Socialization and cognition in children between the age of 18 and 24 months

A cross-cultural study of mother–child dyads was set up to test the hypothesis that sociocultural differences, mediated by variations of maternal intervention, influence the way in which the child manipulates objects and, thereby, his cognitive and social competences. Two series of observations were conducted with three groups of children aged 18–24 months (15 from the American middle class, 15 from French families and 15 from North African families—the last two groups both underprivileged): (a) ‘naturalistic’ observations of two systems of interaction (child–mother and child–children interaction) showed that each child is characterized by one type of object manipulation (protected, induced, activated or autonomous) and that maternal intervention varies with the sociocultural background; assessment of the child's behavioural sequences unravelled his strategies for solving and avoiding conflicts with his peers; (b) observations of the child with a standardized material permitted an evaluation of his cognitive competences for spontaneous problem-solving. Regarding the assumptions of our hypothesis, the results furnish the following conclusions: (1) social and cognitive competences are related to the object manipulation type. In all samples, children characterized by ‘activated’ and ‘autonomous’ manipulation obtain the better results; (2) maternal intervention differs among the samples depending on the sociocultural background; these differences (limitation and physical contact) do not correspond to differences in types of manipulation; (3) type of manipulation is an interactive construction; it characterizes the functioning of the mother–child dyad and its prevailing dynamics between permanence and change. ©1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Beyond statistical significance: Five principles for the new era of data analysis and reporting

A crisis of confidence in research findings in consumer psychology and other academic disciplines has led to various proposals to abandon, replace, strengthen, or supplement the null hypothesis significance testing paradigm. The proliferation of such proposals, and their often-conflicting recommendations, can increase confusion among researchers. We aim to bring some clarity by proposing five simple principles for the new era of data analysis and reporting of research in consumer psychology. We avoid adding to researchers' confusion and proposing more onerous or rigid standards. Our goal is to offer straightforward practical principles that are easy for researchers to keep in mind while analyzing their data and reporting their findings. These principles involve (1) interpreting p-values as continuous measures of the strength of evidence, (2) being aware of assumptions that determine whether one can rely on p-values, (3) using theory to establish the applicability of findings to new settings, (4) employing multiple measures of evidence and various processes to obtain them, but assigning special privilege to none, and (5) reporting procedures and findings transparently and completely. We hope that these principles provide researchers with some guidance and help to strengthen the reliability of the conclusions derived from their data, analyses, and findings.     

The Age of Discoveries and Patriotism: James Darmesteter's Assessment of French Orientalism

The rapid development of Orientalism in the nineteenth century played a fundamental role in the expansion of our prior conceptions of various religious traditions. In this article, I will analyse James Darmesteter's assessment of the development of French Orientalism. He discussed this issue in his Essais orientaux (1883a). First, I will describe the discoveries mentioned by Darmesteter. Second, I will highlight his comments about the contributions of French scholars to the development of orientalism. Finally, I will analyse the relation between the Franco–German War (1870–71) and Darmesteter's Essais. The article will show that the military vocabulary used by Darmesteter is a clear indication of the impact of the war on his writing.     

Interactions Between Exogenous Auditory and Visual Spatial Attention

Six experiments were carried out to investigate the issue of cross-modality between exogenous auditory and visual spatial attention employing Posner's cueing paradigm in detection, localization, and discrimination tasks. Results indicated cueing in detection tasks with visual or auditory cues and visual targets but not with auditory targets (Experiment 1). In the localization tasks, cueing was found with both visual and auditory targets. Inhibition of return was apparent only in the within-modality conditions (Experiment 2). This suggests that it is important whether the attention system is activated directly (within a modality) or indirectly (between modalities). Increasing the cue validity from 50% to 80% influenced performance only in the localization task (Experiment 4). These findings are interpreted as being indicative for modality-specific but interacting attention mechanisms. The results of Experiments 5 and 6 (up/down discrimination tasks) also show cross-modal cueing but not with visual cues and auditory targets. Furthermore, there was no inhibition of return in any condition. This suggests that some cueing effects might be task dependent.     

