Guilt by association and honor by association: The role of acquired equivalence

Guilt by association and honor by association are two types of judgments that suggest that a negative or positive quality of a person or object can transfer to another person or object, merely by co-occurrence. Most examples have been demonstrated under conditions of direct associations. Here, we provide experimental evidence of guilt by association and honor by association via indirect associations. We show that participants may treat two individuals alike if they have been separately paired with a common event using an acquired-equivalence paradigm. Our findings suggest that association fallacies can be examined using a paradigm originally developed for research with nonhuman animals and based on a representation mediation account.     

Why This Makes Me Think of That

This study was aimed at explaining how and under what conditions surface similarity leads to the retrieval of an analogous base problem in LTM. Some elements of a theory of the organisation of knowledge in memory are proposed. Two levels of representation are distinguished. The first level represents directly accessible, local surface properties. The second level represents more abstract information pertaining to the category with which each analogous problem can be associated. Some results will be described showing that access to an analogue in LTM based on surface properties is determined by the existence of a similarity at a higher level of abstraction. This is a “search-area” effect, in that categorical information seems to delimit a memory search space, within which the connection between local surface properties is more likely to be made.     

Dutch and Polish Perceptions of Leadership and Culture: The GLOBE Project

In this paper the objectives of a new international research project that focuses on the perception of leadership across cultures will be presented. The definition of leadership will be discussed in relation to cross-cultural leadership research. The ideas and theory on which the project is based will be introduced along with several of the hypotheses the project is designed to test. Besides testing the general hypotheses, results obtained in the GLOBE study can also be used for a more focused comparison between two countries. In this paper, differences in preferred leadership attributes and national culture dimensions in The Netherlands and Poland are presented. A total of 287 Dutch managers from six organizations and 277 Polish managers from six organizations filled out questionnaires. The results indicate that Dutch and Polish cultures differ strongly on power distance, uncertainty avoidance and future orientation. Regarding preferred attributes for outstanding leadership, Polish respondents score especially high on administrative skills, vision, and diplomacy, whereas Dutch managers emphasize integrity, inspirational behavior and vision. Polish respondents are also less negative about autocratic leadership.     

Both sheep and goats can solve inferential by exclusion tasks

Animal Cognition - Despite the domestication of sheep and goats by humans for several millennia, we still lack comparative data on their cognitive capacity. Comparing the cognitive skills of farm...     

The use of event‐related potentials in the study of early cognitive development

The article by Guillaume Thierry is a welcome one, alerting the field to the exciting ways in which event‐related potentials (ERPs) can be used to study cognitive development. It is also timely: there is great interest in the brain sciences, and in how neuroscience can be applied to cognitive development and indeed to education. In my view, however, the article is perhaps too cautious. It does not seem necessary to delay the use of ERPs in cognitive work until all in the field have agreed on the sound characterization of ERP components. It should be possible for further characterization to proceed hand‐in‐hand with data gathering on applied questions. In fact, as partly noted by Thierry, in the auditory domain well‐characterized ERP components are already available, even for infants (e.g. Cheour et al., 1997; Leppänen and Lyytinen, 1997). Furthermore, it is of developmental interest to study older children as well as infants. If ERPs are seen as a tool to complement existing behavioural investigations, rather than as a stand‐alone method to be used independently, then auditory ERPs can certainly be used in current cognitive‐developmental work. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Boundaries of American Identity: Relations Between Ethnic Group Prototypicality and Policy Attitudes

We sought to document that the extent to which different ethnic groups are perceived as embodying the American identity is more strongly linked to antiminority policy attitudes and acculturation ideologies among majority‐group members (European Americans) than among minority‐group members (Asian Americans or Latino/as). Participants rated 13 attributes of the American identity as they pertain to different ethnic groups and reported their endorsement of policy attitudes and acculturation ideologies. We found a relative consensus across ethnic groups regarding defining components of the American identity. However, European Americans were perceived as more prototypical of this American identity than ethnic minorities, especially by European American raters. Moreover, for European Americans but not for ethnic minorities, relative ingroup prototypicality was related to antiminority policy attitudes and acculturation ideologies. These findings suggest that for European Americans, perceptions of ethnic group prototypicality fulfill an instrumental function linked to preserving their group interests and limiting the rights afforded to ethnic minorities.     

