Parallels Between Action‐Object Mapping and Word‐Object Mapping in Young Children

Across a series of four experiments with 3‐ to 4‐year‐olds we demonstrate how cognitive mechanisms supporting noun learning extend to the mapping of actions to objects. In Experiment 1 (n = 61) the demonstration of a novel action led children to select a novel, rather than a familiar object. In Experiment 2 (n = 78) children exhibited long‐term retention of novel action‐object mappings and extended these actions to other category members. In Experiment 3 (n = 60) we showed that children formed an accurate sensorimotor record of the novel action. In Experiment 4 (n = 54) we demonstrate limits on the types of actions mapped to novel objects. Overall these data suggest that certain aspects of noun mapping share common processing with action mapping and support a domain‐general account of word learning.     

Struggling with the state I am in: Researching policy failures and the English National Health Service

This article examines the tensions between failing when researching policy and researching policy that itself will inevitably tend towards failure. Putting geographic scholarship on policy mobilities into dialogue with recent attempts to reclaim academic failure, I discuss the emotional struggles that can punctuate the geographies of researching, mobilising and critiquing public policy. Supported by diary material as a fixed-term contract policy researcher studying health and care reforms in England, I reflect on failure when working within and beyond the spaces of the local state. With growing pressure on academics to impact policymaking, I emphasise the unsettling ‘betweenness’ of policy mobilities researchers unable to get to grips with power whilst becoming attached to, and part of, policies under investigation. Consequently, I suggest precarious academic researchers are, in more ways than one, occupying uncertain positions within accelerated worlds of fast policy as public intermediaries unable to talk about failure. The article concludes by outlining why this matters in the present crisis.     

Bayesian adaptive estimation: The next dimension

We propose a new psychometric model for two-dimensional stimuli, such as color differences, based on parameterizing the threshold of a one-dimensional psychometric function as an ellipse. The Ψ Bayesian adaptive estimation method applied to this model yields trials that vary in multiple stimulus dimensions simultaneously. Simulations indicate that this new procedure can be much more efficient than the more conventional procedure of estimating the psychometric function on one-dimensional lines independently, requiring only one-fourth or less the number of trials for equivalent performance in typical situations. In a real psychophysical experiment with a yes-no task, as few as 22 trials per estimated threshold ellipse were enough to consistently demonstrate certain color appearance phenomena. We discuss the practical implications of the multidimensional adaptation. In order to make the application of the model practical, we present two significantly faster algorithms for running the Ψ method: a discretized algorithm utilizing the Fast Fourier Transform for better scaling with the sampling rates and a Monte Carlo particle filter algorithm that should be able to scale into even more dimensions.     

Do people make decisions under risk based on ignorance? An empirical test of the priority heuristic against cumulative prospect theory

Brandstätter, Gigerenzer, and Hertwig [Brandstätter, E., Gigerenzer, G., & Hertwig, R. (2006). The Priority Heuristic: Making choices without trade-offs. Psychological Review, 113(2), 409–432] put forward the priority heuristic (PH) as a fast and frugal heuristic for decisions under risk. According to the PH, individuals do not make trade-offs between gains and probabilities, as proposed by expected utility models such as cumulative prospect theory (CPT), but use information in a non-compensatory manner and ignore information. We conducted three studies to test the PH empirically by analyzing individual choice patterns, decision times and information search parameters in diagnostic decision tasks. Results on all three dependent variables conflict with the predictions of the PH and can be better explained by the CPT. The predictive accuracy of the PH was high for decision tasks in which the predictions align with the predictions of the CPT but very low for decision tasks in which this was not the case. The findings indicate that earlier results supporting the PH might have been caused by the selection of decision tasks that were not diagnostic for the PH as compared to CPT.     

Workplace factors associated with family dinner behaviors

This study investigated relationships between workplace factors and family dinners. We examined two aspects of the family dinner, the frequency that the entire family typically has dinner together each week and the frequency that children eat fast food for dinner. Participants were 220 parents who worked at least 20 h a week and had at least one child living at home. Results indicated that work interference with family (WIF) mediated the relationship between family-supportive supervision and family dinner frequency. Greater flexplace (i.e., telecommuting) availability was associated with less frequent use of fast food for children’s dinner.     

