The effect of organismic disadvantage on allocation behavior in children

Equity theory (Adams, 1965) suggests that when persons are asked to divide a given amount of reward between two other persons, one relatively more disadvantaged than the other at performing a task, they will make allocations that are disproportionate to the two persons' performance levels, giving the disadvantaged person a disproportionately larger share and the advantaged person a disproportionately smaller share of the reward. The theory attributes this effect to the allocator's perception that the disadvantaged individual expended a disproportionately greater amount of effort. A group of third- and fourth-graders and a group of seventh-graders were asked to divide rewards between pairs of children that were described to vary in age (“younger” vs. older) or ability (“unskilled” vs. skilled) or that were the “same” in age and ability and that were described to vary (5 vs. 15, or 0 vs. 20 baskets) or to be equal (10 vs. 10 baskets) in performance on a basketball-shooting task. Unlike the group of third- and fourth-graders, the seventh-graders generally made significantly larger allocations to the disadvantaged individuals (“younger” and “unskilled”) than to the “same” individuals, making the largest allocations under the most discrepant performance condition (0 vs. 20). Overall, the results suggested that the equity principle becomes more salient in children as age increases.     

Attention alters the appearance of motion coherence

Selective attention enhances visual information processing, as measured by behavioral performance and neural activity. However, little is known about its effects on subjective experience. Here, we investigated the effect of transient (exogenous) attention on the appearance of visual motion, using a psychophysical procedure that directly measures appearance and controls for response bias. Observers viewed pairs of moving dot patterns and reported the motion direction of the more coherent pattern. Directing attention (via a peripheral precue) to a stimulus location increased its perceived coherence level and improved performance on a direction discrimination task. In a control experiment, we ruled out response bias by lengthening the time interval between the cue and the stimuli, so that the effect of transient attention could no longer be exerted. Our results are consistent with those of neurophysiological studies showing that attention modulates motion processing and provide evidence of a subjective perceptual correlate of attention, with a concomitant effect on performance.     

Figural aftereffects in the perception of faces

We examined figural aftereffects in images of human faces, for which changes in configuration are highly discriminable. Observers either matched or rated faces before or after viewing distorted images of faces. Prior adaptation strongly biases face perception by causing the original face to appear distorted in a direction opposite to the adapting distortion. Aftereffects transferred across different faces and were similar for upright or inverted faces, but were weaker when the adapting and test faces had different orientations (e.g., adapt inverted and test upright). Thus the aftereffects depend on which images are distorted, and not simply on the type of distortion introduced. We further show that the aftereffects are asymmetric, for adapting to the original face has little effect on the perception of a distorted face. This asymmetry suggests that adaptation may play an important normalizing role in face perception. Our results suggest that in normal viewing, figural aftereffects may strongly influence form perception and could provide a novel method for probing properties of human face perception.     

“I Can’t Operate,that Boy Is my Son!”: Gender Schemas and a Classic Riddle

Sex Roles - To study the power of lived experiences and conscious attitudes in helping individuals to overcome nonconscious gender schemas, U.S. university students (n?=?152) were...     

Specific conditions for a selective deficit in memory for order in children with dyslexia

Short-term memory (STM) models distinguish between item and order memorization. The present study aims to explore how item and order STM are affected by the nature of the stimuli, the sequential versus simultaneous mode of presentation, the visual versus auditory presentation modality, the possibility of verbal recoding. A total of 20 children with dyslexia were matched one-by-one with 20 typically reading children on sex, age (8–14 years), and grade. Computerized STM tasks were administered while manipulating type (item vs. order), stimuli (letters vs. colors), sequentiality, input and output modality, as well as the presence/absence of articulatory suppression and distractors. General Linear Model analyses were conducted on accuracy scores for item and order STM. Both item and order recall scores were lower for children with dyslexia. Although order STM in the visual input condition turned out to be more impaired than item STM in the dyslexic group, both item and order memory impairments become evident when verbal recoding is prevented through articulatory suppression. Moreover, dyslexic children, unlike typical readers, were not facilitated by the linguistic nature of the stimuli to be remembered. The present findings suggest that the often-reported selective impairment of serial memory in dyslexia is restricted to stimuli that are verbal in nature or can be verbally recoded, whereas both item and order memory impairments become evident when verbal recoding is prevented through articulatory suppression. The presence of distractors is particularly detrimental to STM in the dyslexic group. The sensitivity to distractors, suppression, and stimuli in STM is predictive of reading performance.     

