Attention AND mentalizing? Reframing a debate on social orienting of attention

ABSTRACT

People spontaneously attend where others are looking. Recently, it has been debated whether such orienting behaviour is supported by domain-general attentional processes, that involve reading the cues’ directional properties, or by processes that involve attributing mental states to agents. In this Opinion, we summarize key evidence for each position and argue that instead of favouring one or the other view, the available data point to an integrated framework in which the attribution of mental states and the operation of domain-general attentional processes both contribute to social orienting. In addition to providing a novel perspective, this view opens several fruitful future research avenues aimed at understanding how the two processes act together to influence cognitions and behaviour.     

Birth rank as a determinant of academic achievement:results from a European survey of primary school children

ABSTRACT

The present study investigates the relationship between birth rank and academic achievement of children in a cross-country study to examine whether firstborn children perform better in primary school than later-born children when controlling for individual, social and parental characteristics. Data were drawn from the School Children Mental Health in Europe (SCMHE) study, which included samples from Bulgaria, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Lithuania, Romania and Turkey (n = 7,518). Children’s academic performance in reading and mathematics was evaluated by teachers and parents reported sociodemographic variables including birth rank and parental attitudes. Controlling for individual, sociodemographic variables and parental attitudes in multinomial regressions, first- or second-born children displayed greater performance in mathematics and in reading as compared to children whose birth rank was third or above. Children from large families, especially when they are not first- or second-born appear to be at greater risk for academic difficulties and should benefit from targeted prevention efforts.     

Does he sound cooperative? Acoustic correlates of cooperativeness

The sound of the voice has several acoustic features that influence the perception of how cooperative the speaker is. It remains unknown, however, whether these acoustic features are associated with actual cooperative behaviour. This issue is crucial to disentangle whether inferences of traits from voices are based on stereotypes, or facilitate the detection of cooperative partners. The latter is likely due to the pleiotropic effect that testosterone has on both cooperative behaviours and acoustic features. In the present study, we quantified the cooperativeness of native French-speaking men in a one-shot public good game. We also measured mean fundamental frequency, pitch variations, roughness, and breathiness from spontaneous speech recordings of the same men and collected saliva samples to measure their testosterone levels. Our results showed that men with lower-pitched voices and greater pitch variations were more cooperative. However, testosterone did not influence cooperative behaviours or acoustic features. Our finding provides the first evidence of the acoustic correlates of cooperative behaviour. When considered in combination with the literature on the detection of cooperativeness from faces, the results imply that assessment of cooperative behaviour would be improved by simultaneous consideration of visual and auditory cues.     

Attentional engagement during syllable discrimination: The role of salient prosodic cues in 6- to 8-month-old infants

Prosodic cues drive speech segmentation and guide syllable discrimination. However, less is known about the attentional mechanisms underlying an infant's ability to benefit from prosodic cues. This study investigated how 6- to 8-month-old Italian infants allocate their attention to strong vs. weak syllables after familiarization with four repeats of a single CV sequence with alternating strong and weak syllables (different syllables on each trial). In the discrimination test-phase, either the strong or the weak syllable was replaced by a pure tone matching the suprasegmental characteristics of the segmental syllable, i.e., duration, loudness and pitch, whereas the familiarized stimulus was presented as a control. By using an eye-tracker, attention deployment (fixation times) and cognitive resource allocation (pupil dilation) were measured under conditions of high and low saliency that corresponded to the strong and weak syllabic changes, respectively. Italian learning infants were found to look longer and also to show, through pupil dilation, more attention to changes in strong syllable replacement rather than weak syllable replacement, compared to the control condition. These data offer insights into the strategies used by infants to deploy their attention towards segmental units guided by salient prosodic cues, like the stress pattern of syllables, during speech segmentation.     

Memory for temporal order in novel sequential action

ABSTRACT

Order is critical for many daily activities. Developmental research has shown that memory for order in action is the least prioritised in a processing hierarchy, and is sensitive to deviant input. The current research investigated these aspects of sequence learning are also present in adults. Participants learned a novel sequence across several exemplars with either easy- or difficult-to-categorize items, which either did or did not involve a deviant order on one exemplar, and were later asked to recall the sequence. Memory for individual sub-actions and order was stronger in the easy conditions, and the deviant order significantly deteriorated ordered recall in the difficult condition only. These findings support the theorised processing hierarchy, with the presence of a deviant order having a larger effect on memory when the load at the earlier item stage is increased. These results have implications for theories of working memory and learning in real-world contexts.     

A parameter analysis method for the weight‐set to satisfy preference orders of alternatives in additive multi‐criteria value models

In the context of the additive multi‐criteria value model, this paper investigates how the set of criteria weights (weight‐set hereafter) can be determined according to the preference orders of alternatives given by the decision maker. A construction method is proposed for the weight‐set for different intervals of β, where β is a differential amount of value between the preference information on two alternatives. The results of this paper are important for sensitivity analysis in multi‐criteria decision making (MCDM) problems and multi‐criteria group decision analysis. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Birth order,stimulating environment,and maternal factors in developmental outcomes: A longitudinal Mexican study

This study longitudinally examined the interplay between birth-order and well-known risk factors in impoverished environments such as inadequate environmental stimulation, low maternal education, and young maternal age in children from birth to 36 months. In the developmental motor domain, the effect of the stimulating environment over time, favored first-borns. In the adaptive domain, maternal education privileged first-born boys. In language development, first-borns reached higher scores over time than laterborn identifying a positive impact of stimulation. In the personal-social domain, firstborns obtained higher averages overall, but stratified models revealed that later-borns reached the first-borns scores as maternal age increased.     

Influence of internal and external factors on early language skills: A cross-linguistic study

Cross-linguistic studies can provide information about general and language specific features of language development, but relatively few such studies are available in literature. The main aim of the present study was to investigate, from a cross-linguistic perspective, the roles of the internal factor of gender and external factors of birth order and parental education level on the development of language in 2-year-old children. We examined 351 children growing up in three European language contexts: Croatian (N = 104), Estonian (N = 141) and Finnish (N = 106). Information on lexical skills and word combination ability was collected using the short form of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories and the influence of background factors on these aspects of language development was investigated. No significant differences were found in lexical skills or word combination ability among the three language groups. These aspects of language development varied significantly with gender, but not with external factors. Our findings suggest that internal factors may influence early language development more than external factors.     

The distinct contributions of cause–effect order and reasoning type in judgments of causality

ABSTRACT

People generally perceive a stronger link between smoking and cancer than between cancer and smoking. Generally, prior research on asymmetrical causal reasoning has not distinguished predictive (searching for effects) and diagnostic reasoning (searching for causes) from the order in which causes and effects are presented. Across 6 studies (overall N = 627), we show that order and reasoning have an additive influence on the causality perception: causes, spatially or temporally presented before the effect, strengthen the causality attribution associated to predictive (vs. diagnostic) frames. Moreover, we show that order and reasoning frame are bi-directionally related, as the cause-first order triggers predictive reasoning and vice versa, and people mentally maintain the cause-first order when envisaging a causal relation. Besides its methodological contribution to the causal reasoning literature, this research demonstrates the powerful role of word order in causal reasoning. Implications for the role of word order in communication and risk prevention are discussed.