Children's and adults' conceptualization and evaluation of lying and truth‐telling

The present study examined children's and adults' categorization and moral judgment of truthful and untruthful statements. 7‐, 9‐ and 11‐year‐old Chinese children and college students read stories in which story characters made truthful or untruthful statements and were asked to classify and evaluate the statements. The statements varied in terms of whether the speaker intended to help or harm a listener and whether the statement was made in a setting that called for informational accuracy or politeness. Results showed that the communicative intent and setting factors jointly influence children's categorization of lying and truth‐telling, which extends an earlier finding (Lee & Ross, 1997) to childhood. Also, we found that children's and adults' moral judgments of lying and truth‐telling were influenced by the communicative intent but not the setting factor. The present results were discussed in terms of Sweetser's (1987) folkloristic model of lying. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

哲学如何摆脱术语的争端？—评查尔默斯的一种策略

由于哲学分析的主要工作是处理语言问题,因此围绕术语的争端在很大程度上构成了哲学讨论的重要内容。然而,查尔默斯则力图清除术语争端,他的方法只能导致无穷后退。我认为,术语争端反映的是意义争端,解决术语争端的办法不是清除它们,而是从用法上澄清术语的意义。     

民航飞行员、飞行学员动态空间能力加工水平检测

动态空间能力是对运动客体的反应和处理.采用距离判断任务和相对到达时间判断任务探讨了民航飞行员、飞行学员和普通大学生的动态空间能力的加工水平.结果表明:在距离判断任务上,飞行员成绩好于飞行学员,飞行学员好于普通大学生;在到达时间判断任务上,飞行员成绩好于飞行学员和普通大学生,而飞行学员和普通大学生之间无差异.研究提示飞行训练可提高飞行员动态空间能力的加工水平,现有民航招飞选拔还应重视和引入同时权衡了距离和速度的时间判断测试.     

曼德勒的"知觉分析"理论及其意义

曼德勒提出"知觉分析"理论来解释儿童概念起源.她假设概念获得是与知觉相分离的.该理论面临一些理论困难:1)知觉与概念的分离是否可能,2)一些基本概念界定模糊.尽管如此,"知觉分析"理论仍然对儿童概念获得问题做出了有效的解释.我们提倡将"知觉分析"理论和"心理理论"、"推理"和"心理模块性"等领域结合,可以克服"知觉分析"理论自身的困难,也可以对这些领域的研究提供实证支持.     

演绎推理的认知和脑机制研究述评

演绎推理是指假设在某些前提成立的条件下推测必然会出现的结论,它是人类重要的思维形式.不同的认知理论对人在推理过程中表现出的逻辑和非逻辑特性作出了相应的解释和预测,而来自认知神经科学的研究也进一步揭示了推理行为的脑机制,对演绎推理的认知理论进行了验证和发展.本文通过对国内外有关演绎推理认知与脑机制研究现状的回顾,以期能促进该领域研究的不断深入.     

Finding one's meaning: a test of the relation between quantifiers and integers in language development

We explored children’s early interpretation of numerals and linguistic number marking, in order to test the hypothesis (e.g., Carey (2004). Bootstrapping and the origin of concepts. Daedalus, 59-68) that children’s initial distinction between one and other numerals (i.e., two, three, etc.) is bootstrapped from a prior distinction between singular and plural nouns. Previous studies have presented evidence that in languages without singular-plural morphology, like Japanese and Chinese, children acquire the meaning of the word one later than in singular-plural languages like English and Russian. In two experiments, we sought to corroborate this relation between grammatical number and integer acquisition within English. We found a significant correlation between children’s comprehension of numerals and a large set of natural language quantifiers and determiners, even when controlling for effects due to age. However, we also found that 2-year-old children, who are just acquiring singular-plural morphology and the word one, fail to assign an exact interpretation to singular noun phrases (e.g., a banana), despite interpreting one as exact. For example, in a Truth-Value Judgment task, most children judged that a banana was consistent with a set of two objects, despite rejecting sets of two for the numeral one. Also, children who gave exactly one object for singular nouns did not have a better comprehension of numerals relative to children who did not give exactly one. Thus, we conclude that the correlation between quantifier comprehension and numeral comprehension in children of this age is not attributable to the singular-plural distinction facilitating the acquisition of the word one. We argue that quantifiers play a more general role in highlighting the semantic function of numerals, and that children distinguish between numerals and other quantifiers from the beginning, assigning exact interpretations only to numerals.     

