Effect of social organisation on interspecific differences in overmarking behaviour of foals in African equids

Animal Cognition - Overmarking remains an unstudied topic in juvenile mammals. We have previously documented a very high rate of overmarking by foals in four captive African equid species: mountain...     

Roles and Representations of Women in Early Chinese Philosophy: A Survey

An understanding of the roles and representations of women in classical Chinese philosophy is here derived from central texts such as the Analects, the Lienü Zhuan, and the I Ching. We argue that the roles of women during the classical period of Chinese philosophy tended to be as part of the “inner,” working domestically as a housewife and mother. This will be shown from three passages from the Analects. Women were represented as submissive and passive, as with the qualities ascribed to yin energy, and therefore as rightfully subordinate to men. However, despite representations of women in philosophy being thus at this time, there were exceptions, specific women who could take a male “outer” political role. The story of Jing Jiang from the Lienü Zhuan suggests that although women being involved in “outer” affairs were looked down on, there were still women who would be and who would occasionally get praised for doing so. This shows that it was realized, explicitly or otherwise, that women were capable of taking those roles, but also that they were not allowed to take such roles at that time.     

Subtyping versus bookkeeping in stereotype learning and change: connectionist simulations and empirical findings

A distributed connectionist network can account for both bookkeeping (M. Rothbart, 1981) and subtyping (M. B. Brewer, V. Dull, & L. Lui, 1981; S. E. Taylor, 1981) effects. The finding traditionally regarded as demonstrating subtyping is that exposure to moderate (compared with extreme) disconfirmers leads to subsequent ratings of the group that are less stereotypic. Despite learning that is incremental and analogous to bookkeeping, the simulations replicate this finding and suggest that the "subtyping" pattern of results will be drastically reduced if disconfirmers are encountered before the stereotype is well-established. This novel prediction holds with human participants and offers a tantalizing suggestion: Although moderate disconfirmers may produce more stereotype change. stereotype development might be discouraged by exposure to either extreme or moderate disconfirmers.     

Developmental and content effects in reasoning with causal conditionals

Two predictions derived from Markovits and Barrouillet's (2001) developmental model of conditional reasoning were tested in a study in which 72 twelve-year-olds, 80 fifteen-year-olds, and 104 adults received a paper-and-pencil test of conditional reasoning with causal premises ("if cause P then effect Q"). First, we predicted that conditional premises would induce more correct uncertainty responses to the Affirmation of the consequent and Denial of the antecedent forms when the antecedent term is weakly associated to the consequent than when the two are strongly associated and that this effect would decrease with age. Second, uncertainty responding to the Denial of the antecedent form ("P is not true") should be easier when the formulation of the minor premise invites retrieval of alternate antecedents ("if something other than P is true"). The results were consistent with the hypotheses and indicate the importance of retrieval processes in understanding developmental patterns in conditional reasoning with familiar premises.     

Representation of the gender of human faces by infants: a preference for female

Six experiments based on visual preference procedures were conducted to examine gender categorization of female versus male faces by infants aged 3 to 4 months. In experiment 1, infants familiarized with male faces preferred a female face over a novel male face, but infants familiarized with female faces divided their attention between a male face and a novel female face. Experiment 2 demonstrated that these asymmetrical categorization results were likely due to a spontaneous preference for females. Experiments 3 and 4 showed that the preference for females was based on processing of the internal facial features in their upright orientation, and not the result of external hair cues or higher-contrast internal facial features. While experiments 1 through 4 were conducted with infants reared with female primary caregivers, experiment 5 provided evidence that infants reared with male primary caregivers tend to show a spontaneous preference for males. Experiment 6 showed that infants reared with female primary caregivers displayed recognition memory for individual females, but not males. These results suggest that representation of information about human faces by young infants may be influenced by the gender of the primary caregiver.     

Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) recognize spatial and object correspondences between a scale model and its referent

In the present study, the contributions of spatial and object features to chimpanzees' comprehension of scale models were examined. Seven chimpanzees that previously demonstrated the ability to use a scale model as an information source for the location of a hidden item were tested under conditions manipulating the feature correspondence and spatial-relational correspondence between objects in the model and an outdoor enclosure. In Experiment 1, subjects solved the task under two conditions in which one object cue (color or shape) was unavailable, but positional cues remained. Additionally, performance was above chance under a third condition in which both types of object cues, but not position cues, were available. In Experiment 2, 2 subjects solved the task under a condition in which shape and color object cues were simultaneously unavailable. The results suggest that, much like young children, chimpanzees are sensitive to both object and spatial-relational correspondences between a model and its referent.     

