北太平洋巨型章鱼

北太平洋巨型章鱼是170余种巨型章鱼中的一种。人们曾经误把它们看成为海怪,实际上,它们性格平和,并不像古老传说描述的那样会攻击船只。     

七片口香糖

我突然意识到,不仅仅是一片口香糖,母亲还可能默默做着不计其数的牺牲,只是我从来没有注意到罢了。终于来了,我青春年华中最让人激动的时光。我第一次驾车行驶在通往大学的路上,12年的学习终于等到这一天。我真的搞不清谁更高兴,妈妈还是我?父亲三年前撒     

Relations of Children's Effortful Control and Teacher-Child Relationship Quality to School Attitudes in a Low-Income Sample

RESEARCH FINDINGS: The purpose of this study was to examine the relations of children's effortful control and quality of relationships with teachers to school attitudes longitudinally in an ethnically diverse and economically disadvantaged sample. Data were collected as part of a larger intervention project during mid-fall, winter, and late spring (ns = 823, 722, and 758, respectively) for 2 cohorts of 3- to 5-year-olds (collected during 2 different school years). Children's effortful control was assessed in the fall with parents' and teachers' reports and 2 behavioral measures. Teacher-child relationship quality was assessed mid-year with teachers' reports of closeness and conflict. Attitudes toward school were assessed in late spring using teachers' and students' reports of school avoidance and liking. Effortful control, in general, was positively correlated with teacher-child closeness and school liking and negatively correlated with conflict and school avoidance. Using structural equation modeling and controlling for sex and ethnicity, we found that effortful control was positively related to teacher-child relationship quality, which in turn was positively related to school attitudes. Furthermore, the relation of effortful control to school attitudes was mediated by teacher-child relationship quality. PRACTICE OR POLICY: Results provide evidence for the importance of relational processes that take place within the classroom context and have implications for teachers and clinicians working to increase school success in ethnic minority and low-income children.     

Factors associated with exclusive breastfeeding 2 to 4 weeks following discharge from a large, urban, academic medical center striving for baby-friendly designation

Substantial evidence documents the superiority of breastfeeding for mothers and breastmilk for babies. Although the American Academy of Pediatrics and the U.S. Healthy People 2010 initiative promote breastfeeding, current breastfeeding rates often fall short of recommendations. This study determined factors associated with exclusive breastfeeding 2 to 4 weeks following discharge from a large, urban, academic medical center striving for Baby-Friendly designation. Results indicated that mothers who breastfed within the first hour of birth (61%) were significantly more likely to be exclusively breastfeeding 2 to 4 weeks after discharge. Incorporating care practices that include a number of the "Ten Steps to Successful Breastfeeding," as recommended by the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative, may increase the duration of exclusive breastfeeding after discharge.     

Bringing text display digital radio to consumers with hearing loss

Radio is migrating to digital transmission, expanding its offerings to include captioning for individuals with hearing loss. Text display radio requires a large amount of word throughput with minimal screen display area, making good user interface design crucial to its success. In two experiments, we presented hearing, hard-of-hearing, and deaf consumers with National Public Radio stories converted to text and examined their preferences for and reactions to midsized and small radio text displays. We focused on physical display attributes such as text color, font style, line length, and scrolling type as well as emergency alert messages and emergency prompts for drivers, announcer identification schemes, and synchronization of audio and text. Results suggest that midsized, Global Positioning System (GPS)-style displays were well liked, synchronization of audio and text was important to comprehension and retrieval of story details, identification of announcers was served best with a combination of name change in parenthesis and color change, and a mixture of color and flashing symbols was preferred for emergency alerting.     

Longitudinal patterns of emerging literacy in beginning deaf and hearing readers

The emerging reading and spelling abilities of 24 deaf and 23 hearing beginning readers were followed over 2 years. The deaf children varied in their language backgrounds and preferred mode of communication. All children were given a range of literacy, cognitive and language-based tasks every 12 months. Deaf and hearing children made similar progress in literacy in the beginning stages of reading development and then their trajectories began to diverge. The longitudinal correlates of beginning reading in the deaf children were earlier vocabulary, letter-sound knowledge, and speechreading. Earlier phonological awareness was not a longitudinal correlate of reading ability once earlier reading levels were controlled. Only letter name knowledge was longitudinally related to spelling ability. Speechreading was also a strong longitudinal correlate of reading and spelling in the hearing children. The findings suggested that deaf and hearing children utilize slightly different reading strategies over the first 2 years of schooling.     

Theory of mind in dogs?: examining method and concept

In line with other research, Udell, Dorey, and Wynne’s (in press) finding that dogs and wolves pass on some trials of a putative theory-of-mind test and fail on others is as informative about the methods and concepts of the research as about the subjects. This commentary expands on these points. The intertrial differences in the target article demonstrate how critical the choice of cues is in experimental design; the intersubject-group differences demonstrate how life histories can interact with experimental design. Even the best-designed theory-of-mind tests have intractable logical problems. Finally, these and previous research results call for the introduction of an intermediate stage of ability, a rudimentary theory of mind, to describe subjects’ performance.     

Statistical learning of action: The role of conditional probability

Identification of distinct units within a continuous flow of human action is fundamental to action processing. Such segmentation may rest in part on statistical learning. In a series of four experiments, we examined what types of statistics people can use to segment a continuous stream involving many brief, goal-directed action elements. The results of Experiment 1 showed no evidence for sensitivity to conditional probability, whereas Experiment 2 displayed learning based on joint probability. In Experiment 3, we demonstrated that additional exposure to the input failed to engender sensitivity to conditional probability. However, the results of Experiment 4 showed that a subset of adults—namely, those more successful at identifying actions that had been seen more frequently than comparison sequences—were also successful at learning conditional-probability statistics. These experiments help to clarify the mechanisms subserving processing of intentional action, and they highlight important differences from, as well as similarities to, prior studies of statistical learning in other domains, including language.     

Choice and goal-directed behavior in preschool children

Preschool children (3–4 years old) were trained to perform two actions to gain different outcomes, in the form of video clips from different cartoons, before one of these outcomes was devalued by noncontingent exposure. The effect of outcome devaluation was subsequently assessed in an extinction test by giving children the opportunity to perform both actions in the absence of any outcomes. When the two actions were trained concurrently, performance during the test was modulated by outcome value and children showed a preference for the action trained with the currently valued outcome. By contrast, when each action was trained separately on different trials, test performance was insensitive to outcome devaluation. These effects of the training schedules are interpreted in terms of dual-process theories of action control.     

我的吻在哪里

小女孩儿名叫辛迪。她有一个和睦的家,日子过得很不错。但这个家从一开始就缺少了一样东西,只不过辛迪还没有意识到。辛迪9岁那年,有一天到朋友德比家去玩儿,留在那儿过夜。睡觉时,德比的妈妈给两个女孩儿盖上被子,并亲吻了她们,祝她们晚安。"我爱你。"德比的妈妈说。"我也爱你。"德比说。辛迪惊奇得睡不着觉。因为在这之前从没人吻