Which types of income matter most for well‐being in China: Absolute,relative or income aspirations?

China has experienced remarkable economic growth, but that has not been associated with increases in individual well‐being, implying that well‐being may not be sensitive to increases in absolute income (AI). Thus, the relationship between well‐being and other types of income is worth investigating. This study employed a national sample of 5471 respondents from 31 provinces of China (excluding Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan) to compare the effects of AI, relative income (RI) and income aspirations (IA) on individual well‐being in China. The results of a hierarchical regression analysis found that, compared to AI and RI, IA explained more variation in well‐being. These findings highlight the importance of IA for well‐being among the Chinese.     

Predicting risk decisions in a modified Balloon Analogue Risk Task: Conventional and single-trial ERP analyses

Event-related potential (ERP) has the potential to reveal the temporal neurophysiological dynamics of risk decision-making, but this potential has not been fully explored in previous studies. When predicting risk decision with ERPs, most studies focus on between-trial analysis that reflects feedback learning, while within-trial analysis that could directly link option assessment with behavioral output has been largely ignored. Suitable task design is crucial for applying within-trial prediction. In this study, we used a modified version of the classic Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART). In each trial of the task, participants made multiple rounds of decisions between a risky option (pump up the balloon) and a safe option (cash out). Behavioral results show that as the level of economic risk increased, participants were less willing to make a risky decision and also needed a longer response time to do so. In general, the ERP results showed distinct characteristics compared with previous findings based on between-trial prediction, particularly about the role of the P1 component. Specifically, both the P1 (amplitude and latency) and P3 (amplitude) components evoked by current outcomes predicted subsequent decisions. We suggest that these findings indicate the importance of selective attention (indexed by the P1) and motivational functions (indexed by the P3), which may help clarify the cognitive mechanism of risk decision-making. The theoretical significance of these findings is discussed.     

Prioritization to visual objects: Roles of sensory uncertainty

Two hypotheses, attentional prioritization and attentional spreading, have been proposed to account for object-based attention. The attentional-prioritization hypothesis posits that the positional uncertainty of targets is sufficient to resolve the controversy raised by the competing attentional-spreading hypothesis. Here we challenge the sufficiency of this explanation by showing that object-based attention is a function of sensory uncertainty in a task with consistent high positional uncertainty of the targets. In Experiment 1, object-based attention was modulated by sensory uncertainty induced by the noise from backward masking, showing an object-based effect under high as compared to low sensory uncertainty. This finding was replicated in Experiment 2 with increased task difficulty, to exclude that as a confounding factor, and in Experiment 3 with a psychophysical method, to obtain converging evidence using perceptual threshold measurement. Additionally, such a finding was not observed when sensory uncertainty was eliminated by replacing the backward-masking stimuli with perceptually dissimilar ones in Experiment 4. These results reveal that object-based attention is influenced by sensory uncertainty, even under high positional uncertainty of the targets. Our findings contradict the proposition of attentional spreading, proposing instead an automatic form of object-based attention due to enhancement of the perceptual representation. More importantly, the attentional-prioritization hypothesis based solely on positional uncertainty cannot sufficiently account for object-based attention, but needs to be developed by expanding the concept of uncertainty to include at least sensory uncertainty.     

Capacity limit of ensemble perception of multiple spatially intermixed sets

The visual system is remarkably efficient at extracting summary statistics from the environment. Yet at any given time, the environment consists of many groups of objects distributed over space. Thus, the challenge for the visual system is to summarize over multiple groups. The current study investigates the capacity and computational efficiency of ensemble perception, in the context of perceiving mean sizes of multiple spatially intermixed groups of circles. In a series of experiments, participants viewed an array of one to eight sets of circles. Each set contained four circles in the same colors, but with different sizes. Participants estimated the mean size of a probed set. The set that would be probed was either known before onset of the array (pre-cue condition) or afterwards (post-cue condition). By comparing estimation error in the pre-cue and post-cue conditions, we found that participants could reliably estimate mean sizes for approximately two sets (Experiment 1). Importantly, this capacity was robust against attention bias toward individual objects in the sets (Experiment 2). Varying the exposure time to stimulus arrays did not increase the capacity limit, suggesting that ensemble perception could be limited by an internal resource constraint, rather than the speed of information encoding (Experiment 3). Moreover, we found that the visual system could not encode and hold more individual items than ensemble representations (Experiment 4). Taken together, these results suggest that ensemble perception provides an efficient way of information processing but with constraints.     

留学经验与艺术创造力

采用两个艺术创造力测量任务比较了中国留学生、德国大学生和中国国内学生的艺术创造力水平。使用共感评价技术作为评判艺术作品创造程度、技术水平等维度的方法。研究发现:(1)在艺术创造力任务中,中国留学生没有表现出比中国国内学生的优势,说明可能多元文化经验对创造力表达的影响是有条件的;(2)德国学生的艺术创造力水平高于中国学生,本结果支持前人研究中有关个人主义文化相对于集体主义文化更有助于创造力表达的相关假设;(3)共感评价技术是艺术创造力研究的有效工具。     

工科院校大学生网络成瘾与人格特征的关系

目的了解工科院校大学生网络成瘾现状及其与人格特征的关系,为多方面理解网络成瘾及其矫治提供依据。方法采取随机抽样的方法从西安市某工科院校抽取学生共262人,用网络成瘾量表和艾森克人格量表对研究对象进行测试。结果网络成瘾检出率为41.8%;男生网络成瘾程度显著高于女生;大三、大四学生网络成瘾程度显著高于大一学生,大三学生成瘾程度显著高于大二学生和大四学生;大学生的网络成瘾程度与神经质、精神质呈显著的正相关,与掩饰性呈显著的负相关,与内外向的相关不显著。结论人格特征在一定程度上可以预测网络成瘾的程度。     

Do 10-month-old infants understand others' false beliefs?

As adults, we know that others’ mental states, such as beliefs, guide their behavior and that these mental states can deviate from reality. Researchers have examined whether young children possess adult-like theory of mind by focusing on their understanding about others’ false beliefs. The present research revealed that 10-month-old infants seemed to interpret a person’s choice of toys based on her true or false beliefs about which toys were present. These results indicate that like adults, even preverbal infants act as if they can consider others’ mental states when making inferences about others’ actions.     

孔子为学思想及现代启示

国以民为本,家以孝为先,做人以德为重,修身以学为主。学为立世之本,学可以明智、学可以致用、学可以立德。孔子为学思想博大精深,给后人留下了宝贵的经验和启示。     

Working memory can enhance unconscious visual perception

We demonstrate that unconscious processing of a stimulus property can be enhanced when there is a match between the contents of working memory and the stimulus presented in the visual field. Participants first held a cue (a colored circle) in working memory and then searched for a brief masked target shape presented simultaneously with a distractor shape. When participants reported having no awareness of the target shape at all, search performance was more accurate in the valid condition, where the target matched the cue in color, than in the neutral condition, where the target mismatched the cue. This effect cannot be attributed to bottom-up perceptual priming from the presentation of a memory cue, because unconscious perception was not enhanced when the cue was merely perceptually identified but not actively held in working memory. These findings suggest that reentrant feedback from the contents of working memory modulates unconscious visual perception.