The prioritization of visuo-spatial associations during mental imagery

While previous research has shown that during mental imagery participants look back to areas visited during encoding it is unclear what happens when information presented during encoding is incongruent. To investigate this research question, we presented 30 participants with incongruent audio-visual associations (e.g. the image of a car paired with the sound of a cat) and later asked them to create a congruent mental representation based on the auditory cue (e.g. to create a mental representation of a cat while hearing the sound of a cat). The results revealed that participants spent more time in the areas where they previously saw the object and that incongruent audio-visual information during encoding did not appear to interfere with the generation and maintenance of mental images. This finding suggests that eye movements can be flexibly employed during mental imagery depending on the demands of the task.

     

Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus) quantify split solid objects

Recent research suggests that gorillas’ and orangutans’ object representations survive cohesion violations (e.g., a split of a solid object into two halves), but that their processing of quantities may be affected by them. We assessed chimpanzees’ (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos’ (Pan paniscus) reactions to various fission events in the same series of action tasks modelled after infant studies previously run on gorillas and orangutans (Cacchione and Call in Cognition 116:193–203, 2010b). Results showed that all four non-human great ape species managed to quantify split objects but that their performance varied as a function of the non-cohesiveness produced in the splitting event. Spatial ambiguity and shape invariance had the greatest impact on apes’ ability to represent and quantify objects. Further, we observed species differences with gorillas performing lower than other species. Finally, we detected a substantial age effect, with ape infants below 6 years of age being outperformed by both juvenile/adolescent and adult apes.     

On the origin of the understanding of time, speed, and distance interrelations

We examined 18- and 24-month-old infants' sensitivity to the functional relationships between time, speed, and distance. The task included a train moving first visibly and then into a tunnel. The movement of the train was always accompanied by a train-characteristic sound signalling the travel duration. After the train concluded its travel, infants were requested to search for it in two possible locations inside the tunnel. Infants' reaching and head turn behavior indicated that 24-month-olds were sensitive to time-speed-distance interrelations, while 18-month-olds showed no such understanding. Reducing occlusion duration (by shortening the tunnel's length) revealed an increase in 18-month-olds' reaching and anticipatory head turns. Results are discussed in terms of the developmental course of the understanding of time-speed-distance interrelations and the strength of infants' representations.     

Do gorillas (Gorilla gorilla) and orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus) fail to represent objects in the context of cohesion violations?

Recent research suggests that witnessing events of fission (e.g., the splitting of a solid object) impairs human infants’, human adults’, and non-human primates’ object representations. The present studies investigated the reactions of gorillas and orangutans to cohesion violation across different types of fission events implementing a behavioral paradigm previously used with human infants. Results suggest that fission events vary in their impact on representational abilities but do not destroy apes’ representations of continuously existing objects.     

Imaginal Dialogues in the Self:Theory and Method

ABSTRACT The story a person tells about his or her life is viewed as a polyphonic novel. This metaphor implies that the self is multivoiced; that is, there is no single "I" as an agent of self-organization but several, relatively independent "I" positions that complement and contradict each other in dialogical relationships. From this perspective the role ofimaginal figures in the organization of the self is analyzed. A theory and method are presented allowing us to study both the content and the organization of multivoiced self-narratives. The method is illustrated with two idiographic studies, where people tell their life story not only from the perspective of the familiar "I" but also from the perspective of an imaginal figure with whom they have had a long-lasting relationship. Finally, it is argued that the metaphor of a polyphonic novel is particularly useful because it allows us to decentralize the Western concept of the self.     

