Sexual Receptivity Signal of Lordosis Posture and Intra-Sexual Competition in Women

Previous research has shown that women may use self-enhancement strategies to compete with one other. Lumbar curvature in women is considered to enhance a woman′s attractiveness, potentially due to its role in bipedal fetal load and sexual receptiveness. The current study investigated the role of lumbar curvature on women’s perceptions of sexual receptiveness as well as its role in women’s intrasexual competitiveness. Study 1 (N = 138) tested and confirmed that women’s intrasexual competition influences their perception of sexual receptivity of women as a function of lordosis posture depicted in a standing posture. Study 2 (N = 69) replicated these results and extended them to other postures, namely, the quadruped and supine positions. Study 3 (N = 106), using a two-alternative forced-choice task, revealed that other women perceive relatively larger arched-back postures as more threatening to their relationship and frequently as being more attractive. Collectively, this work suggests that women consider a lordotic posture in other women as a signal of sexual receptivity and perceive it as a threat to their relationship. This research provides robust support for the sexually receptivity hypothesis of lumbar curvature, questioning the alternative morphological vertebral wedging hypothesis.

Alternating Italian thetic and sentence-focus constructions

In this article we study the alternation between the two most prominent Italian thetic and sentence-focus constructions, viz. the Syntactic Inversion Construction (henceforth: SIC), e.g. Arriva il treno (‘The train is arriving’), and the Presentational Cleft (henceforth: PC), e.g. C’è il treno che arriva (‘The train is arriving’). Based on the existing literature on the two constructions and drawing inspiration from a number of cognitive-functional hypotheses pertaining to constraints on the amount of referentially new constituents that can be conveyed in a single clause, we put forward the hypothesis that Italian language users are more likely to prefer the PC over the SIC if the utterance involves a high number of referentially new constituents. To assess this hypothesis, we constructed a pilot experiment consisting of a 100-split forced choice task that was administered by means of an online questionnaire to 66 native speaker participants. The results of the experiment indicate that the preference for the PC indeed increases if the number of referentially new constituents is higher. This is however not the only factor involved in the alternation and the preference of the language users seems not only to be determined by the number of referentially new constituents, but also by their syntactic status.

Common neural functions during children's naturalistic and controlled laboratory mathematics learning

A major goal of human neuroscience is to understand how the brain functions in the real world, and to measure neural processes under conditions that are ecologically valid. A critical step toward this goal is understanding how brain activity during naturalistic tasks that mimic the real world, relates to brain activity in more traditional laboratory tasks. In the present study, we used intersubject correlations to locate reliable stimulus-driven cerebral processes among children and adults in a naturalistic video lesson and a laboratory forced-choice task that shared the same arithmetic concept. We show that relative to a control condition with grammatical content, naturalistic and laboratory arithmetic tasks evoked overlapping activation within brain regions previously associated with math semantics. The regions of specific functional overlap between the naturalistic mathematics lesson and laboratory mathematics task included bilateral intraparietal cortex, which confirms that this region processes mathematical content independently of differences in task mode. These findings suggest that regions of the intraparietal cortex process mathematical content when children are learning about mathematics in the real world.

Postverbal subjects in child Italian: Argument structure, discourse and the definiteness effect

While previous work on postverbal subjects in Italian has shown that young children are sensitive to the effects of argument structure and definiteness, little is known about the acquisition of postverbal subjects at the VP-periphery. In response, the present study investigated such subjects under new-information focus by monolingual Italian children (6;1 – 7;4). For this, we employed an elicitation task and a forced-choice task. The results indicated that the children use postverbal subjects at the VP-periphery felicitously, although they do not perform at ceiling. Unexpectedly, the results also suggested possible remnant difficulty with the definiteness effect. However, after comparison with adult data we argue that this is not a developmental issue and instead may suggest that our children were aware that the definiteness effect is not about definiteness per se.

Locative Inversion, PP Topicalization, and Weak Crossover in English

The literature on locative inversion in English currently disputes whether locative inversion differs from PP topicalization in permitting a quantifier in the fronted PP to bind a pronoun in the subject. In order to resolve this dispute, this paper runs two experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk, one an acceptability judgment task and the other a forced-choice task. Both find that PP topicalization does not differ from locative inversion: both permit variable binding. Locative inversion also does not differ from a minimally different sentence with the overt expletive there. These findings remove an argument against the null expletive analysis of English locative inversion, and they also show that weak crossover is not uniformly triggered by A-bar movement.

Methodological issues with value-based decision-making (VBDM) tasks: does trial wording matter?

Objective: Most value-based decision-making (VBDM) tasks instruct people to make value judgements about stimuli using wording relating to consumption, however in some contexts this may be inappropriate. This study aims to explore whether variations of trial wording capture a common construct of value. Method: Pre-registered, within-subject design. Fifty-nine participants completed a two-alternative forced choice task where they chose between two food images. Participants completed three blocks of trials: one asked which they would rather consume (standard wording), one asked which image they like more, and one asked them to recall which image they rated higher during a previous block. We fitted a drift-diffusion model to the reaction time and choice data to estimate evidence accumulation (EA) processes during the different blocks. Results: There was a highly significant main effect of trial difficulty, but this was not modified by trial wording (F = 2.00, p = .11, np2 = .03, BF10 = .05). We also found highly significant positive correlations between EA rates across task blocks (rs > .44, ps < .001). Conclusions: Findings provide initial validation of substitute wording for VBDM tasks that can be used in contexts where it may be undesirable to ask participants to make consummatory judgements.