One Frog, Two Frog, Red Frog, Blue Frog: Factors Affecting Children's Syntactic Choices in Production and Comprehension

Two experiments are reported which examine children's ability to use referential context when making syntactic choices in language production and comprehension. In a recent on-line study of auditory comprehension, Trueswell, Sekerina, Hill, and Logrip (1999) examined children's and adults' abilities to resolve temporary syntactic ambiguities involving prepositional phrases (e.g., “Put the frog on the napkin into ¨”). Although adults and older children used the referential context to guide their initial analysis (pursuing a destination interpretation in a one-frog context and a modifier interpretation in a two-frog context), 4 to 5-year olds' initial and ultimate analysis was one of destination, regardless of context. The present studies examined whether these differences were attributable to the comprehension process itself or to other sources, such as possible differences in how children perceive the scene and referential situation. In both experiments, children were given a language generation task designed to elicit and test children's ability to refer to a member of a set through restrictive modification. This task was immediately followed by the “put” comprehension task. The findings showed that, in response to a question about a member of a set (e.g., “Which frog went to Mrs. Squid's house?”), 4- to 5-year-olds frequently produced a definite NP with a restrictive prepositional modifier (e.g., “The one on the napkin”). These same children, however, continued to misanalyze put instructions, showing a strong avoidance of restrictive modification during comprehension. Experiment 2 showed that an increase in the salience of the platforms that distinguished the two referents increased overall performance, but still showed the strong asymmetry between production and comprehension. Eye movements were also recorded in Experiment 2, revealing on-line parsing patterns similar to Trueswell et al.: an initial preference for a destination analysis and a failure to revise early referential commitments. These experiments indicate that child–adult differences in parsing preferences arise, in part, from developmental changes in the comprehension process itself and not from a general insensitivity to referential properties of the scene. The findings are consistent with a probabilistic model for uncovering the structure of the input during comprehension, in which more reliable linguistic and discourse-related cues are learned first, followed by a gradually developing ability to take into account other more uncertain (or more difficult to learn) cues to structure.     

Is the concept of "repression" useful for the understanding chronic PTSD?

Theories concerning the value of avoiding versus attending to trauma-related thoughts provide mixed support for specific coping strategies such as repression. The goal of this study is to examine the usefulness of the concept of repression in understanding chronic Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). One hundred and fifty individuals who had been in a motor vehicle accident were included. Participants were classified into four groups (repressors, low anxious, high anxious, and defensively high anxious) based on methodology introduced by Weinberger et al. [J. Abnormal Psychol. 88 (1979) 369]. These four groups were compared on measures of PTSD symptomatology, anxiety, depression, and where appropriate, perceived pain and disability. Results revealed a fairly consistent pattern of group differences such that repressors reported fewer PTSD symptoms, fewer additional anxiety disorders, less depression, and less physical disability due to pain relative to the high anxious and defensively high anxious groups. Regression analyses examining the separate and interactive effects of anxiety and social desirability to predict PTSD symptomatology showed that the majority of the variance was explained by anxiety. In many respects, these data suggest that repression may not be a useful concept for understanding chronic PTSD.     

Accuracy and speed of orthographic processing in persons with developmental dyslexia

A group of 39 persons (20 male and 19 female, 11.0 to 32.5 yr.) with developmental dyslexia and 42 controls (21 male and 21 female, 11.2 to 32.3 years) were compared on computerized tests of sight word reading, nonword decoding, and spelling recognition. The subjects with developmental dyslexia performed significantly slower and less accurately than controls on all tasks. Further, the effect size of the group differences was larger for the older group. Within-group analyses showed a significant difference by age group on accuracy. Only the control group showed a significant age difference between groups on response time. Mean accuracy and response times for the reading-disabled subjects resembled shifted versions of the control group means. These results agree with previous reports that phonological deficits persist for reading-disabled adults and suggest a test of whether the discrepancy between reading-disabled and typically achieving readers may actually increase across age groups.