What is an academic emotion? Insights from Filipino bilingual students’ emotion words associated with learning

We explored Filipino learners’ concept of academic emotions by studying the words they use to describe their emotional experiences associated with learning. Two main theoretical frames were used as reference in the analysis: Clore, Ortony, & Foss’ (1978) taxonomy of emotion words, and Pekrun’s (2006) dimensions of academic emotions. We asked Filipino learners to describe the positive and negative emotions that they associate with their learning experiences using an open ended questionnaire. The 676 students used 1337 words which were classified into root word categories; 38 categories which were mentioned by at least 1% of the participants were included in the analysis. The interpretive analysis suggested that Filipino learners’ concept of academic emotions includes appraisals of cognitive and even physical conditions, beyond the typical affective conditions assumed in theories of emotions and academic emotions. Moreover, Filipino learners’ concepts of academic emotions include a wider range of emotion concepts, and may require additional characteristic dimensions, compared to what is being studied in current academic emotions research.     

Intersensory redundancy accelerates preverbal numerical competence

Intersensory redundancy can facilitate animal and human behavior in areas as diverse as rhythm discrimination, signal detection, orienting responses, maternal call learning, and associative learning. In the realm of numerical development, infants show similar sensitivity to numerical differences in both the visual and auditory modalities. Using a habituation-dishabituation paradigm, we ask here, whether providing redundant, multisensory numerical information allows six-month-old infants to make more precise numerical discriminations. Results indicate that perceptually redundant information improved preverbal numerical precision to a level of discrimination previously thought attainable only after additional months of development. Multimodal stimuli may thus boost abstract cognitive abilities such as numerical competence.     

Metric error monitoring in the numerical estimates

Recent studies have shown that participants can keep track of the magnitude and direction of their errors while reproducing target intervals (Akdoğan & Balcı, 2017) and producing numerosities with sequentially presented auditory stimuli (Duyan & Balcı, 2018). Although the latter work demonstrated that error judgments were driven by the number rather than the total duration of sequential stimulus presentations, the number and duration of stimuli are inevitably correlated in sequential presentations. This correlation empirically limits the purity of the characterization of “numerical error monitoring”. The current work expanded the scope of numerical error monitoring as a form of “metric error monitoring” to numerical estimation based on simultaneously presented array of stimuli to control for temporal correlates. Our results show that numerical error monitoring ability applies to magnitude estimation in these more controlled experimental scenarios underlining its ubiquitous nature.     

When quantity trumps number: discrimination experiments in cotton-top tamarins (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Saguinus oedipus</Emphasis>) and common marmosets (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Callithrix jacchus</Emphasis>)

The capacity for non-linguistic, numerical discrimination has been well characterized in non-human animals, with recent studies providing careful controls for non-numerical confounds such as continuous extent, density, and quantity. More poorly understood are the conditions under which animals use numerical versus non-numerical quantification, and the nature of the relation between these two systems. Here we test whether cotton-top tamarins and common marmosets can discriminate between two quantities on the basis of the amount of food rather than on number. In three experiments, we show that when choosing between arrays containing different numbers and sizes of food objects, both species based their decisions on the amount of food with only minor influences of numerical information. Further, we find that subjects successfully discriminated between two quantities differing by a 2:3 or greater ratio, which is consistent with the ratio limits found for numerical discrimination with this species. These studies demonstrate that non-human primates possess mechanisms that enable quantification of total amount, in addition to the numerical representations demonstrated in previous studies, with both types of quantification subject to similar processing limits.     

Temporal order judgment reveals how number magnitude affects visuospatial attention

The existence of spatial components in the mental representation of number magnitude has raised the question regarding the relation between numbers and spatial attention. We present six experiments in which this relation was examined using a temporal order judgment task to index attentional allocation. Results demonstrate that one important consequence of numerical processing is the automatic allocation of spatial attention, which in turn affects the perception of the temporal order of visual events. Given equal onset time, left-side stimuli are perceived to occur before right-side stimuli when a small number (1, 2) is processed, whereas right-side stimuli are perceived to occur before left-side stimuli when a larger number (8, 9) is processed. In addition, we show that this attentional effect is specific to quantity processing and does not generalize to non-numerical ordinal sequences.     

