Self-determined profiles of academic motivation

Motivation and Emotion - This study was designed to investigate academic motivation profiles (and their similarity) among distinct samples of high school students. Anchored in recent developments...     

The Impact of Type of Examples on Originality: Explaining Fixation and Stimulation Effects

There are obstacles to creativity: one of them is called fixation effect, the fact that some knowledge about existing or obvious solutions is spontaneously activated and constrains the generation of new solutions. Converging evidence in cognitive psychology has indicated that the ability to generate original ideas can be limited by recently activated knowledge, such as examples of solutions. On the other hand, neuroimaging studies have recently demonstrated that exposure to examples could, on the contrary, have a stimulating effect on originality. To make sense of what seems to be contradictory studies, we hypothesized that two types of examples could have opposite effects on originality: (1) restrictive examples—within the fixation effect—could lead to a reduction in the originality of the solutions, whereas (2) expansive examples—outside the fixation effect—could provoke solutions of higher originality. Results from a total of 160 participants confirmed that the solutions proposed by the group exposed to restrictive examples were less original than those given by the group exposed to expansive examples.     

Perpetrator Abhorrence: Disgust as a Stop Sign

Most contemporary research on disgust can be divided into “disgust advocates” and “disgust skeptics.” The so‐called advocates argue that disgust can have a positive influence on our moral judgment; skeptics warn that it can mislead us toward prejudice and discrimination. This article compares this disagreement to a structurally similar debate in the field of genocide studies concerning the phenomenon of “perpetrator abhorrence.” While some soldiers report having felt strong disgust in the moment of committing or witnessing atrocity, scholars disagree on whether such disgust is moral in nature. These empirical cases provide us with reasons to reconsider the normative features of disgust. Inspired by the conceptualization of disgust in Immanuel Kant and Aurel Kolnai, and as an alternative to both the disgust advocates and the skeptics, this article argues that the analogy of a stop sign can better help us define disgust responses.     

A phenomenological survey of auditory verbal hallucinations in the hypnagogic and hypnopompic states

The phenomenology of auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) occurring in hypnagogic and hypnopompic (H&H) states has received little attention. In a sample of healthy participants (N = 325), 108 participants reported H&H AVHs and answered subsequent questions on their phenomenology. AVHs in the H&H state were found (1) to be more likely to only feature the occasional clear word than to be clear, (2) to be more likely to be one-off voices than to be recurrent voices, (3) to be more likely to be voices of people known to the individual than unknown persons, (4) to be more likely to talk directly to the person rather than not, and (5) to only rarely give commands, ask questions, or to result in an interactive conversation. Their phenomenology was similar to normative AVHs in wakefulness (as established by previous research) in that the voice-hearer was usually the target of the voice, and the voice was more likely to be of a recognized person. However, H&H AVHs differed from AVHs in wakefulness in that commands and questions were rare, and there was typically no dialogical engagement with the voice. We conclude by proposing that two distinct types of H&H AVHs may exist (which we term “dialogic” and “monologic”), based on an analysis of the phenomenology of the experience, and suggest avenues for future research.     

Compression as a Universal Principle of Animal Behavior

A key aim in biology and psychology is to identify fundamental principles underpinning the behavior of animals, including humans. Analyses of human language and the behavior of a range of non‐human animal species have provided evidence for a common pattern underlying diverse behavioral phenomena: Words follow Zipf's law of brevity (the tendency of more frequently used words to be shorter), and conformity to this general pattern has been seen in the behavior of a number of other animals. It has been argued that the presence of this law is a sign of efficient coding in the information theoretic sense. However, no strong direct connection has been demonstrated between the law and compression, the information theoretic principle of minimizing the expected length of a code. Here, we show that minimizing the expected code length implies that the length of a word cannot increase as its frequency increases. Furthermore, we show that the mean code length or duration is significantly small in human language, and also in the behavior of other species in all cases where agreement with the law of brevity has been found. We argue that compression is a general principle of animal behavior that reflects selection for efficiency of coding.     

Developmental time course of the acquisition of sequential egocentric and allocentric navigation strategies

Navigation in a complex environment can rely on the use of different spatial strategies. We have focused on the employment of “allocentric” (i.e., encoding interrelationships among environmental cues, movements, and the location of the goal) and “sequential egocentric” (i.e., sequences of body turns associated with specific choice points) strategies during navigation. To investigate the developmental pattern of these two strategies in school-aged children, we used a virtual reality paradigm in which the spontaneous or imposed use of both strategies could be assessed. Our results showed an increase in spontaneous use of the allocentric strategy and also an increase in reliance on environmental landmarks with age. Although a majority of the children spontaneously used the sequential egocentric strategy, all age groups performed above chance when the allocentric strategy was imposed. Altogether, our findings suggest that young children are able to employ an allocentric strategy but that the nature of this allocentric strategy changes progressively in a complex cognitive representation between 5 and 10 years of age.