The movement of internal facial features elicits 7 to 8‐month‐old infants' preference for face patterns

A preference for static face patterns is observed in newborns and disappears around 3 months after birth. A previous study has demonstrated that 5‐month‐old infants prefer schematic faces only when the internal features are moving, suggesting that face‐specific movement enhances infants' preference. The present study investigates the facilitative effect of the movement of internal facial features on infants' preference. To examine infants' preference, we used animated face patterns consisting of a head‐shaped contour and three disk blobs. The inner blobs expanded and contracted to represent the opening and closing of the eyes and mouth, and were constrained to open and close only in a biologically possible vertical direction resembling the facial muscle structure. We compared infants' preferential looking time for this vertically moving (VM) face pattern with their looking time for a horizontally moving (HM) face pattern in which blobs transformed at the same speed in a biologically impossible, horizontal direction. In Experiment 1, 7 to 8‐month‐olds preferred the VM to the HM, but 5 to 6‐month‐olds did not. However, the preference was diminished in both cases when the moving face patterns were presented without contour (Experiment 2). Our results suggest that internal facial features with vertical movements promote face preference in 7 to 8‐month‐olds. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Angle illusion in a straight road

We report a new angle illusion observed when viewing a real scene involving a straight road. The scene portrays two white lines which outline a traffic lane on a road and converge to a vanishing point. In experiment 1, observers estimated the angle created by these converging lines in this scene or in its image projected onto a screen. Results showed strong underestimation of the angle, ie over 50% for observations of both the real scene and its projected image. Experiment 2 assessed how depth cues in projected images influence the angle illusion. Results showed that this angle illusion disappeared when scene information surrounding convergent lines was removed. In addition, the illusion was attenuated with projection of an inverted scene image. These findings are interpreted in terms of a misadoption of depth information in the processing of angle perception in a flat image; in turn, this induces a massive angle illusion.     

Group communication and decision-making strategies

In daily life, people frequently make inferences about current and future states of the world. Most of these inferences are not made individually, but by exchanging information about which strategies could be used with other people. In an experiment, we analyzed whether exchanging information socially increased the probability of selecting the most adaptive strategy. In our experiment, take-the-best (TTB; Gigerenzer & Goldstein, 1996), a simple heuristic that employs one-reason decision making, achieved the highest payoff. Results showed that the fit of TTB increased substantially across trial blocks when participants were allowed to exchange information with other group members. In contrast, when participants made inferences individually, they did not select the most adaptive strategy even after seven trial blocks. Overall, our results support the hypothesis that group communication increases the likelihood that participants select the most adaptive strategy for making inferences.     

Thought-experiment intuitions and truth in fiction

What sorts of things are the intuitions generated via thought experiment? Timothy Williamson has responded to naturalistic skeptics by arguing that thought-experiment intuitions are judgments of ordinary counterfactuals. On this view, the intuition is naturalistically innocuous, but it has a contingent content and could be known at best a posteriori. We suggest an alternative to Williamson’s account, according to which we apprehend thought-experiment intuitions through our grasp on truth in fiction. On our view, intuitions like the Gettier intuition are necessarily true and knowable a priori. Our view, like Williamson’s, avoids naturalistic skepticism.     

Physiological evidence that a masked unrelated intervening item disrupts semantic priming: implications for theories of semantic representation and retrieval models of semantic priming

Event-related potentials were recorded in a paradigm where an unrelated word was interposed between two related words. In one condition, the intervening item was masked and in another condition it was not. The N400 component indicated that priming of the related word was disrupted by the intervening item whether it was masked or not. The data are interpreted to be inconsistent with retrieval models of priming.     

Simple mechanisms for gathering social information

Social contexts are notoriously complex, yet decisions are nevertheless made by using simple strategies. We argue that the concept of fast and frugal heuristics provides a promising framework for understanding how we gather social information to make decisions in social environments. That is, we assume that under limitations of time, energy, and computational resources people use cognitively based shortcuts that rely on information from social environments to solve different types of real problems. We review three successful applications of heuristics to the social arena. We first introduce some commonly faced social inference problems (e.g., selecting a mate or deciding whether to cooperate with someone) and then discuss how individuals can use simple strategies to solve such problems. For each problem, we consider how social environments are structured, and how we take advantage of this structure when using heuristics to make inferences and decisions.     

Cultural differences in drawing movements between right-handed Japanese and German participants

Differences in drawing movements with the dominant and nondominant hands by 41 right-handed students from Japan (9 men, 12 women; M age = 20.3 yr., SD = 1.4) and Germany (13 men, 7 women; M age = 23.4 yr., SD = 3.0) were investigated. Participants were asked to use each hand to draw a circle, a pentagon, and a rhombus in one stroke. Analysis showed that Japanese participants drew a circle clockwise with the dominant right hand, starting from 6 or 7 o'clock on the face of a clock, while the German participants drew the circle counterclockwise, starting from 11 or 12 o'clock. Moreover, when drawing a pentagon and a rhombus with the right hand, Japanese participants drew counterclockwise from the top-center vertex, whereas almost half of German participants drew clockwise from the left side and others drew counterclockwise from the top-center vertex. Using the left hand, no significant difference was found in starting positions or directionality. Cultural differences in the starting positions and directionality when using the dominant right hand probably reflect the influence of writing habits on the drawing movement of the dominant hand.     

Validation of a Japanese Version of the Work Engagement Scale for Students

We sought to verify the reliability and validity of the Japanese version of the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale for Students (UWES‐S‐J). We examined 824 university students. We calculated the goodness of fit for a single‐factor model and the three‐factor model. The fit to the data was better for the three‐factor than for the single‐factor model, but all factors were highly positively correlated. Additionally, the UWES‐S‐J had good internal consistency and test–retest reliability. For the content validity, there were significant positive correlations between the UWES‐S‐J score and social support, a resilience scale, and subjective happiness. The UWES‐S‐J has good reliability and validity and may therefore be used to assess study engagement among Japanese students.