How capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) quantify objects and substances

Humans and nonhuman animals appear to share a capacity for nonverbal quantity representations. But what are the limits of these abilities? Results of previous research with human infants suggest that the ontological status of an entity as an object or a substance affects infants' ability to quantify it. We ask whether the same is true for another primate species-the New World monkey Cebus apella. We tested capuchin monkeys' ability to select the greater of two quantities of either discrete objects or a nonsolid substance. Participants performed above chance with both objects (Experiment 1) and substances (Experiment 2); in both cases, the observed performance was ratio dependent. This finding suggests that capuchins quantify objects and substances similarly and do so via analog magnitude representations.     

Does Gender Affect Visiting a World Heritage Site?

ABSTRACT

The city of Guimarães in Portugal is a place of strong symbolic and cultural significance, and the nomination of its historical center as a World Heritage Site in 2001 enhanced its tourism potential. This study presents the results of a survey conducted in 2010 and 2011 to capture the profile and motivations of tourists visiting Guimarães as a cultural tourism destination. The study addressed two main issues: whether males and females have similar or different preferences in choosing the city as their destination, and whether there are gender differences in the perception of the attributes of Guimarães. A better understanding of the gendered nature of the destination is a valuable cue for shaping products and services according to visitors’ preferences. The results suggest that both men and women are aware of the main elements responsible for the city's World Heritage status. That the destination is a Heritage Site that also offers the opportunity to tour the region has a significant positive effect on male tourists’ choice of Guimarães. Regarding the perceived attributes of the city, results indicate minor gender differences with one exception: Women expressed more apprehension than men regarding the perceived security of the destination.     

Exploring the perception of social characteristics in faces using the isolation effect

The age, sex, and distinctiveness of faces can be judged from objective and partially independent facial features. In contrast, the physical basis of other social judgements, such as attractiveness, intelligence, and trustworthiness is not as yet entirely understood, despite the consistency of these judgements from faces. The present set of experiments investigated the perception of social characteristics in faces, using an adaptation of the von Restorff/isolation paradigm to determine which social characteristics are spontaneously encoded from the face. The isolation effect involves enhanced memory for perceptually salient items in a list (items that are isolated in the sense that they are in numeric minority) and our results suggested that its locus is at the encoding stage of the recognition memory experiment. Isolation in the present experiments was achieved by manipulating the number of faces included in the sets on the basis of certain characteristics. Because the manipulation of the characteristics of faces in a set to be learnt was not mentioned in most of the experiments, any resulting memory increment for the isolated items could be taken as an index of spontaneous processing of the manipulated social characteristic. Age and sex were found to be spontaneously encoded from faces. Results for other characteristics were mixed, ranging from distinctiveness and attractiveness, for which there was some indication of spontaneous processing, to intelligence and trustworthiness, which did not seem to be spontaneously encoded from faces. For intelligence, an isolation effect was found only when the experiment required a judgement that led to activation of the appropriate stereotype.     

Holistic reasoning on the other side of the world: validation of the analysis-holism scale in Mexicans

The universality of cognitive processes has been called into question. Research suggests that individuals from Eastern cultures (e.g., China, Korea) when compared to individuals from Western cultures (e.g., the United States) prefer to reason holistically. This line of research has not been extended to cultural groups far removed from cultures traditionally surveyed in cross-cultural research such as Hispanics. We conducted two studies to understand: 1) the generalizability of the construct of holistic reasoning in Mexicans, and 2) the preferred reasoning style of Mexicans when compared to U.S. Americans. Results support the generalization of the factor structure of holistic reasoning as originally hypothesized by Choi, Koo, and Choi (2007). The results of Study 2 suggest that Mexicans scored higher than U.S. Americans on certain aspects of holistic reasoning.     

The evolution of intergroup bias: perceptions and attitudes in rhesus macaques

Social psychologists have learned a great deal about the nature of intergroup conflict and the attitudinal and cognitive processes that enable it. Less is known about where these processes come from in the first place. In particular, do our strategies for dealing with other groups emerge in the absence of human-specific experiences? One profitable way to answer this question has involved administering tests that are conceptual equivalents of those used with adult humans in other species, thereby exploring the continuity or discontinuity of psychological processes. We examined intergroup preferences in a nonhuman species, the rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta). We found the first evidence that a nonhuman species automatically distinguishes the faces of members of its own social group from those in other groups and displays greater vigilance toward outgroup members (Experiments 1-3). In addition, we observed that macaques spontaneously associate novel objects with specific social groups and display greater vigilance to objects associated with outgroup members (Experiments 4-5). Finally, we developed a looking time procedure-the Looking Time Implicit Association Test, which resembles the Implicit Association Test (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995)-and we discovered that macaques, like humans, automatically evaluate ingroup members positively and outgroup members negatively (Experiments 6-7). These field studies represent the first controlled experiments to examine the presence of intergroup attitudes in a nonhuman species. As such, these studies suggest that the architecture of the mind that enables the formation of these biases may be rooted in phylogenetically ancient mechanisms.