No need to fake it: reproduction of the Asch experiment without confederates

In the present experiment, we replicated Asch's seminal study on social conformity without using confederates. We adapted a presentation trick in order to present two different stimuli secretly to groups of participants to create minorities and majorities without utilizing confederates. One hundred and four Japanese undergraduates (40 men and 64 women) carried out Asch-equivalent tasks in same-sex groups of four. In each group, we adapted the fMORI Technique to present the tasks such that one person (minority participant) observed different stimuli than the other three people (majority participants). The same nine stimulus sets that Asch had used were carefully reproduced as PowerPoint slides and projected onto a half-transparent screen. As for the critical tasks, the top part of the standard lines appeared in either green or magenta so that two groups of participants would see them differently when they wore two types of polarizing sunglasses that filtered either green or magenta to make the lines appear longer or shorter. A post-experimental questionnaire confirmed that no participant among either the minority or majority viewers noticed the presentation trick. The results showed that, in line with Asch's basic findings, the minority women participants conformed to the majority. However, our study produced two different results: While minority women conformed, minority men did not. Contrary to Asch's findings, the frequency of conformity of minority participants was almost the same regardless of whether the majority answered unanimously or not.     

The neural correlates of driving performance identified using positron emission tomography

Driving is a complex behavior involving multiple cognitive domains. To identify neural correlates of driving performance, [15O]H2O positron emission tomography was performed using a simulated driving task. Compared with the resting condition, simulated driving increased regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) in the cerebellum, occipital, and parietal cortices. Correlations between rCBF and measurements of driving performance were evaluated during simulated driving. Interestingly, rCBF in the thalamus, midbrain, and cerebellum were positively correlated with time required to complete the course and rCBF in the posterior cingulate gyrus was positively correlated with number of crashes during the task. These brain regions may thus play roles in the maintenance of driving performance.     

Anomalous production of vacancy clusters and the possibility of plastic deformation of crystalline metals without dislocations

High-speed heavy plastic deformation of thin foils of fcc metals, including aluminium, is found to produce a high density of small vacancy clusters, in the form of stacking-fault tetrahedra. The dependences of the density of the clusters on the deformation temperature and deformation rate indicate the production of vacancy clusters from deformation-induced dispersed vacancies. Neither dislocations nor any indication of the reaction of dislocations are present in the regions containing a high density of vacancy clusters. A possible model is proposed that describes, at extremely high strain rates where dislocation generation is difficult, how a high concentration of point defects is produced by a large number of parallel shifts of atomic planes without dislocations.     

Unforced Revision in Processing Relative Clause Association Ambiguity in Japanese: Evidence Against Revision as Last Resort

The current study tackles a long standing question of whether comprehenders perform structural revision when it is not forced by grammar or not. Using an eye-tracking reading paradigm, we addressed this issue by making use of global structural ambiguity in Japanese. Our results show that comprehenders initially associate a relative clause with the first potential head noun and that they revise this analysis when the second noun is lexico-semantically possible as the relative clause head, but do not when it is impossible. The results are incompatible with the Revision as Last Resort hypothesis. Instead, they support the parsing with unforced revision that is immediately sensitive to lexical properties. We argue that our results cannot be accounted for by serial modular processing models but that they can be explained by ranked-parallel interactive processing models. Furthermore, we propose that head-finality is a key factor involved in the availability of unforced revision.     

Relativism about Reasons

Historians must be sensitive to the alienness of the past. Insofar as they are concerned with their actors’ reasoning, they must (through open-minded empirical investigation) find out how their actors thought, and not assume that they thought like us. This is familiar historiographical advice, but pushed too far it can be brought to conflict with rather weak assumptions about what historians must presuppose if they are to interpret their actors at all. The present paper sketches those assumptions, and argues that the influential ‘Strong Program’ in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) falls foul of them. We do not argue from the correctness of the assumptions to the falsity of SSK. Rather, we note the incompatibility, and then show how SSK theorists’ tendency to take interpretation for granted blinds them—and perhaps their readers—to the existence of the conflict.

A quantitative near-infrared spectroscopy study: a decrease in cerebral hemoglobin oxygenation in Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment

A newly developed quantitative near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) system was used to measure changes in cortical hemoglobin oxygenation during the Verbal Fluency Task in 32 healthy controls, 15 subjects with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and 15 patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). The amplitude of changes in the waveform, which was quantitatively calculated by a signal processing method, was significantly lower in the frontal, and the bilateral parietal areas in the AD group, whereas that in the MCI group was significantly lower only in the right parietal area. The NIRS system may be a potential tool for the primary screening of AD.     

Immediate use of prosody and context in predicting a syntactic structure

Numerous studies have reported an effect of prosodic information on parsing but whether prosody can impact even the initial parsing decision is still not evident. In a visual world eye-tracking experiment, we investigated the influence of contrastive intonation and visual context on processing temporarily ambiguous relative clause sentences in Japanese. Our results showed that listeners used the prosodic cue to make a structural prediction before hearing disambiguating information. Importantly, the effect was limited to cases where the visual scene provided an appropriate context for the prosodic cue, thus eliminating the explanation that listeners have simply associated marked prosodic information with a less frequent structure. Furthermore, the influence of the prosodic information was also evident following disambiguating information, in a way that reflected the initial analysis. The current study demonstrates that prosody, when provided with an appropriate context, influences the initial syntactic analysis and also the subsequent cost at disambiguating information. The results also provide first evidence for pre-head structural prediction driven by prosodic and contextual information with a head-final construction.     

Texture and grain boundary character distribution (GBCD) in rapidly solidified and annealed Fe–6·5 mass% Si ribbons

Abstract

The type and frequency of grain boundaries, the so-called grain boundary character distribution (GBCD), has been determined in rapidly solidified and subsequently annealed Fe-6·5 mass% Si alloy ribbon by the scanning electron microscopy-electron channelling pattern (SEM-ECP) technique. High frequencies of low-angle boundaries and coincidence boundaries with Σ3, Σ9, Σ11, Σ17 and Σ19 were observed in a fully annealed ribbon with well defined {110} texture. The total frequency of low-angle boundaries and coincidence boundaries is almost one-half of all grain boundaries. The coincidence boundaries which occurred more frequently are exactly those predicted theoretically from the coincidence orientations for 〈110〉 rotation in cubic crystals, similar to those observed previously in {100} textured ribbons of the same alloy produced by the same processing method. The presence of a close relationship between the type of texture and GBCD has been confirmed by experiment on differently textured ribbons of the same material.