Constraints on statistical computations at 10 months of age: the use of phonological features

Recently, several studies have argued that infants capitalize on the statistical properties of natural languages to acquire the linguistic structure of their native language, but the kinds of constraints which apply to statistical computations remain largely unknown. Here we explored French‐learning infants' perceptual preference for labial‐coronal (LC) words over coronal‐labial words (CL) words (e.g. preferring bat over tab) to determine whether this phonotactic preference is based on the acquisition of the statistical properties of the input based on a single phonological feature (i.e. place of articulation), multiple features (i.e. place and manner of articulation), or individual consonant pairs. Results from four experiments revealed that infants had a labial‐coronal bias for nasal sequences (Experiment 1) and for all plosive sequences (Experiments 2 and 4) but a coronal‐labial bias for all fricative sequences (Experiments 3 and 4), independently of the frequencies of individual consonant pairs. These results establish for the first time that constellations of multiple phonological features, defining broad consonant classes, constrain the early acquisition of phonotactic regularities of the native language.     

Pet dogs synchronize their walking pace with that of their owners in open outdoor areas

Affiliation between interacting partners is associated with a high level of behavioural synchronization in many species. Pet dogs are known to share strong affiliative bonds with their owners and to synchronize their behaviour with them when moving freely indoors. Surprisingly, outdoor dog–human interspecific synchronization has seldom been investigated. We therefore explored whether, when allowed to move freely in a familiar outdoor space, dogs synchronize their behaviour with their owners’ movements. We found that dogs visibly synchronized both their location (staying in close proximity) and their activity (moving when their owner moved, and at the same pace, and standing still when their owner stood still) with those of their owners. By demonstrating that owners act as attractors for their dogs in an outdoor space, the present study contributes new data to the understanding of interspecific behavioural synchronization.     

Newborns modulate their crawling in response to their native language but not another language

Human newborns can propel themselves to their mother's breast when positioned skin to skin on her abdomen just after birth. For decades, researchers have considered this primitive crawling behavior a spinal reflex, immune to supra spinal control. However, recent research suggests that neonatal crawling is already responsive to visual and olfactory stimuli processed at a supra spinal level. Here we report that a few hours post birth, French newborns can also modulate their crawling in response to their native language – a source of information that is processed supra-spinally. The crawling patterns of 23 French-born newborns were recorded on video and via an infrared motion capture system during two randomly ordered 2-min trials. The newborns were secured on a mini skateboard to facilitate arm and leg movements during their crawling propulsion. They heard a repetitive sequence of the same sentences either in French, their native language, or in English, a rhythmically different and hence discriminable unfamiliar language, on each trial. In French, compared to English, crawling was enhanced, with significantly more arm and leg steps and significantly more and larger trunk rotations in the cephalo-caudal axis. Moreover, newborns rotated their heads and trunk toward the appropriate loud speaker when hearing French but not English. These preliminary findings suggest that newborn crawling is not a simple stereotyped reflex under spinal control, but a complex pattern that can be modulated in response to higher-order, supra-spinally processed stimuli. The findings open fascinating questions about the range of stimuli to which newborn crawling is responsive.     

Silent or Talking in the Classroom: Implicit Self-Stereotyping Among Asian and White Students

In academic settings, Asian students are often described as less talkative than White students. We provide an account of this phenomenon based on research on cultural influences on the self, self-categorization, and implicit social cognition. We hypothesized that the classroom context activates a process of implicit self-stereotyping. Asian and White participants were asked to imagine themselves in a classroom or leisure context. Next, they completed Implicit Association Tests assessing their self-concept, ethnic stereotypes, and ethnic identification. In the classroom context only, ethnic stereotypes accounted for a more reserved self-concept among Asian participants and a more talkative self-concept among White participants.