Traffic safety climate attitudes of road users in Germany

This paper validates traffic safety climate attitudes based on a representative sample of road users of all travel modes. We use the German version of the Traffic Climate Scale (TCS) which was applied in a large-scale road safety survey in 2010. A total of 1680 people were surveyed. The sample is representative for socio-demographic characteristics and travel mode choice in Germany. Factor analysis reveals a three-factor structure of traffic safety climate with the factor ‘External affective demands’ describing emotional engagement in traffic, the factor ‘Internal requirements’ representing individual skills and abilities to successfully participate in traffic, and the factor ‘Functionality’ describing requirements for a functional traffic system. The less emotionally demanding and the more functional traffic is perceived to be, the safer people feel in traffic. External affective demands are consistently related to the perception of others’ driving/riding style but not to one’s own, whereas internal requirements are consistently related to one’s own driving/riding style but not to the perception of others. There is no relation between traffic safety climate and accidents or near accidents. Contrary to our expectations, a positive traffic safety climate is associated with more secondary tasks while driving and traffic violations. Behavioural control beliefs may mediate the traffic climate–traffic behaviour relationship. The results are discussed with reference to attitude research and the theory of planned behaviour in particular.     

Response to Algarabel et al., 2012 “Recognition memory deficits in mild cognitive impairment”. Reconsidering claims of familiarity disruptions in mild cognitive impairment

There is some debate over the relative impairment of recollection and familiarity in mild cognitive impairment (MCI). A recent publication by Algarabel et al. (2012, Recognition memory deficits in mild cognitive impairment, Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, 19, 608–619) claims to undermine previous studies reporting preserved familiarity in patients with MCI. Here, we respond to their main criticisms, concluding that they are not sufficiently supported by the data presented. The role of recollection and familiarity in MCI remains unresolved and further work will be required to disentangle the mixed literature.     

The influence of inhibitory processes on affective theory of mind in young and old adults

The primary aim of this study was to examine the impact of an inhibition manipulation on the effect of age on theory of mind (ToM) in an ecologically valid, affective ToM task. Participants were 30 young and 30 old adults. The Cambridge Mindreading Face-Voice Battery was used to measure ToM; in addition, measures of fluid and crystallized intelligence were taken. Participants were subjected to three levels of inhibitory demand during ToM reasoning: emotional inhibition, non-emotional inhibition, and no inhibition. Old adults performed worse than young adults. The emotional and non-emotional inhibition conditions resulted in worse ToM performance compared to the no inhibition condition. There were no differences in the impact of the inhibition conditions on old and young adults. Regression analyses suggested that old adults’ crystallized intelligence was a significant predictor of ToM performance, whereas it did not predict young adults’ ToM performance. Results are discussed in terms of verbal ability as a possible compensatory mechanism in coping with verbal inhibitory load in ToM reasoning.     

It’s how you say it – The extended Theory of Planned Behaviour explains active transport use in cardiac patients depending on the type of self-report in a hypothesis-generating study

Physical activity (PA) plays an essential part in the secondary prevention of persons with coronary heart disease (CHD). A substantial amount of PA can be gained through increasing the use of active transport modes (walking or cycling for at least 10 min/day) in CHD patients’ daily routine, benefiting the mortality and morbidity rate as well as the environment. The current study aims to investigate the utility of the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) framework extended with habit strength, in understanding the behavioural intention and the behaviour of using active transport modes during the daily travel routine of CHD patients. A cross-sectional survey was conducted from 131 CHD patients. The behaviour was measured using three self-report methods; 1) scale measure, the walking or cycling frequency, 2) direct ATS (Active Travel Score, PA calculated by the directly reported aggregated time spent per day for walking or cycling for travel purposes), and 3) indirect ATS (PA calculated by combining the duration spent on trips by walking and cycling from the self-reported one-day travel diary). Additionally, the participants completed surveys on the direct measures of TPB constructs and habit strength. The results indicated that the TPB constructs explained a 38% variance in the intention to use active transport modes of CHD patients, by which the variance increased to 59% with the addition of habit strength. On the contrary, different behavioural measures were explained differently by TPB and habit strength. The scale measure of behaviour was best predicted (up to 21%) by TPB and habit strength. However, the direct and indirect measures of behaviour were poorly explained (up to 3% and 10% only, respectively). Habit strength moderated the relationship between behaviour (scale measure) and behavioural intention. Surprisingly, higher behavioural intention resulted in a lower behavioural frequency when the habit strength to be active is low. This suggests a limited control over the behaviour thus indicating the intention-behaviour gap. The current study findings highlight the inconsistent predictive utility of TPB across different types of behavioural self-report measures, targeted at the use of active transport modes in CHD patients. However, considering this study as hypothesis-generating, further research is necessary to replicate and extend these findings.     

