The influence of conceptual (mis)match on collaborative referring in dialogue

A modified procedure for naming 332 pictures and collecting norms: Using tangram pictures in psycholinguistic studies

Tangram pictures are abstract pictures which may be used as stimuli in various fields of experimental psychology and are often used in the field of dialogue psychology. The present study provides the first norms for a set of 332 tangram pictures. These pictures were standardized on a set of variables classically used in the literature on cognitive processes, such as visual perception, language, and memory: name agreement, image agreement, familiarity, visual complexity, image variability, and age of acquisition. Furthermore, norms for concreteness were also provided owing to the influence of this variable on the processes involved in lexical production. Correlational analyses on all variables were performed on the data collected from French native speakers. This new set of standardized pictures constitutes a reliable database for researchers when they select tangram pictures. Given the abstract nature of tangram pictures, this paper also discusses the similarities and differences with the literature on line drawings, and highlights their value for dialogue psychology studies, for psycholinguistics studies, and for cognitive psychology in general.

When non-salient information becomes salient in conversational memory: Collaboration shapes the effects of emotion and self-production

People's memory of what was said and who said what during dialogue plays a central role in mutual comprehension and subsequent adaptation. This article outlines that well-established effects in conversational memory such as the self-production and the emotional effects actually depend on the nature of the interaction. We specifically focus on the impact of the collaborative nature of the interaction, comparing participants' conversational memory in non-collaborative and collaborative interactive settings involving interactions between two people (i.e., dialogue). The findings reveal that the amplitude of these conversational memory effects depends on the collaborative vs. non-collaborative nature of the interaction. The effects are attenuated when people have the opportunity to collaborate because information that remained non-salient in the non-collaborative condition (neutral and partner-produced words) became salient in the collaborative condition to a level similar to otherwise salient information (emotional and self-produced words). We highlight the importance of these findings in the study of dialogue and conversational memory.

Is young children's helping affected by helpees' need? Preschoolers, but not infants selectively help needy others

Infants and toddlers engage in instrumental helping, that is, help others in achieving an action-based goal. The underlying psychological mechanisms are unclear and hotly debated. The present study examined whether young children's helping is affected by others' need. To this end, 1.5- and 3.5-year-old children (n = 101) were simultaneously confronted with a needy and a non-needy other in a variety of helping tasks. The results show that the 3.5-year-old, but not the 1.5-year-old children preferentially helped the needy person. This suggests developmental changes in the psychological mechanisms underlying early instrumental helping. The results are explained by a developmental account according to which helping only gradually becomes an other-oriented and need-based behavior in the first years of life.