Transfer of pattern recall skills may contribute to the development of sport expertise

Superior recall of domain‐specific patterns is well established as a defining attribute of expert performers. Recent studies on the developmental histories of expert team ball sport players (e.g. Baker, Côté, & Abernethy, 2003a ) also suggest that experts characteristically receive exposure to a wide range of sports in their developing years and that this related sports experience may reduce the amount of sport‐specific training needed to become an expert. This study examined whether the facilitation of expertise associated with other sport experience might arise from positive transfer of pattern recall skills from one sport to another. Expert netball, basketball and field hockey players and experienced non‐experts performed a recall task for patterns of play derived from each of these sports. Experts from sports different to those shown in the presented pattern consistently outperformed non‐experts in their recall of defensive player positions, suggesting some selective transfer of pattern recall skills may indeed be possible. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Association between obesity and suicide in woman,but not in man: a population-based study of young adults

The relationship between obesity and suicide risk is still unclear with controversial research results. The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between obesity and suicide risk for men and women in a population-based study of young adults. This is a cross-sectional population-based study that identified young adults between 18 and 35 years of age. Suicide risk was investigated through the structured clinical interview Mini. Weight and height were assessed, and participants were classified as normal-weight body mass index (BMI < 30) or obese (BMI > 30). The prevalence of obesity was of 19.9% of the total sample (n = 1953). Obesity was more prevalent among women and participants between 27 and 35 years of age. Suicide risk was present in 13.0% of the sample and more prevalent among women. In our study we found an association between obesity and suicide risk for women, but not for men. Obesity was associated with a higher prevalence of suicide risk in women. Given the strength of the relationship between BMI and suicide, identifying the mechanisms associated with obesity, especially for women, can lead to new insights into the prevention of suicide risk     

The development of generosity and moral cognition across five cultures

Morality is an evolved aspect of human nature, yet is heavily influenced by cultural environment. This developmental study adopted an integrative approach by combining measures of socioeconomic status (SES), executive function, affective sharing, empathic concern, theory of mind, and moral judgment in predicting sharing behavior in children (N = 999) from the age of 5 to 12 in five large‐scale societies: Canada, China, Turkey, South Africa, and the USA. Results demonstrate that age, gender, SES, culture, and social cognitive mechanisms explain over 20% of the variance worldwide in children's resource allocation. These findings are discussed in reference to standard cultural comparisons (individualist/collectivist), as well as the degree of market integration, and highlight continuities and discontinuities in children's generosity across urban contexts.     

A psychological study of unconnected conditionals

Unconnected conditionals, also called irrelevant conditionals, are sentences of form if A, C, whose antecedent and consequent bear no connection. According to the main theories of conditional reasoning, the truth or high probability of an antecedent and a consequent is sufficient to make true or highly probable the corresponding conditional. We tested this assumption and showed that it does not hold for unconnected conditionals. Furthermore, we investigated experimentally the factors which favour the endorsement of irrelevant conditional constructions and found that this rate increases when an analogy can be built between the antecedent and the consequent or when the conditional is asserted before its components.     

Gaze following and gaze priming in lemurs

Although primates have often been found to co-orient visually with other individuals, members of these same species have usually failed to use co-orientation to find hidden food in object-choice experiments. This presents an evolutionary puzzle: what is the function of co-orientation if it is not used for a function as basic as locating resources? Co-orientation responses have not been systematically investigated in object-choice experiments, and requiring co-orientation with humans (as is typical in object-choice tasks) may underestimate other species’ abilities. Using an object-choice task with conspecific models depicted in photographs, we provide experimental evidence that two lemur species (Eulemur fulvus, n = 4, and Eulemur macaco, n = 2) co-orient with conspecifics. Secondly, by analysing together two measures that have traditionally been examined separately, we show that lemurs’ gaze following behaviour and ultimate choice are closely linked. Individuals were more likely to choose correctly after having looked in the same direction as the model, and thus chose objects correctly more often than chance. We propose a candidate system for the evolutionary origins of more complex gaze following: ‘gaze priming.’     

The moderating effect of parental warmth on the association between spanking and child aggression: a longitudinal approach

Using data from the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Study, this study analysed the stability of child aggressive behaviour beginning in infancy and tested whether spanking when the child was 36 months was associated with aggressive child behaviour among three ethnic groups and whether maternal warmth moderated the effect of spanking on aggressive behaviour in each ethnic group at 36 months, after controlling for earlier aggressive behaviour. Participants included 693 Hispanic parent–child dyads, 1013 African‐American dyads and 1086 Caucasian dyads who met qualifications for participation in the Early Head Start programme. Findings suggest that infant temperament was associated with aggressive behaviour at 24 and 36 months and that child aggression remained stable. Among the three ethnic groups, spanking was only associated with aggressive behaviour for children who had Caucasian mothers and maternal warmth did not moderate the effect of spanking on aggressive behaviour. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Are animal models predictive for humans?

It is one of the central aims of the philosophy of science to elucidate the meanings of scientific terms and also to think critically about their application. The focus of this essay is the scientific term predict and whether there is credible evidence that animal models, especially in toxicology and pathophysiology, can be used to predict human outcomes. Whether animals can be used to predict human response to drugs and other chemicals is apparently a contentious issue. However, when one empirically analyzes animal models using scientific tools they fall far short of being able to predict human responses. This is not surprising considering what we have learned from fields such evolutionary and developmental biology, gene regulation and expression, epigenetics, complexity theory, and comparative genomics.