Integrating the Meaning of Person Names into Discourse Context: An Event-Related Potential Study

The meaning of person names is determined by their associated information. This study used event related potentials to investigate the time course of integrating the newly constructed meaning of person names into discourse context. The meaning of person names was built by two-sentence descriptions of the names. Then we manipulated the congruence of person names relative to discourse context in a way that the meaning of person names either matched or did not match the previous context. ERPs elicited by the names were compared between the congruent and the incongruent conditions. We found that the incongruent names elicited a larger N400 as well as a larger P600 compared to the congruent names. The results suggest that the meaning of unknown names can be effectively constructed from short linguistic descriptions and that the established meaning can be rapidly retrieved and integrated into contexts

Attentional Modulation of Emotional Conflict Processing with Flanker Tasks

Emotion processing has been shown to acquire priority by biasing allocation of attentional resources. Aversive images or fearful expressions are processed quickly and automatically. Many existing findings suggested that processing of emotional information was pre-attentive, largely immune from attentional control. Other studies argued that attention gated the processing of emotion. To tackle this controversy, the current study examined whether and to what degrees attention modulated processing of emotion using a stimulus-response-compatibility (SRC) paradigm. We conducted two flanker experiments using color scale faces in neutral expressions or gray scale faces in emotional expressions. We found SRC effects for all three dimensions (color, gender, and emotion) and SRC effects were larger when the conflicts were task relevant than when they were task irrelevant, suggesting that conflict processing of emotion was modulated by attention, similar to those of color and face identity (gender). However, task modulation on color SRC effect was significantly greater than that on gender or emotion SRC effect, indicating that processing of salient information was modulated by attention to a lesser degree than processing of non-emotional stimuli. We proposed that emotion processing can be influenced by attentional control, but at the same time salience of emotional information may bias toward bottom-up processing, rendering less top down modulation than that on non-emotional stimuli

THE SPEED OF INFORMATION PROCESSING OF 9- TO 13-YEAR-OLD INTELLECTUALLY GIFTED CHILDREN

In general, intellectually gifted children perform better than non-gifted children across many domains. The present validation study investigated the speed with which intellectually gifted children process information. 184 children, ages 9 to 13 years old (91 gifted, M age = 10.9 yr., SD = 1.8; 93 non-gifted children, M age = 11.0 yr., SD = 1.7) were tested individually on three information processing tasks: an inspection time task, a choice reaction time task, an abstract matching task. Intellectually gifted children outperformed their non-gifted peers on all three tasks obtaining shorter reaction time and doing so with greater accuracy. The findings supported the validity of the information processing speed in identifying intellectually gifted children

How Has the Wenchuan Earthquake Influenced People's Intertemporal Choices?

On May 12, 2008, a major magnitude-8.0 earthquake shook Wenchuan, China. An opportunity sample of 104 college students was obtained to conduct a within-subject study investigating the influence of the earthquake on intertemporal choices. The findings indicated that after the earthquake, delayed gains were discounted significantly more steeply than before it, and that delayed losses tended to be discounted more steeply after the earthquake, although this tendency did not reach statistical significance. These results suggest that after the disaster, people might be more shortsighted when they make decisions with intertemporal tradeoffs. Implications of these findings for intervention and management in the aftermath of disasters are discussed

Psychological Traces of China's Socio-Economic Reforms in the Ultimatum and Dictator Games

Can traces of rapid socio-economic changes within a society be reflected in experimental games? The post-Mao reforms in China provide a unique natural quasi-experiment to study people from the same society who were raised with radically different values about distribution of wealth and altruistic behavior. We tested whether the size of offers in the ultimatum and dictator games are an increasing function of the number of years Chinese citizens experienced of the Mao era ("planned economy"). For the cohort that lived throughout the entire Mao era, we found that mean offers in the two games were substantially higher than what is typically offered in laboratory studies. These offers were also higher than those of two younger Chinese cohorts. In general, the amount offered decreased with less time spent under Mao, while in the oldest group in which every member spent the same amount of time under Mao, the younger members tended to offer more, suggesting an additional effect of early education under Mao and contradicting the alternative hypothesis that generosity increases with age. These results suggest that some of the observed individual differences in the offers made in experimental games can be traced back to the values of the socio-economic era in which individuals grew up

Family Income Affects Children's Altruistic Behavior in the Dictator Game

This study aimed to examine how family income and social distance influence young rural Chinese children's altruistic behavior in the dictator game (DG). A total of 469 four-year-old children from eight rural areas in China, including many children left behind by parents who had migrated to urban areas for work, played the DG. Stickers comprised the resource, while recipients in the game were assumed to be either their friends or strangers, with the social distance (i.e., strangers compared to friends) as a between-subjects variable. Children donated significantly more stickers to their friends than to strangers. Moreover, children from lower income families donated more stickers than children from higher income families. However, no gender and parental migrant status differences in children's prosocial behaviors were evident in this sample. Findings of this study suggest that children's altruistic behaviours to peers are influenced by family characteristics since preschool age. The probable influence of local socialization practices on development and the possible adaptive significance were discussed

Recent developments in multivariate pattern analysis for functional MRI

Multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) is a recently-developed approach for functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data analyses. Compared with the traditional univariate methods, MVPA is more sensitive to subtle changes in multivariate patterns in fMRI data. In this review, we introduce several significant advances in MVPA applications and summarize various combinations of algorithms and parameters in different problem settings. The limitations of MVPA and some critical questions that need to be addressed in future research are also discussed