Power imbalance,its legitimacy,and aggression

Sixty Japanese female students were asked to exchange shocks in electric roulette games with female opponents. The subjects were assigned to either the 80%, 50%, or 20% win conditions. Half of them were then led to judge that the power unbalance was legitimate by being informed that the assignment was based on a prior performance contest, with the good performer being assigned to the advantageous position. The other subjects were led to perceive the power imbalance as illegitimate by being informed that the assignment was randomly decided. The opponents always severely attacked them. The retaliation by the subjects was analyzed by a two-way ANOVA with Power Imbalance and Legitimacy. It was found that the subjects both in the 20% and 50% win conditions set more intense shocks to their opponents than those in the 80% win condition. This is not consistent with the fear of retaliation hypothesis which had predicted that the subjects would refrain from intensely aggressing against the opponent who had a greater aggressive capacity. It was also found that in the 80% win condition, the subjects set more intense shocks when the unbalance had been determined by their performance than when determined by luck, whereas in the 20% win condition, they set more intense shocks when the imbalance had been determined by luck than when determined by their performance. These suggest that retaliation depended upon perceived justifiability of aggression which was predicated on the legitimacy of the power imbalance. Finding in the 50% win condition that the shock settings were higher when the power imbalance had been determined by their performance than when determined by luck was interpreted in terms of their heightened competitiveness.     

Development of infants’ intuitions about support relations: sensitivity to stability

Can infants perceive stability when a supported box is put on a supporting box in a balanced position? In Experiment 1, 41 infants saw three events. In a stable event, the supported box was put on a wide supporting box in a balanced position. In an unstable event, the supported box was put on a narrow supporting box in a balanced position. In an impossible event, the supported box was put on the extreme end of a wide supporting box. Infants 4 to 6.5 months old looked equally at all three events. Infants 6.5 to 10 months old looked slightly longer at the impossible event than at the other events. Infants 10 to 13 months old looked reliably longer at the unstable and impossible events than at the stable event. The results of Experiment 2 indicate that these differences in looking times did not come from differences in stimulus configurations between the events. These results suggest that infants above 10 months old are sensitive to stability of support relations.     

Habituation of exploratory activity to new stimuli, to the absence of a previously presented stimulus and to new contexts, in rats

Rats trained to run a shuttle-alleyway for food exhibited exploratory behaviour to a novel visual/tactual stimulus presented in a specific place of the alley. Intermittent presentation of the same stimulus in the same place resulted in reduction of the exploratory activity (habituation), both within and between sessions. The animals also directed exploratory activity to the absence of the previously presented stimulus at the place where the stimulus had been presented before; this latter response also habituated. The presentation (1) of the same stimulus to which the animals had already habituated in another place in the alleyway or when the animals were running in an opposite direction to the previous trials of stimulus presentation, or (2) of another stimulus, resulted, again, in the appearance of exploratory activity. These results lead to the conclusion that the animals code external events, store this information, and use it to detect spatial- and directional-contextual changes and to generate predictions about that specific environment.     

Maternal Behavior Modifications during Pretense and Their Long-Term Effects on Toddlers’ Understanding of Pretense

Recent studies indicate the need to investigate the sources of toddlers’ understanding of another person's pretense. The present study is a cultural and longitudinal extension of the work of Lillard and Witherington (2004 Lillard, A. S. & Witherington, D. C. (2004). Mothers’ behavior modifications during pretense and their possible signal value for toddlers. Developmental Psychology, 40, 95–113. doi:10.1037/0012-1649.40.1.95[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), who claimed that mothers modify their behaviors during pretense and that the some of these behavior modifications help their toddlers understand maternal pretense. Experiment 1 investigated whether mothers would change their behaviors during pretense with a sample of 31 Japanese mother–infant pairs. Experiment 2, with a subsample of 20 mother–child pairs who had participated in Experiment 1, examined whether the maternal behavior modifications at 18 months predicted their toddlers’ understanding of pretense at 24 months. The results of Experiment 1 indicated that Japanese mothers smiled more frequently, gazed at their toddlers longer, used sound effects more frequently, and engaged in more frequent snack-related actions in a “pretense condition” than in a “real condition.” In addition, some of these behaviors were significantly related to their toddlers’ apparent understanding of pretense. Experiment 2 showed that both the frequency of maternal smiles and the number of sound effects in the pretense condition at 18 months predicted toddlers’ understanding of the pretense enacted by a strange adult at 24 months. This research indicates the impact of maternal behavior modifications during pretense on the development of symbolic thought in the 2nd year of life.     

