A demonstration of shape constancy

In order to compare the recognition of objective (defined in three dimensions) and projective (on the frontal-parallel plane) shapes, subjects were asked to identify angles (either objective or projective) on random polygons that were displayed in complex and meaningful photographic slides in the frontal-parallel plane. The subjects’ judgments corresponded much more closely to the objective than to the projective shapes, almost independently of which of the two shapes they were asked to judge and of whether the slides were presented in a normal upright orientation or were rotated 180 deg. The results are incompatible with the strong form of the shape-slant hypothesis, which assumes that the primary perceptual information concerns the properties of the projective retinal image. The results indicate, instead, that a tacit conception of three-dimensional space is primary in the perceptual process.     

Heidegger's Nietzsche interpretation

Continental Philosophy Review -     

When “reliability” fails,must a measure be discarded?—The case of Kinesthetic Aftereffect

Critics of Kinesthetic Aftereffect (KAE) recommend abandoning it as a personality measure largely because of poor test-retest reliability. Although no test can be valid if lacking true reliability, to discard a measure because of poor retest reliability is an oversimplification of validation procedures. This pitfall is exemplified here by a reexamination of KAE. KAE scores involve measures before (pretest) and after (test) aftereffect induction. Internal analysis of a KAE study showed: Differential bias is present; its locus is the second session pretest; its form makes second-session pretest scores functionally more similar to first- and second-session test scores and functionally more dissimilar to first-session pretest scores. Given this second session bias, the retest correlation tells us nothing about the true reliability of a one-session KAE score. However, if a measure possesses external validity, it must to some degree show true reliability. Based upon a literature review of one-session KAE validity studies, we conclude that one-session KAE scores are valid and hence show true reliability. KAE remains a promising personality measure.     

Simulating the Acquisition of Verb Inflection in Typically Developing Children and Children With Developmental Language Disorder in English and Spanish

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have significant deficits in language ability that cannot be attributed to neurological damage, hearing impairment, or intellectual disability. The symptoms displayed by children with DLD differ across languages. In English, DLD is often marked by severe difficulties acquiring verb inflection. Such difficulties are less apparent in languages with rich verb morphology like Spanish and Italian. Here we show how these differential profiles can be understood in terms of an interaction between properties of the input language, and the child's ability to learn predictive relations between linguistic elements that are separated within a sentence. We apply a simple associative learning model to sequential English and Spanish stimuli and show how the model's ability to associate cues occurring earlier in time with later outcomes affects the acquisition of verb inflection in English more than in Spanish. We relate this to the high frequency of the English bare form (which acts as a default) and the English process of question formation, which means that (unlike in Spanish) bare forms frequently occur in third-person singular contexts. Finally, we hypothesize that the pro-drop nature of Spanish makes it easier to associate person and number cues with the verb inflection than in English. Since the factors that conspire to make English verb inflection particularly challenging for learners with weak sequential learning abilities are much reduced or absent in Spanish, this provides an explanation for why learning Spanish verb inflection is relatively unaffected in children with DLD.     

Abstraction and the (Misnamed) Language Familiarity Effect

Talkers are recognized more accurately if they are speaking the listeners’ native language rather than an unfamiliar language. This “language familiarity effect” has been shown not to depend upon comprehension and must instead involve language sound patterns. We further examine the level of sound‐pattern processing involved, by comparing talker recognition in foreign languages versus two varieties of English, by (a) English speakers of one variety, (b) English speakers of the other variety, and (c) non‐native listeners (more familiar with one of the varieties). All listener groups performed better with native than foreign speech, but no effect of language variety appeared: Native listeners discriminated talkers equally well in each, with the native variety never outdoing the other variety, and non‐native listeners discriminated talkers equally poorly in each, irrespective of the variety's familiarity. The results suggest that this talker recognition effect rests not on simple familiarity, but on an abstract level of phonological processing.     

A social neuroscience perspective on adolescent risk-taking

This article proposes a framework for theory and research on risk-taking that is informed by developmental neuroscience. Two fundamental questions motivate this review. First, why does risk-taking increase between childhood and adolescence? Second, why does risk-taking decline between adolescence and adulthood? Risk-taking increases between childhood and adolescence as a result of changes around the time of puberty in the brain’s socio-emotional system leading to increased reward-seeking, especially in the presence of peers, fueled mainly by a dramatic remodeling of the brain’s dopaminergic system. Risk-taking declines between adolescence and adulthood because of changes in the brain’s cognitive control system—changes which improve individuals’ capacity for self-regulation. These changes occur across adolescence and young adulthood and are seen in structural and functional changes within the prefrontal cortex and its connections to other brain regions. The differing timetables of these changes make mid-adolescence a time of heightened vulnerability to risky and reckless behavior.     

A facet analysis of police officers' self‐reported use of suspect‐interviewing strategies and their Discomfort with Ambiguity

This study sought to establish: (i) whether tactics in police suspects interviews can be represented by two interacting facets (cognitive/emotional and coercive/facilitative) and (ii) whether a preference for coercive combinations are positively associated with Discomfort with Ambiguity (Kruglanski, 1989 ). Ninety‐nine police interviewers from the Crime Wing Headquarters of the Hong Kong Police completed a self‐report survey of preferred suspect interviewing tactics, as well as Chiu, Morris, Hong, and Menon (2000) version of the Need For Closure scale. Smallest Space Analysis (Guttman, 1968 ) revealed a duplex structure of cognitive and affective coercive/facilitative themes. Moreover, self‐report results indicated that high scorers on Discomfort with Ambiguity were more willing to use a wider variety of tactics (including more coercive cognitive and emotional tactics) than low scorers (who were more prudent in their constraint and willingness to stick with facilitative cognitive and emotional tactics). Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.