The Social N400 effect: how the presence of other listeners affects language comprehension

During conversation, it is necessary to keep track of what others can and cannot understand. Previous research has focused largely on understanding the time course along which knowledge about interlocutors influences language comprehension/production rather than the cognitive process by which interlocutors take each other’s perspective. In addition, most work has looked at the effects of knowledge about a speaker on a listener’s comprehension, and not on the possible effects of other listeners on a participant’s comprehension process. In the current study, we introduce a novel joint comprehension paradigm that addresses the cognitive processes underlying perspective taking during language comprehension. Specifically, we show that participants who understand a language stimulus, but are simultaneously aware that someone sitting next to them does not understand the same stimulus, show an electrophysiological marker of semantic integration difficulty (i.e., an N400-effect). Crucially, in a second group of participants, we demonstrate that presenting exactly the same sentences to the participant alone (i.e. without a co-listener) results in no N400-effect. Our results suggest that (1) information about co-listeners as well as the speaker affect language comprehension, and (2) the cognitive process by which we understand what others comprehend mirrors our own language comprehension processes.     

Meaning above the head: combinatorial constraints on the visual vocabulary of comics

“Upfixes” are “visual morphemes” originating in comics where an element floats above a character’s head (ex. lightbulbs or gears). We posited that, similar to constructional lexical schemas in language, upfixes use an abstract schema stored in memory, which constrains upfixes to locations above the head and requires them to “agree” with their accompanying facial expressions. We asked participants to rate and interpret both conventional and unconventional upfixes that either matched or mismatched their facial expression (Experiment 1) and/or were placed either above or beside the head (Experiment 2). Interpretations and ratings of conventionality and face–upfix matching (Experiment 1) along with overall comprehensibility (Experiment 2) suggested that both constraints operated on upfix understanding. Because these constraints modulated both conventional and unconventional upfixes, these findings support that an abstract schema stored in long-term memory allows for generalisations beyond memorised individual items.     

Sleep variability and fatigue in adolescents: Associations with school‐related features

This study aims to evaluate the influences of sleep duration and sleep variability (SleepV), upon adolescents' school‐related situations. The Health Behaviour in School‐Aged Children (HBSC) survey is based on a self‐completed questionnaire. The participants were 3164 pupils (53.7% girls), attending the 8th and 10th grades, 14.9 years old, and were inquired about subjective sleep duration during the week and weekends, SleepV, fatigue, difficulties in sleep initiation, school achievement, feelings towards schools, pressure with school work and skipping classes. Multiple regression models used, as dependent variables: (a) school achievement, (b) disliking school, (c) pressure with school work and (d) skipping classes, using as independent variables, each of the remaining school‐related variables, fatigue, total sleep duration and difficulties in sleep initiation. The average sleep duration in the week and during weekdays was lower than recommended for these age groups, and almost half of students had high SleepV between weekdays and weekends. A logistic model revealed that the absence of SleepV was associated with lower perception of school work pressure, less frequent skipping classes, more infrequent fatigue and more infrequent difficulties in sleep initiation. Poor sleep quality, SleepV and insufficient sleep duration affected negatively school‐related variables.     

The effects of intertrial interval and instructional format on skill acquisition and maintenance for children with autism spectrum disorders

We replicated and extended the study by Koegel, Dunlap, and Dyer (1980) by examining the effects of 3 intertrial‐interval (ITI) durations on skill acquisition in 2 children with autism spectrum disorders. Specifically, we compared the effect of short (2 s), progressive (2 s to 20 s), and long (20 s) ITIs on participants’ mastery of tacts or intraverbals presented in massed‐trial and varied‐trial instructional formats. We also measured (a) stereotypic and problem behavior during the ITI, (b) maintenance of skills, and (c) responding to novel adults and settings. Results showed that short ITIs in a varied‐trial format produced the most efficient acquisition of skills; however, most ITI durations produced more efficient skill acquisition in a varied format compared to a massed format. The trial format and ITI duration associated with the lowest levels of stereotypic and problem behavior during the ITI and responding during maintenance and novel adult and setting probes differed across participants.     

Developing critical awareness: the consequences of action and reflection for perceptions of group injustices

Individuals often cannot address (objective) group injustices until they develop a (subjective) critical awareness of them. In three studies, we tested two potential psychological pathways toward critical awareness: Reflection (deductive, knowledge driven) and action (inductive, action driven) mindsets. Across studies, participants were exposed to an objectively unjust event, enacted by the experimenter. Based on a pilot study (N = 31) and first experiment (N = 28), we developed the hypothesis that action (vs. reflection) mindsets increase group entitativity (due to their reliance on expectancy effects), but not necessarily (subjective) critical awareness of (objective) group injustice. Study 2 (N = 121) confirmed this hypothesis. We discuss the difficulties of developing (subjective) critical awareness of (objective) group injustices.     

DESIGNING CONFUCIAN CONSCIENCE INTO SOCIAL NETWORKS

Several scholars have argued that Internet use might be fundamentally incompatible with Confucian ethics, because the values that are embedded in the Internet might be in conflict with Confucian values. In addition, the design of various social network services (SNS) considers very little of non‐Western values in its engineering. Against this background, this article explores the philosophical question of whether Internet use, particularly social network services, is compatible with the fundamental values and norms of Confucian ethics. In addition, the article discusses the Confucian notion of tian xia (under heaven), and argues that tian xia, as a basic structuring principle of Confucian philosophy, helps to innovate a different social media.     

Assessing moderated mediation in linear models requires fewer confounding assumptions than assessing mediation

It is well known from the mediation analysis literature that the identification of direct and indirect effects relies on strong no unmeasured confounding assumptions of no unmeasured confounding. Even in randomized studies the mediator may still be correlated with unobserved prognostic variables that affect the outcome, in which case the mediator's role in the causal process may not be inferred without bias. In the behavioural and social science literature very little attention has been given so far to the causal assumptions required for moderated mediation analysis. In this paper we focus on the index for moderated mediation, which measures by how much the mediated effect is larger or smaller for varying levels of the moderator. We show that in linear models this index can be estimated without bias in the presence of unmeasured common causes of the moderator, mediator and outcome under certain conditions. Importantly, one can thus use the test for moderated mediation to support evidence for mediation under less stringent confounding conditions. We illustrate our findings with data from a randomized experiment assessing the impact of being primed with social deception upon observer responses to others’ pain, and from an observational study of individuals who ended a romantic relationship assessing the effect of attachment anxiety during the relationship on mental distress 2 years after the break‐up.     

Reading Without Words: Eye Movements in the Comprehension of Comic Strips

The study of attention in pictures is mostly limited to individual images. When we ‘read’ a visual narrative (e.g., a comic strip), the pictures have a coherent sequence, but it is not known how this affects attention. In two experiments, we eyetracked participants in order to investigate how disrupting the visual sequence of a comic strip would affect attention. Both when panels were presented one at a time (Experiment 1) and when a sequence was presented all together (Experiment 2), pictures were understood more quickly and with fewer fixations when in their original order. When order was randomised, the same pictures required more attention and additional ‘regressions’. Fixation distributions also differed when the narrative was intact, showing that context affects where we look. This reveals the role of top‐down structures when we attend to pictorial information, as well as providing a springboard for applied research into attention within image sequences.Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.