Evidence for a young adult face bias in accuracy and consensus of age estimates

Adults' face processing may be specialized for the dimensions of young adult faces. For example, young and older adults exhibit increased accuracy in normality judgments and greater agreement in attractiveness ratings for young versus older adult faces. The present study was designed to examine whether there is a similar young adult face bias in facial age estimates. In Experiment 1, we created a face age continuum by morphing an averaged young adult face with an averaged older adult face in 5% increments, for a total of 21 faces ranging from 0 to 100% old. Young and older adults estimated facial age for three stimulus age categories [young (morphs 0–30%), middle‐aged (morphs 35–65%), and older adult (morphs 70–100%)]. Both age groups showed the least differentiation in age estimates for young adult faces, despite showing greater consensus across participants in estimates for young faces. In Experiment 2, young and older adults made age estimates for individual young and older adult identities. Both age groups were more accurate and showed greater consensus in age estimates for young faces. Collectively, these results provide evidence for a bias in processing young adult faces beyond that which is often observed in recognition and normality/attractiveness judgment tasks.     

Specificity of Postural Control: Comparing Expert and Intermediate Dancers

The expert–novice approach is inappropriate for studying postural control in sport and dance when novices are completely unable to perform relevant postural tasks and experts cannot demonstrate specific skills on everyday postural tasks. We tested expertise-specific differences on 6 static everyday and 5 dynamic dance-like postural tasks of varying difficulty in 13 professional and 12 intermediate nonprofessional dancers. Results showed a clear expert advantage on sway area for dance-like postural tasks, but not for static everyday tasks. This effect was also found for the control parameter of root mean square (RMS) velocity and partly for RMS amplitude of the difference signal between CoP and CoG line location. Results indicate that the expert advantage is task-specific and deliver new insights into the specificity of experts' postural performance.     

教学设计中的成绩表现和心流体验:基于认知负荷视角

教学设计是为优化教学效果而形成的教学实施方案。为提高学习表现,认知负荷理论认为在组织教学设计时需考虑内、外认知负荷两大因素,但少有研究关注学生在学习过程中的体验。本研究通过单词复合性操纵内在负荷,通过呈现方式操纵外在负荷,探究两类负荷对心流体验及表现的影响。结果发现,内在负荷对心流及表现均有影响,外在负荷仅在低水平组表现出对心流及表现的影响,另外内外负荷在低水平组的表现上存在交互作用。结果表明,教学设计中的内在负荷是影响心流及表现的稳定因素,外在负荷不仅受知识水平影响,其对表现的有效性还受内在负荷的调节。     

Luther,learning, and the liberal arts

The learning goals of a well‐designed course in the liberal arts include not only the imparting of knowledge but also the development of critical thinking and disciplinary expertise. A class on Luther can help students acquire those intellectual skills associated with the discipline of history and the liberal arts more generally as they consider broader questions about institutional religion, spirituality, moral choices, and human agency. Current scholarship on how people learn highlights the importance of adequate mental frameworks for the acquisition, retention, and retrieval of new ideas and information. This scholarship underlies the choice of specific strategies used to teach about Luther and the Reformation. Assignments provide “scaffolding,” which begins with modeling and then moves from simpler to more complex assignments. Students practice the specific intellectual skills of critical reading and textual analysis over the course of the semester.     

同龄效应的类别化-个体化模型

针对面孔认知偏好的类别化-个体化模型,探讨该模型中的知觉经验、加工方式和动机水平对本龄效应的影响。结果表明增加对异龄面孔的知觉经验、个体化加工异龄面孔及提高加工异龄面孔的动机都能有效改善对异龄面孔的再认,减少本龄效应量。这说明本龄效应遵循类别化-个体化模型,且在类别化-个体化模型中本龄效应与本族效应加工原理相仿。。     

Shock and awe: Distinct effects of taboo words on lexical decision and free recall

Taboo stimuli are highly arousing, but it has been suggested that they also have inherent taboo-specific properties such as tabooness, offensiveness, or shock value. Prior studies have shown that taboo words have slower response times in lexical decision and higher recall probabilities in free recall; however, taboo words often differ from other words on more than just arousal and taboo properties. Here, we replicated both of these findings and conducted detailed item analyses to determine which word properties drive these behavioural effects. We found that lexical-decision performance was best explained by measures of lexical accessibility (e.g., word frequency) and tabooness, rather than arousal, valence, or offensiveness. However, free-recall performance was primarily driven by emotional word properties, and tabooness was the most important emotional word property for model fit. Our results suggest that the processing of taboo words is influenced by distinct sets of factors and by an intrinsic taboo-specific property.     

Motor expertise and performance in spatial tasks: A meta-analysis

The present study aimed to provide a summary of findings relevant to the influence of motor expertise on performance in spatial tasks and to examine potential moderators of this effect. Studies of relevance were those in which individuals involved in activities presumed to require motor expertise were compared to non-experts in such activities. A final set of 62 effect sizes from 33 samples was included in a multilevel meta-analysis. The results showed an overall advantage in favor of motor experts in spatial tasks (d = 0.38). However, the magnitude of that effect was moderated by expert type (athlete, open skills/ball sports, runner/cyclist, gymnast/dancers, musicians), stimulus type (2D, blocks, bodies, others), test category (mental rotation, spatial perception, spatial visualization), specific test (Mental Rotations Test, generic mental rotation, disembedding, rod-and-frame test, other), and publication status. These findings are discussed in the context of embodied cognition and the potential role of activities requiring motor expertise in promoting good spatial performance.     

Do we reflect while performing skillful actions? Automaticity,control, and the perils of distraction

From our everyday commuting to the gold medalist’s world-class performance, skillful actions are characterized by fine-grained, online agentive control. What is the proper explanation of such control? There are two traditional candidates: intellectualism explains skillful agentive control by reference to the agent’s propositional mental states; anti-intellectualism holds that propositional mental states or reflective processes are unnecessary since skillful action is fully accounted for by automatic coping processes. I examine the evidence for three psychological phenomena recently held to support anti-intellectualism (choking under pressure, expertise-induced amnesia, and expert confabulation) and argue that it supports neither traditional candidate, but an intermediate attention-control account, according to which the top-down, intention-directed control of attention is a necessary component of skillful action. Only this account recognizes both the role of automatic control in skilled action and the need for higher-order cognition to thread automatic processes together into a unified, skillful performance. This applies to bodily skillful action in general, from the world-class performance of experts to mundane, habitual action. The attention-control account stresses that, for intentions to play their role as top-down modulators of attention, agents must sustain the intention’s activation; hence, the need for reflecting throughout performance.     

认知负荷视角下的知识反转效应

知识反转效应研究始于20世纪90年代中期, 在认知负荷的框架下对学习者先备知识与教学方法有效性之间的交互作用进行研究, 其研究范式起源于能力倾向与教学处置交互作用模型。认知负荷理论认为知识反转效应的产生是由于高先备知识者接受冗余教学而产生了额外的认知负荷, 动机理论却认为, 高先备知识者由于冗余的认知加工而产生的负荷可能是一种动机资源负荷。在优化外在认知负荷与相关认知负荷的教学设计中发现了大量知识反转效应的实验证据, 其教学的启示意义在于需要随着学习者领域知识的不断变化适宜性地调整教学方法。未来需要在完善研究方法、拓展研究领域的基础上, 整合研究成果以建立效应发生与发展的理论模型。