Conceptual priming for realistic auditory scenes and for auditory words

Two experiments were conducted using both behavioral and Event-Related brain Potentials methods to examine conceptual priming effects for realistic auditory scenes and for auditory words. Prime and target sounds were presented in four stimulus combinations: Sound–Sound, Word–Sound, Sound–Word and Word–Word. Within each combination, targets were conceptually related to the prime, unrelated or ambiguous. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to judge whether the primes and targets fit together (explicit task) and in Experiment 2 they had to decide whether the target was typical or ambiguous (implicit task). In both experiments and in the four stimulus combinations, reaction times and/or error rates were longer/higher and the N400 component was larger to ambiguous targets than to conceptually related targets, thereby pointing to a common conceptual system for processing auditory scenes and linguistic stimuli in both explicit and implicit tasks. However, fine-grained analyses also revealed some differences between experiments and conditions in scalp topography and duration of the priming effects possibly reflecting differences in the integration of perceptual and cognitive attributes of linguistic and nonlinguistic sounds. These results have clear implications for the building-up of virtual environments that need to convey meaning without words.     

Emotional prosody: sex differences in sensitivity to speech melody

Emotional prosody is defined as the ability to express emotions through variations of different parameters of the human speech, such as pitch contour, intensity and duration. A recent study has discovered clear differences between men and women in the time course of emotional prosodic processing. There are several interpretations of these intriguing results that hold promise for future studies on language comprehension.     

Trust in organismic development, autonomy support, and adaptation among mothers and their children

The current studies examined relations between mothers’ trust in organismic development, autonomy supportive parenting, and adaptation among mothers and their young children. Study 1 showed that trust in organismic development was distinct from optimism, neuroticism, and social desirability whereas it correlated with having relaxed expectations for developmental milestones and making fewer social comparisons about one’s child. Study 2 used observational methods to demonstrate a significant link between trust in organismic development and mothers behaving in an autonomy-supportive rather than controlling manner toward their 1-year-old child during puzzle solving activities. Study 3 used a 1 year prospective design to show that trust in first time mothers was associated with better maternal and child adaptation over time, controlling for initial levels of adaptation and child temperament. Study 4 explored possible social/political antecedents of trust in organismic development by comparing the beliefs of first time mothers from Canada and Norway. The four studies suggest that trust in organismic development fosters autonomy supportive parenting practices and positive maternal and child adaptation. These findings are discussed from the perspective of self-determination theory.

An Integrative Analysis of Person–Organization Fit Theories

This study provides an integrative analysis of three approaches to person–organization (P–O) fit theory and measurement: values congruence and personality congruence (supplementary fit measures), and work environment congruence (a needs–supplies fit measure). Commensurate measures of each aspect of fit were collected from 105 employees in six organizations in the western United States. Values congruence and work environment congruence were both related to job satisfaction and organizational commitment, but personality congruence was not. All three fit measures were related to employees' intent to remain with their employer, although this effect was generally mediated by satisfaction and commitment. When multiple fit measures were used in a single analysis, values congruence and work environment congruence had the strongest and most consistent effects on the outcome measures. These results suggest a revised, multidimensional model of P–O fit.     

Moral responsibility for actions and omissions: a new challenge to the asymmetry thesis

This paper presents a new challenge to the thesis that moral responsibility for an omission requires the ability to do the omitted action, whereas moral responsibility for an action does not require the ability to do otherwise than that action. Call this the asymmetry thesis. The challenge arises from the possibility of cases in which an omission is identical to an action. In certain of such cases, the asymmetry thesis leads to a contradiction. The challenge is then extended to recent variations of the asymmetry thesis defended by John Martin Fischer and Carolina Sartorio. Finally, a possible objection to the challenge is addressed.     

