Human-nature connectedness as a pathway to sustainability: A global meta-analysis.

Internationally agreed sustainability goals are being missed. Here, we conduct global meta-analyses to assess how the extent to which humans see themselves as part of nature-known as human-nature connectedness (HNC)-can be used as a leverage point to reach sustainability. A meta-analysis of 147 correlational studies shows that individuals with high HNC had more pronature behaviours and were significantly healthier than those with low HNC. A meta-analysis of 59 experimental studies shows significant increases in HNC after manipulations involving contact with nature and mindfulness practices. Surprisingly, this same meta-analysis finds no significant effect of environmental education on HNC. Thus, HNC is positively linked to mind-sets that value sustainability and behaviours that enhance it. Further, we argue that HNC can be enhanced by targeted practices, and we identify those most likely to succeed. Our results suggest that enhancing HNC, via promotion of targeted practices, can improve sustainability and should be integrated into conservation policy.

Schoolchildren cooperate more successfully with non-kin than with siblings.

Cooperation plays a key role in the development of advanced societies and can be stabilized through shared genes (kinship) or reciprocation. In humans, cooperation among kin occurs more readily than cooperation among non-kin. In many organisms, cooperation can shift with age (e.g. helpers at the nest); however, little is known about developmental shifts between kin and non-kin cooperation in humans. Using a cooperative game, we show that 3- to 10-year-old French schoolchildren cooperated less successfully with siblings than with non-kin children, whether or not non-kin partners were friends. Furthermore, children with larger social networks cooperated better and the perception of friendship among non-friends improved after cooperating. These results contrast with the well-established preference for kin cooperation among adults and indicate that non-kin cooperation in humans might serve to forge and extend non-kin social relationships during middle childhood and create opportunities for future collaboration beyond kin. Our results suggest that the current view of cooperation in humans may only apply to adults and that future studies should focus on how and why cooperation with different classes of partners might change during development in humans across cultures as well as other long-lived organisms.

Two facets of patience in young children: Waiting with and without an explicit reward.

Patience, or the ability to tolerate delay, is typically studied using delay of gratification (DoG) tasks. However, among other factors (e.g., type of reward), the use of a reward to test patience is affected by an individual's motivation to obtain the reward (e.g., degree of preference for the small vs. large reward). In addition, DoG tasks do not assess the extent to which an individual can wait in the absence of an explicit reward-or what we term "patience as a virtue." Accordingly, the current study used a new measure of patience-the "pure waiting paradigm"-in which 3- to 5-year-old children waited 3 min with nothing to do and with no explicit reward. We then examined the relation between performance on this task (as assessed by children's spontaneous patient behaviors) and performance on two DoG tasks (candy and video rewards). Significant correlations were found between DoG performance and patient behaviors in the pure waiting paradigm, especially when controlling for motivation. These results and methodology show for the first time a direct link between patience as a virtue and DoG performance and also provide new insights about the study of patience in children.

A new approach to measuring patience in preschoolers.

Patience in children has usually been studied using delay of gratification paradigms. However, another important aspect of patience that has not been well documented is the ability to adjust one's behavior while waiting without an explicit reward as a motivator (e.g., sitting in the doctor's waiting room). To examine this aspect of patience, video-recordings of sixty-one 3- and 4-year olds waiting for two separate 3-min periods were examined and coded for children's spontaneous behaviors. We found that 4-year olds displayed more patient (i.e., staying still) behaviors than 3-year olds during this "waiting paradigm." Interestingly, we also found that children who displayed less patient behaviors during the waiting paradigm were also those who succeeded on a future-thinking task. These findings have important implications for measuring patience in young children and highlight the potential impact of spontaneous behaviors on children's performance in cognitive tasks such as those assessing future-oriented cognition.

Object and proper name retrieval in temporal lobe epilepsy: a study of difficulties and latencies.

