Social comparisons in the classroom: an investigation of the better than average effect among secondary school children

The better than average (BTA) effect refers to the tendency for the majority of people to rate themselves as being higher on positive attributes and lower on negative attributes than other people. The present study examined the occurrence of the BTA effect on five important characteristics among 15,806 first-year secondary school Dutch students. In addition, it explored the influence of students' gender, cultural background, and ability level on their evaluations of characteristics relative to their classmates. Results yielded small BTA effects, with the exception of the item “being eager to get high grades,” on which the effect was much larger. In addition, larger BTA effects were found among boys than girls, but this difference could not be attributed to actual differences in performance. Likewise, larger BTA effects were found among ethnic minority students from Turkish and Moroccan backgrounds than ethnic majority students, but this difference also could not be attributed to actual differences in performance. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Quality of maternal thinking and mother-child interaction in at-risk contexts

This study investigates how the maternal level of perspectivistic reasoning and the level of socialization goals in the representation of their actions are related to the quality of mother-child behaviors as well as to the expert ratings on maternal practices in at-risk contexts. It also investigated whether there is any direct link between mother and child behaviors and expert ratings. A sample of 75 mothers of children between 8 and 12 years old reported on their level of perspectivistic reasoning and were characterized by the social workers of municipal services as being coercive, neglectful or meeting their child's needs. Interactions during a collaborative task were observed to obtain information on level of socialization goals and mother-child behaviors. Structural equation models showed that mothers' higher levels of perspectivism and higher levels of socialization goals positively predicted the mother's and child's sensitivity and active involvement in the task and negatively predicted avoidance and passivity. Higher levels of perspectivism consistently predicted experts' views on maternal practices. However, only mother's avoidance predicted negatively expert ratings on coercion practice, indicating that expert views were mostly derived from the mothers' perspective on their child. The implications of these results for parental assessment and intervention programs are discussed.     

Diffusion models of the flanker task: discrete versus gradual attentional selection

The present study tested diffusion models of processing in the flanker task, in which participants identify a target that is flanked by items that indicate the same (congruent) or opposite response (incongruent). Single- and dual-process flanker models were implemented in a diffusion-model framework and tested against data from experiments that manipulated response bias, speed/accuracy tradeoffs, attentional focus, and stimulus configuration. There was strong mimcry among the models, and each captured the main trends in the data for the standard conditions. However, when more complex conditions were used, a single-process spotlight model captured qualitative and quantitative patterns that the dual-process models could not. Since the single-process model provided the best balance of fit quality and parsimony, the results indicate that processing in the simple versions of the flanker task is better described by gradual rather than discrete narrowing of attention.     

Religion and action control: Faith-specific modulation of the Simon effect but not Stop-Signal performance

Previous findings suggest that religion has a specific impact on attentional processes. Here we show that religion also affects action control. Experiment 1 compared Dutch Calvinists and Dutch atheists, matched for age, sex, intelligence, education, and cultural and socio-economic background, and Experiment 2 compared Italian Catholics with matched Italian seculars. As expected, Calvinists showed a smaller and Catholics a larger Simon effect than nonbelievers, while performance of the groups was comparable in the Stop-Signal task. This pattern suggests that religions emphasizing individualism or collectivism affects action control in specific ways, presumably by inducing chronic biases towards a more “exclusive” or “inclusive” style of decision-making. Interestingly, there was no evidence that religious practice affects inhibitory skills.     

The advantage of mentally rotating clockwise

The time taken to decide whether a character is shown in its mirror or normal version has been shown to increase approximately linearly with the angular departure from an up-right position. Additionally, in some studies, decisions took longer for clockwise tilted characters than for counterclockwise tilted ones. Other studies do not report the latter effect. We argue that inconsistencies across studies are caused by variance in participants' strategies. The task employed here was specifically designed to bring these strategies and thereby the direction of rotation under experimental control. From the EEG recorded during the rotation period, we extracted an event-related slow potential whose amplitude is sensitive to the amount of mental rotation. In both strategy conditions, the slow potential's amplitude was lower for clockwise than for counterclockwise rotations. We take this as evidence that mental rotation of alphanumeric characters is easier in a clockwise than in a counterclockwise direction.     

