Who am I? Autobiographical retrieval improves access to self-concepts

It is considered that an individual's current self-concept plays a crucial role in guiding the retrieval of autobiographical memory. Using a novel fluency paradigm, the present research examined whether or not the reverse is also true, that is, does memory retrieval influence the description of the conceptual self? Specifically, this study examined the effect of prior autobiographical reverie on the subsequent retrieval of stored self-concepts. Participants wrote a description of a personally relevant memory or a control topic (of no relevance to the self), following which they had 60 seconds to generate as many self-defining statements as possible, each beginning with I am. Participants engaging in autobiographical retrieval generated significantly more statements than those in the control condition, suggesting that autobiographical retrieval increased access to self-concepts. Type of statement also varied according to group. Participants in the autobiographical memory condition were more likely to conceptualise themselves in relation to their psychological traits, and this was replicated in a second experiment conducted online. Findings support the idea that self and episodic memory are highly related constructs, and are discussed in relation to implications for individuals with autobiographical memory deficits

Reading Companion: The Technical and Social Design of an Automated Reading Tutor

This paper describes IBM’s automatic reading tutor system, the Reading Companion. The reading tutor aims to improve the literacy skills of beginning readers, both children and adults, and help adults who are non-native speakers of English to learn the language. We describe Reading Companion’s architecture, which allows a large, globally distributed reading companion community to create and share new reading material. We also report substantial accuracy improvements in recognizing children’s speech gained by training the recognizer on the IBM Kidspeak corpus, a newly developed corpus of children’s speech

Estimating the age of Calliphora vicina eggs (Diptera: Calliphoridae): determination of embryonic morphological landmarks and preservation of egg samples

ORCID No. 0000-0002-8917-9646© The Author(s) 2016. Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The attached file is the published version of the article

The sun is no fun without rain : Physical environments affect how we feel about yellow across 55 countries

Across cultures, people associate colours with emotions. Here, we test the hypothesis that one driver of this cross-modal correspondence is the physical environment we live in. We focus on a prime example – the association of yellow with joy, – which conceivably arises because yellow is reminiscent of life-sustaining sunshine and pleasant weather. If so, this association should be especially strong in countries where sunny weather is a rare occurrence. We analysed yellow-joy associations of 6625 participants from 55 countries to investigate how yellow-joy associations varied geographically, climatologically, and seasonally. We assessed the distance to the equator, sunshine, precipitation, and daytime hours. Consistent with our hypotheses, participants who live further away from the equator and in rainier countries are more likely to associate yellow with joy. We did not find associations with seasonal variations. Our findings support a role for the physical environment in shaping the affective meaning of colour.Peer reviewe