Representational insight in pigeons: comparing subjects with and without real-life experience

Understanding the relation between objects and their pictures at a level beyond mere feature discrimination is by no means a trivial cognitive ability, and support of this is still weak in nonhuman species. Here, we report evidence of representational insight in pigeons. Responding to pictures of human body parts was compared in birds that had extensive pre-experience with live humans and in birds that had never seen any human heads. In a two-alternative forced-choice procedure the pigeons were trained to discriminate between pictures of either handless or headless humans and nonhumans. On test, the birds had to choose (i) between body parts they had already seen in training and the parts that had been missing, (ii) between previously seen parts and arbitrary skin patches, and (iii) between previously missing parts and skin patches. Only the pigeons that lacked experience with real heads and were trained with pictures of headless humans failed to show a significant preference for pictures of missing parts (i.e., heads) over arbitrary skin patches. This demonstrates the importance of individual experience with the real 3D-referents of pictures for classification of the latter and is thereby evidence of representational insight.     

“Where there is a will, there is an A”: examining the roles of self-efficacy and self-concept in college students’ current educational attainment and career planning

As previous research indicates self-efficacy and self-concept have similar effects on achievement outcomes, the current study investigated the differential effects of both constructs on academic performance and career path certainty in college freshmen. Results indicated high school GPA was best predicted by general self-efficacy, whereas current GPA was most strongly related to self-efficacy for learning. However, academic competence did not moderate either self-efficacy or academic performance. Career path certainty was best explained by general self-efficacy and job competence, and scholastic competence best predicted current academic performance. Yet, no mediation effect was found for general self-efficacy amongst the variables of self-concept, academic performance, and career path certainty.     

Learning of an oddity rule by pigeons in a four-choice touch-screen procedure

Six pigeons were trained to peck at a target (odd stimulus) that was presented on a touch-screen together with three identical distractors (non-odd stimuli). The target could be either a square or a circle that was either blue or green, and the distractors in each trial were always of the opposite form and color to the target. Thus, the birds could solve the task by attending to color, form, or both. Transfer tests showed that performance was not disrupted by novel forms, stimulus sizes, distractor numbers, and display configurations, but broke down with novel stimulus types (textured stimuli, clip art images, and photographs). Transfer to novel colors was, for the most part, restricted to trials in which only one component—target or distractors, but not both—had a novel color. This suggested that the pigeons used a couple of if–then rules rather than an oddity concept to solve the task, and that color differences between target and distractors were the only cue upon which responding was based. A control experiment with the order of color and form tests being reversed excluded the possibility of the prevalence of color being an artifact of task order and reinforcement contingencies.     

Dyadic Causal Sequencing of Depressive Symptoms and Relationship Satisfaction in Romantic Partners Across Four Years

Abstract

Causal sequencing between relationship satisfaction and depressive symptoms has important ramifications for couples therapy. Using dyadic data from the Pairfam study (N?=?1,876 German couples), an auto-regressive cross-lagged model was used to test the causal sequencing of these associations annually across four years. Although depressive symptoms had a significant bidirectional association with relationship satisfaction both within and between partners, depressive symptoms tended to serve as a stronger and more consistent predictor of relationship satisfaction than the reverse direction. Thus, clinically focusing on reducing depressive symptoms in couples’ therapy may serve to help prevent future deterioration in relationship quality.     

Love in the counter-transference: The uses of the therapist's excitement

SUMMARY

The psychoanalytic tradition has always had difficulty with the question of the therapist's sexual feelings toward the patient. This paper traces that difficulty: from Freud's original struggle to replace moralism with a psychoanalytic mode of understanding, to the more recent literature on countertransference which still seems particularly averse to the possibility of the therapist's sexual experience. By way of a discussion of a psychoanalytic psychotherapy, I argue for the sometimes central therapeutic role of the therapist's experiencing, and then containing, excitement.     

Exemplar similarity and rule application

We report four experiments examining effects of instance similarity on the application of simple explicit rules. We found effects of similarity to illustrative exemplars in error patterns and reaction times. These effects arose even though participants were given perfectly predictive rules, the similarity manipulation depended entirely on rule-irrelevant features, and attention to exemplar similarity was detrimental to task performance. Comparison of results across studies suggests that the effects are mandatory, non-strategic and not subject to conscious control, and as a result, should be pervasive throughout categorization.     

ON THE RELATION BETWEEN REINFORCER EFFICACY AND PREFERENCE

Most research on stimulus preference and reinforcer assessment involves a preference assessment that is followed by a reinforcer assessment. Typically, the most and least preferred stimuli are tested as reinforcers. In the current study, we first quantified the reinforcing efficacies of six food items and then assessed relative preference for each item. Relative preference ranking and reinforcer efficacies showed almost perfect concordance for 1 participant and partial concordance for the other. Discordance tended to occur with the weakest reinforcers.     

Does your body count? Embodied influences on the preferred counting direction of preschoolers

Many studies confirm that preschoolers from left-to-right reading societies count from left to right, which reflects the cultural direction of their spatial-numerical associations (SNAs). Other factors, not directly related to cultural experience, have not yet been systematically examined as potential determinants of counting direction in preschool children. In this study, we test one such determinant, i.e. whether and how counting direction is related to body-centred reference frames, such as a preferred hand in different spatial-motoric settings. We first asked preschoolers to count spontaneously. Then, we asked them to use a particular hand to count objects presented close to or far away from their bodies. An overall left-to-right counting dominance was replicated, but it was modulated by a counting hand in both tasks: Children preferred to start counting from an object ipsilateral to the hand used. This pattern increased when stimuli were in a position close to the body. We conclude that early counting preferences of preliterate children are embodied. The SNAs which were assessed are not only related to culture but also to situated individual bodily reference frames.