Development of the mirror-image sensitivity for different object categories-Evidence from the mirror costs of object images in children and adults.

Object recognition relies on a multitude of factors, including size, orientation, and so on. Mirrored orientation, particularly due to children's mirror confusion in reading, holds special significance among various object orientations. Brain imaging studies suggest that the visual ventral and dorsal streams exhibit distinct orientation sensitivity across diverse object categories. Yet, it remains unclear whether mirror orientation sensitivity also varies among these categories during development at the behavioral level. Here, we explored the mirror sensitivity of children and adults across five distinct categories, which encompass tools that activate both the visual ventral stream for function information and the dorsal stream for manipulation information, and animals and faces that mainly activate the ventral stream. Two types of symbols, letters and Chinese characters, were also included. Mirror sensitivity was assessed through mirror costs-that is, the additional reaction time or error rate in the mirrored versus the same orientation condition when judging the identity of object pairs. The mirror costs in reaction times and error rates consistently revealed that children exhibited null mirror costs for tools, and the mirror costs for tools in adults were minimal, if any, and were smaller than those for letters and characters. The mirror costs reflected in absolute reaction time and error rate were similar across adults and children, but when the overall difference in reaction times was considered, adults showed a larger mirror cost than children. Overall, our investigation unveils categorical distinctions and development in mirror sensitivity of object recognition across the ventral and dorsal streams.

Environmental Regulation, Resource Misallocation, and Total Factor Productivity: An Empirical Analysis Based on 284 Cities at the Prefecture-Level and Above in China.

We investigated the impact of environmental regulation on total factor productivity (TFP) based on a panel dataset of 284 cities at the prefecture-level and above in mainland China from 2006 to 2020 and examined whether environmental regulation had a resource reallocation effect and thus affected TFP. The results showed that there was an "inverted U-shaped" pattern in the impact of environmental regulation on TFP in China and a moderate strengthening of environmental regulation helped to increase TFP, which still held after endogeneity treatment and robustness tests. The "inverted U-shaped" relationship between environmental regulation and TFP in eastern, central, and western cities still held, while environmental regulation did not produce significant effects on TFP in the northeast. The effect of environmental regulation on TFP in large, medium, and small cities tested in groups by city size was consistent with the full sample findings, but the effects decreased in a gradient with city size. The analysis of the impact mechanism showed that environmental regulation had a suppressive effect on resource misallocation and could generate a positive resource reallocation effect and enhance city TFP. The labor reallocation effect of environmental regulation for TFP was stronger than the capital reallocation effect. The findings of our study are of policy reference value for optimizing resource allocation through environmental regulation and thus promoting high-quality city development in China.