How infant-directed actions enhance infants’ attention,learning, and exploration: Evidence from EEG and computational modeling

When teaching infants new actions, parents tend to modify their movements. Infants prefer these infant-directed actions (IDAs) over adult-directed actions and learn well from them. Yet, it remains unclear how parents’ action modulations capture infants’ attention. Typically, making movements larger than usual is thought to draw attention. Recent findings, however, suggest that parents might exploit movement variability to highlight actions. We hypothesized that variability in movement amplitude rather than higher amplitude is capturing infants’ attention during IDAs. Using EEG, we measured 15-month-olds’ brain activity while they were observing action demonstrations with normal, high, or variable amplitude movements. Infants’ theta power (4–5 Hz) in fronto-central channels was compared between conditions. Frontal theta was significantly higher, indicating stronger attentional engagement, in the variable compared to the other conditions. Computational modelling showed that infants’ frontal theta power was predicted best by how surprising each movement was. Thus, surprise induced by variability in movements rather than large movements alone engages infants’ attention during IDAs. Infants with higher theta power for variable movements were more likely to perform actions successfully and to explore objects novel in the context of the given goal. This highlights the brain mechanisms by which IDAs enhance infants’ attention, learning, and exploration.     

Context-dependent alarm responses in wild vervet monkeys

Animal Cognition - The alarm calls of nonhuman primates are occasionally cited as functionally equivalent to lexical word meaning in human language. Recently, however, it has become increasingly...     

Can we predict non-response in developmental tasks? Assessing the longitudinal relation between toddlers' non-response and early academic skills

To date, virtually no studies have examined toddlers' non-response in developmental tasks. This study investigates data from 3667 toddlers to address (1) whether two aspects of non-response (completion and engagement) are separable, (2) how stable these aspects are from ages two to three, (3) how non-response relates to background characteristics, and (4) whether non-response at ages two and three predicts early academic skills at age six. Structural equation modelling shows that completion and engagement are separable constructs, relatively stable across age, and related to several background characteristics. Especially engagement predicts later academic performance. Results show that non-response in behavioural tasks in toddlers is not random, increasing the likelihood of sampling bias and lack of generalizability in developmental studies.     

Stolen elections: How conspiracy beliefs during the 2020 American presidential elections changed over time

Conspiracy beliefs have been studied mostly through cross-sectional designs. We conducted a five-wave longitudinal study (N = 376; two waves before and three waves after the 2020 American presidential elections) to examine if the election results influenced specific conspiracy beliefs and conspiracy mentality, and whether effects differ between election winners (i.e., Biden voters) versus losers (i.e., Trump voters) at the individual level. Results revealed that conspiracy mentality kept unchanged over 2 months, providing first evidence that this indeed is a relatively stable trait. Specific conspiracy beliefs (outgroup and ingroup conspiracy beliefs) did change over time, however. In terms of group-level change, outgroup conspiracy beliefs decreased over time for Biden voters but increased for Trump voters. Ingroup conspiracy beliefs decreased over time across all voters, although those of Trump voters decreased faster. These findings illuminate how specific conspiracy beliefs are, and conspiracy mentality is not, influenced by an election event.     

Autobiographical memory impairment in chronic schizophrenia: Significance and clinical correlates

Previous studies of autobiographical memory (AM) in schizophrenia yielded a reduction of specificity, richness of details and conscious recollection, which indicate both, quantitative and qualitative AM changes. However, their associations with psychopathological symptoms and neuropsychological deficits were not resolved. Therefore, we sought to investigate AM with respect to psychopathology and neuropsychology in patients with chronic schizophrenia to rule out the influence of different courses of the disease. AM of four lifetime periods was examined in 75 patients and 50 healthy controls by using a semi-structured interview. The recalled episodes were rated for memory specificity. Subsequently, one single event of each period of life was rated for details and experiential aspects of reliving (originality, vividness/visual imagery, emotional re-experiencing and emotional valence). When contrasted with healthy controls, patients recalled a significantly reduced number of episodes and personal semantic facts; moreover, memory specificity of AM was significantly lower in patients than controls. While the richness of details calculated for single events showed only minor, non-significant group differences, vividness and emotional re-experiencing were significantly less pronounced in the patient group. Along with this, AM performance correlated significantly with negative symptoms including apathy as well as verbal memory and executive functions. Our results underline the significance of overgenerality as a key feature of AM in schizophrenia as well as a dissociation between intact number of details of single events and reduced vividness and emotional re-experiencing. The extent of negative symptoms including apathy and impairments of verbal memory/executive functions may explain AM deficits in chronic schizophrenia.     

Developing the social identity theory of leadership: Leader agency in leader group prototypicality

The social identity theory of leadership is a unique perspective in leadership research in capturing how responses to leadership are informed by how the leader is perceived through the lens of the group identity shared by leaders and followers. I review the theory in broad strokes to make the case that a particularly valuable future development of the theory is to complement the theory's emphasis on group member (follower) perceptions of leader group prototypicality, the extent to which the leader is perceived to embody the group identity, with theory and evidence speaking to leader agency in influencing such perceptions.     

Agricultural policy and strategic investment in information technology

In this article the perspective shifts to the “upstream” end of the agricultural knowledge and information system (AKIS). Because knowledge policy and strategic decision-making are not the prerogative of the public sector, organizations such as cooperative unions and multinational companies are included. After considering the influence of the changing environment on the nature of the AKIS, the role of knowledge management and policy in the emerging knowledge and information market is examined. Special attention is given to public and private R&D. The article then looks where information technology (IT) fits in and what considerations determine strategic investment in IT projects and sustained services. Some of the European experiences with this strategic investment are evaluated.     

Parent and child perceptions of Boszormenyi-Nagy's ethical dimensions of the parent-child relationship

The parent-child relationship plays an important role in Boszormenyi-Nagy's contextual therapy. This article presents the results of four interview studies of the opinions of parents and children about their ethical relationship.The children in these studies were five-to-seven-year-olds, 10-to-12 year olds and 15-year-olds. In one study only the mothers were interviewed, in the other three both parents participated. In all 73 children, 62 mothers, and 43 fathers were interviewed. The majority of parents and children agreed with most aspects of Nagy's theory about the parent-child relation, but there were some notable exceptions. Very few shared Nagy's ideas about entitlement. The age of the child had a clear effect on the opinions of the children on the dimensions of trust/reliability, loyalty and shifting of the balance with age of the child and on the opinions of the parents on the dimensions of childrens' rights, parents' rights, and balance of fairness. The sex of the interviewee had some effect: Mothers and fathers differ on the dimension of parents' rights and adolescent girls and boys differ on the dimensions of childrens' rights and parents' duties.     

Auditory accessory effects on visual processing

A series of experiments on intersensory facilitation demonstrates that non-informative sound of low to moderate intensity (30/80 dB) facilitates the reaction to a visual stimulus. By manipulating the preprocessing and perceptual stages of the visual signals, it appears that auditory intensity reduces choice reaction time independently from the positive influence of the intensity and duration of the visual imperative signal, but interacts with the effect of stimulus degradation. Degraded stimuli take more profit of the sound than intact stimuli. Besides a short-term activation effect, originated by accessories of the auditory modality, on the motor adjustment stage (cf. Sanders 1983), the results suggest that the accessory influences the stage of feature extraction.