Humans’ Pupillary Contagion Extends to Cats and Dogs

When viewing pupil sizes change, our own pupil sizes change, a phenomenon known as pupillary contagion. This involuntary response is reliable between humans, but can be affected by familiarity and empathy. We investigated whether the pupillary contagion response occurs for humans viewing familiar species – cats and dogs – and whether it is modulated by preferences for particular species. Pupil sizes were measured while viewing cat, dog, and human images with small, medium, and large pupils. Trait empathy, cat and dog affiliation and experience were subsequently measured. There was an image pupil size effect, but this did not vary by species. There was greater pupil size change to cats and dogs than to humans, but this might have been due to the varying size and appearance of the cats and dogs. Greater dog affiliation was also associated with smaller overall pupil size change to dogs and larger change to humans, but this did not interact with image pupil size. Dog affiliation might be associated with less arousal to dog images. In sum, pupillary contagion responses indicate a spontaneous transfer of information about internal states and the findings suggest that humans are sensitive to this across species, regardless of individual preference.

Implicit Analogies in Learning: Supporting Transfer by Warming Up

Analogies between old and new concepts are common during classroom instruction. Previous transfer studies focused on how features of initial learning guide later, spontaneous transfer to new problem solving. We argue for a shift in the focus of analogical-transfer research toward understanding how to best support analogical transfer from previous learning when children are engaged in new learning episodes. Such research may have important implications for teaching and learning in mathematics, which relies heavily on analogies between old and new information. Some existing research promotes supporting explicit connections across old and new information within an analogy. Alternatively, we argue that teachers can invite implicit analogical reasoning through warm-up activities designed to activate relevant prior knowledge. Warm-up activities close the transfer space between old and new learning without additional direct instruction.

Sorting out the problem of inert knowledge: Category construction to promote spontaneous transfer

A fundamental goal in the study of human cognition is to understand the transfer of knowledge. This goes hand-in-hand with the translational goal of promoting such transfer via instructional techniques. Despite a rich history of research using the analogical problem-solving paradigm, no study activity has been found to produce a robust rate of successful spontaneous transfer—even when the test is immediate. We propose the category status hypothesis as an explanation of the difficulty of transfer and as motivation for a novel approach to promoting transfer. We report a set of experiments evaluating a category construction technique based on a sorting task. In Experiment 1a, we found category construction to be significantly more effective than the ‘gold standard’ of schema abstraction through comparison of two analogous cases. In Experiment 1b, we explored a variation of the category construction technique that did not reliably differ in effectiveness from comparison-based schema abstraction—we also verified that both study tasks were superior to a baseline task of separate summarization of two cases. In Experiment 2, we conducted a replication of the initial design with higher power and confirmed the significant advantage for category construction over schema abstraction via comparison. In Experiment 3, we compared category construction to an information-consistent reading comprehension control in order to evaluate competing interpretations of the category construction advantage found in Experiments 1 and 2. We discuss theoretical and applied implications of these findings.

Spontaneous transfer of droplets across microfluidic laminar interfaces

Passive transfer of droplets across the laminar interfaces of two immiscible fluids is successfully achieved by precise control of the interfacial energies in a three phase microfluidic system.