When one-two-three beats two-one-three: Tracking the acquisition of the verbal number sequence

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - Learning how to count is a crucial step in cognitive development, which progressively allows for more elaborate numerical processing. The existing body of...     

Episodic feeling-of-knowing accuracy and cued recall in the elderly: evidence for double dissociation involving executive functioning and processing speed

This research investigated adult age differences in a metamemory monitoring task-episodic feeling-of-knowing (FOK) and in an episodic memory task-cued recall. Executive functioning and processing speed were examined as mediators of these age differences. Young and elderly adults were administered an episodic FOK task, a cued recall task, executive tests and speed tests. Age-related decline was observed on all the measures. Correlation analyses revealed a pattern of double dissociation which indicates a specific relationship between executive score and FOK accuracy, and between speed score and cued recall. When executive functioning and processing speed were evaluated concurrently on FOK and cued recall variables, hierarchical regression analyses showed that executive score was a better mediator of age-related variance in FOK, and that speed score was the better mediator of age-related variance in cued recall.     

Different cognitive processes in two image-scanning paradigms

Mental image scanning is generally assumed to be a single process that allows people to shift attention across visualized objects. However, this implicit assumption is open to question. We report a set of three experiments based on the tasks originally designed by Kosslyn, Ball, and Reiser (1978) and Finke and Pinker (1982). Participants scanned the identical images of an array of dots in the two tasks. Nevertheless, the participants required more time to shift their focus over the imaged stimulus in the Kosslyn et al. (1978) paradigm. Moreover, correlational analyses revealed no consistent relationship between the slopes of the increases in scanning times with increasing distances in the two paradigms. We conclude that in the Kosslyn et al. (1978) paradigm, the participants draw primarily on transformational processes to scan, whereas in the Finke and Pinker (1982) paradigm, they draw primarily on attentional processes. Both processes, transforming the image and shifting an attention window, produce linear increases in time with increases in distance, but for different reasons.     

Chances and frequencies in probabilistic reasoning: rejoinder to Hoffrage,Gigerenzer, Krauss,and Martignon

Do individuals unfamiliar with probability and statistics need a specific type of data in order to draw correct inferences about uncertain events? Girotto and Gonzalez (Cognition 78 (2001) 247) showed that naive individuals solve frequency as well as probability problems, when they reason extensionally, in particular when probabilities are represented by numbers of chances. Hoffrage, Gigerenzer, Krauss, and Martignon (Cognition 84 (2002) 343) argued that numbers of chances are natural frequencies disguised as probabilities, though lacking the properties of true probabilities. They concluded that we failed to demonstrate that naive individuals can deal with true probabilities as opposed to natural frequencies. In this paper, we demonstrate that numbers of chances do represent probabilities, and that naive individuals do not confuse numbers of chances with frequencies. We conclude that there is no evidence for the claim that natural frequencies have a special cognitive status, and the evolutionary argument that the human mind is unable to deal with probabilities.     

Is signal detection theory fundamentally flawed? A response to Balakrishnan (1998a, 1998b, 1999)

For nearly 50 years, signal detection theory (SDT; Green & Swets, 1966; Macmillan & Creelman, 1991) has been of central importance in the development of psychophysics and other areas of psychology. The theory has recently been challenged by Balakrishnan (1998b), who argues that, within SDT, an alternative index is “better justified” than d’ and who claims to show (1998a, 1999) that SDT is fundamentally flawed and should be rejected. His evidence is based on new nonparametric measures that he has introduced and applied to experimental data. He believes his results show that basic assumptions of SDT are not supported—in particular, that payoff and probability manipulations do not affect the position of the decision criterion. In view of the importance of SDT in psychology, these claims deserve careful examination. They are critically reviewed here. It appears that it is Balakrishnan’s arguments that fail, and not SDT.