Do Questions Get Infants Talking? Infant Vocal Responses to Questions and Declaratives in Maternal Speech

Maternal questions play a crucial role in early language acquisition by virtue of their special grammatical, prosodic and lexical forms, and their abundance in the input. Infants are able to discriminate questions from other sentence types and produce rising intonations in their own requests. This study examined whether caregiver questions were related to the quantity of infant vocalizations. Thirty‐six infants aged 10 and 14 months participated in a laboratory play session with their mothers. In separate blocks, mothers were instructed to ask questions and to refrain from asking questions. Both block‐level and utterance‐level analyses found no evidence that maternal questions affected the amount of infant‐response vocalizations. Mothers of 14‐month‐olds (but not 10‐month‐olds) tended to repeat questions. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

On the “Theological Turn” in French henomenology

In this paper, I show that the claim for a “theological turn” in French phenomenology is not tenable by analyzing the relation between transcendencies and the modes of givenness in Husserl, the relation between the ethical transcendence and its mode of givenness in Levinas, and the question of the self of phenomenon and giveness in Marion. I argue that the inner motive of phenomenology requires it to go beyond the horizon of objectness and the question about God or theological issues are determined as part of its essential task in phenomenology. The principle of “go to the thing itself” does not predetermine or presuppose what phenomenology should deal with; it is always the thing itself that imposes itself on phenomenology.     

Modeling and prediction of driver preparations for making a right turn based on vehicle velocity and traffic conditions while approaching an intersection

This paper focuses on modeling and predicting the influence of a vehicle’s velocity and the relative position between a driver’s vehicle and a vehicle to the front or rear on the onset of driver preparations for making a right turn at an intersection. Repeated experiments were carried out on a public road to measure driver preparations, including releasing the accelerator pedal, moving the right foot to cover the brake pedal, and activating the turn signal, as well as to record vehicle velocity and the relative distances to the leading and following vehicles. Structural equation modeling was applied to estimate these relationships quantitatively. Two separate latent variables accounting for the interaction between the driver’s vehicle and leading or following vehicles, and the onset point where driving behavior changes from straight mode to preparation mode before a right turn, were introduced in the specification of the structural equation model. The model estimates and testing indicate that the proposed structural equation model represents well the relationship hypothesized by observational analysis: that the vehicle velocity and the traffic conditions surrounding the driver’s vehicle strongly influence the driver’s deceleration and more weakly influenced turn signal activation. The proposed structural equation model contributes to the prediction of the onset locations of covering the brake pedal and activating the turn signal based on the vehicle velocity and the relative distances to the front and rear vehicles when the accelerator pedal is released. The prediction accuracy is high compared with predictions in which the vehicle velocity and the headway or rear distances are not taken into account or predictions using a single regression model with one independent variable, namely driving speed. Finally, a possible new addition to in-vehicle navigation systems that detects unusual driver behavior by predicting the driver’s preparatory maneuvers is discussed.     

影响9点问题解决的关键行为

在已有研究的基础上,作者提出划出第三条线是解决9点问题关键行为的假设,并设计了三个实验来验证假设.结果表明:任意两条线的提示训练使9点问题的解决率接近或达到100%,因而,提示两条线不能被看成是解决9点问题的关键行为;而提示划出第三条线的训练使9点问题的解决率明显高于提示其它任何一条线训练的效果,可以被认为是解决9点问题的关键行为;能够引导被试划出第三条线的训练使9点问题的解决率明显提高.     

詹姆斯心理学的现象学转向及其理论意蕴

本文在阐明詹姆斯心理学的出发点、并考察其心理学思想的探索和突破的基础上指出,詹姆斯关于心理学的思想历程无疑经历了一个根本的转向;又结合与胡塞尔现象学的比较认为,转向之后的詹姆斯的心理学思想的潜在意义,只有借用胡塞尔现象学的思想框架和概念工具,才能得到有效的表达和进一步的发展。文章最后还暗示了詹姆斯心理学思想的现象学转向对于理解并构建心理学的学科同一性的潜在意义。     

Errata

Corrections to:
K. Tanaka and S. Takimoto, "Effects of intrepersonal affect on fairness judgment" published in Japanese Psychological Review , 1997, Vol.39, No. 4
M. Ito et al., "Visual evoked potentails to geometric forms: Effects of spatial orientation" published in Japanese Psychological Review , 1997, Vol.39, No. 4
K. Ono, "Response stereotypy in humans maintained by response-contingent events" published in Japanese Psychological Review , 1997, Vol.39, No. 4     

