Constraints on children's color term acquisition

Kowalski and Zimiles (2006) and O'Hanlon and Roberson (2006) address an age-old question: Why do children find it difficult to learn color terms? Here these articles are reflected on, providing a focused examination of the issues central to this question. First, the criteria by which children are said to find color naming difficult are considered. Although the age of color term acquisition is decreasing, and color naming might not be more difficult than other abstract attributes, several stages of difficulty are identified. Second, it is argued that there are potentially multiple constraints (e.g., conceptual, attentional, and linguistic) for these multiple stages of difficulty with color term acquisition. Third, it is argued that the validity and reliability of techniques for identifying constraints need to be considered and that converging evidence for the constraints should be provided. Finally, a series of new questions that need to be asked to provide a well-rounded explanation of the difficulties children face when learning color terms is outlined.     

Science and Human Behavior translated into Portuguese: Ciência e Comportamento Humano

Science and Human Behavior was translated to Portuguese as part of the effort to begin a psychology course at the University of Brasília 40 years ago; one of the many results of the first visit of Fred S. Keller to Brazil. The book has been used continuously in undergraduate courses in Brazil since 1967.     

汉语第三人称单数代词对人物性别判定的影响

采用启动范式考察汉语第三人称单数代词对人物性别判定的影响.实验l发现,“他”导致被试更多地将人物判定为男性,“她”使被试产生更多的女性意象,中性句引起的偏差较小.PMB程度无性别差异.实验2表明,“他”导致被试更多地将中性人物判定为男性,将部分女性误判为男性.     

INTERFACING INFANT MENTAL HEALTH KNOWLEDGE: PERSPECTIVES OF SOUTH AFRICAN SUPERVISORS SUPPORTING LAY MOTHER–INFANT HOME VISITORS

This article is part of a project investigating the interfacing of clinically and research‐generated knowledge in the field of infant mental health (IMH) with local cultural models of child care and development. The article explores the experiences and challenges reported by psychology‐trained supervisors in supervision with local, lay, trained home visitors. Supervisors and supervisees were drawn from two early intervention programs which apply relational IMH mental health models in socioeconomically deprived townships in South Africa. Literature that considers supervisors’ experiences of conducting supervision with lay counselors has been limited, and even more so in settings where there are marked cultural and contextual differences between supervisors and supervisees. These differences pose particular challenges regarding the finding of a shared theoretical understanding of the work as well as to the establishment of a secure working alliance. While it was found that psychoanalytic and attachment‐informed theories of infant development are applicable in these South African settings, differences in race, language, education, socioeconomic status, and culture between supervisors and supervisees challenge the supervisor–supervisee relationship and require psychological processing and creative solutions to ensure integrity in the application of the model.     

The impact of children’s lexical and morphosyntactic knowledge on narrative competence development: A prospective cohort study

The authors investigate the contribution of children's early comprehension of relational terms and morphosyntactic knowledge to the development of narrative competence in kindergarten and Grade 1. Narrative competence was assessed through the cohesion, coherence, and structure of children’s productions. The participants in this study were 714 Italian children. The authors measured their oral narrative competence through a storytelling task at the beginning and end of the kindergarten year. A total of 115 children were randomly selected and followed through Grade 1, and their narrative competence was measured again. According to the path analysis model, early morphosyntactic knowledge contributes to explain narrative competence in Grade 1. Early comprehension of relational terms contributes to narrative competence at the end of the school year. These findings confirm the importance of exploring the influence of early language skills on narrative competence development and suggests early intervention at the level of language antecedents of narrative competence.     

Learning from experience in nonlinear environments: Evidence from a competition scenario

We test people’s ability to learn to estimate a criterion (probability of success in a competition scenario) that requires aggregating information in a nonlinear manner. The learning environments faced by experimental participants are kind in that they are characterized by immediate, accurate feedback involving either naturalistic outcomes (information on winning and/or ranking) or the normatively correct probabilities. We find no evidence of learning from the former and modest learning from the latter, except that a group of participants endowed with a memory aid performed substantially better. However, when the task is restructured such that information should be aggregated in a linear fashion, participants learn to make more accurate assessments. Our experiments highlight the important role played by prior beliefs in learning tasks, the default status of linear aggregation in many inferential judgments, and the difficulty of learning in nonlinear environments even in the presence of veridical feedback.     

Skepticism revisited: Chalmers on The Matrix and brains-in-vats

Thought experiments involving The Matrix, brains-in-vats, or Cartesian demons have traditionally thought to describe skeptical possibilities. Chalmers has denied this, claiming that the simulations involved are real enough to at least sometimes defeat the skeptic. Through an examination of the meaning of kind terms in natural language I argue that, though the Chalmers view may be otherwise attractive, it is not an antidote to skepticism.