Why Do you Often Stop your Impulsive Behavior at the Last Moment?

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - Intentional inhibition, a critical ability of human cognitive control, is the capacity to internally withhold a to-be-performed action. In the voluntary...     

Young Mandarin learners use function words to distinguish between nouns and verbs

Mandarin requires neither determiners nor morphological inflections, which casts doubt on Mandarin‐speaking children's ability to use function words as a syntactic bootstrapping tool to identify the form class of a new word. This study examined 3‐ and 5‐year‐old Mandarin learners' ability to use function words to interpret new words as either nouns or verbs in the absence of the requirement for determiners and inflections in the ambient language. In Experiment 1, 3‐, and 5‐year‐old Mandarin‐speaking children were exposed to eight novel words embedded in sentence frames differing only in the form class markers used. The 5‐year‐olds interpreted the novel words as either nouns or verbs depending on the form class markers they heard, while the 3‐year‐olds learned only the nouns. Experiment 2 confirmed that the 5‐year‐olds understood the function of the verb‐marker. Thus, Mandarin‐speaking children can use function words to distinguish nouns versus verbs, and this ability appears between three and five years of age.     

Does Scope of Attention Affect Creativity? Testing the Attentional Priming Hypothesis

Creativity is linked to broad scope of attention, a state or trait that allocates attentional resources over a wide range of perceptual stimuli. According to the attentional priming hypothesis, a mechanism underlying the creativity–attention link is that broad perceptual attention scope primes broad conceptual attention scope—the activation of a wide range of memory contents—which therefore facilitates creative ideation. This study aimed to test the hypothesis in three experiments using three manipulations and two creativity tasks. Experiment 1 used the Navon letter task to prime attention to global patterns or local details of composite stimuli and measured creativity via the task to generate alternative uses of daily objects. Experiment 2 modified a cue-size procedure in which participants repeatedly attended to large or small visual cues before a target stimulus appeared. Experiment 3 devised a manipulation that required participants to view and visualize images associated with broad or narrow attention and adopted the alternative uses task and the task to invent alien creatures. Across the experiments, although the results were in the predicted direction, they were non-significant. This study found no evidence that broadness of perceptual attention affects creativity.     

Core Job Characteristic and Uncertainty Avoidance: Into the Black Box of Transformational Leadership Effect on Creativity

Drawing upon the job characteristic model and the “management of meaning” perspective, this study examines the process and conditions through which transformational leadership fosters employee creativity. Our results reveal that the effect of transformational leadership on creativity is mediated by employees’ perceptions of core job characteristics (variety, identity, significance, autonomy, feedback). This mediation effect is further moderated by employees’ uncertainty avoidance orientation. Specifically, transformational leaders foster creativity through followers’ perceptions of core job characteristics only among employees low on uncertainty avoidance. The association between enhanced job characteristics and creativity is more positive for employees with low uncertainty avoidance orientation than those with high uncertainty avoidance orientation. Implications and future research directions are discussed.     

Revisiting predictive bias of cognitive ability tests against Hispanic American job applicants

Previous studies have concluded that cognitive ability tests are not predictively biased against Hispanic American job applicants because test scores generally overpredict, rather than underpredict, their job performance. However, we highlight two important shortcomings of these past studies and use meta-analytic and computation modeling techniques to address these two shortcomings. In Study 1, an updated meta-analysis of the Hispanic–White mean difference (d-value) on job performance was carried out. In Study 2, computation modeling was used to correct the Study 1 d-values for indirect range restriction and combine them with other meta-analytic parameters relevant to predictive bias to determine how often cognitive ability test scores underpredict Hispanic applicants’ job performance. Hispanic applicants’ job performance was underpredicted by a small to moderate amount in most conditions of the computation model. In contrast to previous studies, this suggests cognitive ability tests can be expected to exhibit predictive bias against Hispanic applicants much of the time. However, some conditions did not exhibit underprediction, highlighting that predictive bias depends on various selection system parameters, such as the criterion-related validity of cognitive ability tests and other predictors used in selection. Regardless, our results challenge “lack of predictive bias” as a rationale for supporting test use.     

科学发明情境中问题提出的脑机制再探

以高生态学效度的科学发明问题情境作为实验材料, 采用静息态功能磁共振成像技术, 基于低频振幅(ALFF)和静息态功能连接(RSFC)的分析方法, 探讨创造性科学问题提出的脑机制。结果发现, 在控制了被试性别、年龄后, 提出新颖有效性问题的比率越高, 左内侧前额叶(Left media prefrontal cortex, L-mPFC)和右小脑前叶(Right cerebellum)的ALFF值越高。进一步功能连接分析发现, 提出新颖有效性问题的比率与mPFC和楔叶(Cuneus)之间的功能连接强度呈显著正相关。结果强调mPFC对于科学发明情境中问题提出的重要作用, 且更高比率的新颖有效性问题的提出是通过mPFC与其它脑区的协同联结来实现的。     

叠音人名的婴儿图式效应及其对人际信任的影响

叠音人名是一种特有的人名形式,但鲜有研究考察其心理特征。本研究通过4个实验探讨叠音人名的婴儿图式效应及其对人际信任的作用机制。实验1采用特质推断指标,结果发现个体认为叠音人名的主人更像婴儿。实验2采用反应类别指标,结果表明叠音人名产生了更强烈的积极情绪。实验3表明叠音人名不影响人际信任。实验4表明在获得正性反馈后,个体不会增加对叠音人名个体的人际信任;在获得负性反馈后,个体则会减少对叠音人名个体的人际信任。上述结果表明,叠音人名可以引发婴儿图式效应,叠音人名与结果反馈类型共同影响人际信任。     

Career maturity and state anxiety of Taiwanese college student athletes given cognitive career-oriented group counseling

In this study, the extent to which a cognitive career-based group counseling program might promote career maturity and decrease state anxiety among student athletes was investigated at two business colleges in Taiwan. 80 male and female participant volunteers, averaging about 19 years of age, were divided into control and treatment groups in each college. The treated group was given instruction. Analysis indicates that treated students exhibited overall lower mean state anxiety than the nontreated group. However, no significant treatment group differences were detected among participants' career maturity scores. The results raise important questions regarding the ways in which institutions of higher education seek benefit from student athletes' physical talents, e.g., increased name recognition, yet often do not prepare them for their careers postgraduation.     

Culture and systems of thought: holistic versus analytic cognition

The authors find East Asians to be holistic, attending to the entire field and assigning causality to it, making relatively little use of categories and formal logic, and relying on "dialectical" reasoning, whereas Westerners are more analytic, paying attention primarily to the object and the categories to which it belongs and using rules, including formal logic, to understand its behavior. The 2 types of cognitive processes are embedded in different naive metaphysical systems and tacit epistemologies. The authors speculate that the origin of these differences is traceable to markedly different social systems. The theory and the evidence presented call into question long-held assumptions about basic cognitive processes and even about the appropriateness of the process-content distinction.     

廖燕哲学思想举要

文章从"性无善恶可分"的人性观、"以天地为心胸"的修养观、揭示专制愚民政策的政治哲学观三个方面,揭示廖燕卓尔不群的哲学体悟,指出廖燕在岭南学术史有其不可或缺的地位。