Japanese and British Children's Understanding of the Social Function of Pretend Crying

The purpose of this study was to investigate cross-cultural differences in children's understanding of pretend crying. Five- and 6-year-olds from Japan and the United Kingdom (N = 71) heard two hypothetical stories in which the protagonist of each story pretended to cry in front of another person. Children were asked about the appearance–reality distinction of pretend crying, the other character's thoughts and behavior, and the children's own moral judgment of pretend crying. Cultural differences were found in their understanding of the social function of pretend crying. Japanese children judged that pretend crying elicited another's concern and prosocial behavior more than British children. There were no significant differences in appearance–reality distinction or moral judgments between Japanese and British children. All participants successfully discriminated between pretend crying and real crying, and most participants judged pretend crying as “not good” behavior. These results suggested that Japanese children might be more expected to be sensitive to others’ feelings, and that such cultural differences in communication and socialization lead to different patterns in expectations of the social consequences of pretend crying.     

8~15岁儿童贫富观的发展特点及其与成人的比较

儿童贫富观是其价值观的重要体现,贫富观形成是儿童社会化进程中的重要方面,然而目前国内尚缺乏中国儿童贫富观的系统研究。本研究以8~9岁、11~12岁、14~15岁以及成人(主要为大学生,年龄为20.7±1.32岁)为研究对象(N=186),结合开放性问题和结构化问卷,考察他们对于贫富的感知、公平判断、归因以及对于缓解贫困对策的认识。结果发现:控制社会经济地位之后,(1)8~9岁儿童对贫富的认识局限于表面特征,11~12岁更关注心理特征,而成人提及系统特征的比例更高;(2)8~9岁儿童较其他年龄组更倾向于对贫富做不公平的判断;(3)在贫富的归因和缓解贫困的对策上,儿童和成人都认可个人因素的重要性,但成人更多关注国家政策和社会的影响,并且认为消除贫困是不可能的。中国儿童贫富观的发展与西方已有研究相比,既有共性也有文化特异性。     

Inferring the intentional states of autonomous virtual agents

Inferring the mental states of other agents, including their goals and intentions, is a central problem in cognition. A critical aspect of this problem is that one cannot observe mental states directly, but must infer them from observable actions. To study the computational mechanisms underlying this inference, we created a two-dimensional virtual environment populated by autonomous agents with independent cognitive architectures. These agents navigate the environment, collecting “food” and interacting with one another. The agents’ behavior is modulated by a small number of distinct goal states: attacking, exploring, fleeing, and gathering food. We studied subjects’ ability to detect and classify the agents’ continually changing goal states on the basis of their motions and interactions. Although the programmed ground truth goal state is not directly observable, subjects’ responses showed both high validity (correlation with this ground truth) and high reliability (correlation with one another). We present a Bayesian model of the inference of goal states, and find that it accounts for subjects’ responses better than alternative models. Although the model is fit to the actual programmed states of the agents, and not to subjects’ responses, its output actually conforms better to subjects’ responses than to the ground truth goal state of the agents.     

Logical Metonymy Resolution in a Words‐as‐Cues Framework: Evidence From Self‐Paced Reading and Probe Recognition

Logical metonymy resolution (begin a book → begin writing a book) has traditionally been explained either through complex lexical entries (qualia structures) or through the integration of the implicit event via post‐lexical access to world knowledge. We propose that recent work within the words‐as‐cues paradigm can provide a more dynamic model of logical metonymy, accounting for early and dynamic integration of complex event information depending on previous contextual cues (agent and patient). We first present a self‐paced reading experiment on German subordinate sentences, where metonymic sentences and their paraphrased version differ only in the presence or absence of the clause‐final target verb (Der Konditor begann die Glasur → Der Konditor begann, die Glasur spreading the icing). Longer reading times at the target verb position in a high‐typicality condition (baker + icing → spread ) suggest that we make use of knowledge activated by lexical cues to build expectations about events. The early and dynamic integration of event knowledge in metonymy interpretation is bolstered by further evidence from a second experiment using the probe recognition paradigm. Presenting covert events as probes following a high‐typicality or a low‐typicality metonymic sentence (Der Konditor begann die Glasur → SPREAD ), we obtain an analogous effect of typicality at 100 ms interstimulus interval.     

