Bootstrapping word order in prelexical infants: a Japanese-Italian cross-linguistic study

Learning word order is one of the earliest feats infants accomplish during language acquisition [Brown, R. (1973). A first language: The early stages, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.]. Two theories have been proposed to account for this fact. Constructivist/lexicalist theories [Tomasello, M. (2000). Do young children have adult syntactic competence? Cognition, 74(3), 209-253.] argue that word order is learned separately for each lexical item or construction. Generativist theories [Chomsky, N. (1995). The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.], on the other hand, claim that word order is an abstract and general property, determined from the input independently of individual words. Here, we show that eight-month-old Japanese and Italian infants have opposite order preferences in an artificial grammar experiment, mirroring the opposite word orders of their respective native languages. This suggests that infants possess some representation of word order prelexically, arguing for the generativist view. We propose a frequency-based bootstrapping mechanism to account for our results, arguing that infants might build this representation by tracking the order of functors and content words, identified through their different frequency distributions. We investigate frequency and word order patterns in infant-directed Japanese and Italian corpora to support this claim.     

Relationships in Families after a Family Member’s Death: A Qualitative Metasynthesis

The aim of this article is to understand the bereavement of a family as a unit from multiple perspectives. Using qualitative metasynthesis, we described family members’ bereavement experiences from multiple perspectives. The most common perspectives reported were those of parents who had lost their children. No studies reported the perspectives of husbands. Every article explicitly or implicitly referred to a continued connection with the deceased and the effect of this connection on family relationships. This article addresses the importance of focusing on more than one relationship within a family, which should be investigated further in future research.     

Symbolic magnitude modulates perceptual strength in binocular rivalry

Basic aspects of magnitude (such as luminance contrast) are directly represented by sensory representations in early visual areas. However, it is unclear how symbolic magnitudes (such as Arabic numerals) are represented in the brain. Here we show that symbolic magnitude affects binocular rivalry: perceptual dominance of numbers and objects of known size increases with their magnitude. Importantly, variations in symbolic magnitude acted like variations in luminance contrast: we found that an increase in numerical magnitude of adding one lead to an equivalent increase in perceptual dominance as a contrast increment of 0.32%. Our results support the claim that magnitude is extracted automatically, since the increase in perceptual dominance came about in the absence of a magnitude-related task. Our findings show that symbolic, acculturated knowledge about magnitude interacts with visual perception and affects perception in a manner similar to lower-level aspects of magnitude such as luminance contrast.     

The category of 1:1 ratio caused by assimilation of two neighboring empty time intervals

We investigated the perception of temporal patterns of two neighboring empty time intervals, t1 and t2, in this order. In a previous study, we reported that bilateral assimilation took place during t1 and t2, as well as unilateral assimilation. [Miyauchi, R. & Nakajima, Y. (2005). Bilateral assimilation of two neighboring empty time intervals. Music Perception, 22, 411-424]. The points of subjective equality (PSEs) of t1 and t2 approached each other. We speculated that these temporal patterns would yield nearly 1:1 ratios perceptually despite the change in the physical temporal ratio between t1 and t2. However, we were uncertain whether these temporal patterns were really perceived as having 1:1 ratios. In the present study, we conducted three experiments. In Experiment 1, we measured subjective similarities of two temporal patterns and analyzed the results by hierarchical cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling. The temporal patterns, where the physical ratio between t1 and t2 was varied systematically, were divided into three clusters, and one cluster consisted of the temporal patterns within a range of -80 ms 相似文献   

Unilateral memory storage in the procerebrum of the terrestrial slug Limax

In most sensory modalities, neuronal inputs are bilaterally processed in a higher center. In some animal species, however, functional lateralization is sometimes observed in the sensory processing at the higher level. For the terrestrial slug Limax, olfaction is the most important sensory modality and this slug can acquire odor-aversion memories. Previously, it has been demonstrated in bilateral PC ablation experiments that the procerebrum (PC) is necessary for odor-aversion memory, and that the PC is the memory storage site. On the other hand, it has been hypothesized that only the unilateral PC is used for odor-aversion learning. Here we demonstrated that the number of the slugs with intact memory performance was reduced by approximately 50% when the PC was surgically ablated only unilaterally before or after conditioning. There was no difference in the memory performance of the right vs. the left PC-ablated slugs. However, memory deficit from unilateral PC ablation was not observed when the ipsilateral tentacles were also amputated at the same time. We also showed that there was no lateral memory transfer from one PC to the other, after up to 7 days post-conditioning. Our results demonstrated clearly that either the left or right PC is randomly used for olfactory learning, and that the side of use is determined at the level of the olfactory ascending pathway to the PC.     