PURPOSE: Retrieving a specific name is sometimes difficult and can be even harder when pathology affects the temporal lobes. Word finding difficulties have been well documented in temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) but analyses have mostly concentrated on the study of accuracy. Our aim here was to go beyond simple accuracy and to provide both a quantitative and a qualitative assessment of naming difficulties and latencies in patients with TLE. METHODS: Thirty-two patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (16 with epilepsy affecting the cerebral hemisphere dominant for language (D-TLE) and 16 with epilepsy affecting the cerebral hemisphere non-dominant for language (ND-TLE)) and 34 healthy matched control subjects were included in the study. The experiment involved naming 70 photographs of objects and 70 photographs of celebrities as fast as possible. Accuracy and naming reaction times were recorded. Following each trial, a questionnaire was used to determine the specific nature of each subject's difficulty in retrieving the name (e.g., no difficulty, paraphasia, tip of the tongue, feeling of knowing the name, etc). Reaction times were analysed both across subjects and across trials. KEY FINDINGS: D-TLE patients showed consistent and quasi-systematic impairment compared to matched control subjects on both object and famous people naming. This impairment was characterized not only by lower accuracy but also by more qualitative errors and tip of the tongue phenomena. Furthermore, minimum reaction times were slowed down by about 70 ms for objects and 150 ms for famous people naming. In contrast, patients with ND-TLE were less impaired, and their impairment was limited to object naming. SIGNIFICANCE: These results suggest that patients with TLE, in particular D-TLE, show a general impairment of lexical access. Furthermore, there was evidence of subtle difficulties (increased reaction times) in patients with TLE.

The neural dynamics of face detection in the wild revealed by MVPA.

Previous magnetoencephalography/electroencephalography (M/EEG) studies have suggested that face processing is extremely rapid, indeed faster than any other object category. Most studies, however, have been performed using centered, cropped stimuli presented on a blank background resulting in artificially low interstimulus variability. In contrast, the aim of the present study was to assess the underlying temporal dynamics of face detection presented in complex natural scenes. We recorded EEG activity while participants performed a rapid go/no-go categorization task in which they had to detect the presence of a human face. Subjects performed at ceiling (94.8% accuracy), and traditional event-related potential analyses revealed only modest modulations of the two main components classically associated with face processing (P100 and N170). A multivariate pattern analysis conducted across all EEG channels revealed that face category could, however, be readout very early, under 100 ms poststimulus onset. Decoding was linked to reaction time as early as 125 ms. Decoding accuracy did not increase monotonically; we report an increase during an initial 95-140 ms period followed by a plateau ∼140-185 ms-perhaps reflecting a transitory stabilization of the face information available-and a strong increase afterward. Further analyses conducted on individual images confirmed these phases, further suggesting that decoding accuracy may be initially driven by low-level stimulus properties. Such latencies appear to be surprisingly short given the complexity of the natural scenes and the large intraclass variability of the face stimuli used, suggesting that the visual system is highly optimized for the processing of natural scenes.

Fast and Famous: Looking for the Fastest Speed at Which a Face Can be Recognized.

Face recognition is supposed to be fast. However, the actual speed at which faces can be recognized remains unknown. To address this issue, we report two experiments run with speed constraints. In both experiments, famous faces had to be recognized among unknown ones using a large set of stimuli to prevent pre-activation of features which would speed up recognition. In the first experiment (31 participants), recognition of famous faces was investigated using a rapid go/no-go task. In the second experiment, 101 participants performed a highly time constrained recognition task using the Speed and Accuracy Boosting procedure. Results indicate that the fastest speed at which a face can be recognized is around 360-390 ms. Such latencies are about 100 ms longer than the latencies recorded in similar tasks in which subjects have to detect faces among other stimuli. We discuss which model of activation of the visual ventral stream could account for such latencies. These latencies are not consistent with a purely feed-forward pass of activity throughout the visual ventral stream. An alternative is that face recognition relies on the core network underlying face processing identified in fMRI studies (OFA, FFA, and pSTS) and reentrant loops to refine face representation. However, the model of activation favored is that of an activation of the whole visual ventral stream up to anterior areas, such as the perirhinal cortex, combined with parallel and feed-back processes. Further studies are needed to assess which of these three models of activation can best account for face recognition.

How Fast is Famous Face Recognition?

The rapid recognition of familiar faces is crucial for social interactions. However the actual speed with which recognition can be achieved remains largely unknown as most studies have been carried out without any speed constraints. Different paradigms have been used, leading to conflicting results, and although many authors suggest that face recognition is fast, the speed of face recognition has not been directly compared to "fast" visual tasks. In this study, we sought to overcome these limitations. Subjects performed three tasks, a familiarity categorization task (famous faces among unknown faces), a superordinate categorization task (human faces among animal ones), and a gender categorization task. All tasks were performed under speed constraints. The results show that, despite the use of speed constraints, subjects were slow when they had to categorize famous faces: minimum reaction time was 467 ms, which is 180 ms more than during superordinate categorization and 160 ms more than in the gender condition. Our results are compatible with a hierarchy of face processing from the superordinate level to the familiarity level. The processes taking place between detection and recognition need to be investigated in detail.