Evidence for Early closure Attachment on First pass Reading Times in French

An eye-tracking experiment was conducted in French with sentences of the form 'N V N1of-N2 who . . . ' Example: 'A journalist approachedthe barrister (male) of the singer (female) who seemed more confident (masculine or feminine gender) than (s)he ought to be.' The results are consistentwiththose of Cuetos and Mitchell(1988).French readers,like Spanish readers, prefer early closure (and are garden-pathed when the sentence turns out to be a late-closure attachment). This effect was exhibited by first-pass reading times that are usually assumed to reflect initial syntactic commitments. These results are discussed in relation to Frazier and Clifton's recent proposals concerning attachment mechanisms in the case of 'non-primary' relationships such as relative clauses, and more precisely the notion that early-closure attachments observed in cross-linguistic studies are determined by relatively late processes.     

From selling to managing strategic customers - a competency analysis

An increasing number of companies select strategic customers, who are then treated differently from standard customers. Thus, the customer-facing function has been divided into two separate functions: traditional selling and strategic account management. This article seeks to provide a comprehensive overview that compares the competencies of salespeople with the competencies of strategic account managers. The article's objective is to highlight a competency path that can lead salespeople to transition successfully into strategic account managers. Leveraging the two distinct competency classifications, we identify the key skills that traditional salespeople must be trained in or “unlearn” to successfully transition. From a theoretical perspective, this article bridges the gap between the literature on sales and the literature on strategic account management and pinpoints the major differences between those two customer-facing dimensions. From a managerial perspective, the article helps practitioners draw a competency grid to assess both salespeople's ability to succeed in their role transition and the training required to support this transition.     

When does ‘Can’ imply ‘Ought’?

ABSTRACT

The Assistance Principle is common currency to a wide range of moral theories. Roughly, this principle states: if you can fulfil important interests, at not too high a cost, then you have a moral duty to do so. I argue that, in determining whether the ‘not too high a cost’ clause of this principle is met, we must consider three distinct costs: ‘agent-relative costs’, ‘recipient-relative costs’ and ‘ideal-relative costs’.     

The emotional body and time perception

We examined the effects of emotional bodily expressions on the perception of time. Participants were shown bodily expressions of fear, happiness and sadness in a temporal bisection task featuring different stimulus duration ranges. Stimulus durations were judged to be longer for bodily expressions of fear than for those of sadness, whereas no significant difference was observed between sad and happy postures. In addition, the magnitude of the lengthening effect of fearful versus sad postures increased with duration range. These results suggest that the perception of fearful bodily expressions increases the level of arousal which, in turn, speeds up the internal clock system underlying the representation of time. The effect of bodily expressions on time perception is thus consistent with findings for other highly arousing emotional stimuli, such as emotional facial expressions.     

Neural and behavioral correlates of visual recognition memory in 4- and 8-month-old infants.

The neural and behavioral correlates of the 4- and 8-month-old infant's ability to distinguish between frequently and infrequently presented familiar and novel events was examined. Cortical event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded as infants were familiarized to two faces. During the test trials that followed, one of these faces was presented frequently, and the other infrequently; on each of the remaining 20% of the trials, a previously unseen, novel face was presented. Following the ERP phase, infants' looking times were recorded to pairs of faces, some of which had been seen during the ERP testing, and some of which had not. At 4 months the ERP activity invoked by the three classes of events was similar, suggesting that infants were unable to distinguish among them. At 8 months the ERP activity differed only between the Infrequent Novel events and the two classes of familiar events, but did not differ between the frequently and infrequently presented familiar events. The ERP findings complement previously reported data from 6-month-old infants in describing a trend whereby infants become increasingly able to respond to stimuli on the basis of whether they have been seen before, and not on the basis of how often they had been seen. The behavioral data at both 4 and 8 months were less clear cut than the ERP data. These findings are discussed in the context of the neural and cognitive processes involved in dissociating probability information from novelty detection.     

Inhibitory Control Deficits in Individuals with Amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment: a Meta-Analysis

Neuropsychology Review - Amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) is a prodromal stage of Alzheimer’s disease that is characterized by impairments in episodic memory. Recent evidence has...     

Contemporary research on parenting. The case for nature and nurture

Current findings on parental influences provide more sophisticated and less deterministic explanations than did earlier theory and research on parenting. Contemporary research approaches include (a) behavior-genetic designs, augmented with direct measures of potential environmental influences; (b) studies distinguishing among children with different genetically influenced predispositions in terms of their responses to different environmental conditions; (c) experimental and quasi-experimental studies of change in children's behavior as a result of their exposure to parents' behavior, after controlling for children's initial characteristics; and (d) research on interactions between parenting and nonfamilial environmental influences and contexts, illustrating contemporary concern with influences beyond the parent-child dyad. These approaches indicate that parental influences on child development are neither as unambiguous as earlier researchers suggested nor as insubstantial as current critics claim.