that semantically incongruous stimulus inputs would lead to binocular rivalry and that congruous ones would lead to an absence of rivalry. The hypothesis was supported.     

MATERNAL EXPECTATIONS FOR MASTERY OF DEVELOPMENTAL TASKS IN JAPAN AND THE UNITED STATES*

Maternal expectations about development help organize parental behavior by providing internal referents against which a child's growth and behavior are evaluated, thus identifying occasions for intervention by the adult. Fifty-eight mothers from Japan and 67 mothers from the United States were interviewed about the ages at which they expected their four-year-old children to acquire a number of specific developmental skills. There were no differences between the two groups of mothers in mean age of mastery expectation across all 38 items but Japanese mothers expected early mastery on skills that indicated emotional maturity, self-control, and social courtesy. Mothers in the U.S. expected mastery at an earlier age on items indicating verbal assertiveness and social skills with peers. Maternal expectations were found to correlate with children's performance on tests of school aptitude when the children were six years of age.     

The effect of repeated writing on memory

Repeated writing, or rehearsal by writing, is a common memory strategy for the Japanese, especially when learning new logographic characters. The to-be-remembered items are written down not as external prompts, as with reminder notes, but to be memorized in the course of writing them down over and over again. In this study, we investigated whether the strategy was effective, and if so, in which condition. Experiment 1 showed that repeated writing improved memory for graphic designs but not for Chinese characters, words, or syllables. Experiment 2 showed that the effect occurred for both Japanese and American subjects, suggesting that it was not the result of a cultural background associated with a logographic language. Instead, the effect seemed to be accounted for by the encoding specificity of visual-motor information, because repeated writing improved free recall— that included writing—but did not improve recognition (Experiment 3). In Experiment 4, the strategy was applied to learning the Arabic alphabet. Finally, similarities between repeated writing and     

Effects upon rats' responses on a running wheel of single alternation of large and small rewards and external cues

Thirty-two rats were trained to run on a running wheel for one or six pellets of food, in either single alternation (SA) or quasi-random sequences of reward magnitude and with external cues either informing or not informing the rats of the reward magnitude. Reward-magnitude discrimination was clearly shown when the informative cues were given, but without such cues the SA patterning of responding appeared only late in training. The reward-magnitude discrimination developed most quickly when internal (SA) cues and external informative cues were both present; the effects of these two classes of cues on discrimination were interactive rather than additive. Possible explanations are given for the superior discrimination under the condition where both the internal and external cues were present over the condition when only the external cues were present.     

Temporal cortex activation during speech recognition: an optical topography study

Cortical activity during speech recognition was examined using optical topography (OT), a recently developed non-invasive technique. To assess relative changes in hemoglobin oxygenation, local changes in near-infrared light absorption were measured simultaneously from 44 points in both hemispheres. A dichotic listening paradigm was used in this experiment, in which target stimuli and non-target stimuli were presented to different ears. Subjects were asked to track targets and to press a button when targets shifted from one ear to the other. We compared three tasks: (i) a control task, in which a tone was used as the target; (ii) a repeat task, in which the target was one repeated sentence; (iii) a story task, in which the targets were continuous sentences of a story. The activity for the story task, compared with the repeat task, was localized in the left superior temporal cortex. Relative to the control task, we observed in this region a larger increase in oxyhemoglobin concentration and a decrease in deoxyhemoglobin concentration in the story task than those in the repeat task. These results suggest that the activity in the left temporal association area reflects the load of auditory, memory, and language information processing.     

Difference threshold for stimulus length under simultaneous and nonsimultaneous viewing conditions

The present study was concerned with Weber’s Law as it is related to the discriminability of the lengths of lines. Experiments were conducted to investigate three questions: (I) Is Weber’s Law equally applicable to simultaneous and nonsimultaneous viewing conditions? (2) Is the relationship between the stimulus sizes and the values ofDLs described more adequately by the function proposed by Weber or a generalized Weber’s Law stated by Miller? and (3) Is Weber’s Law better approximated by proximal or distal size? It was demonstrated that the discriminability of the lengths of lines follows Weber’s Law under the nonsimultaneous viewing condition, but not under the simultaneous viewing condition. Under the nonsimultaneous viewing condition, it was noted that the generalized Weber’s Law as stated by Miller described the relationship between the DL and stimulus size significantly better than the function proposed by Weber. From the results pertaining to the third question, it was not possible to determine whether the proximal or the distal size follows Weber’s Law more closely.     

On the semantic duplicity of the first person pronoun “I”

Continental Philosophy Review -