SNARC (spatial–numerical association of response codes) meets SPARC (spatial–pitch association of response codes): Automaticity and interdependency in compatibility effects

Concepts, including the mental number line, or addressing pitch as high and low, suggest that the spatial–numerical and spatial–pitch association of response codes (SNARC and SPARC) effects are domain-specific and thus independent. Alternatively, there may be dependencies between these effects, because they share common automatic or controlled decision mechanisms. In two experiments, participants were presented with spoken numbers in different pitches; their numerical value, pitch, and response compatibility were varied systematically. This allowed us to study SNARC and SPARC effects in a factorial design (see also Fischer, Riello, Giordano, &; Rusconi, 2013 Fischer, M. H., Riello, M., Giordano, B. L., &; Rusconi, E. (2013). Singing numbers?…?in cognitive space--a dual-task study of the link between pitch, space, and numbers. Topics in Cognitive Science, 5(2), 354–366. Retrieved from http://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12017[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Participants judged the stimuli on numerical magnitude, pitch, or parity (odd–even). In all tasks, the SNARC and SPARC effects had superadditive interactions. These were interpreted as both effects sharing a common mechanism. The task variation probes the mechanism: In the magnitude judgement task, numerical magnitude was explicit, whereas pitch was implicit; in the pitch judgement task, it was vice versa. In the parity judgement task, both dimensions were implicit. Regardless of whether they were implicit or explicit, both SNARC and SPARC effects occurred in all tasks. We concluded that by not requiring focal attention the common mechanism operates automatically.     

Early lexical development of children raised in institutional care in Russia

Children abandoned to institutions display a host of developmental delays, including those involving general cognition and language. The majority of published studies focus on children over 3 years of age; little is known about whether these delays may be detected earlier when children undergo rapid lexical development. To investigate the early language development of children raised in institutional settings in the Russian Federation, we compared a group of children in institutional care (n = 36; 8–35 months) to their age-matched peers raised in biological families, who have never been institutionalized (n = 72) using the Russian version of the CDI. The results suggest that institutionalization is associated with pronounced delays in children's early language development with large and robust effect sizes. Among children with a history of institutionalization, these delays are also associated with difficulties in Daily Living skills, communication, and socialization.     

Abstract morphemes and lexical representation: the CV-Skeleton in Arabic

Overlaps in form and meaning between morphologically related words have led to ambiguities in interpreting priming effects in studies of lexical organization. In Semitic languages like Arabic, however, linguistic analysis proposes that one of the three component morphemes of a surface word is the CV-Skeleton, an abstract prosodic unit coding the phonological shape of the surface word and its primary syntactic function, which has no surface phonetic content (McCarthy, J. J. (1981). A prosodic theory of non-concatenative morphology, Linguistic Inquiry, 12 373-418). The other two morphemes are proposed to be the vocalic melody, which conveys additional syntactic information, and the root, which defines meaning. In three experiments using masked, cross-modal, and auditory-auditory priming we examined the role of the vocalic melody and the CV-Skeleton as potential morphemic units in the processing and representation of Arabic words. Prime/target pairs sharing the vocalic melody but not the CV-Skeleton consistently failed to prime. In contrast, word pairs sharing only the CV-Skeleton primed reliably throughout, with the amount of priming being as large as that observed between word pattern pairs sharing both vocalic melody and CV-Skeleton. Priming between morphologically related words can be observed when there is no overlap either in meaning or in surface phonetic form.     

What makes counting count? Verbal and visuo-spatial contributions to typical and atypical number development

Williams Syndrome (WS) is marked by a relative strength in verbal cognition coupled with a serious impairment in non-verbal cognition. A strong deficit in numerical cognition has been anecdotally reported in this disorder; however, its nature has not been systematically investigated. Here, we tested 14 children with WS (mean age=7 years 2 months), 14 typically developing controls individually matched on visuo-spatial ability (mean age=3 years 5 months) as well as a larger group of typically developing controls (mean age=3 years 4 months) on two tasks to assess their understanding that counting determines the exact quantity of sets (cardinality principle). The understanding of the cardinality principle in children with WS is extremely delayed and only at the level predicted by their visuo-spatial MA. In this clinical group, only language accounted for a significant amount of the variance in cardinality understanding, whereas in the normal comparison group only visuo-spatial competence predicted the variance. The present findings suggest that visuo-spatial ability plays a greater role than language ability in the actual development of cardinality understanding in typically developing children, whereas the opposite obtains for the clinical group.