Semicompatibilism: no ability to do otherwise required

In this paper, I argue that it is open to semicompatibilists to maintain that no ability to do otherwise is required for moral responsibility. This is significant for two reasons. First, it undermines Christopher Evan Franklin’s recent claim that everyone thinks that an ability to do otherwise is necessary for free will and moral responsibility. Second, it reveals an important difference between John Martin Fischer’s semicompatibilism and Kadri Vihvelin’s version of classical compatibilism, which shows that the dispute between them is not merely (or even largely) a verbal dispute. Along the way, I give special attention to the notion of general abilities, and, though I defend the distinctiveness of Fischer’s semicompatibilism against the verbal dispute charge, I also use the discussion of the nature of general abilities to argue for the falsity of a certain claim that Fischer and coauthor Mark Ravizza have made about their account (namely that “reactivity is all of a piece”).     

Effects of proactive interference on non-verbal working memory

Working memory (WM) is a cognitive system responsible for actively maintaining and processing relevant information and is central to successful cognition. A process critical to WM is the resolution of proactive interference (PI), which involves suppressing memory intrusions from prior memories that are no longer relevant. Most studies that have examined resistance to PI in a process-pure fashion used verbal material. By contrast, studies using non-verbal material are scarce, and it remains unclear whether the effect of PI is domain-general or whether it applies solely to the verbal domain. The aim of the present study was to examine the effect of PI in visual WM using both objects with high and low nameability. Using a Directed-Forgetting paradigm, we varied discriminability between WM items on two dimensions, one verbal (high-nameability vs. low-nameability objects) and one perceptual (colored vs. gray objects). As in previous studies using verbal material, effects of PI were found with object stimuli, even after controlling for verbal labels being used (i.e., low-nameability condition). We also found that the addition of distinctive features (color, verbal label) increased performance in rejecting intrusion probes, most likely through an increase in discriminability between content–context bindings in WM.     

Lay counselors: Thoughts on the crossing of ecological frameworks and the use of lay counselors in the scale up of early infant mental health interventions

The recent call for the scale-up of evidence-based early childhood development interventions, in lower and middle-income countries and for minority groups in high-income countries, has seen numerous suggestions to train greater numbers of lay mental health workers to fulfill these functions. While studies have found that concepts from developed country settings, such as attachment, parental sensitivity, and containment, find purchase and relevance within developing settings, the management of contextual and cultural factors and the tensions of cultural interfacing in the rollout of these programs in developing country settings require consideration. Drawing on the experiences of two successful South African mother–infant home-visiting programs as examples, this article discusses some of the challenges in provision of attachment-based infant mental health programs and highlights the need for careful consideration of a number of factors pertaining to the recruitment, supervision, and management of lay mental health workers before large-scale rollout is conducted.     

Adults' age-related differences in adaptivity of strategy choices: evidence from computational estimation

Four experiments document adults' age-related changes in computational estimation performance and in adaptivity of strategy choices (i.e., the ability to choose the most precise strategy on each trial). Young and older adults were asked to provide estimates of 2-by-2-digit multiplication problems (e.g., 43 x 78) under varying conditions of speed and accuracy emphasis. The main findings showed that (a) older adults provided less accurate estimates and took more time to estimate, especially on the most difficult problems or when using harder strategies; (b) young and older adults had similar strategy preferences; and (c) older adults chose estimation strategies less adaptively than young adults. Implications of these findings for understanding strategic changes during adulthood in a wide variety of cognitive domains are discussed.     

Familiar words can serve as a semantic seed for syntactic bootstrapping

Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. But how do they learn which contexts are linked to which semantic features in the first place? We investigate if 3‐ to 4‐year‐old children (n = 60) can learn about a syntactic context from tracking its use with only a few familiar words. After watching a 5‐min training video in which a novel function word (i.e., ‘ko’) replaced either personal pronouns or articles, children were able to infer semantic properties for novel words co‐occurring with the newly learned function word (i.e., objects vs. actions). These findings implicate a mechanism by which a distributional analysis, associated with a small vocabulary of known words, could be sufficient to identify some properties associated with specific syntactic contexts.