阅读训练对儿童早期字词意识发展的作用

该研究探讨了幼儿园中、大班及小学一、二年级儿童在完成字／词意识任务上的年龄差异以及阅读训练对字／词意识发展的影响。实验结果表明：（1）5岁儿童的字词意识尚处于不断的发展之中。6岁及7岁儿童的字意识发展已经达到了成熟水平,但他们的词意识正处于不断的发展之中。（2）初级的阅读训练促进了5岁儿童字意识的发展,但对词意识的发展没有影响。（3）小学语文教学对6岁儿童的口头任务没有影响,但显著地促进了圈词任务成绩的提高。     

Lying in the elementary school years: verbal deception and its relation to second-order belief understanding

The development of lying to conceal one's own transgression was examined in school-age children. Children (N=172) between 6 and 11 years of age were asked not to peek at the answer to a trivia question while left alone in a room. Half of the children could not resist temptation and peeked at the answer. When the experimenter asked them whether they had peeked, the majority of children lied. However, children's subsequent verbal statements, made in response to follow-up questioning, were not always consistent with their initial denial and, hence, leaked critical information to reveal their deceit. Children's ability to maintain consistency between their initial lie and subsequent verbal statements increased with age. This ability is also positively correlated with children's 2nd-order belief scores, suggesting that theory of mind understanding plays an important role in children's ability to lie consistently.     

What are you looking at? Acuity for triadic eye gaze

The authors measured observers' ability to determine direction of gaze toward an object in space. In Experiment 1, they determined the difference threshold for determining whether a live "looker" was looking to the left or right of a target point. Acuity for eye direction was quite high (approximately 30 s arc). Viewing the movement of the looker's eyes did not improve acuity. When one of the looker's eyes was occluded, the observers' acuity was disrupted and their point of subjective equality was shifted away from the exposed eye. Experiment 2 was a replication of Experiment 1, but digitized gaze displays were used. The results of Experiment 3 showed that the acuity for direction of gaze depended on the position of the looker's target. Overall, the results indicated that humans are highly sensitive to gaze direction and that information from both eyes is used to determine direction of regard.     

对我国高等医学教育学制与学位改革和发展的思考

通过对国内外医学教育学制与学位的比较,以及对我国目前试行的住院医师培训制度存在问题的分析,提出我国六年制培养医学硕士的模式;认为这有利于提高中国高等医学教育层次,有利于统一医学教育学制和学位,有利于国际交流;也为毕业生衔接新体制留下了接口.     

Organizational Tenure Diversity as Predictors of Combat Performance in ROK Army

Drawing on the upper-echelons theory and diversity issues, this study examines the relationships between top management team (TMT) organizational tenure, tenure diversity, and combat performance. The study is based on of Korea Combat Training Center (KCTC) that is designed for training and evaluation of the battalion combat power. Findings indicate that battalions with higher levels of TMT tenure have a positive effect on combat performance. Tenure diversity of TMT has a negative effect on combat performance. In addition, results showed that the negative relationships between tenure diversity of TMT and combat performance are attenuated by commander’s shared experience with other TMT members.     

Personalized persuasion: tailoring persuasive appeals to recipients' personality traits

Persuasive messages are more effective when they are custom-tailored to reflect the interests and concerns of the intended audience. Much of the message-framing literature has focused on the advantages of using either gain or loss frames, depending on the motivational orientation of the target group. In the current study, we extended this research to examine whether a persuasive appeal's effectiveness can be increased by aligning the message framing with the recipient's personality profile. For a single product, we constructed five advertisements, each designed to target one of the five major trait domains of human personality. In a sample of 324 survey respondents, advertisements were evaluated more positively the more they cohered with participants' dispositional motives. These results suggest that adapting persuasive messages to the personality traits of the target audience can be an effective way of increasing the messages' impact, and highlight the potential value of personality-based communication strategies.     

Semantic size does not matter: "bigger" words are not recognized faster

Sereno, O'Donnell, and Sereno (2009) reported that words are recognized faster in a lexical decision task when their referents are physically large than when they are small, suggesting that "semantic size" might be an important variable that should be considered in visual word recognition research and modelling. We sought to replicate their size effect, but failed to find a significant latency advantage in lexical decision for "big" words (cf. "small" words), even though we used the same word stimuli as Sereno et al. and had almost three times as many subjects. We also examined existing data from visual word recognition megastudies (e.g., English Lexicon Project) and found that semantic size is not a significant predictor of lexical decision performance after controlling for the standard lexical variables. In summary, the null results from our lab experiment--despite a much larger subject sample size than Sereno et al.--converged with our analysis of megastudy lexical decision performance, leading us to conclude that semantic size does not matter for word recognition. Discussion focuses on why semantic size (unlike some other semantic variables) is unlikely to play a role in lexical decision.     

When all signs point to you: lies told in the face of evidence

Young children's ability to tell a strategic lie by making it consistent with the physical evidence of their transgression was investigated along with the sociocognitive correlates of such lie-telling behaviors. In Experiment 1, 247 Chinese children between 3 and 5 years of age (126 boys) were left alone in a room and asked not to lift a cup to see the contents. If children lifted up the cup, the contents would be spilled and evidence of their transgression would be left behind. Upon returning to the room, the experimenter asked children whether they peeked and how the contents of the cup ended up on the table. Experiment 1 revealed that young children are able to tell strategic lies to be consistent with the physical evidence by about 4 or 5 years of age, and this ability increases in sophistication with age. Experiment 2, which included 252 Chinese 4-year-olds (127 boys), identified 2 sociocognitive factors related to children's ability to tell strategic lies. Specifically, both children's theory-of-mind understanding and inhibitory control skills were significantly related to their ability to tell strategic lies in the face of physical evidence. The present investigation reveals that contrary to the prevailing views, even young children are able to tell strategic lies in some contexts.     

Visual working memory contaminates perception

Indirect evidence suggests that the contents of visual working memory may be maintained within sensory areas early in the visual hierarchy. We tested this possibility using a well-studied motion repulsion phenomenon in which perception of one direction of motion is distorted when another direction of motion is viewed simultaneously. We found that observers misperceived the actual direction of motion of a single motion stimulus if, while viewing that stimulus, they were holding a different motion direction in visual working memory. Control experiments showed that none of a variety of alternative explanations could account for this repulsion effect induced by working memory. Our findings provide compelling evidence that visual working memory representations directly interact with the same neural mechanisms as those involved in processing basic sensory events.