When music tempo affects the temporal congruence between physical practice and motor imagery

When people listen to music, they hear beat and a metrical structure in the rhythm; these perceived patterns enable coordination with the music. A clear correspondence between the tempo of actual movement (e.g., walking) and that of music has been demonstrated, but whether similar coordination occurs during motor imagery is unknown. Twenty participants walked naturally for 8 m, either physically or mentally, while listening to slow and fast music, or not listening to anything at all (control condition). Executed and imagined walking times were recorded to assess the temporal congruence between physical practice (PP) and motor imagery (MI). Results showed a difference when comparing slow and fast time conditions, but each of these durations did not differ from soundless condition times, hence showing that body movement may not necessarily change in order to synchronize with music. However, the main finding revealed that the ability to achieve temporal congruence between PP and MI times was altered when listening to either slow or fast music. These data suggest that when physical movement is modulated with respect to the musical tempo, the MI efficacy of the corresponding movement may be affected by the rhythm of the music. Practical applications in sport are discussed as athletes frequently listen to music before competing while they mentally practice their movements to be performed.     

Looking at You or Looking Elsewhere: The Influence of Head Orientation on the Signal Value of Emotional Facial Expressions

The role of horizontal head tilt for the perceptions of emotional facial expressions was examined. For this, a total of 387 participants rated facial expressions of anger, fear, sadness, and happiness, as well as neutral expressions shown by two men and two women in either a direct or an averted face angle. Decoding accuracy, attributions of dominance and affiliation, emotional reactions of the perceivers, and the felt desire to approach the expresser were assessed. Head position was found to strongly influence reactions to anger and fear but less so for other emotions. Direct anger expressions were more accurately decoded, perceived as less affiliative, and elicited higher levels of anxiousness and repulsion, as well as less desire to approach than did averted anger expressions. Conversely, for fear expressions averted faces elicited more negative affect in the perceiver. These findings suggest that horizontal head position is an important cue for the assessment of threat.

German Inflection: The Exception That Proves the Rule

Language is often explained as the product of generative rules and a memorized lexicon. For example, most English verbs take a regular past tense suffix (ask-asked), which is applied to new verbs (faxed, wugged), suggesting the mental rule "add - ed to a Verb." Irregular verbs (break-broke, go-went) would be listed in memory. Alternatively, a pattern associator memory (such as a connectionist network) might record all past tense forms and generalize to new ones by similarity; irregular and regular patterns would differ only because of their different numbers of verbs. We present evidence that mental rules are indispensible. A rule concatenates a suffix to a symbol for verbs, so it does not require access to memorized verbs on their sound patterns, but applies as the "default," whenever memory access fails. We find 21 such circumstances for regular past tense formation, including novel, unusual-sounding, and rootless and headless derived words; in every case, people inflect them regularly (explaining quirks like flied out, sabre-tooths, walk-mans). Contrary to the connectionist account, these effects are not due to regular words constituting a large majority of vocabulary. The German participle -t applies to a much smaller percentage of verbs than its English counterpart, and the German plural -s applies to a small minority of nouns. But the affixes behave in the language like their English counterparts, as defaults. We corroborate this effect in two experiments eliciting ratings of participle and plural forms of novel German words. Thus default suffixation is not due to numerous regular words reinforcing a pattern in associative memory. Because default cases do not occupy a cohesive similarity space, but do correspond to the range of a symbol, they are evidence for a memory-independent, symbol-concatenating mental operation.     

Beauty or function? How different mass customization toolkits affect customers' process enjoyment

Although it is widely acknowledged that mass customization (MC) increases both company and customer value, the research has neglected the possible effects of different MC toolkits on customer responses. In this study, we investigate the influence of different MC toolkits on customers' process enjoyment by manipulating the extent to which those toolkits allow customers to customize a product's functional attributes (functional MC toolkits), aesthetic attributes (aesthetic MC toolkits), or both (supreme toolkits). In addition, we examine the moderating effect of customers' ability to customize. The results of two experimental studies show that regardless of their ability to customize, customers' process enjoyment is higher with an aesthetic MC toolkit than with a functional MC toolkit. For customers with a high ability to customize, process enjoyment with a supreme toolkit is higher than process enjoyment with an aesthetic toolkit, whereas no differences exist for customers with a low ability to customize. This research contributes significantly to the existing literature on mass customization and provides managers with insights on how to more effectively develop and implement MC toolkits. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.