Personalized and not general suggestion produces false autobiographical memories and suggestion-consistent behavior

Suggesting false childhood events produces false autobiographical beliefs, memories and suggestion-consistent behavior. The mechanisms by which suggestion affects behavior are not understood, and whether false beliefs and memories are necessary for suggestions to impact behavior remains unexplored. We examined the relative effects of providing a personalized suggestion (suggesting that an event occurred to the person in the past), and/or a general suggestion (suggesting that an event happened to others in the past). Participants (N=122) received a personalized suggestion, a general suggestion, both or neither, about childhood illness due to spoiled peach yogurt. The personalized suggestion resulted in false beliefs, false memories, and suggestion-consistent behavioral intentions immediately after the suggestion. One week or one month later participants completed a taste test that involved eating varieties of crackers and yogurts. The personalized suggestion led to reduced consumption of only peach yogurt, and those who reported a false memory showed the most eating suppression. This effect on behavior was equally strong after one week and one month, showing a long lived influence of the personalized suggestion. The general suggestion showed no effects. Suggestions that convey personal information about a past event produce false autobiographical memories, which in turn impact behavior.     

Increasing magnitude counts more: asymmetrical processing of ordinality in 4-month-old infants

While infants' ability to discriminate quantities has been extensively studied, showing that this competence is present even in neonates, the ability to compute ordinal relations between magnitudes has received much less attention. Here we show that the ability to represent ordinal information embedded in size-based sequences is apparent at 4months of age, provided that magnitude changes involve increasing relations. Infants in Experiments 1A and 1B discriminated changes in ordinal relations after habituation to ascending sequences, but did not show evidence of discrimination after habituation to descending sequences. In Experiment 2 we replicated this asymmetry in magnitude discrimination even when additional cues known to boost ordinal competence were provided. The presence of an asymmetry between ascending vs. descending order during infancy suggests a developmental continuity in the underlying code used to represent magnitude, whereby the reported addition advantage in children and adults' arithmetic performance emerges.     

Perceptual simulation in developing language comprehension

We tested an embodied account of language proposing that comprehenders create perceptual simulations of the events they hear and read about. In Experiment 1, children (ages 7–13 years) performed a picture verification task. Each picture was preceded by a prerecorded spoken sentence describing an entity whose shape or orientation matched or mismatched the depicted object. Responses were faster for matching pictures, suggesting that participants had formed perceptual-like situation models of the sentences. The advantage for matching pictures did not increase with age. Experiment 2 extended these findings to the domain of written language. Participants (ages 7–10 years) of high and low word reading ability verified pictures after reading sentences aloud. The results suggest that even when reading is effortful, children construct a perceptual simulation of the described events. We propose that perceptual simulation plays a more central role in developing language comprehension than was previously thought.     

Effect of an aerobic training program as complementary therapy in patients with moderate depression

The aim of this study was to assess the effects of an aerobic training program as complementary therapy in patients suffering from moderate depression. 82 female patients weredivided into a group that received traditional pharmacotherapy (Fluoxetine 20 mg) and a group that received pharmacotherapy plus an aerobic training program. This program was carried out for eight consecutive weeks, three days per week, and included gymnastics, dancing, and walking. Depressive symptoms were measured with the Beck Depression Inventory and the ICD-10 Guide for Depression Diagnosis, both administered before and after treatments. The results confirm the effectiveness of the aerobic training program as a complementary therapy to diminish depressive symptoms in patients suffering from moderate depression.     

Factor Analysis via Components Analysis

When the factor analysis model holds, component loadings are linear combinations of factor loadings, and vice versa. This interrelation permits us to define new optimization criteria and estimation methods for exploratory factor analysis. Although this article is primarily conceptual in nature, an illustrative example and a small simulation show the methodology to be promising.     

Analysis of the US-preexposure effect in flavor acceptance conditioning

In three experiments, rats received exposure to a sucrose solution followed by conditioning with a neutral flavor as the conditioned stimulus (CS) and sucrose as the unconditioned stimulus (US). In Experiments 1 and 2, some rats were given both the preexposure and the conditioning phases in a highly familiar context (the homecage), whereas other animals received both phases in a novel and distinctive context. In both cases the magnitude of the conditioning effect was reduced by preexposure to the US. Experiment 3 directly assessed the possible role of contextual cues by changing the context between the exposure phase and the conditioning phase but found no loss of the US-preexposure effect in these conditions. These results lend no support to the blocking-by-context account of the US-preexposure effect; alternative interpretations are considered.