Grammatical gender effects on cognition: implications for language learning and language use

In 4 experiments, the authors addressed the mechanisms by which grammatical gender (in Italian and German) may come to affect meaning. In Experiments 1 (similarity judgments) and 2 (semantic substitution errors), the authors found Italian gender effects for animals but not for artifacts; Experiment 3 revealed no comparable effects in German. These results suggest that gender effects arise as a generalization from an established association between gender of nouns and sex of human referents, extending to nouns referring to sexuated entities. Across languages, such effects are found when the language allows for easy mapping between gender of nouns and sex of human referents (Italian) but not when the mapping is less transparent (German). A final experiment provided further constraints: These effects during processing arise at a lexical-semantic level rather than at a conceptual level.     

Should the probabilities count?

When facing a choice between saving one person and saving many, some people have argued that fairness requires us to decide without aggregating numbers; rather we should decide by coin toss or some form of lottery, or alternatively we should straightforwardly save the greater number but justify this in a non-aggregating contractualist way. This paper expands the debate beyond well-known number cases to previously under-considered probability cases, in which not (only) the numbers of people, but (also) the probabilities of success for saving people vary. It is shown that, in these latter cases, both the coin toss and the lottery lead to what is called an awkward conclusion, which makes probabilities count in a problematic way. Attempts to avoid this conclusion are shown to lead into difficulties as well. Finally, it is shown that while the greater number method cannot be justified on contractualist grounds for probability cases, it may be replaced by another decision method which is so justified. This decision method is extensionally equivalent to maximising expected value and seems to be the least problematic way of dealing with probability cases in a non-aggregating manner.     

Collaboration in young children

Humans accomplish much of what they do in collaboration with others. In ontogeny, children's earliest abilities to collaborate develop in two basic steps. First, 1- and 2-year-olds learn to form with others joint goals and joint attention--which include an understanding of the individual roles and perspectives involved. Second, as they approach their third birthdays, children's collaborative interactions with others take on a more normative dimension involving obligations to the partner. In addition, their cognitive abilities to conceptualize simultaneously both their own role and perspective along with those of the other develop considerably as well. This form of collaborative interaction is underlain by species-unique skills and motivations for shared intentionality that make possible, ultimately, such things as complex cultural institutions.     

No anticipation without intention: Response–effect compatibility in effect-based and stimulus-based actions

Goal-directed behavior is characterized by the anticipation of the resulting effect during response selection. Such anticipations can be contextualized in the sense that response–effect relationships in one stimulus context are inverted in another stimulus context. The primary study aim was to test the hypothesis that contextualized effect anticipation might depend on whether subjects adopt either an effect-based action control style or a stimulus-based control style. Importantly, we hypothesized that the choice of control styles depends on explicit instruction. Effect anticipation during response selection was determined by assessing the behavioral impact of spatial compatibility between the required response and an additional task-irrelevant spatial feature attached to the anticipated effect that would be produced by that response in a given context. In two experiments we found a compatibility effect exclusively in blocks with effect-based instruction but not in stimulus-based blocks. Furthermore, subjects could quickly switch between styles without one strategy dominating the others. Together, this shows that contextualized anticipation of distal visual effects is not an automatic process but depends on the intention to produce an effect.     

Perceived Threat,Social Identification,and Psychological Well‐Being: The Effects of Political Conflict Exposure

Using data drawn from the adult population in Northern Ireland (N = 1,515), this article examines the relationship between perceived intergroup threat and psychological well‐being, taking into consideration the mediating role of social identification and the moderating role of political conflict exposure. Results by and large confirmed our predictions that perceived threat would be directly associated with poorer well‐being but would also exert a positive indirect effect on well‐being via increased social identification. However, these relationships were dependent on individuals' prior conflict exposure, such that the positive indirect relationship between perceived threat and psychological well‐being emerged only for two subpopulations: individuals who had high direct and high indirect exposure to conflict, and individuals who had low direct, but high indirect conflict exposure. No indirect effects emerged for individuals with relatively lower conflict exposure. Results are discussed with regard to their implications for research on the consequences of intergroup threat in political conflict settings and beyond.     

Bigger knows better: Young children selectively learn rule games from adults rather than from peers

Preschoolers' selective learning from adult versus peer models was investigated. Extending previous research, children from age 3 were shown to selectively learn simple rule games from adult rather than peer models. Furthermore, this selective learning was not confined to preferentially performing certain acts oneself, but more specifically had a normative dimension to it: children understood the way the adult demonstrated an act not only as the better one, but as the normatively appropriate/correct one. This was indicated in their spontaneous normative interventions (protest, critique, etc.) in response to third party acts deviating from the one demonstrated by the adult model. Various interpretations of these findings are discussed in the broader context of the development of children's social cognition and cultural learning.