Rhythmic priming across effector systems: A randomized controlled trial with Parkinson’s disease patients

This study investigated the immediate effects of auditory-motor entrainment across effector systems by examining whether Rhythmic Auditory Stimulation training of arm or finger movements would modulate gait speed. Forty-one participants with idiopathic Parkinson’s Disease were randomly assigned to 3 groups. Participants in the finger-tapping group tapped in synchrony with a metronome set to 20% faster pace than the pre-training walking cadence, whereas participants in the other group were asked to swing both arms in an alternating motion in synchrony with the metronome. Participants in the control condition did not receive training. To assess gait parameters pre- and post-training, participants walked on a 14-meter flat walkway at his/her preferred walking cadence with no auditory cueing. Results indicated that there was a significant increase in gait velocity after the finger tapping training (p < .005), whereas no differences were observed in the arm swing (p = .802) and in the control conditions (p = .525). Similarly, there were significant changes in gait cadence post-training in the finger tapping group (p < .005), but not after arm swing training (p = .879) or control (p = .759). There were no significant changes in stride length post-training in none of the groups. These findings suggest that auditory-motor entrainment in one effector system may prime a second effector system. Interestingly, however, the priming effect on gait was only observed in the finger tapping condition and not with synchronized arm swing movements. These findings have significant implications for motor rehabilitation and open new avenues for further investigation of the mechanisms underlying cross-effector coupling.     

基于因果报应观念的认知调查与厚黑行为抑制效果分析

因果报应是中国传统文化的一个重要观念,至今仍然影响着当下社会大众。研究通过问卷调查来了解社会大众对因果报应的认知与理解,并进一步通过启动实验考察因果报应启动对厚黑行为的抑制效果,研究结果表明:(1)社会大众对因果报应的认知与接纳是一种客观存在,55.83%的被试知晓因果报应,33.81%的被试表示相信因果报应的存在,10.09%的被试表示因果报应很灵验,23.67%的被试表示因果报应影响自己的行为处世,22.96%的被试表示会用因果报应提示教育身边的亲友。(2)因果报应材料的启动能显著地抑制厚黑行为,中性材料的启动不能抑制厚黑行为,因果报应启动的内容与厚黑人格对厚黑行为具有交互效应,因果报应启动能更显著地抑制高厚黑人格被试的厚黑行为。基于社会治理的视角,社会公众对因果报应的接纳成就了其参与社会治理的可能性,因果报应内蕴的道德自律、匡扶正义、累德向善等价值内核成就了其参与社会治理的效用性,因果报应观念应建设性发掘和创造性地转化为当下的社会治理所用。     

Interactions of reading and semantics along the ventral visual processing stream

Converging evidence supports a distributed-plus-hub view of semantic processing, in which there are distributed modular semantic sub-systems (e.g., for shape, colour, and action) connected to an amodal semantic hub. Furthermore, object semantic processing of colour and shape, and lexical reading and identification, are processed mainly along the ventral stream, while action semantic processing occurs mainly along the dorsal stream. In Experiment 1, participants read a prime word that required imagining either the object or action referent, and then named a lexical word target. In Experiments 2 and 3, participants performed a lexical decision task (LDT) with the same targets as in Experiment 1, in the presence of foils that were legal nonwords (NW; Experiment 2) or pseudohomophones (PH; Experiment 3). Semantic priming was similar in effect size regardless of prime type for naming, but was greater for object primes than action primes for the LDT with PH foils, suggesting a shared-stream advantage when the task demands focus on orthographic lexical processing. These experiments extend the distributed-plus-hub model, and provide a novel paradigm for further research.     

Does religious priming increase the prosocial behaviour of a Japanese sample in an anonymous economic game?

We examined the effect of religious priming on a Japanese sample in an anonymous dictator game whereas previous studies on religious priming on prosociality had mainly been conducted within Western contexts. The current study attempted to examine whether religion increases prosocial behaviour in a Japanese sample through the replication of ‘God is Watching You’ (Shariff & Norenzayan, 2007) where it was found that participants primed with religion‐related words and secular justice‐related words behaved more prosocially than participants primed with neutral words in an anonymous dictator game. The current experiment was conducted with Japanese students (n = 106) to examine whether the results of the original study could be applied to Japanese people. The results showed that among the three priming conditions (control, religion, secular justice), there was no difference in the amount of money participants allocated to anonymous strangers, although in the secular justice priming condition, theists allocated more money than atheists. The results might be due to the fact that the religious priming words used in the original study did not precisely activate the propositional network of religion that Japanese participants have. More culture‐specific studies are necessary to examine how religious priming works for non‐Westerners.     

Does translation involve structural priming?

