Infant search tasks reveal early concepts of containment and canonical usage of objects

It is difficult to gain unambiguous evidence on the use of concepts by infants. Many results can be accounted for in terms of action-based strategies. The evidence reported here fulfils the minimal criteria for the operation of working concepts in infants. Search tasks are used with a filled interval which forces memory-search, and the object is hidden in containers which fulfil their customary job or violate it. Infants treat an upright cup as a more reliable location marker than an inverted one. A series of experiments probes the phenomenon. The results indicate that the infants have a working concept of containment which can be triggered by the provision of containers in their canonical orientation. Even “object permanence tasks” lead infants to access their knowledge of the relationships into which things typically enter in the world outside the laboratory.     

Children's strategies in producing three-dimensional relationships on a two-dimensional surface

It is a common task to give children a picture containing implicit depth cues and to require them to extract depth information from it. The cues are always selected from the adult repertoire; little is known about children's production of their own cues. In this experiment, 5- to 10-year-old children were required to draw one object behind another in a situation in which adults invariably produce the further object partially occluded by the nearer. The results were an age-related decline in the tendency to segregate the objects and an increase in the tendency to group the objects using partial occlusion, with a cross-over at 8 years. At all ages some children drew one object inside the boundary of the other. It is argued that the results are composed of two tendencies, a gradual mastery of discrete scaling phenomena (e.g., “up” on the page means “further”) within a given style, and a set of decisions to be made between incompatible styles.     

The processing of fundamental frequency in a dichotic matching task

The temporal characteristics of auditory memory were investigated using a reaction time paradigm. The study attempted to determine whether or not there are functionally distinct left and right hemisphere components of auditory memory with different capacities for the retention of nonlinguistic information, such as fundamental frequency, over the course of several seconds. The results indicated that fundamental frequency information in auditory memory remains substantially unchanged over the course of 2 sec. No evidence was found for the existence of separate left and right hemisphere components of auditory memory with different temporal characteristics. The implications of this finding for the organization of auditory memory in the brain are discussed.     

Human social defeat and approach–avoidance: Escalating social-evaluative threat and threat of aggression increases social avoidance

Basic research on avoidance by Murray Sidman laid the foundation for advances in the classification, conceptualization and treatment of avoidance in psychological disorders. Contemporary avoidance research is explicitly translational and increasingly focused on how competing appetitive and aversive contingencies influence avoidance. In this laboratory investigation, we examined the effects of escalating social-evaluative threat and threat of social aggression on avoidance of social interactions. During social-defeat learning, 38 adults learned to associate 9 virtual peers with an increasing probability of receiving negative evaluations. Additionally, 1 virtual peer was associated with positive evaluations. Next, in an approach–avoidance task with social-evaluative threat, 1 peer associated with negative evaluations was presented alongside the peer associated with positive evaluations. Approaching peers produced a positive or a probabilistic negative evaluation, while avoiding peers prevented a negative evaluation (and forfeited a positive evaluation). In an approach–avoidance task with social aggression, virtual peers gave and took money away from participants. Escalating social-evaluative threat and aggression increased avoidance, ratings of feeling threatened and threat expectancy and decreased ratings of peer favorableness. These findings underscore the potential of coupling social defeat and approach–avoidance paradigms for translational research on the neurobehavioral mechanisms of social approach–avoidance decision-making and anxiety.     

Single-Stage Prediction Models Do Not Explain the Magnitude of Syntactic Disambiguation Difficulty

The disambiguation of a syntactically ambiguous sentence in favor of a less preferred parse can lead to slower reading at the disambiguation point. This phenomenon, referred to as a garden-path effect, has motivated models in which readers initially maintain only a subset of the possible parses of the sentence, and subsequently require time-consuming reanalysis to reconstruct a discarded parse. A more recent proposal argues that the garden-path effect can be reduced to surprisal arising in a fully parallel parser: words consistent with the initially dispreferred but ultimately correct parse are simply less predictable than those consistent with the incorrect parse. Since predictability has pervasive effects in reading far beyond garden-path sentences, this account, which dispenses with reanalysis mechanisms, is more parsimonious. Crucially, it predicts a linear effect of surprisal: the garden-path effect is expected to be proportional to the difference in word surprisal between the ultimately correct and ultimately incorrect interpretations. To test this prediction, we used recurrent neural network language models to estimate word-by-word surprisal for three temporarily ambiguous constructions. We then estimated the slowdown attributed to each bit of surprisal from human self-paced reading times, and used that quantity to predict syntactic disambiguation difficulty. Surprisal successfully predicted the existence of garden-path effects, but drastically underpredicted their magnitude, and failed to predict their relative severity across constructions. We conclude that a full explanation of syntactic disambiguation difficulty may require recovery mechanisms beyond predictability.     

