Children's attention to stimulus components with variation in relative salience of components and degree of stimulus integration

A total of 400 children at ages 5, 9, and 12 years were given a component selection task with stimuli differing in color and shape. Relative salience of these two stimulus components was manipulated across subjects in two ways: the standard shapes and colors from previous studies were compared with standard shapes in fluorescent colors, and the latter materials were compared with nonsense shapes in fluorescent colors. While fluorescence of color had little effect, the replacement of standard shapes with nonsense figures caused attention to be redirected from shape to color as the primary cue for learning. This effect was more pronounced at age 9 than at age 5. Apparently there is a greater tendency for older than for younger children to withdraw attention from a normally dominant component such as shape, when it is advantageous to adopt another feature such as color as the primary functional cue. An additional variable was integration of components (color within shape vs color as background for shape). Integration produced generally greater attention to color but did not affect the general pattern of salience effects.     

Influence of linguistic complexity,rate of presentation,and interphrase pause time on auditory-verbal comprehension of adult aphasic patients

Among the variables affecting comprehension of linguistic stimuli by aphasic subjects are syntactic complexity and processing time. Comprehension performance of 15 aphasic adults was studied while altering the rate of speech presentation and varying the pause time between the major phrases within sentences of increasing grammatical complexity.Simple Active Affirmative Declarative Sentences, Negative, and Passive sentences were presented (1) at the rate of 150 words per minute (wpm) with 1-sec interphrase pause time (IPT); (2) 150 wpm with no pauses; (3) 120 wpm with 1-sec IPT; (4) 120 wpm with no pauses added.Performance was seen to vary with increasing syntactical complexity and as a function of processing time. Greater comprehension was seen with active affirmative than negative; greater with passive affirmative than with active negative. Clinical implications are discussed. Subjects demonstrated greater comprehension when sentences were presented at slower than normal rate; addition of interphrase pause time intervals aided comprehension. Combining slower rate of presentation and IPT intervals provided greatest increase in auditory processing time and showed concomitant increase in comprehension performance.     

龚道长慷慨解囊资助后学

应韩国国际仙道交流振兴院的邀请,中国道教协会张继禹副会长等2人于10月7日至12日赴韩国参加了首届中韩仙道文化交流学术研讨会。同时参加研讨会的中国学者还有陕西省社科院的两位道教研究专家。这是继任法融会长于去年6月率团访问韩国后,又一次高规格的中韩道教文化交流活动。     

Counterfactual Logic and the Necessity of Mathematics

Journal of Philosophical Logic - This paper is concerned with counterfactual logic and its implications for the modal status of mathematical claims. It is most directly a response to an ambitious...     

Action Generalization Across Group Members: Action Efficiency Matters

Actions are usually generalized among social group members. Importantly, the efficiency of an action with respect to achieving an external target determines action understanding, and it may have different degrees of social relevance to social groups. Thus, this study explored the role of action efficiency in action generalization. We used computer animations to simulate actions in social groups initiated by visual action cues or category labels, and we measured differences in response times between identifying actions that were and were not consistent with group members, without explicit requirements regarding generalization. It was found that in both visually introduced and explicitly labeled social groups, when the group members acted inefficiently toward the external object, perceivers identified group-consistent actions faster than group-inconsistent actions, indicating that the exemplars' common inefficient actions are generalized to the unknown ingroup member, accordingly facilitating the identification of expected consistent inefficient action (Experiment 1). As this effect was not present when removing social group cues, it was determined to be specific to social groups (Experiment 2). Importantly, such generalization was not observed when the identical action was deemed efficient toward the external object (Experiment 3) and was specific to the demonstration of the action being completed by multiple group members rather than being repeated twice by one group member, supporting the group-based inference and ruling out the possibility of the increased memorability of inefficient actions leading to more generalization relative to efficient actions (Experiment 4). Therefore, the efficiency of an action bounds the generalization of the action across social group members through a process that is spontaneous and implicit. This constrained action generalization may be due to inefficient actions being represented as culture-specific conventional forms.     

淄潍河流域商周文化东渐历史背景之考古学观察

商周文化东渐是山东地区商周考古的一个重要课题,淄潍河流域则是山东地区商周考古的一个关键性区域,随着考古资料的日益丰富,从考古学角度探讨淄潍河流域商周文化东渐及其历史背景已成为可能。