A cross-cultural comparison of the coexistence and domain superiority of individuating and relating autonomy

The consensus definition of autonomy in the psychological literature emphasizes self-governance through free volition, not separation or independence from others. Since the concept of self may differ cross-culturally, several researchers have tried to incorporate types of self into the notion of autonomy; however, only the dual model of autonomy has been able to do this while retaining an emphasis on volition. The dual model describes two distinct forms of autonomy-individuating and relating-each with superior function in a specific domain of individual functioning. Individuating autonomy represents a volitional capacity to act against social constraints and offers a route to achieve an independent self-identity by expressing individualistic attributes and distinctions. Relating autonomy represents a volitional capacity to act by emphasizing the harmony of self-in-relation-to-others, the quality of interpersonal relationships, and self-transcendence. These two forms of autonomy have been shown to coexist at the individual level in a Taiwanese sample. This study takes the next step, with a cross-cultural test of the coexistence and domain superiority hypotheses of individuating and relating autonomy. Participants included 306 college students from Taiwan and 183 college students from the United States. Structural equation modelling by multigroup analyses confirmed the cross-cultural equivalence of the two-factor individuating autonomy and relating autonomy measurement model. Across both samples the two forms of autonomy were shown to be mutually inclusive and not exclusive or independent. The domain-superior function of each form of autonomy was also confirmed cross-culturally; each form of autonomy has a dominant, but not necessarily exclusive, domain of functioning. Specifically, individuating autonomy was more associated with intrapersonal than interpersonal domain dependent variables, while relating autonomy was more associated with interpersonal than intrapersonal domain dependent variables. Limitations of the study and considerations for future research are discussed.     

Chinese character recognition in mirror reading: evidence from event-related potential

As is well known, mirror reading in language requires recognition of words and letters in mirror-reversed pattern compared with normal reading, and the cognitive mechanism underlying the mirror reading may involve two critical processes: visuospatial transformation and linguistic regulation. Chinese characters, different from English, are characterized by some unique features in orthography and spelling. Using ERP techniques, the present study investigated neural correlates underlying the mirror reading of Chinese characters, and whether the cognitive processes underlying the recognition of mirrored Chinese characters is different from those of alphabetic words. Twelve native Chinese speakers participated in the experiment, during which they were instructed to make an animal/nonanimal distinction. The stimuli varied with the word category (animal vs nonanimal) and presentation format (normal vs mirror-reversed). The data analyses focused on three aspects: the reaction times (RT) for Chinese words of normal and mirror-reversed formats, peak latencies, and peak amplitudes of ERP components elicited by mirror-reversed and normal Chinese words. The results from implicit reading provide evidence for a mirror-reversed effect. The behavioural data showed that mirror-reversed words were more difficult to identify than normal words, with RTs delayed for mirror-reversed words over normal words. Moreover, a clear N2 component, with maximal activity occurring at 200-250ms interval (N2), was more negative for mirror-reversed words than for normal words at posterior regions. However, there were no latency differences between normal and mirror-reversed words. The occipital N2 might be closely related to abstract word form representation. Larger N2 amplitude in response to mirror-reversed Chinese words is interpreted as reflecting visuospatial transformation in order to compensate for impaired word form analysis. The result of no N2 latency delay indicated that word form analysis and visuospatial transformation might be processed in parallel.     

Developmental shifts in fMRI activations during visuospatial relational reasoning

To investigate maturational plasticity of fluid cognition systems, functional brain imaging was undertaken in healthy 8-19 year old participants while completing visuospatial relational reasoning problems similar to Raven's matrices and current elementary grade math textbooks. Analyses revealed that visuospatial relational reasoning across this developmental age range recruited activations in the superior parietal cortices most prominently, the dorsolateral prefrontal, occipital-temporal, and premotor/supplementary cortices, the basal ganglia, and insula. There were comparable activity volumes in left and right hemispheres for nearly all of these regions. Regression analyses indicated increasing activity predominantly in the superior parietal lobes with developmental age. In contrast, multiple anterior neural systems showed significantly less activity with age, including dorsolateral and ventrolateral prefrontal, paracentral, and insula cortices bilaterally, basal ganglia, and particularly large clusters in the midline anterior cingulate/medial frontal cortex, left middle cingulate/supplementary motor cortex, left insula-putamen, and left caudate. Findings suggest that neuromaturational changes associated with visuospatial relational reasoning shift from a more widespread fronto-cingulate-striatal pattern in childhood to predominant parieto-frontal activation pattern in late adolescence.     

中小学生情绪调节策略与生理反应的关系

采用实验法探讨了巾小学生情绪调节策略与生理反应的关系。研究表明,悲伤情绪状态下,认知重评策略的生理反应要比表达抑制策略的生理反应小;快乐情绪状态下,两种策略的生理反应无显著差异;表达抑制策略下,悲伤情绪组的生理反应大于快乐情绪组的生理反应;认知重评策略下,悲伤情绪组的生理反应小于快乐情绪组;低年级学生比高年级学生情绪的生理反应大;女生比男生情绪的生理反应大;低学业水平学生比高学业水平学生情绪的生理反应大。