The inheritance of agonistic behavior in male mice: A diallel analysis

The diallel cross genetic design was employed to determine the pattern of inheritance of male-male agonistic behavior in laboratory mice. The results indicated strong strain differences in agonistic behaviors and strain ranks that replicated previous findings. The genetic analysis showed the presence of additive and nondirectional dominance effects on the behaviors measured. This pattern has been characterized as indicating the action of stabilizing selection and indicates that the trait has not been under directional selection.     

Serial recall of colors: Two models of memory for serial order applied to continuous visual stimuli

This study investigated the effects of serial position and temporal distinctiveness on serial recall of simple visual stimuli. Participants observed lists of five colors presented at varying, unpredictably ordered interitem intervals, and their task was to reproduce the colors in their order of presentation by selecting colors on a continuous-response scale. To control for the possibility of verbal labeling, articulatory suppression was required in one of two experimental sessions. The predictions were derived through simulation from two computational models of serial recall: SIMPLE represents the class of temporal-distinctiveness models, whereas SOB-CS represents event-based models. According to temporal-distinctiveness models, items that are temporally isolated within a list are recalled more accurately than items that are temporally crowded. In contrast, event-based models assume that the time intervals between items do not affect recall performance per se, although free time following an item can improve memory for that item because of extended time for the encoding. The experimental and the simulated data were fit to an interference measurement model to measure the tendency to confuse items with other items nearby on the list—the locality constraint—in people as well as in the models. The continuous-reproduction performance showed a pronounced primacy effect with no recency, as well as some evidence for transpositions obeying the locality constraint. Though not entirely conclusive, this evidence favors event-based models over a role for temporal distinctiveness. There was also a strong detrimental effect of articulatory suppression, suggesting that verbal codes can be used to support serial-order memory of simple visual stimuli.     

Electrophysiological evidence for modulation of lexical processing after repetitive exposure to foreign phonotactic rules

In two experiments we investigate how repeated exposure to native and non-native phonotactic regularities alters the N400, an event-related potential related to lexico-semantic access. Participants underwent a Passive Listening (Experiment 1) or a Categorization Training (Experiment 2) for monosyllabic pseudowords over 3 days. During Passive Listening participants solely listened to the stimuli while for Categorization Training they learned to assign items to two arbitrary categories by feedback. Notably, this task did not rely on phonotactic regularities. Before training, N400 was larger for legal compared to illegal items. Over the 3-day exposure Passive Listening yielded a significant decrease in N400-amplitude for illegal pseudowords, however, this effect was abolished and partially inverted by the Categorization Training. We suggest the decrease in N400-amplitude indicates more efficient discrimination between native and non-native pseudowords since only the former are potential lexical candidates. On the contrary, Categorization Training introduces a ‘protosemantic’ context overriding prelexical selection processes.     

Deferred imitation in 18-month-olds from two cultural contexts: The case of Cameroonian Nso farmer and German-middle class infants

Imitative learning has been described in naturalistic studies for different cultures, but lab-based research studying imitative learning across different cultural contexts is almost missing. Therefore, imitative learning was assessed with 18-month-old German middle-class and Cameroonian Nso farmer infants – representing two highly different eco-cultural contexts associated with different cultural models, the psychological autonomy and the hierarchical relatedness – by using the deferred imitation paradigm. Study 1 revealed that the infants from both cultural contexts performed a higher number of target actions in the deferred imitation than in the baseline phase. Moreover, it was found that German middle-class infants showed a higher mean imitation rate as they performed more target actions in the deferred imitation phase compared with Cameroonian Nso farmer infants. It was speculated that the opportunity to manipulate the test objects directly after the demonstration of the target actions could enhance the mean deferred imitation rate of the Cameroonian Nso farmer infants which was confirmed in Study 2. Possible explanations for the differences in the amount of imitated target actions of German middle-class and Cameroonian Nso farmer infants are discussed considering the object-related, dyadic setting of the imitation paradigm with respect to the different learning contexts underlying the different cultural models of learning.     

Emotional speech processing: Disentangling the effects of prosody and semantic cues

To inform how emotions in speech are implicitly processed and registered in memory, we compared how emotional prosody, emotional semantics, and both cues in tandem prime decisions about conjoined emotional faces. Fifty-two participants rendered facial affect decisions (Pell, 2005a), indicating whether a target face represented an emotion (happiness or sadness) or not (a facial grimace), after passively listening to happy, sad, or neutral prime utterances. Emotional information from primes was conveyed by: (1) prosody only; (2) semantic cues only; or (3) combined prosody and semantic cues. Results indicated that prosody, semantics, and combined prosody–semantic cues facilitate emotional decisions about target faces in an emotion-congruent manner. However, the magnitude of priming did not vary across tasks. Our findings highlight that emotional meanings of prosody and semantic cues are systematically registered during speech processing, but with similar effects on associative knowledge about emotions, which is presumably shared by prosody, semantics, and faces.     

Accountability from Somewhere and for Someone: Relating with Care

Abstract

In contemporary care institutions, accountability procedures and devices are increasingly pervasive and considered crucial for monitoring quality. Such accountability practices are based on the idea that accountability and care belong in two separate domains. The distinction between accountability ‘from nowhere and for everyone’ and accountability ‘from somewhere and for someone’ problematises this implicit split. Taking seriously the observations of everyday caring and accounting by care professionals, who resist splitting care and accountability from the outset, demands a reconceptualisation of the relation between care and accountability as reciprocal and co-emerging. Both accountability and care are highly circumstantial, emerging, relational notions and it is not clear-cut who or what cares or accounts for what, whom, where and how. Paying due attention to the generative interweaving of accounting and caring, that is, to the narrative work of care professionals, affords the potential to turn universal abstract norms of what good care should be into meaningful care. Creatively reconnecting care experiences, observations, records and relations generates accountability with care. Care professionals do this by daring to prioritise speculatively what matters most in a specific situation without falling back on the reassurance of clear-cut norms of good care and by daring to admit that even while prioritising a certain course of action, they might not know its consequences. Such a speculative commitment and the inclusion of the researcher's experiences in trying to be accountable are crucial for studying accountability as a matter of care and as relatedness in the making.     

Psychometric evaluation of the Basic Traits Inventory in the multilingual South African environment

The objective of this study was to evaluate the psychometric properties of the BTI for all the official language groups in South Africa. Item bias analysis was performed by means of Rasch analysis for a sample of 105 342 respondents with representation of each of the 11 language groups. Reliability values were good for all the language groups and bias was revealed in only 12 of the 193 items (6.2%) through item response modelling. Based on these results, the BTI may be an appropriate measure of personality for all the different language groups in South Africa.