Crime scene actions and offender characteristics in a sample of Finnish stranger rapes

The crime scene actions employed by offenders in stranger rapes were analysed in relation to offender characteristics. Data were drawn from an official police database and consisted of stranger rapes occurring in Finland between 1992 and 2001 (n = 100). The structure of dichotomous variables derived through a content analysis of crime scene actions and offender characteristics were analysed with non‐metric multidimensional scaling (MDS). The first analysis revealed three separate action themes, with thematic emphases on Hostility, Involvement or Theft. The MDS‐solution for offender characteristics suggested four themes: Conventional; Psychiatric/Elderly; Criminal/Violent; and Criminal/Property. Each case was assigned to one of the themes or as a hybrid in order to analyse the associations between action themes and characteristics. The only significant association was found between the action theme, Theft and characteristics theme Criminal/Property. The results are discussed in relation to previous research. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

市场信息整合的创造性思维机制初探

采用个别测试和集体测试相结合的方法, 辅以个别访谈等技术, 运用自编的实验测试材料, 通过两个实验探索市场信息的量、关键启发信息的突出性等对商业投资问题的思维决策结果的影响, 初步探讨了市场信息整合的创造性思维过程和机制。实验结果发现, 提供给被试的市场信息越多, 信息整合的问题空间越大, 其整合过程难度越大; 在问题空间进行搜索时, 被试需要抓住关键启发信息形成一个初始意向, 明确进一步搜索的思维方向; 初始意向形成后, 被试须筛选必要信息、排除冗余信息, 并进一步整合有用信息, 使初始意向更加精致化, 最终形成一个“可盈利的完善的投资方案”。     

Keeping the end in mind: Preliminary brain and behavioral evidence for broad attention to endpoints in pre-linguistic infants

Infants must learn to carve events at their joints to best understand who is doing what to whom or whether an object or agent has reached its intended goal. Recent behavioral research demonstrates that infants do not see the world as a movie devoid of meaning, but rather as a series of sub-events that include agents moving in different manners along paths from sources to goals. This research uses behavioral and electrophysiological methods to investigate infants’ (10–14 months) attention to disruptions within relatively unfamiliar human action that does not rely on goal-objects to signal attainment (i.e., Olympic figure skating). Infants’ visual (Study 1, N = 48) and neurophysiological (Study 2, N = 21) responses to pauses at starting points, endpoints, and within-action locations were recorded. Both measures revealed differential responses to pauses at endpoints relative to pauses elsewhere in the action (i.e., starting point; within-action). Eye-tracking data indicated that infants’ visual attention was greater for events containing pauses at endpoints relative to events with pauses at starting points or within-actions. ERP activity reflecting perceptual processes in early-latency windows (<200 ms) and memory updating processes in long-latency windows (700−1000 ms) showed differential activation to disruptions at the end of a figure-skating action compared to other locations. Mid-latency windows (250−750 ms), in contrast, showed enhanced activation at frontal regions across conditions, suggesting electrophysiological resources may have been recruited to encode disruptions within unfamiliar dynamic human action. Combined, results hint at broad sensitivity to endpoints as a mechanism that supports infants’ proclivity for carving continuous and complex event streams into meaningful units. Findings have potential implications for language development as these units are mapped onto budding linguistic representations. We discuss empirical and methodological contributions for action perception and address potential merits and pitfalls of applying behavioral techniques in conjunction with brain-based measures to study infant development.     

Formalising a hypothesis for the development of anticipatory skill in time-constrained interceptive actions: Implications for the design of junior sport

When professional athletes strike a ball in tennis, cricket or baseball, the high temporal demands often necessitate the need to exploit pre-ball-flight information in order to anticipate the ball's trajectory. Despite the wealth of research probing anticipatory behaviour in sport, our understanding of when, how or why anticipatory skill develops is limited. In this article, we sought to formalise a hypothesis on the development of anticipatory skill. Using empirical temporal data from tennis, cricket and baseball, we propose that the temporal demands of the task dictate an athlete's propensity to anticipate. We then outline the implications of this hypothesis as it relates to junior sport. Notably, we question whether current playing dimensions in junior sport impose temporal demands that are sufficient to elicit anticipatory behaviour. Using tennis, cricket and baseball as examples, we illustrate differences in temporal demands between the junior and professional game and present implications for anticipation. Our discussion challenges the current junior sport experience as it relates to developing anticipatory skill.     

