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.     

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.     

Conceptualizing bullying in adult professional football: A phenomenological exploration

ObjectivesThe aim of this study was to gain an in-depth insight into male professional footballers' perception of the concept of bullying and to explore the essences of this behavior within this context.Design and MethodSemi-structured interviews were conducted with 18 adult male professional football players in the UK. Data were analyzed in accordance with the principles of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis.ResultsParticipants highlighted that key themes within Olewus' (1993) seminal definition of bullying are relevant to professional football such as repetition, power, abuse and harm doing. Notably, there were variations in footballers' views of the constituents of these themes which were explained by divergent perceptions of how the football context shaped these components of bullying. It was evident however, that certain common elements of the football environment, such as its inherent masculinity, identity conforming nature and authoritarianism helped to contextualize the players' conceptualizations of bullying.ConclusionsWhile some of the identified themes mirrored classic definitions of bullying, this concept was articulated in an individually nuanced, context dependent fashion. These findings advance bullying literature by demonstrating how professional football shapes perceptions of this concept, while highlighting the importance of contextually tailored intervention program to address bullying.     

Termination of information evaluation in auditing

A screening decision is about whether a candidate fails to meet a decision maker's criteria and must be rejected, or whether it meets the criteria and can be accepted. Image theory contends that screening decisions are based on a simple, noncompensatory process that focuses solely upon the candidate's negative attributes. This contention has received empirical support in a job screening context in which students role-played a hypothetical person seeking a job. But how robust is image theory's prediction? The present work was done in the context of professional auditors screening prospective clients. The client screening context is a particularly interesting setting to test the implications of image theory. If auditors reject clients with negative attributes, as predicted by image theory, this will indicate that some clients are being denied access to a socially useful service. Further, auditors can accept prospective clients with negative attributes and simply adjust the audit plan and fees to compensate for the client's riskiness. Thus, it is not clear that the preliminary findings obtained in a job screening context will generalize to the audit context. On the other hand, results consistent with the image theory prediction would suggest a robust theory. Even in the client screening context, where auditors used their own criteria to screen prospective clients, we found overwhelming support for image theory's view of screening. The results indicate the potential payoffs of image theory as a robust framework to address audit and other substantive problems. Implications of a noncompensatory, negative oriented, client screening strategy are discussed.     

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.