Left gaze bias in humans, rhesus monkeys and domestic dogs

While viewing faces, human adults often demonstrate a natural gaze bias towards the left visual field, that is, the right side of the viewee’s face is often inspected first and for longer periods. Using a preferential looking paradigm, we demonstrate that this bias is neither uniquely human nor limited to primates, and provide evidence to help elucidate its biological function within a broader social cognitive framework. We observed that 6-month-old infants showed a wider tendency for left gaze preference towards objects and faces of different species and orientation, while in adults the bias appears only towards upright human faces. Rhesus monkeys showed a left gaze bias towards upright human and monkey faces, but not towards inverted faces. Domestic dogs, however, only demonstrated a left gaze bias towards human faces, but not towards monkey or dog faces, nor to inanimate object images. Our findings suggest that face- and species-sensitive gaze asymmetry is more widespread in the animal kingdom than previously recognised, is not constrained by attentional or scanning bias, and could be shaped by experience to develop adaptive behavioural significance.     

Un pas supplémentaire vers l’autonomie de la réparation du défaut d’information médicale !

Question of the nature of the liability and damage repairable in case of failure in the delivery of health information since 2010 is in the heart of debates. Progressively, there is an autonomy movement of the disclosure and together with a detachment of prejudice to the notion of loss of chance. This information is particularly expected when the practitioner uses a product outside of the authorization for placing on the market.     

Is there “smoke without fire”? Applying the theory of values to the study of motivational aspects of ethnic stereotypes: The case of Jewish stereotypes in Russia

Few studies have examined to what extent commonly held stereotypes reflect real intergroup differences in motivational goals. Taking a values perspective (Schwartz et al., 2012), the study examines value preferences among Jews and Russians in Russia, to assess the extent to which commonly held stereotypes reflect values of group members. Results showed that Jews reported substantially higher levels of universalism-tolerance, benevolence (both caring and dependability), and tradition values, and lower levels of power (both dominance and resources), and universalism-nature values, than Russians. Results indicated that the widespread Jewish stereotypes of power, achievement, and rootlessness/cosmopolitanism are ungrounded, while the stereotypes of liberalism and particularism are upheld by the reported differences in the value preferences between Jews and the majority population in Russia. The present study underscores the importance of value comparisons between ethnic minority and majority groups for understanding their motivational goals and thus fighting prejudices and discrimination.     

Near-term fetuses process temporal features of speech

The perception of speech and music requires processing of variations in spectra and amplitude over different time intervals. Near-term fetuses can discriminate acoustic features, such as frequencies and spectra, but whether they can process complex auditory streams, such as speech sequences and more specifically their temporal variations, fast or relatively slow acoustic variations, is unclear. We recorded the cardiac activity of 82 near-term fetuses (38 weeks GA) in quiet sleep during a silent control condition and four 15 s streams presented at 90 dB SPL Leq: two piano melodies with opposite contours, a natural Icelandic sentence and a chimera of the sentence--all its spectral information was replaced with broadband noise, leaving its specific temporal variations in amplitude intact without any phonological information. All stimuli elicited a heart rate deceleration. The response patterns to the melodies were the same and differed significantly from those observed with the Icelandic sentence and its chimera, which did not differ. The melodies elicited a monophasic heart rate deceleration, indicating a stimulus orienting reflex while the Icelandic and its chimera evoked a sustained lower magnitude response, indicating a sustained attentional response or more focused information processing. A conservative interpretation of the data is that near-term fetuses can perceive sound streams and the rapid temporal variations in amplitude that are specific to speech sounds with no spectral variations at all.     

Inhibition and shifting in children with learning deficits in arithmetic and reading

The executive functions of inhibition and shifting were studied in arithmetic-disabled children, reading-disabled children, reading plus arithmetic-disabled children, and controls (N = 74). Measures involved the rapid naming of objects, digits, letters, or quantities with or without additional task requirements that reflected inhibition or shifting. Also, the Making Trails task, reflecting shifting, was administered. For tasks without executive demands, arithmetic-disabled children were slower in the naming of digits and quantities, whereas reading-disabled children were slower in the naming of digits and letters. For the executive tasks, arithmetic-disabled children as well as reading plus arithmetic-disabled children were impaired on the Making Trails task and on an object naming task that required both inhibition and shifting. Reading-disabled children exhibited no problems in executive functioning. Furthermore, it was shown that reading plus arithmetic-disabled children experienced the combination of problems that characterize children with a single learning deficit.     

Speech disruption under delayed auditory feedback in multilingual speakers

The present study investigated the language familiarity hypothesis formulated by Mackay [(1970). How does language familiarity influence stuttering under delayed auditory feedback? Perceptual and Motor Skills, 30, 655-669] that bilinguals speak faster and stutter less under delayed auditory feedback (DAF) when speaking their more familiar language than a less familiar language. Thirty normally fluent native speakers of Dutch (17 males and 13 females, aged between 18;1 and 26;4 years) who were also proficient in French and English read meaningful and nonsense text under DAF in their mother tongue and in the two later acquired languages. The existence of a language familiarity effect was confirmed. The participants required significantly more time and showed significantly more speech disruptions under DAF in the later acquired languages than in the mother tongue, and reading time and number of speech disruptions was significantly higher for the nonsense texts than for the meaningful text for each of the three languages. An additional question addressed was whether or not there were any gender differences in the susceptibility to DAF. Results did not reveal a clear gender difference. EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES: The reader will be able to: (1) summarize the importance of language familiarity for the degree of speech disruption experienced by normally fluent multilingual speakers under delayed auditory feedback; and (2) describe gender differences in the susceptibility to delayed auditory feedback.