Belief-based action prediction in preverbal infants

Successful mindreading entails both the ability to think about what others know or believe, and to use this knowledge to generate predictions about how mental states will influence behavior. While previous studies have demonstrated that young infants are sensitive to others’ mental states, there continues to be much debate concerning how to characterize early theory of mind abilities. In the current study, we asked whether 6-month-old infants appreciate the causal role that beliefs play in action. Specifically, we tested whether infants generate action predictions that are appropriate given an agent’s current belief. We exploited a novel, neural indication of action prediction: motor cortex activation as measured by sensorimotor alpha suppression, to ask whether infants would generate differential predictions depending on an agent’s belief. After first verifying our paradigm and measure with a group of adult participants, we found that when an agent had a false belief that a ball was in the box, motor activity indicated that infants predicted she would reach for the box, but when the agent had a false belief that a ball was not in the box, infants did not predict that she would act. In both cases, infants based their predictions on what the agent, rather than the infant, believed to be the case, suggesting that by 6 months of age, infants can exploit their sensitivity to other minds for action prediction.     

The origins of belief representation: Monkeys fail to automatically represent others’ beliefs

Young infants’ successful performance on false belief tasks has led several researchers to argue that there may be a core knowledge system for representing the beliefs of other agents, emerging early in human development and constraining automatic belief processing into adulthood. One way to investigate this purported core belief representation system is to examine whether non-human primates share such a system. Although non-human primates have historically performed poorly on false belief tasks that require executive function capacities, little work has explored how primates perform on more automatic measures of belief processing. To get at this issue, we modified Kovács et al. (2010)’s test of automatic belief representation to examine whether one non-human primate species—the rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta)—is automatically influenced by another agent’s beliefs when tracking an object’s location. Monkeys saw an event in which a human agent watched an apple move back and forth between two boxes and an outcome in which one box was revealed to be empty. By occluding segments of the apple’s movement from either the monkey or the agent, we manipulated both the monkeys’ belief (true or false) and agent’s belief (true or false) about the final location of the apple. We found that monkeys looked longer at events that violated their own beliefs than at events that were consistent with their beliefs. In contrast to human infants, however, monkeys’ expectations were not influenced by another agent’s beliefs, suggesting that belief representation may be an aspect of core knowledge unique to humans.     

My mother is sensitive,but I am too tired to know: Infant sleep as a moderator of prospective relations between maternal sensitivity and infant outcomes

This study investigated the moderating role of infant sleep in the connections between maternal sensitivity and three indicators of infant functioning: attachment security, theory of mind, and executive functioning (EF). Maternal sensitivity was assessed when infants (27 girls and 36 boys) were 1 year of age. Infant sleep was assessed with actigraphy at age 2; attachment security, theory of mind, and EF were also assessed at age 2. Results indicated that maternal sensitivity was positively related to attachment security only among infants who got more sleep at night, and to conflict-EF and theory of mind only for infants who got greater proportions of their sleep during the night. These results suggest that sleep may enhance the benefits of maternal sensitivity for some aspects of infants’ functioning, providing further support for the importance of sleep maturation as a salient developmental task of infancy.     

Collaborative mother–toddler communication and theory of mind development at age 4

Focusing on social pragmatics, this longitudinal study investigated the contribution of mother–toddler collaborative communication to theory of mind (ToM) development at age 4. At age 2½, 78 toddlers (42 boys) and their mothers were observed during pretend play. At age 4, children were tested using 4 false belief understanding tasks. Both mothers and toddlers engaged in more collaborative (inform, guide/request, and support/confirm) than non-collaborative communication acts. Other-focused collaborative acts of support/confirm by mothers and toddlers predicted children's false belief understanding, even after controlling for 5 covariates. In addition, as active agents in their own ToM development, the contribution of toddlers' collaborative acts to false belief understanding was independent of their mother's. Finally, the way toddlers and their mothers co-constructed their communication mattered. Only when toddlers engaged in high levels of collaborative acts, the mothers' high levels of collaborative acts demonstrated a positive effect on children's ToM development. The applied implications of these findings are discussed.     

Commentary on Ted Ruffman’s “Belief or not belief: …”

I applaud Ruffman for cautioning us against interpreting early sensitivity to others’ beliefs as evidence for an innate theory of mind and for making room for learning. In turn, however, I caution against his claim that all infants need is to understand that people act depending on what they perceive. Instead, infants may keep experiential records (Perner & Roessler, 2010) for other people or records of what they have registered (Apperly & Butterfill, 2009), which makes it less obvious that all required knowledge can be acquired by statistical learning. As a general criticism I remonstrate with current theory of mind research on its lack of concern that we understand people as acting for reasons which goes beyond detecting lawful regularities in behaviour.