What’s new: innovation and enculturation of arithmetical practices

Synthese - One of the most important questions in the young field of numerical cognition studies is how humans bridge the gap between the quantity-related content produced by our evolutionarily...     

An examination of the role of perceived support and employee commitment in employee-customer encounters

The authors examined the relationships between perceived organizational support, organizational commitment, commitment to customers, and service quality in a fast-food firm. The research design matched customer responses with individual employees' attitudes, making this study a true test of the service provider-customer encounter. On the basis of a sample of matched employee-customer data (N = 133), hierarchical linear modeling analyses revealed that perceived organizational support had both a unit-level and an employee-level effect on 1 dimension of service quality: helping behavior. Contrary to affective organizational commitment, affective commitment to customers enhanced service quality. The 2 sub-dimensions of continuance commitment to the organization--perceived high sacrifice and perceived lack of alternatives--exerted effects opposite in sign: The former fostered service quality, whereas the latter reduced it. The implications of these findings are discussed within the context of research on employee-customer encounters.     

Recency Versus Repetition Priming Effects of Cigarette Warnings on Nonsmoking Teenagers: The Moderating Effects of Cigarette-Brand Familiarity

This study focuses on the interactive effects of antismoking warnings and cigarette-brand familiarity on teenagers' smoking intent, attitudes toward the website, and sponsoring brand when exposed to entertainment websites sponsored by cigarette brands. Findings from a 3 (Warning Type) × 2 (Level of Cigarette-Brand Familiarity) factorial design experiment with nonsmoking teenagers demonstrated that text and picture warnings significantly reduced attitudes toward cigarette brands, compared to text-only or no warning. Warnings had assimilation effects on attitudes (toward brand and website) and on smoking intent in the case of familiar brands; and marginally significant contrast effects in the case of unfamiliar brands, which better reflects the repetition priming paradigm than the recency priming paradigm, and calls for attention to cigarette brands' familiarity.     

Molecular and behavioral changes associated with adult hippocampus-specific SynGAP1 knockout

The synaptic Ras/Rap-GTPase-activating protein (SynGAP1) plays a unique role in regulating specific downstream intracellular events in response to N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor (NMDAR) activation. Constitutive heterozygous loss of SynGAP1 disrupts NMDAR-mediated physiological and behavioral processes, but the disruptions might be of developmental origin. Therefore, the precise role of SynGAP1 in the adult brain, including its relative functional significance within specific brain regions, remains unexplored. The present study constitutes the first attempt in achieving adult hippocampal-specific SynGAP1 knockout using the Cre/loxP approach. Here, we report that this manipulation led to a significant numerical increase in both small and large GluA1 and NR1 immunoreactive clusters, many of which were non-opposed to presynaptic terminals. In parallel, the observed marked decline in the amplitude of spontaneous excitatory currents (sEPSCs) and inter-event intervals supported the impression that SynGAP1 loss might facilitate the accumulation of extrasynaptic glutamatergic receptors. In addition, SynGAP1-mediated signaling appears to be critical for the proper integration and survival of newborn neurons. The manipulation impaired reversal learning in the probe test of the water maze and induced a delay-dependent impairment in spatial recognition memory. It did not significantly affect anxiety or reference memory acquisition but induced a substantial elevation in spontaneous locomotor activity in the open field test. Thus, the present study demonstrates the functional significance of SynGAP1 signaling in the adult brain by capturing several changes that are dependent on NMDAR and hippocampal integrity.     

Voice and persuasion in a banking telemarketing context

Voice has been neglected in research on advertising and persuasion. The present study examined the influence of voice and sex on the credibility of the voice source in a banking telemarketing context as well as with regards to the attitude toward the advertisement, and subjects' behavioral intention. An experiment using voices of a man and a woman was conducted. A recorded mock-telemarketing message consisted of an advertisement for an ATM card offered by a Canadian bank. Subjects were undergraduate students (N=399; 71.6% women, 28.4% men; M age=26.5 yr., SD = 7.4). They completed a questionnaire after hearing the message in telemarketing conditions. Analysis indicated a moderate intensity, an unmarked intonation, and a fast speech rate are associated with a more credible source than the other combinations. Sex was not a significant moderator in the relationship between voice characteristics and source credibility. Voice characteristics significantly affected attitudes toward the advertisement and behavioral intention.     

Can cigarette warnings counterbalance effects of smoking scenes in movies?

