Mimicry for money: Behavioral consequences of imitation

Two experiments investigated the idea that mimicry leads to pro-social behavior. It was hypothesized that mimicking the verbal behavior of customers would increase the size of tips. In Experiment 1, a waitress either mimicked half her customers by literally repeating their order or did not mimic her customers. It was found that she received significantly larger tips when she mimicked her customers than when she did not. In Experiment 2, in addition to a mimicry- and non-mimicry condition, a baseline condition was included in which the average tip was assessed prior to the experiment. The results indicated that, compared to the baseline, mimicry leads to larger tips. These results demonstrate that mimicry can be advantageous for the imitator because it can make people more generous.     

Grasp preparation improves change detection for congruent objects

A series of experiments provided converging support for the hypothesis that action preparation biases selective attention to action-congruent object features. When visual transients are masked in so-called change-blindness scenes, viewers are blind to substantial changes between 2 otherwise identical pictures that flick back and forth. The authors report data in which participants planned a grasp prior to the onset of a change-blindness scene in which 1 of 12 objects changed identity. Change blindness was substantially reduced for grasp-congruent objects (e.g., planning a whole-hand grasp reduced change blindness to a changing apple). A series of follow-up experiments ruled out an alternative explanation that this reduction had resulted from a labeling or strategizing of responses and provided converging support that the effect genuinely arose from grasp planning.     

Asymmetrical learning between a tactile and visual serial RT task

According to many researchers, implicit learning in the serial reaction-time task is predominantly motor based and therefore should be independent of stimulus modality. Previous research on the task, however, has focused almost completely on the visual domain. Here we investigated sequence learning when the imperative stimuli were presented tactilely to the fingers. Learning in this task was compared to sequence learning in a typical visual task, using very similar experimental conditions. The results indicate that sequential learning occurs in the tactile task, though to a lesser degree than in its visual counterpart. Furthermore, there was similar cross-modal transfer in both directions, meaning that transfer from the visual to the tactile task was partial. It is proposed that sequence learning involves a stimulus-specific component in the visual but not in the tactile task.     

The Medical Humanities Today: Humane Health Care or Tool of Governance?

The medical humanities have been presented as a panacea for medical reductionism; a means for 'humanizing' medicine. However, there is a lack of consensus about the appropriate contributing disciplines and how curricula should be taught and assessed. This special issue critically examines the role of the medical humanities in medical education and their potential to serve, inadvertently or otherwise, as a tool of governance. The contributors, who include medical educators and medical practitioners, employ a range of perspectives for analysing the pertinent issues.     

Individual differences in learning to perceive length by dynamic touch: Evidence for variation in perceptual learning capacities

Recent studies of perceptual learning have explored and commented on variation in learning trajectories. Although several factors have been suggested to account for this variation, thus far the idea that humans vary in their perceptual learning capacities has received scant attention. In the present experiment, we aimed at providing a detailed picture of the variation in this capacity by investigating the perceptual learning trajectories of a considerable number of participants. The learning process was studied using the paradigm of length perception by dynamic touch. The results showed that there are substantial individual differences in the way perceivers respond to feedback. Indeed, after feedback, the participants' perceptual performances diverged. We conclude that humans vary in their perceptual learning capacities. The implications of this finding for recent discussions on variation in perception are explored.     

A bottleneck in face identification: repetition priming from flanker images

There is evidence that face processing is capacity-limited in distractor interference tasks and in tasks requiring overt recognition memory. We examined whether capacity limits for faces can be observed with a more sensitive measure of visual processing, by measuring repetition priming of flanker faces that were presented alongside a face or a nonface target. In Experiment 1, we found identity priming for face flankers, by measuring repetition priming across a change in image, during task-relevant nonface processing, but not during the processing of a concurrently-presented face target. Experiment 2 showed perceptual priming of the flanker faces, across identical images at prime and test, when they were presented alongside a face target. In a third Experiment, all of these effects were replicated by measuring identity priming and perceptual priming within the same task. Overall, these results imply that face processing is capacity limited, such that only a single face can be identified at one time. Merely attending to a target face appears sufficient to trigger these capacity limits, thereby extinguishing identification of a second face in the display, although our results demonstrate that the additional face remains at least subject to superficial image processing.     

Unmarried, nonresident fathers' involvement with their infants: a risk and resilience perspective.

The authors used a subsample of fathers (n = 652) who participated during the 1-year follow-up of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study to assess the influence of risk and resilience factors on unmarried, nonresident fathers' involvement with their infants. They examined the additive, multiplicative, and moderating models of risk and resilience in relation to paternal involvement. Fathers' relationship to the child's mother was conceptualized as a risk or resilience factor. Fathers in acquaintance relationships with the mother and fathers who scored higher on the additive risk index were less involved in child care. Fathers who scored higher on the additive resilience index were more involved in child care. There was a multiplicative effect of relationship status and the risk index on fathers' involvement. The findings point to the importance of programs that address risk and resilience conditions affecting nonresident fathers in interaction with the quality of relationships they have with their children's birth mother.     

The application of the Things I Worry About Scale to a sample of at-risk American adolescents: an examination of psychometric properties

To date, published studies regarding the Things I Worry About Scale have been conducted exclusively in Northern Ireland and have included relatively homogeneous samples of students. The present study reexamined the psychometric properties of the scale using data collected from a sample of at-risk adolescents in the United States. The factor structure of the instrument was examined to determine the reliability of the instrument with a culture other than that with which the instrument was developed, and salient group differences were identified and discussed. The cross-cultural applicability of the instrument and the stability of the factor structure were explored and found to be relatively robust. However, differences were identified which were specifically related to the emergence of a highly salient component representing a very pessimistic view of what the future held. The results suggest the need for confirmatory factor analytical studies and further examination of the utility of the instrument with diverse populations.     

3-D processing in the Poggendorff illusion

In the Poggendorff illusion two collinear oblique lines, separated by two vertical lines, appear to be misaligned. 3-D processing of the oblique but not the vertical lines is considered to cause this apparent misalignment. We investigated whether more explicitly triggering 2-D versus 3-D interpretations of the different parts of Poggendorff-like displays would influence the apparent misalignment. In Experiment 1, we found that compared to 2-D controls, 3-D interpretations of the vertical parts did not influence apparent misalignment, while for the oblique parts 3-D processing resulted in more apparent misalignment than 2-D controls. In Experiment 2, the amount of contour convergence of the oblique parts was manipulated resulting in the 3-D blocks, but not the 2-D line patterns, to be perceived as receding in depth. Now, apparent misalignment increased the more the 3-D blocks were perceived as receding in depth. We conclude that apparent misalignment in Poggendorff-like displays can be influenced by different interpretations of its separate parts, while keeping the local junctions between the different elements the same.