Patient classification in neuropsychological research

In a number of papers we have been concerned with the type of inferences that are legitimate in "experiments of nature" where the experimenter does not and cannot control the modifications to the cognitive system that are introduced by brain damage. We have argued that in such cases very restrictive conditions must be met in order to be able to draw valid inferences about the structure of normal cognitive mechanisms. Two consequences of these conditions are (1) patient classification into syndrome types (e.g., phonological dysgraphia, agrammatism, and so forth) can play no useful role in research concerned with issues about the structure of normal cognitive functioning or its dissolution under conditions of brain damage; and (2) only single-patient studies allow valid inferences about the structure of cognitive mechanisms from the analysis of impaired performance. Zurif, Gardner, and Brownell (1989, Brain and Cognition, 10, 237-255) have taken exception to our conclusions and propose to show the limitations of our arguments. In this paper we respond to their criticisms.     

When is enough, enough? A comment on Grodzinsky and Marek's "Algorithmic and heuristic processes revisited"

In this comment I argue that although Y. Grodzinsky & A. Marek's (1983, Brain and Language, 33, 216-225) criticism of the conclusions reached by A. Caramazza and E. B. Zurif (1976, Brain and Language, 3, 572-582) in their paper on comprehension disorders in so-called agrammatic patients is not entirely without technical merit, its impact on the claims made by Caramazza and Zurif is inconsequential. I show that there are deeper theoretical and methodological reasons which undermine the claims made by Caramazza and Zurif and the only superficially different proposal of Grodzinsky and Marek.     

Behavioral or hemispheric asymmetry: is there a default option?

The presence of acuity gradients as a moderating variable in hemifield research is not in question. Their importance as a determinant of hemifield differences is unclear, however. The major issues are as follows. First, do vertical displays provide an appropriate control for the acuity gradient? Second, do the initial letters of a word play a critical role in word recognition, either in information-theoretic terms or because the lexicon is itself organized around access codes based on the initial letter or letters of words? Third, do behavioral and hemispheric accounts provide equally attractive explanations of Task Level X Visual Field interactions? Fourth, if the two accounts are equally attractive on empirical grounds, which is to be preferred? Each of these issues is addressed in this reply to M. P. Bryden's (1986, Brain and Cognition, 5, 362-368) and J. Hellige's (1986, Brain and Cognition, 5, 369-376) comments on our article (K. Kirsner & S. Schwartz 1986, Brain and Cognition, 5, 354-361).     

Closed-class words as first syllables do interfere with lexical decisions for nonwords: implications for theories of agrammatism

It has been proposed that a principal cause of the agrammatism of some Broca's aphasics is that such patients, unlike normal subjects, are unable to make use of a special retrieval mechanism for closed-class ("function") words (D. C. Bradley, 1978, Computational distinctions of vocabulary type, Unpublished Ph.D. thesis; D. C. Bradley, M. F. Garrett, & E. B. Zurif, 1980. In D. Caplan (Ed.), Biological studies of mental processes). The main evidence for the existence of such a mechanism consisted of two observations: (1) the recognition of open-class words was observed to be frequency-sensitive, but that of closed-class words was not; and (2) lexical decisions for nonwords which began with open-class words were delayed, whereas there was no such interference for nonwords which began with closed-class words. However, the first of these observations has proved nonreplicable (e.g., B. Gordon & A. Caramazza, 1982, Brain and Language, 15, 143-160, 1983, Brain and Language, 19, 335-345; J. Segui, J. Mehler, W. Frauenfelder, & J. Morton, 1982, Neuropsychologia, 20, 615-627), and in the present paper, three lexical decision experiments are reported in which it is found that, when certain confounding variables are controlled, nonwords which begin with closed-class words are subject to interference. Moreover, contrary to a suggestion of Kolk and Blomert (1985, Brain and Language, 26, 94-105) the interference is independent of the presence of closed-class items in the lexical decision word list. It seems, then, that closed-class words are not qualitatively different from open-class words with respect either to frequency sensitivity or to nonword interference, and in consequence, the above proposed explanation of agrammatism is left without major empirical support.     

An evaluation of assumptions underlying the single-patient-only position in neuropsychological research: a reply.

This note challenges the position adopted by A. Caramazza and W. Badecker (1989, Brain and Cognition 10, 256-295) that, since the a priori classification of patients can only be theoretically arbitrary, the basic unit of analysis in cognitive neuropsychology must be the individual patient. We argue that even if there is no prior theory to justify patient classification, this does not preclude group studies; syndromes are what the world gives us--they constrain theory, permitting groups to be formed for research purposes. We also reexamine a particular example of group-based research that was extensively criticized by Caramazza and Badecker. We confront each of their criticisms, and, again, demonstrate the validity of group-based research.     

