The Role of Gesture in Supporting Mental Representations: The Case of Mental Abacus Arithmetic

People frequently gesture when problem‐solving, particularly on tasks that require spatial transformation. Gesture often facilitates task performance by interacting with internal mental representations, but how this process works is not well understood. We investigated this question by exploring the case of mental abacus (MA), a technique in which users not only imagine moving beads on an abacus to compute sums, but also produce movements in gestures that accompany the calculations. Because the content of MA is transparent and readily manipulated, the task offers a unique window onto how gestures interface with mental representations. We find that the size and number of MA gestures reflect the length and difficulty of math problems. Also, by selectively interfering with aspects of gesture, we find that participants perform significantly worse on MA under motor interference, but that perceptual feedback is not critical for success on the task. We conclude that premotor processes involved in the planning of gestures are critical to mental representation in MA.     

“You’ve Got Mail”: a Daily Investigation of Email Demands on Job Tension and Work-Family Conflict

Journal of Business and Psychology - Email represents a useful organizational tool that can facilitate rapid and flexible communication between organizations, managers, and employees regardless of...     

Black-capped chickadee (Poecile atricapillus) and human (Homo sapiens) chord discrimination

Human music perception is related both to musical experience and the physical properties of sound. Examining the processing of music by nonhuman animals has been generally neglected. We tested both black-capped chickadees and humans in a chord discrimination task that replicates and extends prior research with pigeons. We found that chickadees and humans, in common with pigeons, showed similar patterns of discrimination across manipulations of the 3rd and 5th notes of the triadic chords. For all species (chickadee and humans here, pigeons previously), chords with half-step alterations in the 5th note were easier to discriminate than half-step manipulations of the 3rd note, which is likely due to the sensory consonance of these chords. There were differences among species in terms of the fine discrimination of the chords within this larger pattern of results. Further, the ability to relearn the chords when transposed to a new root differed across species. Our results provide new comparative data suggesting some similarities in chord perception that span a wide range of species, from pigeons (nonvocal learners) to songbirds and humans (vocal learners).     

Influence of familiar features on diagnosis: instantiated features in an applied setting

Medical diagnosis can be viewed as a categorization task. There are two mechanisms whereby humans make categorical judgments: "analytical reasoning," based on explicit consideration of features and "nonanalytical reasoning," an unconscious holistic process of matching against prior exemplars. However, there is evidence that prior experience can also operate at the level of individual "instantiated" features (Brooks & Hannah, 2006). The present studies examined instantiated features in medical diagnosis. Four "pseudopsychiatric" conditions, each described by four characteristic features, were taught to undergraduate psychology students. They practiced on additional cases, then were tested on new cases with features from two conditions. In Experiment 1, diagnoses associated with familiar features presented one or three times during practice were assigned a higher probability than those with novel features. Experiment 2 showed that the impact of feature frequency was dependent on its consistency with the case diagnosis. Experiment 3 showed that the effect of feature familiarity was not confined to cases with two equiprobable diagnoses. Experiment 4 showed that the effect remained after a 24 hour delay. These four studies demonstrated that features seen in practice have a greater influence on diagnosis than novel synonyms. In fact, seeing a feature once within the appropriate context (a patient case in which it is a member of the primary diagnosis) was sufficient to form a diagnostic association equivalent to instantiations seen four times in a different context. The results of these studies have implications for theories of categorization and for teaching clinical reasoning.     

My Group's Fate Is My Fate: Identity-Fused Americans and Spaniards Link Personal Life Quality to Outcome of 2008 Elections

People differ in their reactions to the outcomes of their group. Whereas some may revel in victory and mourn in defeat, others may internalize victory but distance themselves from defeat. Here, we sought to relate these divergent reactions to two forms of alignment with groups–identity fusion and group identification. Investigations of the 2008 elections in the United States and Spain revealed that people who were “fused” with their political party internalized both victory and defeat, but highly identified persons internalized only victory. We discuss how these findings bear on the conceptual distinctions between identity fusion and group identification.     

Distinguishing Direct and Indirect Effects of Executive Functions on Reading Comprehension in Adolescents

This study investigated direct and indirect effects of executive functions on reading comprehension in adolescents (N?=?87, M?=?14.0?years, SD?=?1.5) by testing for parallel mediation of effects of working memory, task-switching, and inhibitory control via decoding and text recall/inference. Working memory showed direct and indirect effects on passage comprehension, the latter mediated by text recall/inference. Task-switching was associated with decoding but its relation to passage comprehension was not significant. Inhibitory control showed indirect effects on passage comprehension via decoding and text recall/inference. Results indicate overlapping but distinct contributions of executive functions to reading skills.     

Self-Esteem Among Young Adults: Differences and Similarities Based on Gender, Race, and Cohort (1990–2012)

The major purpose of this study was to examine the joint effects of race and gender on the self-esteem of young adults. Data came from a large sample of undergraduate students (N?=?7,552; 2,785 men and 4,767 women) enrolled at a Midwestern U.S. University over the period 1990–2012. Consistent with prior research, we found that men had higher self-esteem than women and that Blacks had higher self-esteem than Whites, Hispanics, and Asians. The analyses, however, revealed that the gender differences in self-esteem were not found among Blacks and that the higher self-esteem of Blacks relative to other races was greater among women than among men. The effects of race and gender did not change controlling for social class and other demographic variables, did not differ across domains of self-esteem, and were not affected by period of time. This study deepens our knowledge of social group differences in self-esteem, providing evidence that the higher self-esteem of men (relative to women) and of Blacks (relative to other races) persisted across the past two decades.     

A Trust-Based Home Intervention for Special-Needs Adopted Children: A Case Study

Research on the effects of abuse, neglect, and other traumas in early childhood has consistently demonstrated severe deficits that can be prevalent across the life span. Costs associated with addressing such deficits in special-needs children can strain families and are an immense financial burden to society. Trust-Based Relational Intervention® is an intervention modality that targets the attachment system as part of a dynamic system of development. Presented is a summary of the costs of addressing the sequelae of childhood abuse and neglect, a brief overview of Trust-Based Relational Intervention, and a case study demonstrating the efficacy of this intervention with an adopted special-needs child in a home-based setting.