The Ethical Standards of Sunni Muslim Physicians Regarding Fertility Technologies that are Religiously Forbidden

Journal of Religion and Health - This research project is pioneering in that it is the first to provide empirical data regarding the ethical standards of Sunni Muslim physicians toward religiously...     

The Role of Social Network Structure in the Emergence of Linguistic Structure

Social network structure has been argued to shape the structure of languages, as well as affect the spread of innovations and the formation of conventions in the community. Specifically, theoretical and computational models of language change predict that sparsely connected communities develop more systematic languages, while tightly knit communities can maintain high levels of linguistic complexity and variability. However, the role of social network structure in the cultural evolution of languages has never been tested experimentally. Here, we present results from a behavioral group communication study, in which we examined the formation of new languages created in the lab by micro-societies that varied in their network structure. We contrasted three types of social networks: fully connected, small-world, and scale-free. We examined the artificial languages created by these different networks with respect to their linguistic structure, communicative success, stability, and convergence. Results did not reveal any effect of network structure for any measure, with all languages becoming similarly more systematic, more accurate, more stable, and more shared over time. At the same time, small-world networks showed the greatest variation in their convergence, stabilization, and emerging structure patterns, indicating that network structure can influence the community's susceptibility to random linguistic changes (i.e., drift).     

Dyadic Listening in Teams: Social Relations Model

Listening has powerful organizational consequences. However, studies of listening have typically focused on individual level processes. Alternatively, we hypothesized that perceptions of listening quality are inherently dyadic, positively reciprocated in dyads, and are correlated positively with intimacy, speaking ability, and helping-organizational-citizenship behavior, at the dyadic level. In two studies, teammates rated each other on listening and intimacy; in one, they also rated speaking ability, and helping-organizational-citizenship behavior, totaling 324 and 526 dyadic ratings, respectively. In both studies, social relations modeling suggested that the dyad level explained over 40 percent of the variance in both listening and intimacy, and yielded the predicted positive dyadic reciprocities. Furthermore, as predicted, listening perceptions correlated with intimacy, speaking ability, and helping behavior as reported by other workers, primarily at the dyadic level. Moreover, rating of listening, but not of speaking, by one dyad member, predicted intimacy reported by the other dyad member, and that intimacy, in turn, predicted helping-organizational-citizenship behavior. Counterintuitively, listening quality is more a product of the unique combination of employees than an individual difference construct. We conclude that perceived listening, but not perceived speaking, appears to be the glue that binds teammates to each other dyadically, and consequently affects helping.     

Predicting one's own forgetting: the role of experience-based and theory-based processes

The authors examined the hypothesis that judgments of learning (JOL), if governed by processing fluency during encoding, should be insensitive to the anticipated retention interval. Indeed, neither item-by-item nor aggregate JOLs exhibited "forgetting" unless participants were asked to estimate recall rates for several different retention intervals, in which case their estimates mimicked closely actual recall rates. These results and others reported suggest that participants can access their knowledge about forgetting but only when theory-based predictions are made, and then only when the notion of forgetting is accentuated either by manipulating retention interval within individuals or by framing recall predictions in terms of forgetting rather than remembering. The authors interpret their findings in terms of the distinction between experience-based and theory-based JOLs.     

Learning words and rules: abstract knowledge of word order in early sentence comprehension

Children quickly acquire basic grammatical facts about their native language. Does this early syntactic knowledge involve knowledge of words or rules? According to lexical accounts of acquisition, abstract syntactic and semantic categories are not primitive to the language-acquisition system; thus, early language comprehension and production are based on verb-specific knowledge. The present experiments challenge this account: We probed the abstractness of young children's knowledge of syntax by testing whether 25- and 21-month-olds extend their knowledge of English word order to new verbs. In four experiments, children used word order appropriately to interpret transitive sentences containing novel verbs. These findings demonstrate that although toddlers have much to learn about their native languages, they represent language experience in terms of an abstract mental vocabulary. These abstract representations allow children to rapidly detect general patterns in their native language, and thus to learn rules as well as words from the start.     

Comparing objective and subjective learning curves: judgments of learning exhibit increased underconfidence with practice

When participants studied a list of paired associates for several study-test cycles, their judgments of learning (JOLs) exhibited relatively good calibration on the 1st cycle, with a slight overconfidence. However, a shift toward marked underconfidence occurred from the 2nd cycle on. This underconfidence-with-practice (UWP) effect was very robust across several experimental manipulations, such as feedback or no feedback regarding the correctness of the answer, self-paced versus fixed-rate presentation, different incentives for correct performance, magnitude and direction of associative relationships, and conditions producing different degrees of knowing. It was also observed both in item-by-item JOLs and in aggregate JOLs. The UWP effect also occurred for list learning and for the memory of action events. Several theoretical explanations for this counterintuitive effect are discussed.     

The numerical distance effect is task dependent

Number comparison tasks produce a distance effect e.g., Moyer & Landauer (Nature 215: 1519-1520, 1967). It has been suggested that this effect supports the existence of semantic mental representations of numbers. In a matching task, a distance effect also appears, which suggests that the effect has an automatic semantic component. Recently, Cohen (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 16: 332-336, 2009) suggested that in both automatic and intentional tasks, the distance effect might reflect not a semantic number representation, but a physical similarity between digits. The present article (1) compares the distance effect in the automatic matching task with that in the intentional number comparison task and suggests that, in the latter, the distance effect does include an additional semantic component; and (2) indicates that the distance effect in the standard automatic matching task is questionable and that its appearance in previous matching tasks was based on the specific analysis and design that were applied.     

Is it for real? Evaluating authenticity of musical pitch-space synesthesia

In spatial-sequence synesthesia, ordinal sequences are visualized in explicit spatial locations. We examined a recently documented subtype in which musical notes are represented in spatial configurations, to verify consistency and automaticity of musical pitch-space (M-S) synesthesia. An M-S synesthete performed a mapping pre-task (Exp. 1) used to indicate the locations of 7 auditory or visually presented notes, in 2 sessions a month apart. Results revealed strong correlations between sessions, suggesting the synesthete's musical forms were consistent over time. Experiment 2 assessed automaticity of M-S synesthesia. The same synesthete and matched controls preformed a spatial Stroop-like task. Participants were presented with an auditory or visual musical note and then had to reach for an asterisk (target) with a mouse cursor. The target appeared in a compatible or incompatible location (according to the synesthete's spatial representation). A compatibility effect was found for the synesthete but not for controls. The synesthete was significantly faster when the target appeared in compatible locations than in incompatible ones. Our findings show that for synesthetes, auditory and visually presented notes automatically trigger attention to specific spatial locations according to their specific M-S associations.     

Exploring a mnemonic debiasing account of the underconfidence-with-practice effect

Judgments of learning (JOLs) underestimate the increase in recall that occurs with repeated study (the underconfidence-with-practice effect; UWP). The authors explore an account in terms of a foresight bias in which JOLs are inflated when the to-be-recalled target highlights aspects of the cue that are not transparent when the cue appears alone and the tendency of practice to alleviate bias by providing learners with cues pertinent to recall. In 3 experiments the UWP effect was strongest for items that induce a foresight bias, but delaying JOLs reduced the debiasing effects of practice, thereby moderating the UWP effect. This occurred when delayed JOLs were prompted by the cue alone (like during testing), not when prompted by the cue-target pair (like during study).