Hungry for money: the desire for caloric resources increases the desire for financial resources and vice versa

This report attempts to provide an evolutionary explanation for humans' motivation to strive for money in present-day societies. We propose that people's desire for money is a modern derivate of their desire for food. In three studies, we show the reciprocal association between the incentive value of food and of money. In Study 1, hungry participants were less likely than satiated participants to donate to charity. In Study 2, participants in a room with an olfactory food cue, known to increase the desire to eat, offered less money in a give-some game compared with participants in a room free of scent. In Study 3, participants' desire for money affected the amount of M&M's they ate in a subsequent taste test, but only among participants who were not restricting their food intake in order to manage their weight.     

The effectiveness of early head start for 3-year-old children and their parents: lessons for policy and programs

Early Head Start, a federal program begun in 1995 for low-income pregnant women and families with infants and toddlers, was evaluated through a randomized trial of 3,001 families in 17 programs. Interviews with primary caregivers, child assessments, and observations of parent-child interactions were completed when children were 3 years old. Caregivers were diverse in race-ethnicity, language, and other characteristics. Regression-adjusted impact analyses showed that 3-year-old program children performed better than did control children in cognitive and language development, displayed higher emotional engagement of the parent and sustained attention with play objects, and were lower in aggressive behavior. Compared with controls, Early Head Start parents were more emotionally supportive, provided more language and learning stimulation, read to their children more, and spanked less. The strongest and most numerous impacts were for programs that offered a mix of home-visiting and center-based services and that fully implemented the performance standards early.     

Relations between mental performance and reaction time: New aspects of an old problem

The relation between simple and complex reaction time and psychometrically determined mental performance was reexamined with 486 subjects of above-average intelligence. Various standardized tests measuring aspects of cognitive ability, memory and ability to concentrate were used. Simple and complex reaction times were measured using the Klebelsberg modification of the Mierke apparatus. Correlations between complex reaction time and mental performance as observed by other investigators were mostly confirmed. We found, however, the strongest and most consistent correlations with tests measuring short-term memory; ability to concentrate and spatial ability. On the other hand, tests known and shown again in this paper to load highly on Spearman's general factor g, such as verbal abilities; combinatoric thinking; abstraction; or calculation gave only trivial, and, in most cases, nonsignificant correlations with complex reaction time. We even observed a negative (though, for our data, not significant) correlation between g-loadings of subtests and their correlations with complex reaction time for the only complete standardized intelligence test used in this study, the “Intelligenz-Strukturtest (Amthauer).” Therefore, this study does not support the hypothesis that fast processing of complex information as measured by complex reaction time is the decisive component of the general factor of intelligence g.     

Postaggression footshock inhibits aggressive behavior in dominant but not in isolated mice

Aggressive behavior of dominant and isolated mice was assessed in intermale encounters with nonaggressive intruder mice. After an attack period of 90 s, the aggressor was exposed to a footshock punishment and retested the next day. The shock treatment, independent of the intensity and duration, failed to inhibit spontaneous aggression in isolated DBA/2 mice, while it significantly suppressed spontaneous aggression in dominant C57BL/6 mice. The different effects of post-trial shock punishment were not due to a different shock sensitivity and did not depend on the type of opponent used. Strain differences have been ruled out by the use of dominant and isolated ICR mice. Again, shock punishment was ineffective in isolates, while it reduced aggression in dominant animals. The findings were discussed with reference to the impaired learning performance reported for isolated animals, and suggest a difference between the aggression of isolated and that of dominant mice.     

Performances on Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test and Rey Complex Figure Test in a healthy, elderly Danish sample--reference data and validity issues

This study presents Danish data for Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT) and Rey Complex Figure Test (RCFT) from 100 subjects aged 60-87 years. Education and estimated verbal intelligence (DART score) had a significant impact on the RAVLT trial 1-5 score but not on other RAVLT measures. The RCFT copy score was significantly related to age and the DART score. On RCFT recall a highly significant difference was found between persons who could make a faultless copy and persons with incomplete copy performance. Thus, this study presents separate data for RCFT recall scores according to the subjects' copying performance (in separate tables for age and education groups). For all measures on both RAVLT and RCFT wide distributions of scores were found and the impact of this broad score range on the tests' discriminative validity is discussed. RAVLT performances for elderly were similar to previous published meta-norms, but the included sample of elderly Danes performed better on RCFT (copy and recall) than elderly from the United States.     

Flexibility in Visual Working Memory: Accurate Change Detection in the Face of Irrelevant Variations in Position

Many recent studies of visual working memory have used change-detection tasks in which subjects view sequential displays and are asked to report whether they are identical or if one object has changed. A key question is whether the memory system used to perform this task is sufficiently flexible to detect changes in object identity independent of spatial transformations, but previous research has yielded contradictory results. To address this issue, the present study compared standard change-detection tasks with tasks in which the objects varied in size or position between successive arrays. Performance was nearly identical across the standard and transformed tasks unless the task implicitly encouraged spatial encoding. These results resolve the discrepancies in prior studies and demonstrate that the visual working memory system can detect changes in object identity across spatial transformations.     

Building biases in infancy: the influence of race on face and voice emotion matching

Early in the first year of life infants exhibit equivalent performance distinguishing among people within their own race and within other races. However, with development and experience, their face recognition skills become tuned to groups of people they interact with the most. This developmental tuning is hypothesized to be the origin of adult face processing biases including the other-race bias. In adults the other-race bias has also been associated with impairments in facial emotion processing for other-race faces. The present investigation aimed to show perceptual narrowing for other-race faces during infancy and to determine whether the race of a face influences infants' ability to match emotional sounds with emotional facial expressions. Behavioral (visual-paired comparison; VPC) and electrophysiological (event-related potentials; ERPs) measures were recorded in 5-month-old and 9-month-old infants. Behaviorally, 5-month-olds distinguished faces within their own race and within another race, whereas 9-month-olds only distinguish faces within their own race. ERPs were recorded while an emotion sound (laughing or crying) was presented prior to viewing an image of a static African American or Caucasian face expressing either a happy or a sad emotion. Consistent with behavioral findings, ERPs revealed race-specific perceptual processing of faces and emotion/sound face congruency at 9 months but not 5 months of age. In addition, from 5 to 9 months, the neural networks activated for sound/face congruency were found to shift from an anterior ERP component (Nc) related to attention to posterior ERP components (N290, P400) related to perception.     

Do subjective measures of attention and memory predict actual performance? Metacognition in older couples

Older individuals who recognize their cognitive difficulties are more likely to adjust their everyday life to their actual cognitive functioning, particularly when they are able to estimate their abilities accurately. We assessed self- and spouse-ratings of memory and attention difficulties in everyday life of healthy, older individuals and compared them with the respective test performance. Eighty-four older individuals (women's age, M = 67.4 years, SD = 5.2; men's age, M = 68.5 years, SD = 4.9) completed both the self and the spouse versions of the Attention Deficit Questionnaire and the Everyday Memory Questionnaire and completed two neuropsychological tests. Using the residual score approach, subjective metacognitive measures of memory and attention were created and compared with actual test performance. Significant associations between subjective and objective scores were found only for men and only for episodic memory measures. Men who underreported memory difficulties performed more poorly; men who overreported memory difficulties performed better. Men's recognition performance was best predicted by subjective measures (R2 = .25), followed by delayed recall (R2 = .14) and forgetting rate (R2 = .13). The results indicate gender-specific differences in metacognitive accuracy and predictive validity of subjective ratings.