Children’s cross-cultural categorizations of racially ambiguous faces in Taiwan and the U.S.

Objectives: Racially ambiguous face categorization research is growing in prominence, and yet the majority of this work has focused on White and Western samples and has primarily used biracial Black/White stimuli. Past findings suggest that biracial Black/White faces are more often seen as Black than White, but without testing these perceptions with other groups, generalizability cannot be guaranteed. Methods: We tested 3-7-year old Asian children living in Taiwan—an Eastern cultural context (N = 74)—and Asian children living in the U.S.—a Western cultural context (N = 65) to explore the role that cultural group membership may play in biracial perceptions. Children categorized 12 racially ambiguous biracial Black/White faces and 12 biracial Asian/White faces in a dichotomous forced-choice task and completed a racial constancy measurement. Results: Regarding biracial Black/White faces, Taiwanese and Asian American children both categorized the faces as White significantly more often compared to chance levels, regardless of racial constancy beliefs. For biracial Asian/White faces, Taiwanese children with racial constancy beliefs categorized the faces significantly more often as White, whereas Taiwanese children without racial constancy beliefs categorized the faces significantly more often as Asian. However, Asian American children did not show a bias in categorizing biracial Asian/White faces. Conclusions: Results suggest that hyperdescent over hypodescent for more commonly studied biracial Black/White faces generalizes in both cultural contexts. However, biracial Asian/White stimuli may be perceived in more fixed-like patterns in predominately Asian contexts, since only Taiwanese children showed increased outgroup categorizations once racial constancy beliefs were endorsed.

The complex relationship between conscious/unconscious learning and conscious/unconscious knowledge: The mediating effects of salience in form–meaning connections

This study investigates how implicit and explicit learning and knowledge are associated, by focusing on the salience of target form–meaning connections. The participants were engaged in incidental learning of artificial determiner systems that included grammatical rules of [± plural] (a taught rule), [± actor] (a more salient hidden rule), and [± animate] (a less salient hidden rule). They completed immediate and delayed post-tests by means of a two-alternative forced-choice task with subjective judgments of source attributions. Awareness during the learning phase was identified through analysis of thinking aloud protocols. The results did not support a one-to-one relation between either explicit learning and conscious knowledge, or implicit learning and unconscious knowledge; rather, they indicated that implicit and explicit learning are intricately linked to conscious and unconscious knowledge mediated by the salience of form–meaning connections in target items. This result also suggests the possibility of the later emergence of knowledge without any conscious awareness of it.

How big should this object be? Perceptual influences on viewing-size preferences

When viewing objects depicted in a frame, observers prefer to view large objects like cars in larger sizes and smaller objects like cups in smaller sizes. That is, the visual size of an object that "looks best" is linked to its typical physical size in the world. Why is this the case? One intuitive possibility is that these preferences are driven by semantic knowledge: For example, when we recognize a sofa, we access our knowledge about its real-world size, and this influences what size we prefer to view the sofa within a frame. However, might visual processing play a role in this phenomenon--that is, do visual features that are related to big and small objects look better at big and small visual sizes, respectively, even when observers do not have explicit access to semantic knowledge about the objects? To test this possibility, we used "texform" images, which are synthesized versions of recognizable objects, which critically retain local perceptual texture and coarse form information, but are no longer explicitly recognizable. To test for visual size preferences, we used a two-interval forced choice task, in which each texform was presented at the preferred visual size of its corresponding original image, and a visual size slightly bigger or smaller. Observers consistently selected the texform presented at the canonical visual size as the more aesthetically pleasing one. These results suggest that the preferred visual size of an object depends not only on explicit knowledge of its real-world size, but also can be evoked by mid-level visual features that systematically covary with an object's real-world size.

Reading fluency and statistical learning across modalities and domains: online and offline measures

The vulnerability of statistical learning has been demonstrated in reading difficulties in both the visual and acoustic domains. We examined segmentation abilities of adolescents with three different levels of reading fluency in the acoustic verbal and visual nonverbal domains. We applied online target detection tasks, where the extent of learning is reflected in differences between reaction times to predictable versus unpredictable targets. Explicit judgments of well-formedness were also elicited in an offline two-alternative forced choice task. A significant online learning effect was observed in all groups in both domains, and online patterns were similar in participants with low, medium and high reading fluency. On the offline measures, all groups were at chance in the visual, but not the verbal domain. These findings suggest that there is no robust statistical learning impairment associated with reading problems either in the visual or the acoustic domain in adolescents. Results also imply that offline measures may mask learning abilities, and measuring learning online can provide a deeper understanding of the learning process and of its potential deficits.