Why size counts: children's spatial reorientation in large and small enclosures

When mobile organisms are spatially disoriented, for instance by rapid repetitive movement, they must re-establish orientation. Past research has shown that the geometry of enclosing spaces is consistently used for reorientation by a wide variety of species, but that non-geometric features are not always used. Based on these findings, some investigators have postulated a species-universal 'geometric module' that is transcended by the acquisition of spatial language at 6 years. This conclusion has been challenged, however, by findings that children as young as 18 months actually do use features to reorient in larger enclosures than those used in the original experiments. The reason for the room size effect is explored here in five experiments. Collectively, the data on age at which features are first used point to the importance of both restriction of movement in the small space and the fact that features are closer in the small space. In addition, success is seen at younger ages when the target object is adjacent to the feature. These results favor an adaptive combination model of spatial reorientation over a 'module-plus-language' view.     

The Relationship Between Childhood Teasing and Later Interpersonal Functioning

The current study explored the relationship between recall of a form of bullying, specifically childhood teasing, and later interpersonal functioning in a sample of 414 college students. It was predicted that memories of frequent teasing during childhood would be associated with fewer close friends, a more anxious attachment style in the context of romantic relationships, and lower social self-esteem in early adulthood. Although recalled-teasing was not associated with number of friends later in life, it was related to other interpersonal difficulties. Specifically, frequent teasing was associated with less comfort with intimacy and closeness, less comfort in trusting and depending on others, a greater degree of worry about being unloved or abandoned in relationships, and poorer social self-esteem. The relationship of these difficulties to specific domains of teasing was also explored.     

The time course of semantic and syntactic processing in Chinese sentence comprehension: Evidence from eye movements

In the present study, we examined the time course of semantic and syntactic processing when Chinese is read. Readers’ eye movements were monitored, and the relation between a single-character critical word and the sentence context was manipulated such that three kinds of sentences were developed: (1) congruent, (2) those with a semantic violation, and (3) those with both a semantic and a syntactic violation. The eye movement data showed that the first-pass reading times were significantly longer for the target region in the two violation conditions than in the congruent condition. Moreover, the semantic + syntactic violation caused more severe disruption than did the pure semantic violation, as reflected by longer first-pass reading times for the target region and by longer go-past times for the target region and posttarget region in the former than in the latter condition. These results suggest that the effects of, at least, a semantic violation can be detected immediately by Chinese readers and that the processing of syntactic and semantic information is distinct in both first-pass and second-pass reading.     

The Social Production of Altruism: Motivations for Caring Action in a Low-Income Urban Community

Contemporary social science paints a bleak picture of inner-city relational life. Indeed, the relationships of low-income, urban-residing Americans are represented as rife with distress, violence and family disruption. At present, no body of social scientific work systematically examines the factors that promote loving or selfless interactions among low-income, inner-city American individuals, families and communities. In an effort to fill that gap, this ethnographic study examined the motivations for altruism among a sample of adults (n = 40) who reside in an economically distressed housing community (i.e., housing project) in New York City. Content analyses of interviews indicated that participants attributed altruism to an interplay between 14 motives that were then ordered into four overarching categories of motives: (1) needs-centered motives, (2) norm-based motives deriving from religious/spiritual ideology, relationships and personal factors, (3) abstract motives (e.g., humanism), and (4) sociopolitical factors. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

Transposed-letter effects in reading: evidence from eye movements and parafoveal preview

Three eye movement experiments were conducted to examine the role of letter identity and letter position during reading. Before fixating on a target word within each sentence, readers were provided with a parafoveal preview that differed in the amount of useful letter identity and letter position information it provided. In Experiments 1 and 2, previews fell into 1 of 5 conditions: (a) identical to the target word, (b) a transposition of 2 internal letters, (c) a substitution of 2 internal letters, (d) a transposition of the 2 final letters, or (e) a substitution of the 2 final letters. In Experiment 3, the authors used a further set of conditions to explore the importance of external letter positions. The findings extend previous work and demonstrate that transposed-letter effects exist in silent reading. These experiments also indicate that letter identity information can be extracted from the parafovea outside of absolute letter position from the first 5 letters of the word to the right of fixation. Finally, the results support the notion that exterior letters play important roles in visual word recognition.     