Visual detectability gradients: the effect of distractors in contralateral field

A number of studies involving recognition of tachistoscopically presented words have reported that the typical right visual field performance superiority associated with linguistic stimuli is enhanced by bilateral presentations (simultaneous stimuli in both visual half-fields) compared to unilateral presentations (stimuli in only one half-field on a trial). We have reported the same phenomenon, however, using visual spatial patterns in a search paradigm (E. W. Yund, R. Efron, & D. R. Nichols, 1990c. Brain and Cognition, 12, 117-127) and have accounted for it in terms of the operating characteristics of a visual scanning mechanism which serially examines a decaying neural representation of the stimuli. In the present experiment we attempted to exploit these operating characteristics to influence this difference between unilateral and bilateral presentations. The results not only are consistent with the assumptions of the scanning hypothesis but they also provide new information pertinent to the operating characteristics of this mechanism.     

Syntactic and semantic contributions to sentence comprehension in agrammatism

Five aphasic subjects, who demonstrated agrammatic speech, and eight control subjects were presented with a sentence-picture matching task in which the factors of syntactic complexity, semantic reversibility, and sentence plausibility were independently varied. A subset of the sentences was patterned after that presented by A. Caramazza and E. Zurif (1976, Brain and Language, 5, 572-583) who concluded that Broca's aphasics rely on semantic constraints instead of syntactic information for sentence comprehension. Our aphasic subjects showed the same pattern of performance on this subset of sentences. However, the results from the full set of sentence materials we tested show that the aphasic subjects could perform some sentence level syntactic analyses, even when syntactic information conflicted with semantic constraints. The aphasic subjects correctly interpreted most active and passive sentences. They failed, however, to assign thematic roles and adjectives in center-embedded relative sentences, and instead relied on nonsyntactic information. These results show that both semantic and syntactic information contributed to sentence comprehension in the aphasic subjects we tested, in contrast to previous claims that syntactic and semantic processes are completely dissociated in this population.     

Content Analysis of the Journal of Counseling & Development: Volumes 74 to 84

A content analysis of the research published in the Journal of Counseling & Development (JCD) was conducted for Volumes 74 (1996) through 84 (2006). Frequency distributions were used to identify the most published authors and their institutional affiliations, as well as some basic characteristics (type of sample, gender, and ethnicity) of the study samples. Results are compared with 2 previous content analyses (D. M. Pelsma & J. P. Cesari, 1989; M. E. Williams & W. C. Buboltz, 1999).     

The female advantage in object location memory is robust to verbalizability and mode of presentation of test stimuli

This study extends Duff and Hampson's [Duff, S., & Hampson, E. (2001). A sex difference on a novel spatial working memory task in humans. Brain and Cognition,47, 470-493] finding of a sex-related difference in favor of females for an object location memory task. Twenty female and 20 male undergraduate students performed both manual and computer-generated versions of the task using stimuli that varied in degree of verbalizability. A 2x2x3 ANOVA with Sex as a between-subjects factor, and Presentation (manual or computer) and Stimuli (common objects, common shapes, and novel shapes) as within-subjects repeated measures revealed a significant main effect for Sex. Females made fewer errors than males regardless of presentation and across the three levels of verbalizability (i.e., stimulus types); moreover, the effect size was considered "large" [Cohen, J. (1988). Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences (2nd ed.). Berlin: Springer]. These findings are interpreted within the context of the current literature that demonstrates a female advantage for object location memory (e.g., [Voyer, D., Postma, A., Brake, B., & Imperato-McGinley, J. (2007). Gender differences in object location memory: A meta-analysis. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 14, 23-38]).     

Detection of change in shape and its relation to part structure

Using a change detection paradigm (Barenholtz, E., Cohen, E. H., Feldman, J., & Singh, M. (2003). Detection of change in shape: An advantage for concavities. Cognition, 89(1) 1-9), we measured sensitivity to the changes of shapes and in particular the difference between detecting a new convex or concave vertex. We conclude that concave vertices per se are not more salient, but changes in the sequence of convexities and concavities along a contour are salient. We argue that these changes are likely to signal a change in perceived part structure.     