Are apes essentialists? Scope and limits of psychological essentialism in great apes

Human reasoning is characterized by psychological essentialism (Gelman in The essential child: origins of essentialism in everyday thought. Oxford University Press, New York, 2003): when reasoning about objects, we distinguish between deep essential properties defining the object’s kind and identity, and merely superficial features that can be changed without altering the object’s identity. To date, it is unclear whether psychological essentialism is based on the acquisition of linguistic means (such as kind terms) and therefore uniquely human, or whether it is a more fundamental cognitive capacity which might be present also in the absence of language. In the present study, we addressed this question by testing whether, and if so, under which circumstances non-human apes also rely on psychological essentialism to identify objects. For this purpose, we adapted classical verbal transformation scenarios used in research on psychological essentialism (Keil in Concepts, kinds, and cognitive development. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1989) and implemented them in two nonverbal tasks: first, a box task, typically used to test object individuation (Experiment 1), and second, an object choice task, typically used to test object discrimination, object preferences and logical inferences (Experiments 2–4). Taken together, the results of the four experiments suggest that under suitable circumstances (when memory and other task demands are minimized), great apes engage in basic forms of essentialist reasoning. Psychological essentialism is thus possible also in the absence of language.     

Domestic horses (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Equus ferus caballus</Emphasis>) fail to intuitively reason about object properties like solidity and weight

From early infancy, humans reason about the external world in terms of identifiable, solid, cohesive objects persisting in space and time. This is one of the most fundamental human skills, which may be part of our innate conception of object properties. Although object permanence has been extensively studied across a variety of taxa, little is known about how non-human animals reason about other object properties. In this study, we therefore tested how domestic horses (Equus ferus caballus) intuitively reason about object properties like solidity and height, to locate hidden food. Horses were allowed to look for a food reward behind two opaque screens, only one of which had either the proper height or inclination to hide food rewards. Our results suggest that horses could not intuitively reason about physical object properties, but rather learned to select the screen with the proper height or inclination from the second set of 5 trials.     

Recognizing impossible object relations: intuitions about support in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)

Using looking-time measures, the authors examined untrained chimpanzees' (Pan troglodytes) ability to distinguish between adequate and inadequate support. In 3 experiments, the chimpanzees' sensitivity to different support relations between 2 objects was assessed. In each experiment, the chimpanzees saw a possible and an impossible test event, presented as digital video clips. Looking times in the 3 experiments suggest that chimpanzees use amount of contact between 2 objects, but not type of contact, to distinguish between adequate and inadequate support relations. These results indicate that chimpanzees have some intuition about support phenomena but their sensitivity to relational object properties may differ from that of human infants (Homo sapiens) in this domain.     

Intuitions about gravity and solidity in great apes: the tubes task

We investigated whether great apes, like human infants, monkeys and dogs, are subject to a strong gravity bias when tested with the tubes task, and – in case of mastery – what the source of competence on the tubes task is. We presented 22 apes with three versions of the tubes task, in which an object is dropped down a tube connected to one of three potential hiding places and the subject is required to locate the object. In two versions, apes were confronted with a causal tube that varied in the amount of perceptual information it provided (i.e. presence or absence of acoustic cues). The third version was a non‐causal adaptation of the task in which a painted line ‘connected’ dropping and hiding places. Results indicate that apes neither have a reliable gravity bias when tested with the tubes, nor understand the causal function of the tube. Even though there is evidence that they can integrate tube‐related causal information to localize the object, they seem to depend mainly on non‐causal inferences when searching for an invisibly displaced object.     

Object Individuation in the Absence of Kind-specific Surface Features: Evidence for a Primordial Essentialist Stance?

ABSTRACT

It has been suggested that due to functional similarity, sortal object individuation might be a primordial form of psychological essentialism. For example, the relative independence of identity judgment from perceived surface features is a characteristic of essentialist reasoning. Also, infants engaging in sortal object individuation pay more attention to kind than surface feature information when judging the identity of objects (e.g.). Indeed, previous research found that 14-month-old infants can judge trans-temporal identity even in complete absence of kind-specific surface features. Here, we used another more demanding non-linguistic paradigm to test the limits of these abilities in 14-, 18-, 23- and 36-month-old infants, comparing their performance to recent great ape data. Particularly, we presented infants with two food kinds, whose surface features were then fully transformed to make them look identical. If reasoning according to essentialist principles, participants should select the preferred item despite superficial manipulations. However, only 36-month-olds reliably tracked the preferred item after superficial manipulations. This suggests that, although basic psychological essentialism may emerge early in infancy, more complex forms require domain-general cognitive prerequisites, which only develop in more protracted form.