情绪词对新异刺激喜好度变化的调节机制

通过三个实验探讨了情绪词的情绪信息对新异刺激喜好度变化的调节机制。实验采用评价条件化(Evaluative Conditioning)范式, 将新异刺激(相当于条件刺激, CS)与情绪词(相当于无条件刺激, US)配对呈现, 最后测量被试对新异刺激的喜好程度。三个实验通过设置表面故事, 控制新异刺激与情绪词间的配对关系, 并改变任务的加工深度, 揭示了情绪词调节新异刺激喜好度变化的机制。研究结果表明, 情绪词对新异刺激喜好度的调节不依赖于对刺激间偶联关系的意识以及被试的任务状态, 是一种自下而上的自动化的联想学习过程。     

Beyond rhyme or reason: ERPs reveal task-specific activation of orthography on spoken language

Metaphonological tasks, such as rhyme judgment, have been the primary tool for the investigation of the effects of orthographic knowledge on spoken language. However, it has been recently argued that the orthography effect in rhyme judgment does not reflect the automatic activation of orthographic codes but rather stems from sophisticated response strategies. Such a claim stands in sharp contrast with recent findings using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in lexical and semantic tasks, which were taken to suggest that orthographic information occurs early enough to affect the core process of lexical access. Here, we show that the electrophysiological signature of the orthography effect in rhyme judgment is indeed different from the one obtained in online lexical or semantic tasks. That is, we did not find the orthography effect in the 300-350 ms time window which has previously been shown to process lexical information in the lexico-semantic tasks, but the effect appeared within the 175-250 ms and the 375-750 ms time-windows which we interpreted to reflect segmentation and decisional process, respectively. We conclude that the interactions between phonology and orthography are task-specific. Metaphonological tasks appear of limited use for studying the core processes and interactions that underlie lexical access.     

Trait and state negative affect interactions moderate inhibitory control performance in emotionally loaded conditions

Following the framework that controlled performance is dependent upon cognitive and emotional processes which are inherently inter-linked, effects of trait and state negative affect (NA) on inhibitory control (IC) were studied in two experiments using an emotional day-night task (EDNT) - an inhibition based decision-making task embedded with emotional content. It was hypothesized that the effects of processing negatively loaded stimuli would depend on trait levels of negative and positive affects, particularly in conditions that entail IC. In Experiment 1, EDNT performance was compared with performance of an emotionally loaded control task that required to perform a dominant response rather than to inhibit it. In Experiment 2, EDNT performance was compared with an emotionally loaded control task that required performing an alternative rule which did not involve inhibiting the dominant response. Results of both Experiments showed that participants high on NA trait reactivity showed improved performance while processing ‘sad’ content, only in the inhibitory task and not in either of the control tasks. Results point to an interaction of trait and state factors in IC, and highlight the notion that heightened NA may sub-serve inhibition in sad contexts, which require counter-intuitive operations.     

四卡问题解决中的匹配偏向再探

选取经典的四卡问题作为实验材料,深入探讨了“综合考虑证真证伪作用”的提示以及逻辑分析过程对被试解决四卡问题不能产生促进效应的原因。结果发现:(1)多数被试能对卡片P和-Q进行正确的逻辑推断,但是最后却仍然倾向于选择卡片Q而非-Q,这种错误并非是由于附加的认知任务使得被试的短时记忆容量超载所致。(2)元音偶数组与元音非偶数组的被试对四张卡片作出正确逻辑推断的人数百分比基本一致,但是后者选择P-Q的人数百分比却显著高于前者,这表明多数被试似乎并不依据逻辑分析的结果及其命题检验的规则来作出选择,而是采用匹配策略,错误地选择了Q卡片。     

内隐记忆研究的回顾与展望

近年来,在对内隐记忆的存在性和本质特点进行探讨的过程中,该领域涌现出愈加丰富的实验室研究方法和理论观点,同时也引发了研究者对内隐记忆内涵的深入思考。逐渐细分的内隐记忆研究领域促使人们超越内隐记忆原有的理论框架,去建构一个整合外显记忆与内隐记忆,容纳记忆的无意识和意识过程的完整理论体系。