Learning General Phonological Rules From Distributional Information: A Computational Model

Phonological rules create alternations in the phonetic realizations of related words. These rules must be learned by infants in order to identify the phonological inventory, the morphological structure, and the lexicon of a language. Recent work proposes a computational model for the learning of one kind of phonological alternation, allophony (Peperkamp, Le Calvez, Nadal, & Dupoux, 2006). This paper extends the model to account for learning of a broader set of phonological alternations and the formalization of these alternations as general rules. In Experiment 1, we apply the original model to new data in Dutch and demonstrate its limitations in learning nonallophonic rules. In Experiment 2, we extend the model to allow it to learn general rules for alternations that apply to a class of segments. In Experiment 3, the model is further extended to allow for generalization by context; we argue that this generalization must be constrained by linguistic principles.     

Resilience matters: Explaining the association between personality and psychological functioning during the COVID-19 pandemic

Background/ObjectiveThe objective of the study was to elucidate the underlying mechanism through which basic personality dimensions predict indicators of psychological functioning during the COVID-19 pandemic, including subjective well-being and perceived stress. As a personality characteristic highly contextualized in stressful circumstances, resilience was expected to have a mediating role in this relationship. Method: A sample of 2,722 Slovene adults, aged from 18 to 82 years filled in the Big Five Inventory, the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale, the Perceived Stress Scale, and the Mental Health Continuum. A path analysis with the Bootstrap estimation procedure was performed to evaluate the mediating effect of resilience in the relationship between personality and psychological functioning. Results: Resilience fully or partially mediated the relationships between all the Big Five but extraversion with subjective well-being and stress experienced at the beginning of the COVID-19 outburst. Neuroticism was the strongest predictor of less adaptive psychological functioning both directly and through diminished resilience. Conclusions: Resilience may be a major protective factor required for an adaptive response of an individual in stressful situations such as pandemic and the associated lockdown.     

New rule use drives the relation between working memory capacity and Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices

The correlation between individual differences in working memory capacity and performance on the Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices (RAPM) is well documented yet poorly understood. The present work proposes a new explanation: that the need to use a new combination of rules on RAPM problems drives the relation between performance and working memory capacity scores. Evidence for this account is supported by an item-based analysis of performance during standard administration of the RAPM and an experiment that manipulates the need to use new rule combinations across 2 subsets of RAPM items. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).     

Inconsistent operations: A weapon of math disruption

Word problems embed a math equation within a short narrative. Due to their structure, both numerical and linguistic factors can contribute to problem difficulty. The present studies explored the role of irrelevant information in word problems, to determine whether its negative impact is due to numerical (foregrounding hypothesis) or linguistic (inconsistent‐operations hypothesis) interference. Across three experiments, participants solved multiplication and division word problems containing irrelevant numerical information, which was either associated or disassociated with the protagonist. Results demonstrated increased solution errors on division problems when irrelevant numbers were disassociated with the protagonist. When memory for numerical information was emphasized, disassociation was specifically impacted low‐working memory individuals. The effect of disassociation on division performance persisted even when irrelevant numbers, but not words, were removed from problems. These results suggest that, even in the presence of numerically interfering information, it is the language of word problems that often drive their difficulty.     

Hippocampal involvement in spatial and working memory: a structural MRI analysis of patients with unilateral mesial temporal lobe sclerosis.

Forty-seven patients with unilateral temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) were investigated on the Nine-Box Maze. The task was designed to compare working memory and spatial mapping theories of the functions of the hippocampus and provide measures of spatial, object, working, and reference memory. The results extended our previous findings in a larger group of patients. Spatial memory deficits across both working and reference memory conditions were found in patients with a right epileptogenic focus. There was no evidence of an object working memory deficit, but a nonlateralized impairment in object reference memory was revealed, which is consistent with our previous findings. The pattern of results was confirmed in a subgroup of 33 patients with unilateral atrophy localized to the hippocampus and parahippocampal gyrus, as verified by volumetric analysis of magnetic resonance images. In addition spatial memory errors significantly correlated with volumetric measures of mesial temporal lobe structures and not with measures of the remaining temporal cortex. In contrast, object reference memory errors correlated with volumetric measures of the temporal cortex and not with mesial temporal lobe structures. These findings support a specialized role for the right hippocampal region in spatial memory.     

Uncorking the muse: alcohol intoxication facilitates creative problem solving

That alcohol provides a benefit to creative processes has long been assumed by popular culture, but to date has not been tested. The current experiment tested the effects of moderate alcohol intoxication on a common creative problem solving task, the Remote Associates Test (RAT). Individuals were brought to a blood alcohol content of approximately .075, and, after reaching peak intoxication, completed a battery of RAT items. Intoxicated individuals solved more RAT items, in less time, and were more likely to perceive their solutions as the result of a sudden insight. Results are interpreted from an attentional control perspective.