提取抑制:来自听觉定向遗忘的证据

两个实验采用语音材料考察了词表表达方式下听觉通道的定向遗忘效应以及相应的机制。实验一中,采用2（组别）×2（词表）混合实验设计获得了听觉通道的定向遗忘效应,但是较为模糊,部分数据显示可能是额外的被试个体差异导致的;实验二中,采用2（性别）×2（词表）×2（条件）×2（科系）混合实验设计,严格控制了被试个体差异等因素,获得了较清晰的定向遗忘效应,且支持提取抑制理论。     

关于克里普克模态性的一个自然主义解释

The Kripkean metaphysical modality (i.e. possibility and necessity) is one of the most important concepts in contemporary analytic philosophy and is the basis of many metaphysical speculations. These metaphysical speculations frequently commit to entities that do not belong to this physical universe, such as merely possible entities, abstract entities, mental entities or qualities not realizable by the physical, which seems to contradict naturalism or physicalism. This paper proposes a naturalistic interpretation of the Kripkean modality, as a naturalist’s response to these metaphysical speculations. It will show that naturalism can accommodate the Kripkean metaphysical modality. In particular, it will show that naturalism can help to resolve the puzzles surrounding Kripke’s a posteriori necessary propositions and a priori contingent propositions. __________ Translated from Zhexue yanjiu 哲学研究 (Philosophical Researches), 2008, (1): 18–26     

Differences in preschoolers’ and adults’ use of generics about novel animals and artifacts: A window onto a conceptual divide

Children and adults commonly produce more generic noun phrases (e.g., birds fly) about animals than artifacts. This may reflect differences in participants’ generic knowledge about specific animals/artifacts (e.g., dogs/chairs), or it may reflect a more general distinction. To test this, the current experiments asked adults and preschoolers to generate properties about novel animals and artifacts (Experiment 1: real animals/artifacts; Experiments 2 and 3: matched pairs of maximally similar, novel animals/artifacts). Data demonstrate that even without prior knowledge about these items, the likelihood of producing a generic is significantly greater for animals than artifacts. These results leave open the question of whether this pattern is the product of experience and learned associations or instead a set of early-developing theories about animals and artifacts.     

Bias for consonantal information over vocalic information in 30-month-olds: cross-linguistic evidence from French and English

Using a name-based categorization task, Nazzi found in 2005 that French-learning 20-month-olds can make use of one-feature consonantal contrasts between new labels but fail to do so with one-feature vocalic contrasts. This asymmetry was interpreted as developmental evidence for the proposal that consonants play a more important role than vowels at the lexical level. In the current study using the same task, we first show that by 30 months French-learning infants can make use of one-feature vocalic contrasts (e.g., /pize/–/pyze/). Second, we show that in a situation where infants must neglect either a consonantal one-feature change or a vocalic one-feature change (e.g., match a /pide/ with either a /tide/ or a /pyde/), both French- and English-learning 30-month-olds choose to neglect the vocalic change rather than the consonantal change. We argue that these results suggest that by 30 months of age, infants still give less weight to vocalic information than to consonantal information in a lexically related task even though they are able to process fine vocalic information.     

Verbal predicates foster conscious recollection but not familiarity of a task-irrelevant perceptual feature – An ERP study

Research on the effects of perceptual manipulations on recognition memory has suggested that (a) recollection is selectively influenced by task-relevant information and (b) familiarity can be considered perceptually specific. The present experiment tested divergent assumptions that (a) perceptual features can influence conscious object recollection via verbal code despite being task-irrelevant and that (b) perceptual features do not influence object familiarity if study is verbal-conceptual. At study, subjects named objects and their presentation colour; this was followed by an old/new object recognition test. Event-related potentials (ERP) showed that a study-test manipulation of colour impacted selectively on the ERP effect associated with recollection, while a size manipulation showed no effect. It is concluded that (a) verbal predicates generated at study are potent episodic memory agents that modulate recollection even if the recovered feature information is task-irrelevant and (b) commonly found perceptual match effects on familiarity critically depend on perceptual processing at study.     

阿尔兹海默病患者中的范畴特异性语义记忆损伤

脑损伤可导致范畴特异性语义损伤, 即某一范畴的语义记忆选择性损伤或损伤更严重。阿尔兹海默病患者中的范畴特异性语义损伤可能来自不同范畴之间在熟悉度、词频、获得年龄、视觉复杂度、语义距离、加工要求以及所涉及的主要语义特征等方面的差别。然而, 有无生命范畴本身是否也是一个来源, 尚不清楚。进一步的研究不仅需要整合范畴途径和特征途径, 并区分语义记忆的存储和通达, 而且需要考查疾病严重程度如何影响语义记忆损伤模式。     

Up by upwest: Is slope like north?

Terrain slope can be used to encode the location of a goal. However, this directional information may be encoded using a conceptual north (i.e., invariantly with respect to the environment), or in an observer-relative fashion (i.e., varying depending on the direction one faces when learning the goal). This study examines which representation is used, whether the sensory modality in which slope is encoded (visual, kinaesthetic, or both) influences representations, and whether use of slope varies for men and women. In a square room, with a sloped floor explicitly pointed out as the only useful cue, participants encoded the corner in which a goal was hidden. Without direct sensory access to slope cues, participants used a dial to point to the goal. For each trial, the goal was hidden uphill or downhill, and the participants were informed whether they faced uphill or downhill when pointing. In support of observer-relative representations, participants pointed more accurately and quickly when facing concordantly with the hiding position. There was no effect of sensory modality, providing support for functional equivalence. Sex did not interact with the findings on modality or reference frame, but spatial measures correlated with success on the slope task differently for each sex.     

Episodic retrieval processes take place automatically in auditory negative priming

Episodic retrieval processes involved in negative priming have been argued to be susceptible to the proportion of attended repetition trials. The more trials with the same prime and probe response, the more beneficial should it be to retrieve the prime episode, particularly its response. Retrieval of the prime episode, however, is task-inappropriate for ignored repetition trials, leading to negative priming. Correspondingly, visual negative priming increases with the proportion of attended repetition trials. We tested whether the same is true for the auditory modality. Three attended repetition proportion groups (0–25–50%) showed the same amount of negative priming. All groups committed more prime response errors in ignored repetition than in control trials, implying that prime response retrieval took place. Thus, retrieval processes in auditory negative priming appear to be automatic and cannot be influenced as easily as in the visual domain. In Experiment 2, the proportion of ignored repetition trials was manipulated (25–50–75%) to test whether auditory negative priming can be strategically manipulated at all. Similar to the visual modality negative priming was reduced with increasing proportion of ignored repetition trials. Differences between visual and auditory short-term memory are discussed to account for the results.     

The other modality: Auditory stimuli in language switching

Language switching studies typically implement visual stimuli and visual language cues to trigger a concept and a language response, respectively. In the present study we set out to generalise this to another stimulus modality by investigating language switching with auditory stimuli next to visual stimuli. The results showed that switch costs can be obtained with both auditory and visual stimuli. Yet, switch costs were relatively larger with visual stimuli than with auditory stimuli. Both methodological and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.