Age-Correlated Incremental Consideration of Velocity Information in Relative Time-to-Arrival Judgments

One hundred fifty-one children and 43 adults judged which of 2 cartoon birds would be the first to arrive at a common finish line. Objects moved unidirectionally along parallel trajectories, either at the same or different speeds, and disappeared at different distances from the goal. Overall, 9–10-year-old children performed as well as adults, but 4–5- and 6–8-year-olds erred significantly more often. On trials for which distance to goal at disappearance was a valid cue, 4–5-year-olds scored 80% correct, and no differences were seen between 6–10-year-olds and adults. On the opposite type of trials, where the trailing bird would win the race, only adults retained their level of performance, and all age groups differed markedly. Findings suggest a gradual developmental transition from a distance-based to a time-based understanding of the task.     

The Relationships of Perceived Motivational Climate to Cohesion and Collective Efficacy in Elite Female Teams

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships of perceived motivational climate to cohesion and collective efficacy in elite female teams. A total of 124 basketball and handball athletes completed two season measures (T1, T2). Relationships were examined at an individual level both statically and across time. Canonical correlations revealed that a combination of high perceptions of an ego-involving but low perceptions of a task-involving climate were associated with low perceptions of task cohesion at Time 1. High perceptions of a task-involving but low perceptions of an ego-involving climate were associated with higher perceptions of task cohesion and collective efficacy at Time 2. Moreover, low perceptions of an ego-involving and moderately low perceptions of a task-involving climate were associated with high perceptions of social cohesion at Time 2. Regression analyses including autoregressive influence indicated that a task-involving climate positively predicted variance in T2 group integration-task and collective efficacy after controlling for T1 scores. In contrast, an ego-involving climate negatively predicted changes in T2 athletes’ perceptions of social cohesion (individual attractions to the group-social [ATG-S], group integration-social [GI-S]) and group integration-task [GI-T] after controlling for T1 scores. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

Sick? Or slow? On the origins of intelligence as a psychological object

This paper examines the first moments of the emergence of “psychometrics” as a discipline, using a history of the Binet–Simon test (precursor to the Stanford–Binet) to engage the question of how intelligence became a “psychological object.” To begin to answer this, we used a previously-unexamined set of French texts to highlight the negotiations and collaborations that led Alfred Binet (1857–1911) to identify “mental testing” as a research area worth pursuing. This included a long-standing rivalry with Désiré-Magloire Bourneville (1840–1909), who argued for decades that psychiatrists ought to be the professional arbiters of which children would be removed from the standard curriculum and referred to special education classes in asylums. In contrast, Binet sought to keep children in schools and conceived of a way for psychologists to do this. Supported by the Société libre de l'étude psychologique de l'enfant [Free society for the psychological study of the child], and by a number of collaborators and friends, he thus undertook to create a “metric” scale of intelligence—and the associated testing apparatus—to legitimize the role of psychologists in a to-that-point psychiatric domain: identifying and treating “the abnormal”. The result was a change in the earlier law requiring all healthy French children to attend school, between the ages of 6 and 13, to recognize instead that otherwise normal children sometimes need special help: they are “slow” (arriéré), but not “sick.” This conceptualization of intelligence was then carried forward, through the test's influence on Lewis Terman (1877–1956) and Lightner Witmer (1867–1956), to shape virtually all subsequent thinking about intelligence testing and its role in society.     

The experiential foundations of mathematical knowledge

A view of the sources of mathematical knowledge is sketched which emphasizes the close connections between mathematical and empirical knowledge. A platonistic interpretation of mathematical discourse is adopted throughout. Two skeptical views are discussed and rejected. One of these, due to Maturana, is supposed to be based on biological considerations. The other, due to Dummett, is derived from a Wittgensteinian position in the philosophy of language. The paper ends with an elaboration of Gödel's analogy between the mathematician and the physicist.     

Verifying properties of concepts spontaneously requires sharing resources with same-modality percept

In the present experiments, participants had to verify properties of concepts but, depending on the trial condition, concept-property pairs were presented via headphones or on the screen. The results showed that participants took longer and were less accurate at verifying conceptual properties when the channel used to present the CONCEPT-property pair and the type of property matched in sensory modality (e.g., LEMON-yellow on screen; BLENDER-loud in headphones) compared to when properties and channel did not match (e.g., LEMON-yellow in headphones; BLENDER-loud on screen). Such interference is consistent with theories of embodied cognition holding that knowledge is grounded in modality-specific systems (Barsalou in Behav Brain Sci 22:577–660, 1999). When the resources of one modality are burdened during the task, processing costs are incurred in a conceptual task (Vermeulen et al. in Cognition 109:287–294, 2008).     

Within reach but not so reachable: Obstacles matter in visual perception of distances

A large number of studies have shown that effort influences the visual perception of reaching distance. These studies have mainly focused on the effects of reach-relevant properties of the body and of the objects that people intend to reach. However, any influence of the reach-relevant properties of the surrounding environment remains still speculative. We investigated this topic in terms of the role of obstacle width in perceiving distances. Participants had to estimate the straight-line distance to a cylinder located just behind a transparent barrier of varying width. The results showed that participants perceived the straight-line distance to the cylinder as being longer when they intended to grasp the cylinder by reaching around a wide transparent barrier rather than by reaching around narrower ones. Interestingly, this effect might be due to the anticipated effort involved in reaching. Together, our results show that reach-relevant properties of the surrounding environment influence perceived distances, thereby supporting an embodied view of the visual perception of space.     

Exercise after work,psychological mediators,and affect: A day-level study

In this diary study, we tested the recovery potential of exercise activities during leisure time and examined the psychological mechanisms underlying the relation between exercise activities and affect. We hypothesized that spending time on exercise activities after work will be related to subsequent affect in the evening, and that psychological detachment from work, sense of belonging, and physical self-perceptions explain why exercise activities are related to subsequent affect. One-hundred and twenty-six participants from diverse occupations completed a diary twice a day over five consecutive work days. Multilevel analyses showed that exercise activities after work were related to positive, but not to negative affect in the evening. As proposed, psychological detachment, sense of belonging, and physical self-perceptions mediated the relation between exercise activities after work and positive affect in the evening.     

The personalisation method applied to a working memory task: Evidence of long-term working memory effects

Ericsson and Kintsch (1995) proposed that, in situations of expertise, individuals can overcome working memory limitations by using long-term working memory. It allows a greater capacity than working memory thanks to long-term memory encoding and retrieving. To test this characteristic, an adaptation of Daneman and Carpenter's (1980) reading span was used. To operationalise expertise, the personalisation method (Guida & Tardieu, 2005) was employed. In Experiment 1, a personalised group, which read reading span sentences that mentioned familiar locations, was compared to a nonpersonalised group, which read sentences with unfamiliar locations. In Experiment 2, a personalised group, which read reading span sentences with neutral locations, was encouraged to mentally personalise these locations by thinking about known locations. This group was compared to a nonpersonalised group, which was encouraged to think about unknown locations. The personalised groups were expected to store and retrieve information in long-term memory via long-term working memory more easily than the nonpersonalised groups, which had to count massively on working memory. The results showed that personalisation enhanced reading span and confirmed one implication of the long-term working memory theory: high- and low-reading-span differences could also be due to long-term memory retrieval. Finally, these results are interpreted in terms of interaction between working memory size and long-term memory knowledge, showing that participants with a lower reading span benefited more from high domain knowledge than participants with a higher reading span.