How are bodies special? Effects of body features on spatial reasoning

Embodied views of cognition argue that cognitive processes are influenced by bodily experience. This implies that when people make spatial judgments about human bodies, they bring to bear embodied knowledge that affects spatial reasoning performance. Here, we examined the specific contribution to spatial reasoning of visual features associated with the human body. We used two different tasks to elicit distinct visuospatial transformations: object-based transformations, as elicited in typical mental rotation tasks, and perspective transformations, used in tasks in which people deliberately adopt the egocentric perspective of another person. Body features facilitated performance in both tasks. This result suggests that observers are particularly sensitive to the presence of a human head and body, and that these features allow observers to quickly recognize and encode the spatial configuration of a figure. Contrary to prior reports, this facilitation was not related to the transformation component of task performance. These results suggest that body features facilitate task components other than spatial transformation, including the encoding of stimulus orientation.     

求偶动机对男性冒险行为倾向的影响

基于风险行为的性选择理论, 通过内隐启动的方法探讨了求偶线索与奖赏线索对两性风险行为报告的影响。研究结果显示, 男性接触求偶线索, 与接触奖赏线索相比, 更有可能进行娱乐领域、健康领域与社会领域的风险行为活动; 而女性接触奖赏线索后, 与求偶线索相比, 更有可能会从事社会领域的风险行为活动; 两性接触求偶线索与奖赏线索后都较少可能从事经济领域的风险行为活动。这些结果符合性选择理论, 说明与求偶有关的信息线索能够诱导男性进行高风险活动, 因为在进化过程中冒险行为可以作为好基因的标志增加男性获得配偶的机会。这些结果还揭示了, 求偶动机对男性冒险行为的诱发作用远胜于外部动机(如金钱奖赏), 因为求偶是人类在长期进化过程中形成的本能需求。     

用户换位型思维的形成及对机会信念绩效的影响

用户换位型思维是创业者进行机会识别并应对市场竞争的重要因素,但已有研究忽视了其模式、形成机理及对机会信念绩效的影响。针对此问题,基于结构映射理论与注意力参与模型解构用户换位型思维模式,包括吸收式、归纳式、启发式和分析式;然后,从“个体-用户”双元视角探讨与用户有关的先验知识、灵活的角色导向、认知复杂性以及用户需求不确定性和碎片化等因素对用户换位型思维形成的正向影响;最后,以机会信念形成速度和创新性为绩效指标,阐释用户换位型思维模式对机会信念形成绩效的影响,并考察适应新的信息环境和调用自身知识结构的认知管理策略对用户换位型思维模式与机会信念形成绩效的调节作用。研究结论将丰富用户换位型思维的内涵,拓展结构映射理论与注意力参与模型的解释范围,也为指导创业者运用用户换位型思维去识别机会提供参考,对创业者思考与理解用户有重要意义。     

Alexithymia and risk preferences: Predicting risk behaviour across decision domains

Risk‐taking is a critical health factor as it plays a key role in several diseases and is related to a number of health risk factors. The aim of the present study is to investigate the role of alexithymia in predicting risk preferences across decision domains. One hundred and thirteen participants filled out an alexithymia scale (Toronto Alexithymia Scale—TAS‐20), impulsivity and venturesomeness measures (I7 scale), and—1 month later—the Cognitive Appraisal of Risky Events (CARE questionnaire). The hierarchical regression analyses showed that alexithymia positively predicted risk preferences in two domains: aggressive/illegal behaviour and irresponsible academic/work behaviour. The results also highlighted a significant association of the alexithymia facet, externally oriented thinking (EOT), with risky sexual activities. EOT also significantly predicted aggressive/illegal behaviour and irresponsible academic/work behaviour. The alexithymia facet, Difficulty Identifying Feelings, significantly predicted irresponsible academic/work behaviour. The results of the present study provide interesting insights into the connection between alexithymia and risk preferences across different decision domains. Implications for future studies and applied interventions are discussed.     

Difficult Differences: A Socio‐cultural Analysis of How Diversity Can Enable and Inhibit Creativity

The relationship between diversity and creativity can be seen as paradoxical. A diversity of perspectives should be advantageous for collaborative creativity, yet its benefits are often offset by adverse social processes. One suggestion for overcoming these negative effects is perspective taking. We compared four dyads with low scores on trait perspective taking with four dyads who were high on trait perspective taking on a brainstorming task followed by reconstructive interviews. Trait‐based perspective taking was strongly associated with greater creativity. However, contrary with expectation, interactional perspective taking behaviors (including questioning, signaling understanding, repairing) were associated with lesser creativity. The dyads that generated the fewest ideas were most likely to get stuck within ideational domains, struggling to understand one‐another, having to elaborate and justify their ideas more. In contrast, the dyads that generated many ideas were more likely to recognize each other's ideas as valuable without extensive justification or negotiation. We suggest that perspective taking is crucially important for mediating diversity in the generation of new ideas not only because it enables understanding the perspective of the other, but because it entails an atmosphere of tolerance, playfulness, and mutual recognition.     

