Quantifying the syntactic bootstrapping effect in verb learning: A meta-analytic synthesis.

How do children infer the meaning of a novel verb? One prominent proposal is that children rely on syntactic information in the linguistic context, a phenomenon known as "syntactic bootstrapping". For example, given the sentence "The bunny is gorping the duck," a child could use knowledge of English syntactic roles to infer that "gorping" refers to an action where the bunny is acting in some way on a duck. Here, we examine the strength of the syntactic bootstrapping effect, its developmental trajectory and generalizability using meta-analytic methods. Across 60 experiments in the literature (N = 849 participants), we find a reliable syntactic bootstrapping effect (d = 0.24). Yet, despite its theoretical prominence, the syntactic bootstrapping effect is relatively small, comparable in size to cross-situational learning and sound symbolism, but smaller than mutual-exclusivity and gaze-following. Further, we find that the effect does not strengthen over development, and is present only for studies that use transitive sentences. An examination of a range of methodological factors suggests that the effect is not strongly influenced by methodological implementation. In the General Discussion, we consider implications of our findings for theories of verb learning and make recommendations for future research.

Design of a compact off-axis freeform three-mirror system in a circular configuration.

A compact off-axis three-mirror system, especially with a wide field of view and small f-number, continues to present challenges in the optical design field. To design a compact off-axis three-mirror system based on a freeform surface, an optimization method with a circular configuration and four parameters is proposed. In the proposed method, the f-number and angles of mirrors are combined to optimize and achieve high-quality imaging, which means the modulation transfer function is close to the diffraction limit. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, four design examples with different fields of view (4∘×4∘, 6∘×6∘) and f-numbers (2, 1.75) were created. The results showed that the compact off-axis three-mirror system based on a freeform surface can be designed with a wide field of view, small f-number, and high-quality imaging using the proposed method. Unlike other design methods, the surface parameters of mirrors are obtained with only one calculation and are close to the final optimization results, which saves both time and resources for optimization. The findings indicate that the method is accurate and effective for designing compact off-axis three-mirror systems with freeform surfaces.

Mid-wave infrared polarization detection of ship targets for small temperature difference conditions.

Ship detection under small temperature difference conditions is an important research direction for infrared (IR) detection of typical targets at present. To solve the problems of low contrast and difficult recognition of ship IR imaging due to small temperature differences, the degree of polarization (DOP) images is applied to the field of low-temperature aberration imaging based on the polarization principle. Meanwhile, the misalignment problem caused by the lens jitter in the polarization calculation is solved by the proposed mutual information iterative algorithm. We demonstrate improvement in the target/background local contrast of low-temperature aberration imaging by using the difference in polarization characteristics between the target and the background. The effectiveness of the method was verified by experiments. The results show that the contrast of DOP images combined with multi-angle polarization information is about 30 times higher indoors and three times higher outdoors than IR intensity images. Therefore, the IR polarization detection technique based on DOP images can effectively deal with the problem of low imaging contrast caused by small temperature differences.

United States-China differences in cognition and perception across 12 tasks: Replicability, robustness, and within-culture variation.

Cultural differences between the United States and China have been investigated using a broad array of psychological tasks measuring differences between cognition, language, perception, and reasoning. Using online convenience samples of adults, we conducted two large-scale replications of 12 tasks previously reported to show differences between Western and East Asian cultures. Our results showed a heterogeneous pattern of successes and failures: five tasks yielded robust cultural differences, while five showed no difference between cultures, and two showed a small difference in the opposite direction. We observed moderate reliability for all multitrial tasks, but there was little relation between task scores. As in prior work, cross-cultural differences in cognition (in those tasks showing differences) were not strongly related to explicit measures of cultural identity and behavior. All of our tasks, data, and analyses are openly available for reuse, providing a foundation for future studies that seek to establish a robust and replicable science of cross-cultural difference. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Conducting Developmental Research Online vs. In-Person: A Meta-Analysis.

An increasing number of psychological experiments with children are being conducted using online platforms, in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Individual replications have compared the findings of particular experiments online and in-person, but the general effect of data collection method on data collected from children is still unknown. Therefore, the goal of the current meta-analysis is to estimate the average difference in effect size for developmental studies conducted online compared to the same studies conducted in-person. Our pre-registered analysis includes 211 effect sizes calculated from 30 papers with 3282 children, ranging in age from four months to six years. The estimated effect size for studies conducted online was slightly smaller than for their counterparts conducted in-person, a difference of d = -.05, but this difference was not significant, 95% CI = [-.17, .07]. We examined several potential moderators of the effect of online testing, including the role of dependent measure (looking vs verbal), online study method (moderated vs unmoderated), and age, but none of these were significant. The literature to date thus suggests-on average-small differences in results between in-person and online experimentation.

Habituation Reflects Optimal Exploration Over Noisy Perceptual Samples.

From birth, humans constantly make decisions about what to look at and for how long. Yet, the mechanism behind such decision-making remains poorly understood. Here, we present the rational action, noisy choice for habituation (RANCH) model. RANCH is a rational learning model that takes noisy perceptual samples from stimuli and makes sampling decisions based on expected information gain (EIG). The model captures key patterns of looking time documented in developmental research: habituation and dishabituation. We evaluated the model with adult looking time collected from a paradigm analogous to the infant habituation paradigm. We compared RANCH with baseline models (no learning model, no perceptual noise model) and models with alternative linking hypotheses (Surprisal, KL divergence). We showed that (1) learning and perceptual noise are critical assumptions of the model, and (2) Surprisal and KL are good proxies for EIG under the current learning context.

Time-Modulated Transmissive Programmable Metasurface for Low Sidelobe Beam Scanning.

Programmable metasurfaces have great potential for the implementation of low-complexity and low-cost phased arrays. Due to the difficulty of multiple-bit phase control, conventional programmable metasurfaces suffer a relatively high sidelobe level (SLL). In this manuscript, a time modulation strategy is introduced in the 1-bit transmissive programmable metasurface for reducing the SLLs of the generated patterns. After the periodic time modulation, harmonics are generated in each reconfigurable unit and the phase of the first-order harmonic can be dynamically controlled by applying different modulation sequences onto the corresponding unit. Through the high-speed modulation of the real-time periodic coding sequences on the metasurface by the programmable bias circuit, the equivalent phase shift accuracy to each metasurface unit can be improved to 6-bit and thus the SLLs of the metasurface could be reduced remarkably. The proposed time-modulated strategy is verified both numerically and experimentally with a transmissive programmable metasurface, which obtains an aperture efficiency over 34% and reduced SLLs of about -20 dB. The proposed design could offer a novel approach of a programmable metasurface framework for radar detection and secure communication applications.