反馈类型和反馈时间对动作技能获得的影响

基于简单直线运动任务和复杂曲线追踪任务,在运动技能获得阶段考察不同反馈类型和反馈时间对操作绩效的影响。结果发现,在复杂曲线轨迹追踪任务中,接受运动轨迹反馈的被试组比接受偏差数值反馈组的成绩更好;即时反馈和延迟反馈组的操作绩效间没有显著差异。在简单直线运动任务中,提供落点偏差的图形反馈组成绩始终优于提供“近/远”信息的文本反馈组;在练习初期,即时反馈组成绩更好。说明,反馈信息的具体-抽象程度影响被试运动技能获得,提供具体直观的轨迹/图形反馈利于运动技能获得;反馈时间对运动技能的影响因任务难度而异。     

Response acquisition by zebrafish (Danio rerio) with delayed reinforcement

Zebrafish (Danio rerio) is a common vertebrate animal model in biomedical research and is a promising species for studying how genes interact with environmental factors in determining behavior. The present study investigated how reinforcement parameters affect zebrafish behavior by assessing response acquisition with delayed reinforcement, which has been studied with other species (e.g., rats, pigeons, humans, etc.) but not with zebrafish. Twenty‐four experimentally naïve subjects were exposed to a tandem fixed‐ratio 1 differential‐reinforcement‐of‐other‐behavior x‐s schedule of reinforcement, where x varied across subjects. There were six different delay‐to‐reinforcement durations and sets of four fish were assigned to each delay duration. All of the fish assigned to a 0‐, 0.5‐, or 1‐s delay acquired responding. Two fish acquired responding with a 3‐s delay and one fish appeared to have acquired it with a 6‐s delay although the latter result was less clear. None acquired responding with a 12‐s delay. These results suggest that zebrafish behavior is sensitive to delays to reinforcement and the time frame over which reinforcement is effective may be limited approximately to 6 s. This time frame is shorter than that found with other species. Practical and theoretical implications of the present finding are discussed.     

Cross-modal working memory binding and word recognition skills: how specific is the link?

Recent research has suggested that the creation of temporary bound representations of information from different sources within working memory uniquely relates to word recognition abilities in school-age children. However, it is unclear to what extent this link is attributable specifically to the binding ability for cross-modal information. This study examined the performance of Grade 3 (8–9 years old) children on binding tasks requiring either temporary association formation of two visual items (i.e., within-modal binding) or pairs of visually presented abstract shapes and auditorily presented nonwords (i.e., cross-modal binding). Children’s word recognition skills were related to performance on the cross-modal binding task but not on the within-modal binding task. Further regression models showed that cross-modal binding memory was a significant predictor of word recognition when memory for its constituent elements, general abilities, and crucially, within-modal binding memory were taken into account. These findings may suggest a specific link between the ability to bind information across modalities within working memory and word recognition skills.     

Effects of neutral and enthusiastic praise on the rate of discrimination acquisition

Previous research has shown that praise is an effective reinforcer; however, few researchers have evaluated whether qualitative differences in praise affect responding. The purpose of the current study was to compare the effects of neutral, enthusiastic, and no praise on the rate of matching‐to‐sample acquisition during discrete‐trial training with adults diagnosed with autism and an intellectual disability. In addition, we evaluated preference for neutral, enthusiastic, and no praise. All three participants acquired responses slightly faster during the enthusiastic praise condition. Preference assessment results showed that one participant preferred enthusiastic praise, whereas the two other participants showed indiscriminate selections.     

