Dissimilar items benefit from phonological similarity in serial recall

In short-term serial recall, similar sounding items are remembered less well than items that do not sound alike. This phonological similarity effect has been observed with lists composed only of similar items, and also with lists that mix together similar and dissimilar items. An additional consistent finding has been what the authors call dissimilar immunity, the finding that ordered recall of dissimilar items is the same whether these items occur in pure dissimilar or mixed lists. The authors present 3 experiments that disconfirm these previous findings by showing that dissimilar items on mixed lists are recalled better than their counterparts on pure lists if order errors are considered separately from intrusion errors (Experiment 1), or if intrusion errors are experimentally controlled (Experiments 2 and 3). The memory benefit for dissimilar items on mixed lists poses a challenge for current models of short-term serial recall.     

Warmth and contingency and their relationship to maternal attitudes toward parenting

In this study, the authors addressed the question of whether maternal parenting behaviors in terms of sensitivity, warmth, and contingency with respect to small infants were equally represented in attitudes toward parenting. Sixty mothers from central Germany with middle-class socioeconomic backgrounds were videotaped with their 1st born 3-month-old infant in a free-play and a caregiving episode in their home. The different maternal parenting components were behaviorally analyzed. Maternal attitudes toward parenting were assessed with self-report measures. The results showed that behavioral sensitivity was significantly associated with attitudes related to contingency, whereas behavioral warmth and contingency were not associated with maternal attitudes. The authors interpreted differential associations as a reflection of intuitive and explicit parenting strategies, with only sensitivity being explicitly represented.     

The visual control of reaching and grasping: binocular disparity and motion parallax

The primary visual sources of depth and size information are binocular cues and motion parallax. Here, the authors determine the efficacy of these cues to control prehension by presenting them in isolation from other visual cues. When only binocular cues were available, reaches showed normal scaling of the transport and grasp components with object distance and size. However, when only motion parallax was available, only the transport component scaled reliably. No additional increase in scaling was found when both cues were available simultaneously. Therefore, although equivalent information is available from binocular and motion parallax information, the latter may be of relatively limited use for the control of the grasp. Binocular disparity appears selectively important for the control of the grasp.     

Respect for group members: intragroup determinants of collective identification and group-serving behavior

This experiment examined how (disrespectful vs. respectful) treatment and (negative vs. positive) performance evaluation, both received from the same fellow group members, affects collective identification and willingness to engage in group-serving behavior. It was predicted and found that respectful as opposed to disrespectful intragroup treatment increased collective identification and willingness to engage in group-serving behavior in the immediate group situation, irrespective of whether intragroup evaluation was positive or negative. There was also evidence of a mediating role of collective identification. Regression analyses based on the measurement of perceived intragroup treatment and perceived intragroup evaluation as continuous variables corroborated these findings but also pointed to limits of the positive effects of respectful intragroup treatment. Finally, the interrelation of treatment and evaluation by fellow group members as two possible components of intragroup respect are discussed as well as the political dimension of research on intragroup respect.     

Thematic processing of adjuncts: Evidence from an eye-tracking experiment

We investigated thematic processing in sentences containing a prepositional phrase that was ambiguous between a locative and a temporal interpretation. We manipulated context (temporal or locative), target sentence (temporal or locative), and whether or not the main verb of the target and the context was repeated. Results showed that context dictated the participants' thematic expectations. Thematically, congruent target and context pairs were read faster than incongruent pairs. This effect was not modulated by verb repetition. We argue that wh-words cause readers to lodge semantically vacuous thematic roles in their discourse representation that bias a reader's interpretation of subsequent thematically ambiguous adjuncts in their discourse representation.     

Conditionals and conditional probability

The authors report 3 experiments in which participants were invited to judge the probability of statements of the form if p then q given frequency information about the cases pq, p not q, not pq, and not p not q (where not = not). Three hypotheses were compared: (a) that people equate the probability with that of the material conditional, 1 - P(p not q); (b) that people assign the conditional probability, P(q/p); and (c) that people assign the conjunctive probability P(pq). The experimental evidence allowed rejection of the 1st hypothesis but provided some support for the 2nd and 3rd hypotheses. Individual difference analyses showed that half of the participants used conditional probability and that most of the remaining participants used conjunctive probability as the basis of their judgments.     

Acquired sensitivity to relevant physiological activity in patients with chronic health problems

The hypothesis that biased symptom perception toward excessive symptoms is common when relatively normal chronic patients enter symptom-relating situations, irrespective of emotional variables, was tested in 19 women with severe asthma, 18 with somatization-like characteristics, and 18 controls. Each underwent three experimental conditions: mental stress, resting, and physical exercise. Each condition included three breathing conditions: breathing normally, normal compressed air, and 5.5% CO2-enriched compressed air. Results yielded no group differences in physiological measures, e.g. elevated CO2 in exhaled air (end-tidal partial pressure of CO2, PetCO2), or lung function. Asthma patients experienced more breathlessness, and somatization-like participants more breathlessness, miscellaneous symptoms, and subjective stress than controls. Although these differences suggested acquired biased symptom perception, as it turned out, breathlessness in asthmatics was more influenced by PetCO2 and less by subjective stress compared to controls. Likewise, breathlessness in somatization-like participants was similarly influenced by PetCO2 and subjective stress compared to controls, and miscellaneous symptoms were even more influenced by PetCO2 and less by subjective stress compared to controls. It was concluded that acquired sensitivity to physiological activity associated with habitual symptoms may account for excessive symptoms in patients with chronic health problems.     

Verb frame frequency as a predictor of verb bias

There is considerable evidence showing that the human sentence processor is guided by lexical preferences in resolving syntactic ambiguities. Several types of preferences have been identified, including morphological, syntactic, and semantic ones. However, the literature fails to provide a uniform account of what lexical preferences are and how they should be measured. The present paper provides evidence for the view that lexical preferences are records of prior linguistic experience. We show that a type of lexial syntactic preference, viz., verb biases as measured by norming experiments, can be approximated by verb frame frequencies extracted from a large, balanced corpus using computational learning techniques.