Scenes in movies where smoking occurs have been empirically shown to influence teenagers to smoke cigarettes. The capacity of a Canadian warning label on cigarette packages to decrease the effects of smoking scenes in popular movies has been investigated. A 2 x 3 factorial design was used to test the effects of the same movie scene with or without electronic manipulation of all elements related to smoking, and cigarette pack warnings, i.e., no warning, text-only warning, and text+picture warning. Smoking-related stereotypes and intent to smoke of teenagers were measured. It was found that, in the absence of warning, and in the presence of smoking scenes, teenagers showed positive smoking-related stereotypes. However, these effects were not observed if the teenagers were first exposed to a picture and text warning. Also, smoking-related stereotypes mediated the relationship of the combined presentation of a text and picture warning and a smoking scene on teenagers' intent to smoke. Effectiveness of Canadian warning labels to prevent or to decrease cigarette smoking among teenagers is discussed, and areas of research are proposed.     

Internalized activities

This paper argues that interactive mental processes in humans have a natural tendency to replay internally and cyclically, a typical example being the tunes that run ‘in our head’ for hours. The existence of these ‘internalized activities’ may be shown by both simple introspection and neurological experiments, which also reveal that they occur in all sensory modalities and involve everything from perception to more abstract activities.We will show that this hypothesis provides new ways to explain 1- how real activity is guided by similar internalized activities, 2- how goals are represented to an agent by persistent internalized activities, 3- how the pursuit of these goals subordinates other activities.We account for such internalized activities by means of the sorts of interactive processes described by the interactivist model, with a tendency, like that of Piaget schemes, to run cyclically, whenever possible. They are similar to real activities in that they draw on the same neural machinery, but their sensory-motor aspects are somehow inhibited. Not being enslaved to reality and its timing, they can run faster and in a discontinuous way. Multiple internalized processes may also co-occur with compatible sensory-motor operations, even though the latter are inhibited.When an activity is actually performed by an agent, we argue that a synchronization phenomenon makes previous similar activities run in an internalized way in parallel, and that they help to guide real activity by providing anticipated potentialities in real time. When we make a basketball shot, previous analogous shots run in internal synchrony at the same time, guiding the current attempt.A goal such as a successful shot can be initially present in the agent's mind as a persistent internalized activity. The tendency of internalized activities to run whenever possible allows for a sequence construction mechanism, which operates forward and backward, and permits the creation of sequences of internalized processes projecting from a current activity, such as dribbling against an opponent, to a goal activity, such as shooting.These ideas have been applied 1- to a computer program able to recognize musical rhythms by synchronizing actual rhythms to internalized ones, and 2- to the construction of a model of how an agent represents the routes it knows in a town and how these routes coordinate internally to produce sequences from a current location to a destination.     

Compensatory Effects of Cognitive Characteristics of the Source,the Message,and the Receiver Upon Attitude Change

This study explored the interactive effects of four cognitive variables (perceived expertise of the source, recipients' initial attitudes, number of arguments, and message sidedness) on attitude change. A 2 × 2 × 2 factorial design was used (N = 236 Canadian students): Results showed a positive and significant main effect of initial attitude on attitude change and three significant compensatory effects of independent variables on attitude change: (a) two-sided messages were more persuasive with fewer arguments; conversely for one-sided messages; (b) high expertise compensated for low number of arguments and conversely; and (c) higher expertise was more persuasive in the case of unfavorable recipients and conversely. Results also showed that when the message was one-sided and the number of arguments was large, low expertise was more persuasive than high expertise on initially opposed recipients, which confirms the cognitive response.     

Priming effects of arithmetic signs in 10- to 15-year-old children

In this research, 10- to 12- and 13- to 15-year-old children were presented with very simple addition and multiplication problems involving operands from 1 to 4. Critically, the arithmetic sign was presented before the operands in half of the trials, whereas it was presented at the same time as the operands in the other half. Our results indicate that presenting the ‘x’ sign before the operands of a multiplication problem does not speed up the solving process, irrespective of the age of children. In contrast, presenting the ‘+’ sign before the operands of an addition problem facilitates the solving process, but only in 13 to 15-year-old children. Such priming effects of the arithmetic sign have been previously interpreted as the result of a pre-activation of an automated counting procedure, which can be applied as soon as the operands are presented. Therefore, our results echo previous conclusions of the literature that simple additions but not multiplications can be solved by fast counting procedures. More importantly, we show here that these procedures are possibly convoked automatically by children after the age of 13 years. At a more theoretical level, our results do not support the theory that simple additions are solved through retrieval of the answers from long-term memory by experts. Rather, the development of expertise for mental addition would consist in an acceleration of procedures until automatization.