Acceleration and suppression of rats' responding to avoid foot shock and tail shock

Signalled response-independent shocks were superimposed on rats' wheel-turn responding to avoid shock administered to their feet through a grid floor or to their tails through fixed electrodes. In Experiment I, a tone paired with response-independent foot shock increased responding in three of four rats; a tone paired with tail shock increased responding in only one of four rats and suppressed responding in two rats. In Experiment II, a tone presented randomly with respect to response-independent shock had no reliable effect on responding to avoid foot shock or tail shock. In Experiment III, tail shock and foot shock were compared in a within-subject design while the temporal pattern of responding during conditioned stimuli was recorded. Responding during the conditioned stimulus preceding foot shock was characterized by initial suppression of responding at tone onset, followed by increased responding just before response-independent shock. Responding was suppressed throughout the conditioned stimulus preceding tail shock. Foot shock elicited bursts of responding, but tail shock did not.     

The general matching law describes choice on concurrent variable-interval schedules of wheel-running reinforcement.

Six male Wistar rats were exposed to concurrent variable-interval schedules of wheel-running reinforcement. The reinforcer associated with each alternative was the opportunity to run for 15 s, and the duration of the changeover delay was 1 s. Results suggested that time allocation was more sensitive to relative reinforcement rate than was response allocation. For time allocation, the mean slopes and intercepts were 0.82 and 0.008, respectively. In contrast, for response allocation, mean slopes and intercepts were 0.60 and 0.03, respectively. Correction for low response rates and high rates of changing over, however, increased slopes for response allocation to about equal those for time allocation. The results of the present study suggest that the two-operant form of the matching law can be extended to wheel-running reinforcement. 'I'he effects of a low overall response rate, a short Changeover delay, and long postreinforcement pausing on the assessment of matching in the present study are discussed.     

Look: No hands! Driving on the motorway

How drivers hold their steering wheels when they are driving has been studied in restricted ways for many years. Here I describe the advantages (and disadvantages) of a more naturalistic way of studying this phenomenon, and present the results from two studies that observed the hand positions of motorway drivers from an elevated vehicle. In the first study I tape-recorded the data as we passed traffic on the left, and in the second I used paper and pencil to record the data as traffic passed us on the right. In both studies few drivers kept to the recommended 10-2 (or more generous 9-3) position for holding the steering wheel, and approximately one-third of them were driving with one hand on the wheel. Very few of the drivers observed (some 2%) were using mobile phones, but two were driving with no hands on the wheel. The paper concludes with some discussion of the value of this methodology for obtaining realistic data.     

Quantifying drivers’ comfort-zone and dread-zone boundaries in left turn across path/opposite direction (LTAP/OD) scenarios

The aim of this study is to quantify drivers’ comfort- and dread-zone boundaries in left-turn-across-path/opposite-direction (LTAP/OD) scenarios. These scenarios account for a large fraction of traffic fatalities world-wide. The comfort zone is a dynamic spatiotemporal envelope surrounding the vehicle, within which drivers feel comfortable and safe. The dread zone, a novel concept, describes a zone with a smaller safety margin that drivers will not voluntarily enter, but can push themselves into when conditions provide additional motivation (e.g., when hurried). Quantifying comfort- and dread-zone boundaries in the context of turning left before or after an oncoming vehicle has the potential to inform and improve both the design and driver acceptance of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicles.Using a within-subject design, a test-track experiment was conducted with drivers turning an instrumented vehicle left across the path of an oncoming vehicle. The oncoming vehicle was a self-propelled full-sized computer-controlled balloon vehicle going straight at a constant speed (50 km/h). The driver assumed full control of the instrumented vehicle approximately 20 m before the intersection and had to make the decision to turn left before or after the oncoming balloon vehicle. There were two experimental conditions, comfortable driving and hurried driving. Measures for each turn included post-encroachment time (PET), lateral acceleration, and self-reports of comfort and risk. Drivers consistently accepted shorter time gaps and higher lateral accelerations when hurried. We interpret these findings to suggest that drivers invoke two dynamic, contextually-defined safety margins. The first is the comfort-zone boundary, a limit which drivers do not voluntarily cross without extra motives. The second is the dread-zone boundary, a more distant limit which drivers do not voluntarily cross even with extra motives. Grouping the responses (high/low) to the driver behavior questionnaire (DBQ) improved the ability to predict the dread-zone boundary PET given the comfort-zone boundary PET.