Transient attention does increase perceived contrast of suprathreshold stimuli: a reply to Prinzmetal, Long, and Leonhardt (2008)

Carrasco, Ling, and Read (2004) showed that transient attention increases perceived contrast. However, Prinzmetal, Long, and Leonhardt (2008) suggest that for targets of low visibility, observers may bias their response toward the cued location, and they propose a cue-bias explanation for our previous results. Our response is threefold. First, we outline several key methodological differences between the studies that could account for the different results. We conclude that the cue-bias hypothesis is a plausible explanation for Prinzmetal et al.'s (2008) results, given the characteristics of their stimuli, but not for the studies by Carrasco and colleagues, in which the stimuli were suprathreshold (Carrasco, Ling, & Read, 2004; Fuller, Rodriguez, & Carrasco, 2008; Ling & Carrasco, 2007). Second, we conduct a study to show that the stimuli used in our previous studies are not near-threshold, but suprathreshold (Experiment 1, Phase 1). Furthermore, we found an increase in apparent contrast for a high-contrast stimulus when it was precued, but not when it was postcued, providing more evidence against a cue-bias hypothesis (Experiment 1, Phase 2). We also show that the visibility of the stimuli in Prinzmetal et al. (2008) was much lower than that of Carrasco, Ling, and Read, rendering their stimuli susceptible to their cue-bias explanation (Experiment 2). Third, we present a comprehensive summary of all the control conditions used in different labs that have ruled out a cue bias explanation of the appearance studies. We conclude that a cue-bias explanation may operate with near-threshold and low-visibility stimuli, as was the case in Prinzmetal et al. (2008), but that such an explanation has no bearing on studies with suprathreshold stimuli. Consistent with our previous studies, the present data support the claim that attention does alter the contrast appearance of suprathreshold stimuli.     

The timing of verbal/vocal communications between mothers and their infants: a longitudinal cross-cultural comparison

Early dialogues between parent and child constitute an important factor for the acquisition of culture and hence verbal interaction is considered to be a universal parenting system. Parenting strategies and socialization practices are strongly influenced by the cultural conception of the self, prototypically defined as the model of independence and interdependence. Our study focuses on the temporal organization of spontaneous verbal/vocal behavior of 20 German middle-class and 28 Cameroonian Nso mother–infant dyads. The infants and their mothers were observed weekly in a 5 min free-play interaction scene from 0 to 3 months of age. We hypothesized to find different amounts of vocalization time, synchronous vocalizations, and contingent maternal responses in the verbal/vocal patterns of the two samples. The findings indicate cross-cultural differences in the temporal structure of verbal/vocal interactions already during the first three months of life, reflecting underlying differences in the culture-specific modes of verbal interaction.     

Functional overlap of top-down emotion regulation and generation: An fMRI study identifying common neural substrates between cognitive reappraisal and cognitively generated emotions

One factor that influences the success of emotion regulation is the manner in which the regulated emotion was generated. Recent research has suggested that reappraisal, a top-down emotion regulation strategy, is more effective in decreasing self-reported negative affect when emotions were generated from the top-down, versus the bottom-up. On the basis of a process overlap framework, we hypothesized that the neural regions active during reappraisal would overlap more with emotions that were generated from the top-down, rather than from the bottom-up. In addition, we hypothesized that increased neural overlap between reappraisal and the history effects of top-down emotion generation would be associated with increased reappraisal success. The results of several analyses suggested that reappraisal and emotions that were generated from the top-down share a core network of prefrontal, temporal, and cingulate regions. This overlap is specific; no such overlap was observed between reappraisal and emotions that were generated in a bottom-up fashion. This network consists of regions previously implicated in linguistic processing, cognitive control, and self-relevant appraisals, which are processes thought to be crucial to both reappraisal and top-down emotion generation. Furthermore, individuals with high reappraisal success demonstrated greater neural overlap between reappraisal and the history of top-down emotion generation than did those with low reappraisal success. The overlap of these key regions, reflecting overlapping processes, provides an initial insight into the mechanism by which generation history may facilitate emotion regulation.