A gestural repertoire of 1- to 2-year-old human children: in search of the ape gestures

Animal Cognition - When we compare human gestures to those of other apes, it looks at first like there is nothing much to compare at all. In adult humans, gestures are thought to be a window into...     

Assessment of accused juvenile sex offenders in Germany: a comparison of five different measures

The present study examines the relationship between risk and protective factors among young alleged sexual offenders (N = 66) in pre-trial and pre-treatment settings. For risk assessment purposes, the Screening Tool for the Assessment of Young Sexual Offenders' Risk (STAYSOR), the Structured Assessment of Violence Risk in Youth (SAVRY), and the Structured Assessment of Protective Factors for violence risk (SAPROF) were used. Psychopathological indicators measured with the Basis Raads Onderzoek (BARO) and the German adaption of the Reynolds Adolescent Adjustment Screening Inventory (RAASI) were used to examine the relationship between the risk assessment scales and instruments measuring risk-relevant psychopathological constructs. Risk and protective factors were significantly negatively correlated. Psychopathological measures were positively correlated with risk factors and negatively with protective factors. Although further studies on the predictive validity of the instruments are needed, the results of the present explorative pilot study indicate that the use of all five instruments may be clinically meaningful for the assessment of young persons who are at risk of sexual offending.     

Metacognitive monitoring of attention performance and its influencing factors

Metacognitive monitoring is a central element of metacognitive processing exerting widespread influences on information processing. Albeit being subject to numerous empirical investigations referring to memory performance, there is little research investigating metacognitive monitoring in other cognitive domains. The present study investigated in 45 healthy students whether factors that are known to influence monitoring of memory performance, i.e. task difficulty, time of assessment, and practice, also exhibit a significant impact on monitoring of attention performance. A multivariate analysis of variance with three within-subject repeated measures factors on two dependent variables (monitoring of (a) time, and (b) errors in an attention task) was conducted. Results showed that monitoring ability significantly decreased with increasing task difficulty, was significantly better for post than for pre-assessment, and significantly increased with practice. Therefore, results suggest that the examined factors influenced monitoring of attention performance equivalent to the influence of these factors found in metamemory research.     

Affect Regulation and Decision Making: Risk as a Social Constraint

The social constraints model of affect regulation is applied to decision making involving varying levels of risk in two studies. In Study 1 (N = 46) participants indicated a desire to attenuate both positive and negative induced moods when faced with a high-risk decision but not a low-risk decision. Study 2 (N = 64) provided evidence that attenuated affect helps individuals better identify decision-irrelevant information. Participants who were first made to feel happy or sad and then read a story that was incongruent with their mood were better at identifying decision-irrelevant information than participants who read a story that was congruent with their mood.     

Ceci n'est pas la mort: Evidence for the recruitment of self‐reference from surrealistic art under mortality salience

Previous research has demonstrated that death reminders influence how we perceive art. In the context of terror management theory, this has been explained by the death‐transcending quality of art to convey cultural meaning. In two studies, we examined psychological and neurocognitive responses to naturalistic and surrealistic art when death was primed. We found that naturalistic paintings were evaluated similarly in terms of personal reassurance in both mortality salience and control condition, whereas surrealistic paintings were evaluated as more reassuring in the mortality salience condition than in the control condition. Using high‐field functional magnetic resonance imaging in a second study, we found a similar pattern of results, showing specific activation in the precuneus, a brain area associated with self‐related operations, in all prime conditions for the viewing of naturalistic paintings, but only in the death and disgust prime conditions when viewing surrealistic paintings. Our results suggest motivated self‐reference when viewing both naturalistic and surrealistic artworks under mortality salience. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Do we map remembrances to the left/back and expectations to the right/front of a mental timeline? Space–time congruency effects with retrospective and prospective verbs

Recent experimental studies have shown that people code time in terms of a mental timeline which typically runs from left to right or from back to front. Determining the cognitive function of this mental timeline for language processing, however, is still an unsettled issue. Whereas the studies of Ulrich and Maienborn (2010) and Ulrich et al. (2012) argue against an automatic activation of the mental timeline for the interpretation of tense and temporal adverbials at sentence level, Sell and Kaschak (2011) observe an automatic activation for the processing of past- and future-related sentences in small stories. The present paper reports the results of three experiments which examine the processing of sentences with retrospective and prospective verbs (e.g., to remember, to regret vs. to expect, to announce) in present tense, which locate a second, embedded event in the past or the future. When temporal information was task-relevant, a space–time congruency effect emerged (Experiment 1). This suggests that the mental timeline is not only linked to overtly deictic linguistic material but may also be construed in a more intricate way through the compositional construction of sentence meaning. The congruency effect disappeared, however, when temporal information was task-irrelevant (Experiments 2 and 3), suggesting that the mental timeline is not functionally involved in the cognitive processing of these especially demanding two-event sentences. The results of the present study support the conclusion that the relevant factor driving an automatic activation of the mental timeline is not the number of linguistically expressed events, but might rather be the number of sentential units.     

Software Piracy in Research: A Moral Analysis

Researchers in virtually every discipline rely on sophisticated proprietary software for their work. However, some researchers are unable to afford the licenses and instead procure the software illegally. We discuss the prohibition of software piracy by intellectual property laws, and argue that the moral basis for the copyright law offers the possibility of cases where software piracy may be morally justified. The ethics codes that scientific institutions abide by are informed by a rule-consequentialist logic: by preserving personal rights to authored works, people able to do so will be incentivized to create. By showing that the law has this rule-consequentialist grounding, we suggest that scientists who blindly adopt their institutional ethics codes will commit themselves to accepting that software piracy could be morally justified, in some cases. We hope that this conclusion will spark debate over important tensions between ethics codes, copyright law, and the underlying moral basis for these regulations. We conclude by offering practical solutions (other than piracy) for researchers.