Cross-task repetition amnesia: Impaired recall of RSVP targets held in memory for a secondary task

People often fail to select and encode the second of two targets presented within less than 500ms in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), an effect known as the attentional blink. We investigated how report of the two targets is affected when one of them is maintained in working memory for a secondary, memory-search task. The results showed that report of either target was impaired when it was a member of the memory set relative to when it was not. This effect was independent of both the temporal interval separating the RSVP target from the presentation of the memory set and the interval separating the targets. We propose that the deficit in recall occurs because the association between a target and the memory-search task interferes with the formation of a new association between that target and the following RSVP task, with the result that observers may be biased to ascribe the target only to the memory set.     

Temporal and spatial factors reflecting performance improvement during learning three-ball cascade juggling

Beek and van Santvoord [Beek, P. J., & van Santvoord, A. A. M. (1992). Journal of Motor Behavior, 24, 85-94] proposed a three-stage model of learning to juggle based on group analyses of temporal measures. Here, we examined in detail how the temporal and spatial features of juggling evolved in eight individual participants progressing from the second to the third stage of learning. During the second stage, the dwell ratio, defined as the ratio of the time that the juggler holds a ball between catch and toss and the hand cycle time (HCT), was stable when it was about 0.83. The subjects with a dwell ratio near this value and controlled throws exhibited stable juggling, whereas the subjects with a dwell ratio of 0.80 or smaller exhibited unstable juggling. Compared to the former group, the latter group had a longer time from the throw of a ball to the arrival at its zenith (TZ), and a shorter time between the arrival of an airborne ball at its zenith and the subsequent throw (IZR). The latter group also exhibited larger variability in the dwell ratio and IZR. With practice, the subjects appropriated, on average, the duration of TZ and IZR to the dwell ratio and improved the ability to accurately throw balls by changing the motions of the limb segments involved. Although these changes helped to stabilize the performance during the second stage, the variability problem was not sufficiently resolved. Only two out of eight subjects passed on to the third stage by the last (10th) Session. They achieved small variability in IZR, dwell ratio, and flight paths of the ball while juggling with short HCTs and small dwell ratios. These results suggest that the reduction of variability in these variables was essential to pass on to the third stage.     

Visual transients reveal the veridical position of a moving object

The position of a moving object is often mislocalised in the direction of movement. At the input stage of visual processing, the position of a moving object should still be represented veridically, whereas it should become closer to the mislocalised position at a later processing stage responsible for positional judgment. Here, we show that visual transients expose the veridical position of a moving object represented in early visual areas. For example, when a ring is flashed on a moving bar, the part of the bar within the ring is perceived at the veridical position, whereas the part outside the ring is perceived to be ahead of the ring as in the flash-lag effect. Our observations suggest that a filling-in process is triggered at the edges of the flash. This indicates that, in early cortical areas, moving objects are still represented at their veridical positions, and the perceived location is determined by the higher visual areas.     

Relating inter-individual differences in metacognitive performance on different perceptual tasks

Human behavior depends on the ability to effectively introspect about our performance. For simple perceptual decisions, this introspective or metacognitive ability varies substantially across individuals and is correlated with the structure of focal areas in prefrontal cortex. This raises the possibility that the ability to introspect about different perceptual decisions might be mediated by a common cognitive process. To test this hypothesis, we examined whether inter-individual differences in metacognitive ability were correlated across two different perceptual tasks where individuals made judgments about different and unrelated visual stimulus properties. We found that inter-individual differences were strongly correlated between the two tasks for metacognitive ability but not objective performance. Such stability of an individual’s metacognitive ability across different perceptual tasks indicates a general mechanism supporting metacognition independent of the specific task.     

Intention matters to make you (im)moral: Positive-negative asymmetry in moral character evaluations

ABSTRACT

Is intention, even if unfulfilled, enough to make a person appear to be good or bad? In this study, we investigated the influence of unfulfilled intentions of an agent on subsequent moral character evaluations. We found a positive-negative asymmetry in the effect of intentions. Factual information concerning failure to fulfill a positive intention mitigated the morality judgment of the actor, yet this mitigation was not as evident for the negative vignettes. Participants rated an actor who failed to fulfill their negative intention as highly immoral, as long as there was an external explanation to its unfulfillment. Furthermore, both emotional and cognitive (i.e., informativeness) processes mediated the effect of negative intention on moral character. For the positive intention, there was a significant mediation by emotions, yet not by informativeness. Results evidence the relevance of mental states in moral character evaluations and offer affective and cognitive explanations to the asymmetry.