Animal innovation defined and operationalized

Innovation is a key component of most definitions of culture and intelligence. Additionally, innovations may affect a species' ecology and evolution. Nonetheless, conceptual and empirical work on innovation has only recently begun. In particular, largely because the existing operational definition (first occurrence in a population) requires long-term studies of populations, there has been no systematic study of innovation in wild animals. To facilitate such study, we have produced a new definition of innovation: Innovation is the process that generates in an individual a novel learned behavior that is not simply a consequence of social learning or environmental induction. Using this definition, we propose a new operational approach for distinguishing innovations in the field. The operational criteria employ information from the following sources: (1) the behavior's geographic and local prevalence and individual frequency; (2) properties of the behavior, such as the social role of the behavior, the context in which the behavior is exhibited, and its similarity to other behaviors; (3) changes in the occurrence of the behavior over time; and (4) knowledge of spontaneous or experimentally induced behavior in captivity. These criteria do not require long-term studies at a single site, but information from multiple populations of a species will generally be needed. These criteria are systematized into a dichotomous key that can be used to assess whether a behavior observed in the field is likely to be an innovation.     

Are Nativists a Different Kind of Democrat? Democratic Values and “Outsiders” in Japan

This paper combines three elements: a discussion of democratic values and the status of outsiders in Japanese political culture, the development of new measures to examine sensitive issues of nativism and foreigner perception in Japan, and an empirical exploration of the relationship between democratic values and antipathy toward outsiders. Two forms of democratic orientation were investigated in a sample of about 1,000 university students in Japan: a defensive version, which adheres to the formalistic requirements of democracy but is exclusionary and illiberal, and a universalist version that is liberal and tolerant. A defensive orientation is associated with greater chauvinism, a greater sense of threat emanating from foreigners, and a heightened anxiety about economic competition. A universalist orientation is associated with low perceived threat and low chauvinism, a lack of fear of economic competition, and a positive view of the cultural contributions of outsiders. Nativism may indeed be compatible with democratic values, but only with the defensive, exclusionary form. In short, the defensive form is democracy for xenophobes. Such an orientation is not unique to Japan, but is likely to be found in developing democracies as well as in advanced democracies that feel threatened.     

Lexical complexity and fixation times in reading: Effects of word frequency,verb complexity,and lexical ambiguity

Two experiments investigated whether lexical complexity increases a word’s processing time. Subjects read sentences, each containing a target word, while their eye movements were monitored. In experiment 1, mean fixation time on infrequent words was longer than on their more frequent controls, as was the first fixation after the Infrequent Target. Fixation Times on Causative, factive, and negative verbs and ambiguous nouns were no longer than on their controls. Further analyses on the ambiguous nouns, however, suggested that the likelihood of their various meanings affected fixation time. This factor was investigated in experiment 2. subjects spent a longer time fixating ambiguous words with two equally likely meanings than fixating ambiguous words with one highly likely meaning. The results suggest that verb complexity does not affect lexical access time, and that word frequency And the presence of two highly likely meanings may affect lexical access and/or postaccess integration.     

Transformation to achieve a longitudinally stationary factor pattern matrix

Meredith's method of extracting a factorially invariant solution is adapted to longitudinal settings. An explorational estimation procedure is presented which attempts to identify the longitudinal factor components of an across occasion variance-covariance matrix. This is effected by transforming an initial factor pattern matrix to stationarity. The estimation is performed in two parts, the first employing a stepwise algorithm to ascertain the dimensionality and existence of the longitudinal components and the second being the direct estimation of the existing factor pattern.