Evaluation of human consciousness level by means of “automated fluctuation analysis” of high frequency electroencephalogram fitted by double Lorentzians

Since Berger’s discovery of the electroencephalogram (EEG), its analysis has been generally restricted to the visual range (upmost 100Hz) and has ignored higher frequency components. One reason should be that there are no reliable methods to distinguish the brain potentials from muscle activity. We have introduced fluctuation analysis, which is popular method especially in the field of basic physiology to clinical electrophysiology. In our previous study, it was declared that power spectral density (PSD) of human high frequency EEG was composed of double Lorentzians and vanished into white level within 1kHz. Then the purpose of this study is to elucidate the “Automated Fluctuation Analysis,” which enables us to evaluate these higher frequency components and its physiological meaning especially focused on conscious level from wakefulness to sleep stage 1. Seventy-four scalp recording EEGs in twenty normal subjects were studied. In short, “Automated Fluctuation Analysis” is made of three steps: amplification of EEG signal, A/D conversion and Fast Fourier Transform by signal processor and extraction of Lorentzian parameters. PSD of high frequency EEG was displayed on log-log graph and the algorithm fit to the following Lorentzian formula were mathematically based on Brown & Dennis. S(f)=S1/ [1+(f/fc₁)²] + S2/ [1+(f/fc₂)²], where S(f) is PSD (μ V²/Hz) at each frequency (f;Hz), S1 and S2 are the plateau level or zero-frequency power of the initial and second Lorentz, and fc₁ and fc₂ are the corner or half-power frequency of the initial and second Lorentz, respectively. As results, during wakefulness the PSD of high frequency EEG activity was composed of double Lorentzian fluctuations and the power distribution of S1 value in topographical display was frontal dominant. This pattern of S1 value disappeared and S2 value became lower during sleepiness and the second Lorentz disappeared during sleep.     

Rapid fast-mapping abilities in 2-year-olds

Learning a new word consists of two primary tasks that have often been conflated into a single process: referent selection, in which a child must determine the correct referent of a novel label, and referent retention, which is the ability to store this newly formed label-object mapping in memory for later use. In addition, children must be capable of performing these tasks rapidly and repeatedly as they are frequently exposed to novel words during the course of natural conversation. Here we used a preferential pointing task to investigate 2-year-olds’ (N = 72) ability to infer the referent of a novel noun from a single ambiguous exposure and their ability to retain this mapping over time. Children were asked to identify the referent of a novel label on six critical trials distributed throughout the course of a 10-min study involving many familiar and novel objects. On these critical trials, images of a known object and a novel object (e.g., a ball and a nameless artifact constructed in the laboratory) appeared on two computer screens and a voice asked children to “point at the _____ [e.g., glark].” Following label onset, children were allowed only 3 s during which to infer the correct referent, point at it, and potentially store this new word-object mapping. In a final posttest trial, all previously labeled novel objects appeared and children were asked to point to one of them (e.g., “Can you find the glark?”). To succeed, children needed to have initially mapped the novel labels correctly and retained these mappings over the course of the study. Despite the difficult demands of the current task, children successfully identified the target object on the retention trial. We conclude that 2-year-olds are able to fast map novel nouns during a brief single exposure under ambiguous labeling conditions.     

Preschoolers' interpretations of gesture: label or action associate?

This study explores a common assumption made in the cognitive development literature that children will treat gestures as labels for objects. Without doubt, researchers in these experiments intend to use gestures symbolically as labels. The present studies examine whether children interpret these gestures as labels. In Study 1 two-, three-, and four-year olds tested in a training paradigm learned gesture–object pairs for both iconic and arbitrary gestures. Iconic gestures became more accurate with age, while arbitrary gestures did not. Study 2 tested the willingness of children aged 40–60 months to fast map novel nouns, iconic gestures and arbitrary gestures to novel objects. Children used fast mapping to choose objects for novel nouns, but treated gesture as an action associate, looking for an object that could perform the action depicted by the gesture. They were successful with iconic gestures but chose objects randomly for arbitrary gestures and did not fast map. Study 3 tested whether this effect was a result of the framing of the request and found that results did not change regardless of whether the request was framed with a deictic phrase (“this one 〈gesture〉”) or an article (“a 〈gesture〉”). Implications for preschool children’s understanding of iconicity, and for their default interpretations of gesture are discussed.     

Learning times for large lexicons through cross-situational learning

Cross-situational learning is a mechanism for learning the meaning of words across multiple exposures, despite exposure-by-exposure uncertainty as to a word's true meaning. Doubts have been expressed regarding the plausibility of cross-situational learning as a mechanism for learning human-scale lexicons in reasonable timescales under the levels of referential uncertainty likely to confront real word learners. We demonstrate mathematically that cross-situational learning facilitates the acquisition of large vocabularies despite significant levels of referential uncertainty at each exposure, and we provide estimates of lexicon learning times for several cross-situational learning strategies. This model suggests that cross-situational word learning cannot be ruled out on the basis that it predicts unreasonably long lexicon learning times. More generally, these results indicate that there is no necessary link between the ability to learn individual words rapidly and the capacity to acquire a large lexicon.