Neurodualism: People Assume that the Brain Affects the Mind more than the Mind Affects the Brain

People commonly think of the mind and the brain as distinct entities that interact, a view known as dualism. At the same time, the public widely acknowledges that science attributes all mental phenomena to the workings of a material brain, a view at odds with dualism. How do people reconcile these conflicting perspectives? We propose that people distort claims about the brain from the wider culture to fit their dualist belief that minds and brains are distinct, interacting entities: Exposure to cultural discourse about the brain as the physical basis for the mind prompts people to posit that mind–brain interactions are asymmetric, such that the brain is able to affect the mind more than vice versa. We term this hybrid intuitive theory neurodualism. Five studies involving both thought experiments and naturalistic scenarios provided evidence of neurodualism among laypeople and, to some extent, even practicing psychotherapists. For example, lay participants reported that “a change in a person's brain” is accompanied by “a change in the person's mind” more often than vice versa. Similarly, when asked to imagine that “future scientists were able to alter exactly 25% of a person's brain,” participants reported larger corresponding changes in the person's mind than in the opposite direction. Participants also showed a similarly asymmetric pattern favoring the brain over the mind in naturalistic scenarios. By uncovering people's intuitive theories of the mind–brain relation, the results provide insights into societal phenomena such as the allure of neuroscience and common misperceptions of mental health treatments.     

Reliability of variable message signs information: A field experiment study in Chongqing

A variable message sign (VMS), which is a key component of intelligent transportation systems, has been frequently used in the management of urban roads and motorways to provide drivers with real-time traffic condition information about a road section or area. Nevertheless, there is a lack of unified regulations for VMS design, which makes it difficult to accurately determine the understandability and legibility of VMS information. In practice, inappropriate designs of VMSs are common, such as overload of VMS information and excessive number of phases, particularly on the urban roads of China. Building on our earlier findings obtained by surveys, in this study, field tests were conducted to assess the reliability of VMS information in terms of the visual perception characteristics of drivers. For a full visual perception, the information displayed on a VMS must be reliable, i.e., it should be easy for drivers to detect, obtain, and understand the messages they require. Two basic theories—information theory and visual perception theory—were introduced to build a quantification model of VMS information, select evaluation indices, and design the experimental process. A total of 24 drivers participated in the field experiments and questionnaires. Five indices—information obtainment rate, periodic validity, driver subjective scoring and the corresponding UI (represents information intelligibility), and CE (represents information legibility)—were analyzed to evaluate their relationships to VMS information reliability. The results confirmed that the amount of information, and the scrolling period considering redundant distance, significantly affect the reliability of VMSs information. For static VMSs, the information obtainment rate and the subjective scoring decrease with increasing amount of information. The recollection accuracy of the drivers significantly declines when the amount of information shown increases to 90 bits, corresponding to an information obtainment rate of less than 0.8 and UI equal to 0. For dynamic VMSs, the information reliability deteriorates as the scrolling period shortens and the number of phases increases. Unreasonable reliability is found when the periodic validity is less than 0.9, i.e., the actual scrolling period is more than 10% less than the calculated one, corresponding to CE equal to 0. The reliability of information was evaluated by combining the subjective scoring of the drivers and a data-based statistical analysis and considering driving safety. Accordingly, it was recommended that 90 bit is the maximum amount of information to be shown on a VMS and that the preferred scrolling period of each phase of a dynamic VMS is 5 s. The results of this study support the objective of providing reliable information to drivers by addressing the problems related to the amount of information and presentation time for VMSs. These findings provide a basis for determining the thresholds for VMS information to promote practical and user-friendly designs of VMSs on urban roads.     

When is the Wilcoxon–Mann–Whitney procedure a test of location? Implications for effect-size measures

The Wilcoxon–Mann–Whitney procedure is invariant under monotone transformations but its use as a test of location or shift is said not to be so. It tests location only under the shift model, the assumption of parallel cumulative distribution functions (cdfs). We show that infinitely many monotone transformations of the measured variable produce parallel cdfs, so long as the original cdfs intersect nowhere or everywhere. Thus there are infinitely many effect sizes measured as shifts of medians, invalidating the notion that there is one true shift parameter and thereby rendering any single estimate dubious. Measuring effect size using the probability of superiority alleviates this difficulty.