Participants’ Preferences for Interpretive Programs and Social Interactions at a Japanese Natural Park

ABSTRACT

A case study at Okutama-Kohan Park in Japan was designed to explore adult participants’ preferences for interpretive programs. The study included adults who participated in an interpreter-led program in the park. A questionnaire survey with 492 participants examined their preferences for interpretive program types, topics, timing, and types of social interaction during a program. The associations between participants’ preferences and their age, gender, or group composition were also explored. Designing programs that are consistent with these preferences should help to enhance free-choice adult learning environments.     

Within-word serial order control: Adjacent mora exchange and serial position effects in repeated single-word production

An essential function of language processing is serial order control. Computational models of serial ordering and empirical data suggest that plan representations for ordered output of sound are governed by principles related to similarity. Among these principles, the temporal distance and edge principles at a within-word level have not been empirically demonstrated separately from other principles. Specifically, the temporal distance principle assumes that phonemes that are in the same word and thus temporally close are represented similarly. This principle would manifest as phoneme movement errors within the same word. However, such errors are rarely observed in English, likely reflecting stronger effects of syllabic constraints (i.e., phonemes in different positions within the syllable are distinctly represented). The edge principle assumes that the edges of a sequence are represented distinctly from other elements/positions. This principle has been repeatedly observed as a serial position effect in the context of phonological short-term memory. However, it has not been demonstrated in single-word production. This study provides direct evidence for the two abovementioned principles by using a speech-error induction technique to show the exchange of adjacent morae and serial position effects in Japanese four-mora words. Participants repeatedly produced a target word or nonword, immediately after hearing an aurally presented distractor word. The phonologically similar distractor words, which were created by exchanging adjacent morae in the target, induced adjacent-mora-exchange errors, demonstrating the within-word temporal distance principle. There was also a serial position effect in error rates, such that errors were mostly induced at the middle positions within a word. The results provide empirical evidence for the temporal distance and edge principles in within-word serial order control.     

Online monitoring of the social presence effects in a two‐person‐like driving video game using near‐infrared spectroscopy

We examined how a friend's presence affects a performer's prefrontal activation in daily‐life activities using two wireless portable near‐infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) devices. Participants played a driving video game either solely in the single group or with a friend in the paired group. The two groups (single and paired) were subdivided according to their game proficiency (low and high). The NIRS data demonstrated a significant interaction of group by proficiency. Low‐proficiency players in the paired group showed lower activation than those in the single group, but high‐proficiency players did not. In the paired group, high‐proficiency players showed higher activation than low‐proficiency players, but not in the single group. These results suggest that NIRS detects social presence effects in everyday situations: decreasing prefrontal activation in low‐proficiency performers due to tension reduction and increasing prefrontal activation in high‐proficiency performers due to increased arousal.     

Semantic cueing effects on word retrieval in aphasic patients with lexical retrieval deficit

We examined lexical access in word production, focusing on lexical retrieval deficit in aphasic patients. These patients were asked to name one picture at a time and we investigated how semantic cueing affected their ability to retrieve the word. When the subjects experienced a retrieval failure, they were presented with one type of cue, and then they tried to name the target picture again. Four types of cues were used: phonological, semantic related, semantic category member, and baseline cue. Both phonological and semantically related cues improved performance. In contrast, category member cues had no effects on releasing the retrieval block. These results can be explained by an interactive activation model in word production (Dell & O'Seaghdha, 1991).     

The phonological loop and memory for rhythms: an individual differences approach

The purpose of the current study was to examine the relationship between short-term memory for rhythm and the phonological loop in working memory. Results showed that digit span scores significantly correlated with the scores on the rhythmic memory task, and that the correlation between the two scores remained significant even after the common variance with reading speed was partialled out. Partial correlation and regression analyses indicated that the relation between memory for rhythm and digit span scores is mediated by the third component in the phonological loop, the component that is responsible for regulation of timing mechanisms in immediate memory tasks.     

Interactive processing of phonological information in reading Japanese Kanji character words and their phonemic radicals

Kanji are categorized into four types based on the combinations of "subword validity" (when the right phonemic radical represents the same On-reading as the whole Kanji character) and "radical-neighbor consistency" (when the whole Kanji character represents the same On-reading as all of its neighbor characters). The study demonstrated that both subword validity and radical-neighbor consistency affect naming latencies and error rates regardless of character frequency. The study also demonstrated that the subword validity affects ease of extraction of a subword's phonology. These results suggest that the phonology of the whole Kanji competes with the subword's phonology. Moreover, the competition is stronger when the radical-neighbors aid in extracting the phonology of the whole Kanji.