Children's kinematic false memories

ABSTRACT

Individuals misrecognise as seen the never-presented natural continuation of an action. These false memories derive from the running of kinematic mental models of the actions seen, which rest on motor inferences from implicit knowledge. We verified an implied prediction: kinematic false memories should be detectable even in children. The participants in our experiments first observed photos in which actors were about to perform actions on objects. At recognition they were presented with the original photos, plus (a) distractors representing the unseen natural continuation of the original actions, (b) distractors representing the beginning of other actions on the same objects and (c) distractors representing completed different actions on the same objects. In contrast to the original studies in which participants expressed their confidence in recognition, in our experiments the participants catgorirzed the action as seen or not seen. After replicating the original results with the dichotomous recognition task (Experiment 1), we detected spontaneous false memories also in children (Experiment 2).     

Design and evaluation of a touchscreen apparatus for operant research with pigeons

We developed a touchscreen apparatus for pigeons and conducted a series of experiments that assessed its utility for free-operant procedures. The apparatus incorporated an on-board Windows computer, an electromechanical interface, an amplified speaker, and the touchscreen. We found that merely projecting a virtual key on the screen was insufficient; too many pecks missed the key. Adding a visual target in the center of the key and providing visual feedback for on-key pecks both failed to improve response accuracy. Accuracy was improved by imposing a timeout after off-key pecks or providing a physical boundary around the key. With the physical boundary, response accuracy was comparable to that obtained with conventional plastic keys, and response acquisition via autoshaping also was comparable. Mixing the color elements of the screen's pixels produced color stimuli, but the colors did not function as pure wavelengths of light in tests of stimulus generalization. Both colors and geometric shapes functioned as discriminative stimuli in multiple schedules with variable-interval and extinction components or rich and lean fixed-ratio components. In general, our touchscreen apparatus is a viable alternative to conventional pigeon chambers and increases the experimenter's options for visual stimuli, auditory stimuli, and the number and location of response keys.     

Newborns modulate their crawling in response to their native language but not another language

Human newborns can propel themselves to their mother's breast when positioned skin to skin on her abdomen just after birth. For decades, researchers have considered this primitive crawling behavior a spinal reflex, immune to supra spinal control. However, recent research suggests that neonatal crawling is already responsive to visual and olfactory stimuli processed at a supra spinal level. Here we report that a few hours post birth, French newborns can also modulate their crawling in response to their native language – a source of information that is processed supra-spinally. The crawling patterns of 23 French-born newborns were recorded on video and via an infrared motion capture system during two randomly ordered 2-min trials. The newborns were secured on a mini skateboard to facilitate arm and leg movements during their crawling propulsion. They heard a repetitive sequence of the same sentences either in French, their native language, or in English, a rhythmically different and hence discriminable unfamiliar language, on each trial. In French, compared to English, crawling was enhanced, with significantly more arm and leg steps and significantly more and larger trunk rotations in the cephalo-caudal axis. Moreover, newborns rotated their heads and trunk toward the appropriate loud speaker when hearing French but not English. These preliminary findings suggest that newborn crawling is not a simple stereotyped reflex under spinal control, but a complex pattern that can be modulated in response to higher-order, supra-spinally processed stimuli. The findings open fascinating questions about the range of stimuli to which newborn crawling is responsive.     

Developmental links between executive function and emotion regulation in early toddlerhood

Developmental associations between poor executive function (EF) and problem behaviors in toddlerhood indicate that the interplay between cognition and affect begins very early in life (Hughes, Devine, Mesman, & Blair, 2020). However, very few longitudinal studies of toddlers have included direct measures of both EF and emotion regulation (ER). In addition, while models of ER highlight the importance of situational contexts (e.g., Miller, McDonough, Rosenblum, Sameroff, 2005), existing work is limited by a heavy reliance on lab-based observations of mother-child dyads. Addressing these twin gaps, the current study of 197 families included video-based ratings of ER in toddlers’ dyadic play with both mothers and fathers at each of two time-points (14- and 24-months), with parallel measures of EF being gathered in each home visit. Our cross-lagged analyses showed that EF at 14 months predicted ER at 24 months, but this association was limited to observations of toddlers with mothers. It was also asymmetric: ER at 14 months did not predict EF at 24 months. These findings support co-regulation models of early ER and highlight the predictive utility of very early individual differences in EF.