Gains v. losses,or context dependence generated by confusion?

Animal Cognition - Tversky and Kahneman introduced the term framing for the finding that people give different answers to the same question depending on the way it is posed. One form of framing...     

The beginnings of word segmentation in english-learning infants

A series of 15 experiments was conducted to explore English-learning infants' capacities to segment bisyllabic words from fluent speech. The studies in Part I focused on 7.5 month olds' abilities to segment words with strong/weak stress patterns from fluent speech. The infants demonstrated an ability to detect strong/weak target words in sentential contexts. Moreover, the findings indicated that the infants were responding to the whole words and not to just their strong syllables. In Part II, a parallel series of studies was conducted examining 7.5 month olds' abilities to segment words with weak/strong stress patterns. In contrast with the results for strong/weak words, 7.5 month olds appeared to missegment weak/strong words. They demonstrated a tendency to treat strong syllables as markers of word onsets. In addition, when weak/strong words co-occurred with a particular following weak syllable (e.g., "guitar is"), 7.5 month olds appeared to misperceive these as strong/weak words (e.g., "taris"). The studies in Part III examined the abilities of 10.5 month olds to segment weak/strong words from fluent speech. These older infants were able to segment weak/strong words correctly from the various contexts in which they appeared. Overall, the findings suggest that English learners may rely heavily on stress cues when they begin to segment words from fluent speech. However, within a few months time, infants learn to integrate multiple sources of information about the likely boundaries of words in fluent speech.     

Stephen T. Davis (ed.), Philosophy and Theological Discourse [Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion]

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

"Having it all": women's perception of impact of female promotion on threat of domestic violence

This study involved 219 women participants. The main aim of the present study is to examine the perceived consequences of a work-related promotion for the female partner in a heterosexual relationship. The impact of the promotion was manipulated - both partners share paid and domestic work, the male partner taking responsibility for all the domestic work - or female partner continuing to do all the domestic work, as well as the male partner's sexist ideology. Finally, the study examined gender ideology of participants. The results showed that participants felt that violence was more likely when the male partner was presented as sexist and that this was due to a perception of threat on the part of the male partner.     

Heterogeneity in verbal memory: a marker of preclinical Alzheimer's disease?

Demonstrations of memory changes in those at risk for Alzheimer's disease by the presence of the APOE e4 allele have been inconsistent to date. The present study went beyond traditional analyses of central tendency (i.e., group differences on mean test scores) and also conducted distribution analyses to search for subtle cognitive differences in subgroups of normal-functioning elderly persons with the APOE e4 genotype. The results of the study revealed that (a) the e4 and non-e4 groups failed to differ in terms of their mean scores on tests of memory and verbal skills; and (b) relative to the non-e4 group, the e4 subjects had significantly greater heterogeneity of variance on the memory measures but not on fundamental verbal skills. Logistic regression analyses indicated that the discrepancy in scores on the memory measures was a significant predictor of genotype group membership (82% correct classification rate). Implications of these findings for the detection of a preclinical phase of AD are discussed.     

Obtaining guilty knowledge in human intelligence interrogations: Comparing accusatorial and information-gathering approaches with a novel experimental paradigm

Substantial research has assessed interrogations seeking to obtain a criminal confession, and consequently much has been learned regarding the potential problems with confession evidence. However, an increasing focus on counter-terrorism, and therefore intelligence interrogations, reveals an obvious gap in the literature. Intelligence interrogations are primarily focused on collecting information from individuals as opposed to a confession linked to an alleged event, and little of the extant psychological literature can speak directly to such a scenario. The current research developed an experimental paradigm to test interrogation approaches in an intelligence-gathering context, providing a method for gathering empirical data on human intelligence collection. In the first implementation of this paradigm, accusatorial and information-gathering interrogation strategies were tested using a procedure high in psychological realism. Results indicate that an information-gathering approach yields more relevant information than an accusatorial approach and leads to more diagnostic impressions by third party observers.     

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.