Content words in Hebrew child-directed speech

The goal of the study was to examine whether the ‘noun-bias’ phenomenon, which exists in the lexicon of Hebrew-speaking children, also exists in Hebrew child-directed speech (CDS) as well as in Hebrew adult-directed speech (ADS). In addition, we aimed to describe the use of the different classes of content words in the speech of Hebrew-speaking parents to their children at different ages compared to the speech of parents to adults (ADS). Thirty infants (age range 8:5–33 months) were divided into three stages according to age: pre-lexical, single-word, and early grammar. The ADS corpus included 18 Hebrew-speaking parents of children at the same three stages of language development as in the CDS corpus. The CDS corpus was collected from parent–child dyads during naturalistic activities at home: mealtime, bathing, and play. The ADS corpus was collected from parent–experimenter interactions including the parent watching a video and then being interviewed by the experimenter. 200 utterances of each sample were transcribed, coded for types and tokens and analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. Results show that in CDS, when speaking to infants of all ages, parents’ use of types and tokens of verbs and nouns was similar and significantly higher than their use of adjectives or adverbs. In ADS, however, verbs were the main lexical category used by Hebrew-speaking parents in both types and tokens. It seems that both the properties of the input language (e.g. the pro-drop parameter) and the interactional styles of the caregivers are important factors that may influence the high presence of verbs in Hebrew-speaking parents’ ADS and CDS. The negative correlation between the widespread use of verbs in the speech of parents to their infants and the ‘noun-bias’ phenomenon in the Hebrew-child lexicon will be discussed in detail.     

Learning General Phonological Rules From Distributional Information: A Computational Model

Phonological rules create alternations in the phonetic realizations of related words. These rules must be learned by infants in order to identify the phonological inventory, the morphological structure, and the lexicon of a language. Recent work proposes a computational model for the learning of one kind of phonological alternation, allophony (Peperkamp, Le Calvez, Nadal, & Dupoux, 2006). This paper extends the model to account for learning of a broader set of phonological alternations and the formalization of these alternations as general rules. In Experiment 1, we apply the original model to new data in Dutch and demonstrate its limitations in learning nonallophonic rules. In Experiment 2, we extend the model to allow it to learn general rules for alternations that apply to a class of segments. In Experiment 3, the model is further extended to allow for generalization by context; we argue that this generalization must be constrained by linguistic principles.     

Are Automatic Conceptual Cores the Gold Standard of Semantic Processing? The Context‐Dependence of Spatial Meaning in Grounded Congruency Effects

According to grounded cognition, words whose semantics contain sensory‐motor features activate sensory‐motor simulations, which, in turn, interact with spatial responses to produce grounded congruency effects (e.g., processing the spatial feature of up for sky should be faster for up vs. down responses). Growing evidence shows these congruency effects do not always occur, suggesting instead that the grounded features in a word's meaning do not become active automatically across contexts. Researchers sometimes use this as evidence that concepts are not grounded, further concluding that grounded information is peripheral to the amodal cores of concepts. We first review broad evidence that words do not have conceptual cores, and that even the most salient features in a word's meaning are not activated automatically. Then, in three experiments, we provide further evidence that grounded congruency effects rely dynamically on context, with the central grounded features in a concept becoming active only when the current context makes them salient. Even when grounded features are central to a word's meaning, their activation depends on task conditions.     

Why is number word learning hard? Evidence from bilingual learners

Young children typically take between 18 months and 2 years to learn the meanings of number words. In the present study, we investigated this developmental trajectory in bilingual preschoolers to examine the relative contributions of two factors in number word learning: (1) the construction of numerical concepts, and (2) the mapping of language specific words onto these concepts. We found that children learn the meanings of small number words (i.e., one, two, and three) independently in each language, indicating that observed delays in learning these words are attributable to difficulties in mapping words to concepts. In contrast, children generally learned to accurately count larger sets (i.e., five or greater) simultaneously in their two languages, suggesting that the difficulty in learning to count is not tied to a specific language. We also replicated previous studies that found that children learn the counting procedure before they learn its logic – i.e., that for any natural number, n, the successor of n in the count list denotes the cardinality n + 1. Consistent with past studies, we found that children’s knowledge of successors is first acquired incrementally. In bilinguals, we found that this knowledge exhibits item-specific transfer between languages, suggesting that the logic of the positive integers may not be stored in a language-specific format. We conclude that delays in learning the meanings of small number words are mainly due to language-specific processes of mapping words to concepts, whereas the logic and procedures of counting appear to be learned in a format that is independent of a particular language and thus transfers rapidly from one language to the other in development.