Gravity biases in a non-human primate?

Pre-school children expect falling objects to travel in a straight line even when there are clear physical mechanisms that deviate the object's path (Hood, 1995). The current study set out to determine whether this expectancy is limited to humans. Cotton-top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus oedipus), a New World monkey species, were tested on Hood's (1995) experimental task where objects are dropped down a chimney connected by an opaque tube to one of three containers. Like human children, there was a significant tendency to search in the container underneath the chimney where the food was dropped on the first trial, even though aligned chimneys and containers were never connected. These search errors suggest that there may be a gravity bias that operates when both primate species fail to understand the constraints operating on object trajectories. Unlike human children however, tamarins were generally more likely to perseverate in making errors even though repeated testing and cost incentives were used.     

Racism as a stressor for African Americans. A biopsychosocial model.

Various authors have noted that interethnic group and intraethnic group racism are significant stressors for many African Americans. As such, intergroup and intragroup racism may play a role in the high rates of morbidity and mortality in this population. Yet, although scientific examinations of the effects of stress have proliferated, few researchers have explored the psychological, social, and physiological effects of perceived racism among African Americans. The purpose of this article was to outline a biopsychosocial model for perceived racism as a guide for future research. The first section of this article provides a brief overview of how racism has been conceptualized in the scientific literature. The second section reviews research exploring the existence of intergroup and intragroup racism. A contextual model for systematic studies of the biopsychosocial effects of perceived racism is then presented, along with recommendations for future research.     

The attentional demands of encoding and retrieval in younger and older adults: 2. Evidence from secondary task reaction time distributions

Three studies examined the effects of encoding or retrieval on properties of secondary task reaction time (RT) distributions in younger and older adults. Relative to full attention conditions, encoding and retrieval increased secondary task RT medians and standard deviations more for older adults than for younger adults, and the age-related RT increase was most pronounced among the slowest RTs. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed two age-related mechanisms underlying these effects, which were interpreted as cognitive slowing and reductions in attentional resources. Cognitive slowing affects the entire RT distribution regardless of the memory task. By contrast, reduced attentional resources result in very long RTs, especially when the tasks require self-initiated encoding or retrieval operations.     

Self-reflection and the temporal focus of the wandering mind

Current accounts suggest that self-referential thought serves a pivotal function in the human ability to simulate the future during mind-wandering. Using experience sampling, this hypothesis was tested in two studies that explored the extent to which self-reflection impacts both retrospection and prospection during mind-wandering. Study 1 demonstrated that a brief period of self-reflection yielded a prospective bias during mind-wandering such that participants’ engaged more frequently in spontaneous future than past thought. In Study 2, individual differences in the strength of self-referential thought — as indexed by the memorial advantage for self rather than other-encoded items — was shown to vary with future thinking during mind-wandering. Together these results confirm that self-reflection is a core component of future thinking during mind-wandering and provide novel evidence that a key function of the autobiographical memory system may be to mentally simulate events in the future.     

Differentiating emotional processing and attention in psychopathy with functional neuroimaging

Individuals with psychopathy are often characterized by emotional processing deficits, and recent research has examined the specific contexts and cognitive mechanisms that underlie these abnormalities. Some evidence suggests that abnormal features of attention are fundamental to emotional deficits in persons with psychopathy, but few studies have demonstrated the neural underpinnings responsible for such effects. Here, we use functional neuroimaging to examine attention–emotion interactions among incarcerated individuals (n = 120) evaluated for psychopathic traits using the Hare Psychopathy Checklist–Revised (PCL-R). Using a task designed to manipulate attention to emotional features of visual stimuli, we demonstrate effects representing implicit emotional processing, explicit emotional processing, attention-facilitated emotional processing, and vigilance for emotional content. Results confirm the importance of considering mechanisms of attention when evaluating emotional processing differences related to psychopathic traits. The affective-interpersonal features of psychopathy (PCL-R Factor 1) were associated with relatively lower emotion-dependent augmentation of activity in visual processing areas during implicit emotional processing, while antisocial-lifestyle features (PCL-R Factor 2) were associated with elevated activity in the amygdala and related salience network regions. During explicit emotional processing, psychopathic traits were associated with upregulation in the medial prefrontal cortex, insula, and superior frontal regions. Isolating the impact of explicit attention to emotional content, only Factor 1 was related to upregulation of activity in the visual processing stream, which was accompanied by increased activity in the angular gyrus. These effects highlight some important mechanisms underlying abnormal features of attention and emotional processing that accompany psychopathic traits.     

Skill Acquisition and the LISP Tutor

An analysis of student learning with the LISP tutor indicates that while LISP is complex, learning it is simple. The key to factoring out the complexity of LISP is to monitor the learning of the 500 productions in the LISP tutor which describe the programming skill. The learning of these productions follows the power-law learning curve typical of skill acquisition. There is transfer from other programming experience to the extent that this programming experience involves the same productions. Subjects appear to differ only on the general dimensions of how well they acquire the productions and how well they retain the productions. Instructional manipulations such as remediation, content of feedback, and timing of feedback are effective to the extent they give students more practice programming, and explain to students why correct solutions work.     

Abstract Planning and Perceptual Chunks: Elements of Expertise in Geometry

We present a new model of skilled performance in geometry proof problem solving called the Diagram Configuration model (DC). While previous models plan proofs in a step-by-step fashion, we observed that experts plan at a more abstract level: They focus on the key steps and skip the less important ones. DC models this abstract planning behavior by parsing geometry problem diagrams into perceptual chunks, called diagram configurations, which cue relevant schematic knowledge. We provide verbal protocol evidence that DC's schemas correspond with the step-skipping inferences experts make in their initial planning. We compare DC with other models of geometry expertise and then, in the final section, we discuss more general implications of our research. DC's reasoning has important similarities with Larkin's (1988) display-based reasoning approach and Johnson-Laird's (1983) mental model approach. DC's perceptually based schemas are a step towards a unified explanation of (1) experts' superior problem-solving effectiveness, (2) experts' superior problem-state memory, and (3) experts' ability, in certain domains, to solve relatively simple problems by pure forward inferencing. We also argue that the particular and efficient knowledge organization of DC challenges current theories of skill acquisition as it presents an end-state of learning that is difficult to explain within such theories. Finally, we discuss the implications of DC for geometry instruction.     

Comparative oughts and comparative evils

My thanks to David Banach for commenting on an earlier draft of this essay.     

Differences in performance of young and old monkeys on a visuospatial memory task

Two groups of stumptailed macaques (Macaca arctoides) were compared in terms of performance on a visuospatial working memory task involving repeated presentations of an array of 15 doors, each of which concealed one food reward at the start of a session. Rewards obtained by the subject were not replaced. Errors were defined as responses to doors previously pushed open during the session. Both groups generally obtained all rewards and showed improved performance across sessions, but old monkeys consistently made more errors than young ones, especially in the latter half of a given session. Further, old monkeys were less diverse in the errors they made, indicating different response strategies by the two groups.