When asked to translate utterances, people might merely make sure that their translations have the same meaning as the source, but they might also maintain aspects of sentence form across languages. We report two experiments in which English–German and German–English bilinguals (without specialist translator training) repeated German ditransitive sentences whose meaning was compatible with more than one grammatical form or translated them into English. Participants almost invariably repeated the sentences accurately, thereby retaining the grammatical structure. Importantly, Experiment 1 found that they tended to repeat grammatical form across languages. Experiment 2 included a condition with sentences that had no grammatical equivalent form in English; here participants tended to persist in the order of thematic roles. We argue that cross-linguistic structural priming plays a major role in the act of translation.     

颜色字词的识别真的无需注意力资源的参与?——来自Stroop范式的证据

3个实验采用颜色词、颜色词同音词以及颜色语义联想词作为启动词,使启动词的语义和颜色实现时空分离、启动词处于非空间注意焦点位置、降低启动词可视度的情境下,考察具有自动化加工特征的启动词是否受到注意力资源的制约以及启动词在获得不同数量的注意力资源时其自动化程度是否存在显著的差异。结果发现:(1)注意力资源实质性地决定着自动化加工能否顺利进行,具有自动激活特征的刺激在无法获得注意力资源时,自动化加工过程终止。(2)可用的注意力资源数量调控着自动化加工的效率和语义提取的效果,可用的注意力资源数量越多,对启动刺激的语义加工越完善,对目标刺激的促进效果也越有效。本研究结果支持注意力敏感模型关于自动化加工受认知系统的支持和配置才能完成的假设。     

“Pushing the Button While Pushing the Argument”: Motor Priming of Abstract Action Language

In a behavioral study we analyzed the influence of visual action primes on abstract action sentence processing. We thereby aimed at investigating mental motor involvement during processes of meaning constitution of action verbs in abstract contexts. In the first experiment, participants executed either congruous or incongruous movements parallel to a video prime. In the second experiment, we added a no‐movement condition. After the execution of the movement, participants rendered a sensibility judgment on action sentence targets. It was expected that congruous movements would facilitate both concrete and abstract action sentence comprehension in comparison to the incongruous and the no‐movement condition. Results in Experiment 1 showed a concreteness effect but no effect of motor priming. Experiment 2 revealed a concreteness effect as well as an interaction effect of the sentence and the movement condition. The findings indicate an involvement of motor processes in abstract action language processing on a behavioral level.     

Mothers’ Attributions About Child Misbehavior: Can Situational Suggestions Change General Perceptions?

Mothers’ attributions about children’s misbehavior were experimentally manipulated to examine causal relationships among attributions, mood, and behavior and assess whether suggestion can change mothers’ general perceptions. Forty mothers of children aged 33 to 71 months were primed with dysfunctional child-referent (child responsible) or environment-referent (situation caused) attributions before a parent-child interaction. Mothers in the dysfunctional child-referent condition placed greater responsibility on children, reported less positive mood and endorsed more overly reactive discipline, and their children displayed more negative mood and misbehavior. The experimental manipulation also affected mothers’ general child attributions. Understanding how attributions form and change has implications for parenting interventions.     

Affect in the eyes: explicit and implicit evaluations

The present study investigated whether another individual’s gaze direction influences an observer’s affective responses. In Experiment 1, subjective self-ratings and an affective priming paradigm were employed to examine how participants explicitly and implicitly, respectively, evaluated the affective valence of direct gaze, averted gaze, and closed eyes. The explicit self-ratings showed that participants evaluated closed eyes more positively than direct gaze. However, the implicit priming task showed an inverse pattern of results indicating that direct gaze was automatically evaluated more positively than closed eyes were. Experiment 2 confirmed that the opposite patterns of results between the two tasks were not due to differences in presentation times of the gaze stimuli. The results provide evidence for automatic affective reactions to eye gaze and indicate a dissociation between explicit and implicit affective evaluations of eyes and gaze direction.     

Scrutinizing the Emotional Nature of Intuitive Coherence Judgments

Dual‐system models propose that cognitive processing can occur either intuitively or deliberately. Unlike deliberate decision strategies, intuitive ones are assumed to have an emotional component attached to the decision process. We tested if intuitive decisions are indeed accompanied by an emotional response while deliberate decisions are not. Specifically, we conducted a psychophysiological study in which participants were instructed to decide either intuitively or deliberately if three simultaneously presented words were semantically coherent or incoherent (triad task). The degree of emotionality of these two decision strategies (intuitive vs. deliberate) was compared using changes in electrodermal activity (EDA) and the reaction time (RT) effect of an affective priming paradigm as primary measurements. Based on a valence‐arousal model, our results revealed that intuitive and deliberate judgments do not differ as to their emotional valence but that they do differ in emotional arousal. Most notably, sympathetic activation during intuitive judgments was significantly lower compared to sympathetic activation during deliberate judgments. Our results reflect that a relaxed state of mind—manifested in low sympathetic activity—could underlie the holistic processing that is assumed to facilitate the proliferation of semantic associations during coherence judgments. This suggests that coherence judgments made under an (instructed) intuitive decision mode have a specific psychophysiological signature and that arousal is the differentiating component between intuitive and deliberate decision strategies. © 2016 The Authors Journal of Behavioral Decision Making Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.