Wild skuas can follow human-given behavioural cues when objects resemble natural food

Animal Cognition - The capacity to follow human cues provides animals with information about the environment and can hence offer obvious adaptive benefits. Most studies carried out so far, however,...     

THE INFLUENCE OF INTENSITY AND DURATION OF ELECTRICAL STIMULATION ON SUBJECTIVE VARIABLES

The unpleasantness and subjective duration of an A.C. current of 50 c/sec applied to two fingers was scaled by subjects using the method of magnitude estimation. Stimulation was varied with regard to both intensity and duration. It was found that (1) unpleasantness increased logarithmically with stimulus duration, (2) unpleasantness was a power function, with the exponent 1.5, of stimulus intensity, (3) subjective duration was essentially linearly related to stimulus duration, and (4) subjective duration increased logarithmically with intensity of stimulation.     

Do chickens (Gallus gallus f. domestica) decompose visual figures?

To investigate whether learning to discriminate between visual compound stimuli depends on decomposing them into constituting features, hens were first trained to discriminate four features (red, green, horizontal, vertical) from two dimensions (colour, line orientation). After acquisition, hens were trained with compound stimuli made up from these dimensions in two ways: a separable (line on a coloured background) stimulus and an integral one (coloured line). This compound training included a reversal of reinforcement of only one of the two dimensions (half-reversal). After having achieved the compound stimulus discrimination, a second dimensional training identical to the first was performed. Finally, in the second compound training the other dimension was reversed. Two major results were found: (1) an interaction between the dimension reversed and the type of compound stimulus: in compound training with colour reversal, separable compound stimuli were discriminated worse than integral compounds and vice versa in compound training with line orientation reversed. (2) Performance in the second compound training was worse than in the first one. The first result points to a similar mode of processing for separable and integral compounds, whereas the second result shows that the whole stimulus is psychologically superior to its constituting features. Experiment 2 repeated experiment 1 using line orientation stimuli of reversed line and background brightness. Nevertheless, the results were similar to experiment 1. Results are discussed in the framework of a configural exemplar theory of discrimination that assumes the representation of the whole stimulus situation combined with transfer based on a measure of overall similarity.     

Nighttime in dreams

Based on the continuity hypothesis of dreaming, a study was designed to examine whether time of day within the dream was related to dream emotions. A sample of 1,612 dreams reported by 444 participants was analyzed. As predicted, dream scenarios set at nighttime were associated with less positive and more negative emotions compared to dream scenarios set at other times of the day. In order to pursue this line of research, it would be fruitful to study the dreams of persons with specific nighttime fears.     

The dynamics of ethnic discrimination,identities and outgroup attitudes: A pre–post longitudinal study of ethnic migrants

This longitudinal study among ethnic migrants from Russia to Finland (N = 127) examined the relationships between anticipated and perceived discrimination, ethnic and national identities, and outgroup attitudes towards the national majority group. The study included one pre‐migration and two post‐migration assessments. First, associations between the variables studied were tested using a conventional autoregressive sample‐level modelling approach. Second, individual trajectories and the associations between the individual‐level changes in the variables included in the models were tested. Although there were no sample‐level effects over time, there were significant relationships between changes in discrimination and changes in identification and outgroup attitudes at the individual level. The results indicated that changes in perceived discrimination were not reflected in increased ethnic identification. However, participants who perceived higher levels of discrimination after migration than they anticipated before migration were, in the post‐migration stage, more likely to disidentify from and to increasingly show negative attitudes towards the national majority group. The study complements previous research by examining the identity and attitudinal reactions to perceived ethnic discrimination starting from the pre‐migration stage and highlights the value of incorporating both group and individual perspectives to the research on perceived discrimination. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The philosophy of time of Henri Bergson and Russian culture of the nineteenth–early twentieth centuries

Studies in East European Thought - The article provides proof that the concept of time articulated in Russian philosophy of the nineteenth century was very close to the understanding of time in the...