Knowledge that Transforms

Three-month-old infants cannot yet coordinate and control their limbs for functional tasks like reaching or locomoting This study demonstrates that given an appropriate, novel task, infants can transform their seemingly spontaneous kicking movements into new and efficient patterns of interlimb coordination even at this early age Three-month-old infants were allowed to control the movement of an overhead mobile by means of a string attached to their left ankles In addition, some groups had their two legs yoked together at the ankle with a soft elastic The elastic permitted kicks to be coordinated in any pattern—alternating, single, or simultaneous—but simultaneous kicks provided the most vigorous activation of the mobile All infants kicked more and faster when their kicks were reinforced by mobile movement than when their kicks did not activate the mobile However, only the yoked infants increasingly moved their legs in a simultaneous, or in-phase, pattern The study suggests that learning processes are in place at 3 months for infants to discover a match between their interlimb coordination patterns and a specific task, and that these learning processes, rather than autonomous brain “maturation,” may underlie the acquisition of motor skills

Significant individual variation is observed in how people reason as jurors At the satisficing end of a continuum we identify, the juror draws on evidence selectively to construct a single story of what happened, with no acknowledgment of discrepant evidence or alternative possibilities A contrasting theory-evidence coordination mode of processing entails construction of multiple theories (story-verdict constellations) that are evaluated against the evidence and against alternatives Individual differences influence task outcome, the satisficing mode being associated with more extreme verdict choices and very high certainty

Research suggests that paraprofessional therapists usually produce effects that are greater than effects for control conditions and comparable to those for professional therapist treatment Other nonprofessional psychological treatments, such as self-administered materials and self-help groups, have also demonstrated positive effects Because of the promise of these nonprofessional treatments, their potential for low-cost service delivery, and the important theoretical questions that studies comparing them can answer, psychotherapy outcome research should shift away from comparisons of different professional therapies and instead compare nonprofessional therapies with professional therapy

The explanatory style scores of George Bush and Saddam Hussein were derived using the content analysis of verbatim explanations technique for periods preceding military actions or political conflict These leaders' actions were rated on scales of aggression-passivity and risk-caution Regression and correlational analyses show that increased levels of optimism before conflict predicted heightened aggression and risk taking, whereas increased levels of pessimism prior to an event predicted passivity and caution

The structure of the human form is quickly and unequivocably recognized from 10 to 13 points of light moving as if attached to the major joints and head of a person walking Recent psychophysical and computational models of this process suggest that these displays are organized by low-level processing constraints that delimit the pair-wise connections of the point lights In the current research, these low-level constraints were rendered uninformative by a masking paradigm The results from four experiments converged to show that the perception of structure in a point-light walker display does not require the prior detection of individual features or local relations