Reasoning and normative beliefs: not too sophisticated

Does reasoning to a certain conclusion necessarily involve a normative belief in support of that conclusion? In many recent discussions of the nature of reasoning, such a normative belief condition is rejected. One main objection is that it requires too much conceptual sophistication and thereby excludes certain reasoners, such as small children. I argue that this objection is mistaken. Its advocates overestimate what is necessary for grasping the normative concepts required by the condition, while seriously underestimating the importance of such concepts for our most fundamental agential capacities. Underlying the objection is the observation that normative thoughts do not necessarily cross our minds during reasoning. I show that proponents of the normative belief condition can accommodate this observation by taking the required normative belief to guide the reasoning process and offer a novel account of what such guidance consists in.     

Evaluating the Impact of Careless Responding on Aggregated-Scores: To Filter Unmotivated Examinees or Not?

When examinees' test-taking motivation is questionable, practitioners must determine whether careless responding is of practical concern and if so, decide on the best approach to filter such responses. As there has been insufficient research on these topics, the objectives of this study were to: a) evaluate the degree of underestimation in the true mean when careless responses are present, and b) compare the effectiveness of two filtering procedures in purifying biased aggregated-scores. Results demonstrated that: a) the true mean was underestimated by around 0.20 SDs if the total amount of careless responses exceeded 6.25%, 12.5%, and 12.5% for easy, moderately difficult, and difficult tests, respectively, and b) listwise deleting data from unmotivated examinees artificially inflated the true mean by as much as .42 SDs when ability was related to careless responding. Findings from this study have implications for when and how practitioners should handle careless responses for group-based low-stakes assessments.     

Do Questions Get Infants Talking? Infant Vocal Responses to Questions and Declaratives in Maternal Speech

Maternal questions play a crucial role in early language acquisition by virtue of their special grammatical, prosodic and lexical forms, and their abundance in the input. Infants are able to discriminate questions from other sentence types and produce rising intonations in their own requests. This study examined whether caregiver questions were related to the quantity of infant vocalizations. Thirty‐six infants aged 10 and 14 months participated in a laboratory play session with their mothers. In separate blocks, mothers were instructed to ask questions and to refrain from asking questions. Both block‐level and utterance‐level analyses found no evidence that maternal questions affected the amount of infant‐response vocalizations. Mothers of 14‐month‐olds (but not 10‐month‐olds) tended to repeat questions. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Adolescent risk-taking is predicted by individual differences in cognitive control over emotional,but not non-emotional,response conflict

While much research on adolescent risk behaviour has focused on the development of prefrontal self-regulatory mechanisms, prior studies have elicited mixed evidence of a relationship between individual differences in the capacity for self-regulation and individual differences in risk taking. To explain these inconsistent findings, it has been suggested that the capacity for self-regulation may be, for most adolescents, adequately mature to produce adaptive behaviour in non-affective, “cold” circumstances, but that adolescents have a more difficult time exerting control in affective, “hot” contexts. To further explore this claim, the present study examined individual differences in self-control in the face of affective and non-affective response conflict, and examined whether differences in the functioning of cognitive control processes under these different conditions was related to risk taking. Participants completed a cognitive Stroop task, an emotional Stroop task, and a risky driving task known as the Stoplight game. Regression analyses showed that performance on the emotional Stroop task predicted laboratory risk-taking in the driving task, whereas performance on the cognitive Stroop task did not exhibit the same trend. This pattern of results is consistent with theories of adolescent risk-taking that emphasise the impacts of affective contextual influences on the ability to enact effective cognitive control.     

4～6岁幼儿经济博弈中的信任行为及其影响因素

本研究通过两个实验考察幼儿是否在博弈任务中表现出对陌生人的信任行为,同时考察可能对幼儿的信任产生影响的因素,包括个体认知因素(观点采择)和环境因素(负性反馈和代际传递)。研究对189名4~6岁幼儿及其家长进行多种任务的测量。实验一通过修订Evans和Krugger(2011)的信任博弈任务,考察幼儿在匿名信任博弈中的信任行为,结果发现与4岁幼儿相比,6岁幼儿对他人的信任更低;实验二考察了幼儿信任的影响因素,结果发现,幼儿在得到负性反馈结果后再次进行信任博弈任务时,他们对他人的信任比前次有所降低,6岁幼儿对他人返还数量的预期比4岁幼儿下降程度更大;6岁幼儿的信任行为(第一次给出意愿)与观点采择能力显著相关;6岁幼儿的信任水平与家长的信任水平显著相关。