From Incubation to Insight: Working Memory and the Role of the Cerebellum

An experiment involving 90 students in the 1st, 3rd, and 5th grades investigated how visual examples and grade (our surrogate for age) affected variability in a drawing task. The task involved using circles as the main element in a set of drawings. There were two examples: One was simple and single (a smiley face inside a circle); the other, complex and dual (a fishbowl extending outside a circle and a bicycle using two circles). There were significant effects of both example and grade on variability. Between-grades, 3rd and 5th graders were more variable than 1st graders with the complex (but not the simple) set of examples. Within-grades, 3rd and 5th graders were more variable with the complex (compared to the simple) set of examples. First graders' variability levels did not change with examples. The discussion focuses on how examples have and should be used to increase variability in drawings of both younger and older children.     

Subjective Wellbeing Between Organizational Bonds and Cultural Contaminations

Positive Psychology has recently attempted at “enlarging the paradigm,” explaining the understanding of the human experience of the world. By contrast, for Critical Psychology, “enlarging the paradigm” means moving away from an individualist conceptualization of the psychological. The present article aims at “redistributing the Psychological” toward directions already marked by cultural and discursive conceptions of human experience. Within a transdisciplinary frame, labeled as Psycho-semiotics, Diatextual Analysis has been adopted to investigate the rhetorical modes used by socially excluded enunciators (drug users, immigrants, atypical workers, elderly people, and some categories of churchgoer) to elaborate their own experience of well-being through affective labor and self care.     

Report on work in progress: “Towards a new science of the human”

A multidisciplinary and global study of the evolutionary process of the universe in general and mankind in particular is proposed, drawing from both modern science, approached by taking into consideration its various interdependent aspects; and the study of western and eastern ancient traditions, which prove to have a common foundation that is the comprehension and the control of the evolutionary process itself.

Such a study will lead to the compilation of a “Corpus Unus” of the new science of the human, a science which does not belong to a race, a culture or an age, but is specific to the human being as such.

Such a science will imply the exploration of mankind and of the evolutionary process, and applying the results in a pragmatic way to the betterment of human beings, society, and universe.     

Self-defeating personality and memories of parents' child-rearing behavior: a replication

A recent study of correlations of self-defeating personality and memories of parents' child-rearing behaviour has been replicated on a larger sample. Non-clinical volunteers (145 women and 114 men) were administered Schill's Self-defeating Personality Scale and a short version of the EMBU-Egna Minnen Betr?ffande Uppfostran (own memories of parental education) scale. Replicating previous findings, memories of rejecting or nonsupportive parents were significantly correlated with scores for the Self-defeating Personality Scale for both women (rejecting mother, r = 24; supportive mother, r = -.29; rejecting father, r = .23; supportive father, r = -.36) and men (rejecting mother, r = 40; rejecting father, r = .41; supportive father, r = -.28). Memories of an overinvolved parent were significantly correlated with self-defeating personality scores only among men (mother: r = .41; father: r = .36) as in the original study.     

When power is undeserved: its effects on perception and social judgements

This paper explores the impact of the legitimacy of power position on powerholders' impressions, expectancies' confirmation processes, and decisions about subordinates in the context of a personnel selection process. Participants were assigned to a power position (they were told they will be representatives in a students conference and they will be able to select a mate to go also to the conference and to work under their supervision) on the basis of positive feedback regarding their supervisory skills (legitimate) or negative feedback regarding their supervisory skills (illegitimate). Two applicants were proposed as subordinates: one high in sociability and competence and the other low in both dimensions. Although participants in the two conditions noticed the superiority of one candidate over the other, illegitimate powerholders selected the least sociable and competent subordinate more often than legitimate powerholders. Illegitimate participants also request more information about the best than about the worse candidate. We interpret our findings in light of the larger literature suggesting an impact of illegitimacy on people's attempts to rationalize and justify their position as well as to perpetuate the existing social arrangement.     

Modeling psychometric functions in R

We demonstrate some procedures in the statistical computing environment R for obtaining maximum likelihood estimates of the parameters of a psychometric function by fitting a generalized nonlinear regression model to the data. A feature for fitting a linear model to the threshold (or other) parameters of several psychometric functions simultaneously provides a powerful tool for testing hypotheses about the data and, potentially, for reducing the number of parameters necessary to describe them. Finally, we illustrate procedures for treating one parameter as a random effect that would permit a simplified approach to modeling stimulus-independent variability due to factors such as lapses or interobserver differences. These tools will facilitate a more comprehensive and explicit approach to the modeling of psychometric data.     

Is the go/no-go lexical decision task an alternative to the yes/no lexical decision task?

In the go/no-go lexical decision task (LDT), participants are instructed to respond as quickly as they can when a word is presented and not to respond if a nonword is presented. By minimizing part of the response selection process in the experimental task, the impact of response decision time on the obtained lexical decision time is probably reduced relative to the standard yes/no LDT (Gordon, 1983). Experiments 1 and 2 show that the go/no-go LDT is sensitive to the effects of word frequency and associative priming--the magnitude of these effects is similar with the two tasks. More important, the go/no-go LDT has a number of advantages with respect to the "standard" yes/no LDT: It offers faster response times, more accurate responding, and fewer processing demands than does the yes/no task. Accordingly, the go/no-go task appears to be an excellent alternative to the standard yes/no task.     

Does "whole-word shape" play a role in visual word recognition?

To analyze the impact of outline shape on visual word recognition, the visual pattern of the stimuli can be distorted by size alternation. Contrary to the predictions of models that rely on outline shape (Allen, Wallace, & Weber, 1995), the effect of size alternation was greater for low-frequency words than for high-frequency words in a lexical decision task (Experiment 1). In Experiment 2, the effect of case type (lowercase vs. UPPERCASE) occurred for low-frequency words, but not for high-frequency words. The effect of neighborhood size was remarkably similar in the two experiments. The results can be readily explained in the framework of a resonance model (Grossberg & Stone, 1986), in which a mismatch between the original sensory pattern and the abstract orthographic code slows down the formation of a stable percept.     

Effects of an intervention in active strategies for text comprehension and recall

The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of an intervention program to promote active text-processing strategies (main-idea identification and summarization) at two developmental levels (12- and 16-year-olds). The independent variables were training condition (experimental and control) and school level (7th and 10th grades). Several measures were taken as dependent variables: reading span, reading time, construction of macrostructure, and structural recall. The hypothesis claimed that training would increase comprehension and recall significantly. Furthermore, as a result of the training program, a reduction in developmental differences in the experimental groups at posttest was also expected. Results supported the predictions, showing a significant improvement in the experimental groups' reading comprehension and recall. These results are discussed in terms of the importance of active and self-controlled strategies for text comprehension and recall.