Eye movements during mental time travel follow a diagonal line

Recent research showed that past events are associated with the back and left side, whereas future events are associated with the front and right side of space. These spatial–temporal associations have an impact on our sensorimotor system: thinking about one’s past and future leads to subtle body sways in the sagittal dimension of space (Miles, Nind, & Macrae, 2010). In this study we investigated whether mental time travel leads to sensorimotor correlates in the horizontal dimension of space. Participants were asked to mentally displace themselves into the past or future while measuring their spontaneous eye movements on a blank screen. Eye gaze was directed more rightward and upward when thinking about the future than when thinking about the past. Our results provide further insight into the spatial nature of temporal thoughts, and show that not only body, but also eye movements follow a (diagonal) “time line” during mental time travel.     

The ordinary

This paper discusses Peter Lomas's work in the context of the concepts of ‘ordinary people’ and ‘ordinary language’. Obsessions about whether a person is ordinary or not tend to occur in people who are disturbed. Psychoanalysts use the special language of mechanics to explain the phenomena they observe in the consulting room. In this paper it is argued that ordinary language, our mother tongue, is a better way of understanding people. In his work as a psychotherapist and writer, Peter Lomas found more insight in the ordinary language of literature than he did in theory.     

The Relation between Mind‐mindedness in Mothers with Borderline Personality Disorder and Mental State Understanding in their Children

This study investigated relations between mind‐mindedness in mothers with borderline personality disorder (BPD) and mental state understanding in their children. Participants were 20 mothers with BPD and 19 mothers without personality disorder and their children, aged 39–61 months. Children's mental state understanding was examined via a battery of theory of mind and emotion labelling tasks. Maternal mind‐mindedness was assessed by mothers' use of mental state references to describe their children relative to other attributes. Maternal BPD was associated with fewer references to children's mental states as well as poorer levels of mental state understanding in their children. Findings lend some empirical support to recent theoretical suggestions that BPD is associated with a reduced capacity for mentalization, as well as reduced capacity for mental state understanding in children of mothers with BPD. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The interplay of bottom-up and top-down mechanisms in visual guidance during object naming

An ongoing issue in visual cognition concerns the roles played by low- and high-level information in guiding visual attention, with current research remaining inconclusive about the interaction between the two. In this study, we bring fresh evidence into this long-standing debate by investigating visual saliency and contextual congruency during object naming (Experiment 1), a task in which visual processing interacts with language processing. We then compare the results of this experiment to data of a memorization task using the same stimuli (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, we find that both saliency and congruency influence visual and naming responses and interact with linguistic factors. In particular, incongruent objects are fixated later and less often than congruent ones. However, saliency is a significant predictor of object naming, with salient objects being named earlier in a trial. Furthermore, the saliency and congruency of a named object interact with the lexical frequency of the associated word and mediate the time-course of fixations at naming. In Experiment 2, we find a similar overall pattern in the eye-movement responses, but only the congruency of the target is a significant predictor, with incongruent targets fixated less often than congruent targets. Crucially, this finding contrasts with claims in the literature that incongruent objects are more informative than congruent objects by deviating from scene context and hence need a longer processing. Overall, this study suggests that different sources of information are interactively used to guide visual attention on the targets to be named and raises new questions for existing theories of visual attention.     

Don't Predict the Future–Direct it! Comments on the intellectual history,the Logical and Applicative Visibility,and the Underlying Assumptions of Directed Evolution (DE)

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

—Alan Kay ¹ 1. Alan Kay is one of the inventors of the Smalltalk programming language and one of the originators of the idea of Object Oriented Programming. He is the conceiver of the laptop computer and the architect of the modern windowing GUI.

It is obvious that there are patterns of cultural change—evolution in the neutral sense—and any theory of cultural change worth more than a moment's consideration will have to be Darwinian in the minimal sense of being consistent with the theory of evolution by natural selection of Homo sapiens.

—Daniel Dennett ² 2. Daniel C. Dennett is a Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He is the author of several books, including Consciousness Explained (1991), Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995), and Kinds of Minds (1996). This quote is taken from his forward to Darwinizing Culture (Aunger 2000 Aunger, R. 2000. Darwinizing culture: The status of memetics as a science, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.  [Google Scholar], ix).

The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet.

—William Gibson ³ 3. In the early 1980s William Gibson wrote Neuromancer, coining the term “cyberspace” to describe computer-generated virtual realities long before we saw the similarities with today's Internet.

It is the magician's wand, by means of which he may summon into life whatever form and mould he pleases.

—Charles Darwin commenting on the power of artificial selection ⁴ 4. Here Darwin is explaining the power of artificial selection and its potential for the directed evolution of biological systems (domestication and commercially oriented breeding) in his Origin of Species (1859, 68).