Time pressure increases children’s aversion to advantageous inequity

The relative contribution of intuitive and reflective cognitive systems in cooperative decision making is a topic of hot debate. Research with adults suggests that intuition often favors cooperation, but these effects are contextually sensitive. Emerging evidence has shown that in many contexts children show a tendency toward intuitive cooperation, but research investigating these processes in children is sparse and has produced mixed findings. In the current study we investigated the influence of intuitive and reflective decision processes on children’s fairness behavior by manipulating decision time. We tested (N = 158) pairs of children between 4 and 10 years of age from a rural community in Canada. Children’s decisions to accept or reject allocations of candies were either made under time pressure or after a 10-s delay. We assessed the impact of decision time on children’s aversion to inequitable distributions of resources by comparing their responses to equal allocations with either disadvantageous allocations or advantageous allocations. We found that children showed a greater age-related increase in advantageous inequity aversion when decisions were made under time pressure compared to when they were made after a delay. In contrast, we did not observe a significant impact of decision time on the development of disadvantageous inequity aversion. These findings suggest that intuitive decision processes may contribute to the development of fairness concerns in middle childhood

Is Schematic Biological Motion an Animacy Cue in Infancy?

The goal of the present research was to investigate whether schematic biological motion serves as a cue to the concept of animacy in infancy. In order to present motion cues in the absence of bodily form cues, Michotte’s (1963) schematic biological motion stimuli (i.e., shape rhythmically expanding/contracting in the direction of movement) were used. The video animations displayed an amorphous shape moving in this way behind a screen (i.e., the shadow) and assessed looking patterns when the screen was removed to reveal either an animate or inanimate exemplar in the test phase. In Experiment 1, familiar exemplars of animate entities (i.e., dog, cow) were used as test items. In Experiment 2, the test objects were unfamiliar category exemplars associated with this type of motion (i.e., worm, caterpillar). Infants (10- and 18-months) looked longer when biological motion cues were congruent with the test items in Experiment 1, but 10-month-olds did not show differential looking across congruent and incongruent trials in Experiment 2. These findings suggest that the schematic biological motion stimulus does not serve as a primitive cue to the concept of animacy in infancy

Anything You Can Do, You Can Do Better: Neural Substrates of Incentive-Based Performance Enhancement

Performance-based pay schemes in many organizations share the fundamental assumption that the performance level for a given task will increase as a function of the amount of incentive provided. Consistent with this notion, psychological studies have demonstrated that expectations of reward can improve performance on a plethora of different cognitive and physical tasks, ranging from problem solving to the voluntary regulation of heart rate. However, much less is understood about the neural mechanisms of incentivized performance enhancement. In particular, it is still an open question how brain areas that encode expectations about reward are able to translate incentives into improved performance across fundamentally different cognitive and physical task requirements

Regulation of RKIP Function by Helicobacter pylori in Gastric Cancer

Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) is a gram-negative, spiral-shaped bacterium that infects more than half of the world’s population and is a major cause of gastric adenocarcinoma. The mechanisms that link H. pylori infection to gastric carcinogenesis are not well understood. In the present study, we report that the Raf-kinase inhibitor protein (RKIP) has a role in the induction of apoptosis by H. pylori in gastric epithelial cells. Western blot and luciferase transcription reporter assays demonstrate that the pathogenicity island of H. pylori rapidly phosphorylates RKIP, which then localizes to the nucleus where it activates its own transcription and induces apoptosis. Forced overexpression of RKIP enhances apoptosis in H. pylori-infected cells, whereas RKIP RNA inhibition suppresses the induction of apoptosis by H. pylori infection. While inducing the phosphorylation of RKIP, H. pylori simultaneously targets non-phosphorylated RKIP for proteasome-mediated degradation. The increase in RKIP transcription and phosphorylation is abrogated by mutating RKIP serine 153 to valine, demonstrating that regulation of RKIP activity by H. pylori is dependent upon RKIP’s S153 residue. In addition, H. pylori infection increases the expression of Snail, a transcriptional repressor of RKIP. Our results suggest that H. pylori utilizes a tumor suppressor protein, RKIP, to promote apoptosis in gastric cancer cells

The Golgin GMAP210/TRIP11 Anchors IFT20 to the Golgi Complex

Eukaryotic cells often use proteins localized to the ciliary membrane to monitor the extracellular environment. The mechanism by which proteins are sorted, specifically to this subdomain of the plasma membrane, is almost completely unknown. Previously, we showed that the IFT20 subunit of the intraflagellar transport particle is localized to the Golgi complex, in addition to the cilium and centrosome, and hypothesized that the Golgi pool of IFT20 plays a role in sorting proteins to the ciliary membrane. Here, we show that IFT20 is anchored to the Golgi complex by the golgin protein GMAP210/Trip11. Mice lacking GMAP210 die at birth with a pleiotropic phenotype that includes growth restriction, ventricular septal defects of the heart, omphalocele, and lung hypoplasia. Cells lacking GMAP210 have normal Golgi structure, but IFT20 is no longer localized to this organelle. GMAP210 is not absolutely required for ciliary assembly, but cilia on GMAP210 mutant cells are shorter than normal and have reduced amounts of the membrane protein polycystin-2 localized to them. This work suggests that GMAP210 and IFT20 function together at the Golgi in the sorting or transport of proteins destined for the ciliary membrane

Collaboration Increases Children’s Normative Concern For Fairness

Collaboration increases equity in young children, but whether this precocious equity has a normative foundation or is primarily an interpersonal concern between collaborators remained an open question. Participants included 3- to 7-year-old children (N=104) from a rural community in Canada. In a novel third-party intervention game, children could intervene against inequitable sharing between third parties who earned resources collaboratively or individually. When resources were earned collaboratively, children intervened against inequity more often at an earlier age compared to when resources were earned individually. Children referenced equity or fairness to justify their decisions at a similar rate across the two resource acquisition contexts. These findings contribute to a growing body of evidence supporting the foundational role of collaboration in the development of fairness, providing novel evidence that this concern for fairness is indeed normative

The effect of collaboration on children’s sharing

Three-year-olds divide collaboratively earned resources equally, suggesting that fairness concerns emerge much earlier in ontogeny than previously believed (Hamann al., 2011; Warneken et al., 2011). The aim of this dissertation was to understand the psychological mechanisms underlying children’s precocious egalitarian sharing of collaboratively earned resources. Study 1 provided evidence that collaboration results in a strong sense of fairness, not observed under individual work conditions. Furthermore, the findings support the view that this sense of fairness is driven by equity over generous or prosocial motives. Study 2 showed that collaboration produced an overall increase in sharing, but that increased equitable sharing was only found when children shared the resources they had earned through collaboration. Study 3 found that children considered equity to be fair from a third party evaluation regardless of how others earned resources (i.e., collaboratively, individually). However, they showed a greater motivation to intervene against normative violations when resources were earned collaboratively. This convergent evidence suggests that collaboration is indeed a special context for the development of fairness