Experimental pragmatics and what is said: a response to Gibbs and Moise

Gibbs and Moise [Gibbs, R., Moise, J., 1997. Pragmatics in understanding what is said. Cognition 62, 51-74], present experimental results which, they claim, show that people recognize a distinction between what is said and what is implicated. They also claim that these results provide support for theories of utterance interpretation (such as Relevance Theory) which recognize that pragmatic processes are involved not only in understanding what is implicated but also in working out what is said (the 'explicature'). We attempted to replicate some of these experiments and also adapted them. Our results fail to confirm Gibbs and Moise's claims. Most significantly, they show that, under certain conditions, subjects select implicatures when asked to select the paraphrase that best reflects what a speaker has said. We suggest that our results can be explained within the framework of Relevance Theory (Sperber, D., Wilson, D., 1986. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Blackwell, Oxford) if we assume that subjects select the paraphrase that comes closest to achieving the same set of communicated contextual effects as the original utterance. When an utterance gives rise to a single strong implicature, subjects tend to select this as the paraphrase that best reflects what is said; in other cases (for example in Gibbs and Moise's stimuli) subjects tend to select the explicature.     

Non-verbal IQ is correlated with visual field advantages for short duration coherent motion detection in deaf signers with varied ASL exposure and etiologies of deafness

Studies have reported a right visual field (RVF) advantage for coherent motion detection by deaf and hearing signers but not non-signers. Yet two studies [Bosworth R. G., & Dobkins, K. R. (2002). Visual field asymmetries for motion processing in deaf and hearing signers. Brain and Cognition, 49, 170-181; Samar, V. J., & Parasnis, I. (2005). Dorsal stream deficits suggest hidden dyslexia among deaf poor readers: Correlated evidence from reduced perceptual speed and elevated coherent motion detection thresholds. Brain and Cognition, 58, 300-311.] reported a small, non-significant RVF advantage for deaf signers when short duration motion stimuli were used (200-250 ms). Samar and Parasnis (2005) reported that this small RVF advantage became significant when non-verbal IQ was statistically controlled. This paper presents extended analyses of the correlation between non-verbal IQ and visual field asymmetries in the data set of Samar and Parasnis (2005). We speculate that this correlation might plausibly be driven by individual differences either in age of acquisition of American Sign Language (ASL) or in the degree of neurodevelopmental insult associated with various etiologies of deafness. Limited additional analyses are presented that indicate a need for further research on the cause of this apparent IQ-laterality relationship. Some potential implications of this relationship for lateralization studies of deaf signers are discussed. Controlling non-verbal IQ may improve the reliability of short duration coherent motion tasks to detect adaptive dorsal stream lateralization due to exposure to ASL in deaf research participants.     

Effect of trait and state approach motivation on aggressive inclinations

Research has suggested that individual differences in behavioral approach sensitivity (BAS) are related to state and trait anger [Carver, C. S. (2004). Negative affects deriving from the behavioral approach system. Emotion, 4, 3–22; Harmon-Jones, E. (2003a). Clarifying the emotive functions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activity. Psychophysiology, 40, 838–848; Harmon-Jones, E. (2003b). Anger and the behavioural approach system. Personality and Individual Differences, 35, 995–1005]. The present research sought to extend this past work by testing whether individual differences in BAS would relate to aggressive inclinations, particularly when approach motivation was situationally primed. Results supported predictions, and thus suggest, contrary to several perspectives (e.g., [Gray, J. A. (1990). Brain systems that mediate both emotion and cognition. Cognition & Emotion, 4(3), 269–288; Watson, D. (2000). Mood and temperament. New York: Guilford Press]), that BAS is involved in more than just positive emotional experiences and behaviors.     

The growing significance of hot intelligences

Comments on the original article, "Intelligence: New findings and theoretical developments," by R. E. Nisbett, J. Aronson, C. Blair, W. Dickens, J. Flynn, D. F. Halpern, and E. Turkheimer (see record 2011-30298-001). The present authors note that Nisbett et al's review focuses on intelligences that have been topics of research through the 20th century. Since then, however, attention to a new group of intelligences that the present authors refer to as "hot intelligences" has been growing (Mayer, Salovey, & Caruso, 2004). Although Nisbett et al (2012) mentioned potential newcomers to the group of intelligences, such as practical intelligence, the present authors feel that future reviews should consider the burgeoning research in new conceptions of intelligence. Here the authors express a rationale for including a consideration of these newly described intelligences. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Abstracts

