A dichotic listening study of attention control in older adults

The influence of age on attentional control of bottom-up processing was investigated with a dichotic-listening paradigm. The typical right-ear-advantage (REA) without specific attentional instructions was used as a measure of bottom-up processing (non-forced condition). Top-down attentional control was evaluated by instructing subjects to report only the right or left ear stimulus of the dichotic pair (forced-right, forced-left conditions). Both young and old participants showed a REA in the non-forced condition and an increased REA in the forced-right condition. The old group failed, however, to use attention to modulate the REA to the same degree as the younger participants in the forced-left condition. Only the young group showed a significant left ear advantage (LEA). The results are discussed in relation to cognitive decline in normal aging and in early stages of dementia.     

Are There Cross-Cultural Legal Principles? Modal Reasoning Uncovers Procedural Constraints on Law

Despite pervasive variation in the content of laws, legal theorists and anthropologists have argued that laws share certain abstract features and even speculated that law may be a human universal. In the present report, we evaluate this thesis through an experiment administered in 11 different countries. Are there cross-cultural principles of law? In a between-subjects design, participants (N = 3,054) were asked whether there could be laws that violate certain procedural principles (e.g., laws applied retrospectively or unintelligible laws), and also whether there are any such laws. Confirming our preregistered prediction, people reported that such laws cannot exist, but also (paradoxically) that there are such laws. These results document cross-culturally and –linguistically robust beliefs about the concept of law which defy people's grasp of how legal systems function in practice.     

How terrorism news reports increase prejudice against outgroups: A terror management account

Three studies tested predictions derived from terror management theory (TMT) about the effects of terrorism news on prejudice. Exposure to terrorism news should confront receivers with thoughts about their own death, which, in turn, should increase prejudice toward outgroup members. Non-Muslim (Studies 1-3) and Muslim (Study 3) participants were exposed to news about either Islamic terrorist acts or to control news. When Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered in Amsterdam by an Islamic extremist during data collection of Study 1, this event was included as a naturally occurring factor in the design. Consistent with TMT, terrorism news and Van Gogh’s murder increased death-related thoughts. Death-related thoughts, in turn, increased prejudiced attitudes toward outgroup members, especially when participants had low self-esteem, and when terrorism was psychologically close. Terrorism news may inadvertently increase prejudiced attitudes towards outgroups when it reminds viewers of their own mortality.     

Rationalization and Reflection Differentially Modulate Prior Attitudes Toward the Purity Domain

Outside Western, predominantly secular‐liberal environments, norms restricting bodily and sexual conduct are widespread. Moralization in the so‐called purity domain has been treated as evidence that some putative violations are victimless. However, respondents themselves disagree: They often report that private yet indecent acts incur self‐harm, or harm to one's family and the wider community—a result which we replicate in Study 1. We then distinguish two cognitive processes that could generate a link between harmfulness and immorality, and recreate them in Studies 2 and 3: Colombian and British participants were randomly assigned to either reflect (decide whether acts are harmful and reconsider their initial moral judgments) or rationalize (decide whether acts are immoral and reconsider their initial harmfulness beliefs). In both countries, reflection promoted opposition to unjust, but not impure, behavior. Additionally, in both countries, ruminating on the moral status of impure acts elevated beliefs in the acts' harmfulness. We conclude by suggesting that rationalization aggravates, while reflection mitigates, intergroup disagreement regarding putative violations of purity and decency.     

Spontaneous Sourcing Among Students Reading Multiple Documents

This study used think-aloud methodology to explore undergraduates' spontaneous attention to and use of source information while reading six documents that presented conflicting views on a controversial social scientific issue in a Google-like environment. Results showed that students explicitly and implicitly paid attention to sources of documents as well as sources cited within documents and that their attention to source information was associated with its use in evaluating, predicting, and interpreting the content of the documents. Students' sourcing activity varied across documents. The two documents that took the strongest, opposing stances on the controversy elicited the most sourcing. We also observed that, in essays they wrote on the controversy, students' spontaneous sourcing activity was related to their citation of a particularly trustworthy source. The study's theoretical implications are discussed in terms of the Documents Model framework.     

Familiarity,Cued and Free Odor Identification and Their Association with Cognitive Functioning in Middle Aged and Older Adults

ABSTRACT

The aim of the present study was to examine the association between familiarity of odors, cued and free odor identification performance and cognitive function in elderly adults. It was further investigated how age affects performance on the various odor tasks. A third aim was to investigate the role of familiarity in explaining performance on the free identification task. One hundred and thirty-six participants (aged 45–79 years) with normal olfactory sensitivity were assessed with the Scandinavian Odor Identification Test (SOIT) and standardized tests of cognitive function. Familiarity did not correlate with any measure of cognitive function, while verbal identification performance was associated with several cognitive measures, although correlations were modest. In this sample, free odor identification was affected by increasing age to a marginally larger extent than cued identification performance and familiarity ratings. The results suggest that the different olfactory tasks involve different levels of cognitive processing.     

Understanding and Integrating Multiple Science Texts: Summary Tasks are Sometimes Better Than Argument Tasks

One of the major challenges of a knowledge society is that students as well as other citizens must learn to understand and integrate information from multiple textual sources. Still, task and reader characteristics that may facilitate or constrain such intertextual processes are not well understood by researchers. In this study, we compare the effects of summary and argument essay tasks when undergraduates read seven different texts on a particular scientific topic, finding that an instruction to write summaries may lead to better understanding and integration than an instruction to write argument essays. We discuss several possible explanations for this result. We also found that beliefs about the certainty of knowledge in some instances can moderate the effect of task on comprehension performance.     

Joint attention in term and preterm infants at 12 months corrected age: the significance of gender and intervention based on a randomized controlled trial

This study tested the effects of optimized neonatal mother–infant transactions on joint attention performance at 12 months. Surviving infants <2000 g from a geographically defined area were randomly assigned to a preterm intervention (n = 71) or preterm control group (n = 69). Comparisons were made between preterm groups, secondary with a term group (n = 75). Joint attention was measured using the Early Social Communication Scales. Preterm intervention infants scored significantly higher than preterm control infants on elements Initiating Joint Attention (p < 0.05), Initiating Object Requests (p < 0.05), and Responding to Social Interaction (p < 0.0005). Intervention was not associated with performance on elements Responding to Joint Attention, or on Responding to Requests. ELBW infants scored significantly lower than VLBW and LBW infants on imperative functions. Girls outperformed boys on all communication elements. An intervention implemented during the neonatal period can be of advantage for certain aspects of joint attention performance in preterm infants.