Pauses in elementary school children's verbatim and gist free recall of a story

The aim of the research was to explore the function of pauses in children's oral verbatim and gist-based free recall, assuming that pauses indicate cognitive processing. The main question guiding this research was whether verbatim and gist recall constituted two different ways of cognitive processing associated with different time patterns of speech. Elementary school children (n = 180) between the ages of 8 and 10 years heard a story and were then instructed to either retell the story verbatim or retell its gist. They orally recalled the story for the first time immediately after hearing the story and again 1 week later. The results confirmed the main hypothesis of independence of verbatim and gist traces in that mean pause lengths were longer when verbatim retrieval was asked for as compared to gist retrieval. High correct gist recall was characterized by more and shorter pauses, indicating fluent retrieval.     

Word meaning and the control of eye fixation: semantic competitor effects and the visual world paradigm

When participants are presented simultaneously with spoken language and a visual display depicting objects to which that language refers, participants spontaneously fixate the visual referents of the words being heard [Cooper, R. M. (1974). The control of eye fixation by the meaning of spoken language: A new methodology for the real-time investigation of speech perception, memory, and language processing. Cognitive Psychology, 6(1), 84-107; Tanenhaus, M. K., Spivey-Knowlton, M. J., Eberhard, K. M., & Sedivy, J. C. (1995). Integration of visual and linguistic information in spoken language comprehension. Science, 268(5217), 1632-1634]. We demonstrate here that such spontaneous fixation can be driven by partial semantic overlap between a word and a visual object. Participants heard the word ‘piano’ when (a) a piano was depicted amongst unrelated distractors; (b) a trumpet was depicted amongst those same distractors; and (c), both the piano and trumpet were depicted. The probability of fixating the piano and the trumpet in the first two conditions rose as the word ‘piano’ unfolded. In the final condition, only fixations to the piano rose, although the trumpet was fixated more than the distractors. We conclude that eye movements are driven by the degree of match, along various dimensions that go beyond simple visual form, between a word and the mental representations of objects in the concurrent visual field.     

Sustained attention to local and global target features is different: Performance and tympanic membrane temperature

Vision researchers have investigated the differences between global and local feature perception. No one has, however, examined the role of global and local feature discrimination in sustained attention tasks. In this experiment participants performed a sustained attention task requiring either global or local letter target discriminations or watched the same displays without any work imperative. Reaction time to targets was slower when global feature discriminations were required than when local feature discriminations were required. Tympanic membrane temperature (TMT) was utilized in this study as an index of cerebral activation. Participants in the global letter detection condition had elevated post-task right TMT, indicative of reduced cerebral activation in the right hemisphere, in comparison to participants in the local letter detection or no-work imperative conditions. Both the performance and physiological results of this study indicate increased cognitive fatigue when global feature discriminations are required.     

The role of landmarks in cotton-top tamarin spatial foraging: evidence for geometric and non-geometric features

We report experiments on captive cotton-top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus) designed to explore two components of spatial foraging. First, do tamarins have the capacity to extract geometric information concerning the spatial relationship between a landmark and a piece of food located above or below it? Second, when tamarins use a landmark to find a target location, what non-geometric features of the landmark do they encode? To explore these problems, we created an artificial jungle environment and trained subjects to find food either above or below a target object (i.e., landmark). Once subjects successfully located the food, we transformed various features associated with the landmark, including its color, orientation, and shape; we also manipulated the landmark-food reward distance, the overall shape of the jungle, and the number and position of landmarks. Results showed that the tamarins' success in finding the food reward was not affected by landmark color, orientation, number, or overall shape of the jungle, suggesting that with respect to the particular test conditions, these features are not relevant to the representation of a landmark. Subjects also generalized to novel landmark-food distances, suggesting that they had integrated geometric (i.e., above/below) with non-geometric (i.e., color/shape) features. Performance was negatively affected by changes to the shape of the landmark, indicating that this feature is critical to the representation of a landmark. Accepted after revision: 7 August 2001 Electronic Publication     

"Not just right experiences": perfectionism,obsessive-compulsive features and general psychopathology

Individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) frequently report uncomfortable sensations of things not being just right ("not just right experiences"; NJREs) and a need to ritualize until they quiet these sensations. However, very little work has been conducted to empirically examine the nature and characteristics of this phenomenon. In this paper, we present two studies that systematically examine NJREs in large undergraduate samples. In Study 1, NJREs were shown to be related to both OCD features and maladaptive domains of perfectionism. In Study 2, NJREs were again significantly related to OCD features. Further, NJREs were shown to have particularly strong relationships with specific OCD symptom clusters (e.g., checking, ordering). Finally, NJREs were significantly more strongly correlated with features of OCD than symptoms from other domains of psychopathology (e.g., social anxiety, trait anxiety, worry, depression). General conclusions are drawn, and future directions are discussed.     

梁启超《管子》研究的特色与影响

梁启超是清末民初的著名学者,一身兼有旧学和新学影响,在《管子》研究上也有所建树。他的《管子》研究,正处于变法维新时期,他以今文经学的宗旨为指导思想,通过对中西方制度等方面的对比,试图找到改变中国命运的一剂良方。《管子》是礼法并重、制度以刚柔相济为要,故而十分符合梁启超的初衷。他结合自己的学术研究,通过《管子》书来评价管仲,并突显了《管子》的经济与法治思想,这是其《管子》研究的特色,并在《管子》真伪的讨论、义理的研究和管子形象的提升上对后世产生深远的影响。     

叠音品牌名称对消费者知觉和偏好的影响

品牌名称是重要的品牌资产,在传递品牌价值、构建品牌形象和凸显品牌特征的过程中起到关键作用。以往研究发现,品牌名称的语义特征和语音特征都会对消费者知觉和偏好产生影响,但少有研究考察品牌名称语音特征中叠音的作用。本研究将从婴儿图式的角度,基于刻板印象内容模型,通过4个实验考察叠音品牌名称对消费者知觉和偏好的影响,并检验元音特征和产品类型的调节作用。研究结果表明:(1)与非叠音品牌名称相比,叠音品牌名称会让消费者觉得该品牌更像婴儿,进而感觉该品牌更加温暖,但是能力更低。(2)叠音对于消费者温暖知觉的影响受到元音特征的调节。当品牌名称中含有前元音时,叠音对于温暖知觉的影响会削弱。(3)叠音对于消费者偏好的影响受到产品类型的调节。对于享乐型产品,消费者更偏好叠音品牌名称;对于实用型产品,消费者更偏好非叠音品牌名称。本文为品牌名称的设计提供了指导,同时也丰富了婴儿图式和刻板印象内容模型的理论内涵。     

Lexically-driven syntactic priming

Syntactic priming studies demonstrate that exposure to a particular syntactic structure leads speakers to reproduce the same structure in subsequent utterances. Explanations for this phenomenon rely on either the retrieval of morphosyntactic features associated with the verb in the prime sentence or the preservation of the mapping between message and word sequences in the prime sentence. Two experiments test the featural account of syntactic priming. We used single word primes to investigate the dative alternation in German (Experiment 1) and Dutch (Experiment 2). Native speakers read ditransitive verbs that are restricted either to the prepositional (dative) or double object construction, followed by pictures that can be described with either structure. We find that a single verb in isolation is sufficient to bias speakers' production preferences supporting lexically-driven accounts of syntactic priming.