K orner , S. and B rown , G. (1990) Exclusion of children from family psychotherapy: Family therapists' beliefs and practices. Journal of Family Psychology
S charff , J.S. (1989) Play with young children in family therapy: An extension of the therapist's holding capacity. Journal of Psychotherapy and the Family
H alperin , S. M. (1989) A neglected triangle: Grandmother, mother, and daughter. Contemporary Family Therapy: An International Journal
W ojcik , J.V. and I verson , E.R. (1989) Therapeutic letters: The power of the printed word. Journal of Strategic and Systemic Therapies
C assano , D.R. (1989) Multi-family group therapy in social work practice. Social Work with Groups
R oberts , M., C aesar , L., P erryclear , B. and P hillips , D. (1989) Reflecting team consultations. Journal of Strategic and Systemic Therapies
W arner , M.S. (1989) Empathy and strategy in the family system. Person Centered Review
D e B ord , J.B. (1989) Paradoxical interventions: A review of the recent literature. Journal of Counseling and Development
C ole , D.A. and J ordan , A.E. (1989) Assessment of cohesion and adaptability in component family dyads: A question of convergent and discrimimant validity, Journal of Counseling Psychology
M usante , L., T reiber , F.A., S trong , W.B. and L ecy , M. (1990) Individual and cross-spouse correlations of perceptions of family functioning, blood pressure and dimensions of anger. Journal of Psychosomatic Research     

Screening for malingering in a criminal-forensic sample with the personality assessment inventory

In this study, the authors examined how overreporting of psychopathology indices on the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI; L. C. Morey, 1991) performed as screening measures for malingering in a sample of 166 defendants undergoing pretrial court-ordered evaluations in the federal criminal justice system. Using results from the Structured Interview of Reported Symptoms (SIRS; R. Rogers, R. M. Bagby, & S. E. Dickens, 1992) as the criterion measure of malingering, the authors found that the Negative Impression scale (NIM) was the most effective PAI screening measure (cut score > or = 81 T). NIM performed as well as an established comparison measure from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory--2 (J. N. Butcher, W. G. Dahlstrom, J. R. Graham, A. Tellegen, & B. Kaemmer, 1989; Infrequency [F] cut score > or = 95 T), supporting the use of either of these indices as reasonable screening measures to identify potential malingerers for subsequent evaluation.     

Facing up to the issues: Reply to Hellige (1983)

In a recent article in this journal, Hellige (Brain and Cognition, 2, 199-203, 1983) presented a critique of the chimeric-face technique that was used by us to validate a hand preference questionnaire. Data were presented by Hellige to show that the left visual field (LVF) bias that occurs on this task is due primarily to differences in detail in the features of the two faces and not because of right hemisphere dominance for face perception. In our rebuttal, we acknowledge that the two faces are not mirror-image duplicates of each other, but contend that this fact does not explain why differences between left-handers and right-handers have been observed on this task. Further data on the role of handedness as well as other variables impacting on this task are presented. A possible explanation is also offered for the rather small extent of LVF bias that Hellige obtained when he used corrected (i.e., true mirror-image) versions of Jaynes' chimeric faces.     

Reviews

Book reviewed in this article:
Ethics of Environment and Development: Global Challenge and International Response . Edited by J. R onald E ngel and J oan G ibb E ngel .
Amythia: Crisis in the Natural History of Western Culture . By L 1oyal D. R ue. Foreword by William G. Doty.
God in History: Shapes of Freedom . By P eter C. H odgson .
The Brain and Belief: Faith in the Light of Brain Research . By J ames B. A shbrook .     

On the Nature of Cognitive Control and Endogenous Orienting: A Response to Chica and Bartolomeo (2010)

Chica and Bartolemeo (Unconscious strategies? Commentary on Risko and Stolz (2010): The proportion valid effect in covert orienting: Strategic control or implicit learning? Consciousness and Cognition, 19, 443–444.) agree that our results (Risko, E. F., & Stolz, J. A. (2010). The proportion valid effect in covert orienting: Strategic control or implicit learning? Consciousness and Cognition, 19, 432–442.) are consistent with an implicit learning account of the proportion valid effect. Nevertheless, they raise two general issues (1) that an explicit strategy might be operative in other contexts and (2) that orienting in response to implicit knowledge is endogenous. In our response, we address each of these issues and further discuss the concepts of endogenous orienting and cognitive control.     

The semantic interference effect in the picture-word interference paradigm: does the response set matter?

In three picture-word interference experiments we explore some properties of the semantic interference (SI) effect in the picture-word interference paradigm. In Experiments 1 and 2, we test whether SI may be obtained when the distractor words are not part of the response set and when only one picture per semantic category is included in the experiment. In Experiment 3, we explore if the magnitude of the SI effect depends on whether or not the distractor words are part of the response set. Reliable SI effects were obtained in all three experiments and the magnitude of the effect did not vary as a function of whether or not distractor words are part of the response set. These results are problematic for the selection mechanism in the WEAVER++ lexical access model (Levelt, W. J. M., Roelofs, A., & Meyer, A. S. (1999). A theory of lexical access in speech production. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 22, 1-75; Roelofs, A. (1992). A spreading-activation theory of lemma retrieval in speaking. Cognition, 42, 107-142).