Episodic memory and the hippocampus: it's about time

Several recent studies have sought to develop animal models of episodic memory, the capacity to recollect unique personal experiences. However, these studies have not yet provided unambiguous evidence that this capacity is based on recollection of the learning episodes. A recent study that examined memory for the ordering of events within unique experiences, and demonstrated a critical and selective role for the hippocampus, suggests a new and promising model for neurobiological analyses of episodic memory.     

The role of temporal shifts in turnover processes: it's about time

To better understand the process of organizational withdrawal, a turnover model incorporating dynamic predictors measured at 5 distinct points in time was examined by following a large occupationally and organizationally diverse sample over a 2-year period. Results demonstrated that turnover can be predicted by perceived costs of turnover, organizational commitment, and critical events measured soon after entry into the organization. Occupational unemployment rates, job satisfaction, and search for alternative jobs also become significant predictors when measured over time. Critical events predicted turnover in a manner distinct from the operation of attitudes, consistent with the unfolding model (Lee & Mitchell, 1994). The path to turnover was marked by consistently low perceived costs of turnover and satisfaction, decreases in commitment, and increases in job search over time.     

Predicting compulsive Internet use: it's all about sex!

The objective of this research was to assess the predictive power of various Internet applications on the development of compulsive Internet use (CIU). The study has a two-wave longitudinal design with an interval of 1 year. The first measurement contained 447 adult heavy Internet users who used the Internet at least 16 h per week and had Internet access at home for at least 1 year. For the second measurement, all participants were invited again, of whom 229 responded. By means of an online questionnaire, the respondents were asked about the time spent on various Internet applications and CIU. On a cross-sectional basis, gaming and erotica seem the most important Internet applications related to CIU. On a longitudinal basis, spending a lot of time on erotica predicted an increase in CIU 1 year later. The addictive potential of the different applications varies; erotica appears to have the highest potential.     

浅谈对“五戒”的认识和意义

道教戒律是道教徒植福修因之慧炬,登真入道之慈航。是道教徒的道德规范,行为准则。故学道之士莫不持戒精严以积功累行。三洞诸经中说戒甚多:有《初真戒》、《三皈依戒》、《中极三百大戒》、《积功归根五戒》、《天仙大戒》……这些戒律皆为前贤祖师所授。对道教弟子的言行举止作了严格的规定和详细说明。上述戒律中《积功归根五戒》:“一、不得杀生;二、不得荤酒;三、不得妄言绮语、口是心非;四、不得偷盗;五、不得邪淫”,是每一位玄门弟子必须遵守的最基本的戒律之一。《老君戒经》曰:是五戒者,持身之本,持法之根。凡能持此五戒精进无虞者…     

Further thoughts on second-order family therapy--this time it's personal

A series of articles has recently appeared in which implications of second-order cybernetics for the practice of family therapy have been discussed. In this article, we attempt to advance the discussion by addressing ideas that we think have not been adequately emphasized thus far. Specifically proposed are ideas about conditions that might facilitate the emergence of consciously pragmatic strategy informed by the kind of systemic wisdom that delicately balances natural systems without the benefit of human planning. It is argued that a shift in the personal habits of knowing and acting that typically organize individual human experience is required. After attempting to specify what this shift might involve, implications of these ideas for the practice of family therapy and for human action in general are discussed.     

Valuable, but not maximal: it's time behavior therapy attend to its behaviorism

The field of behavior therapy is not in touch with itself in terms of its overarching behaviorism. Many erroneously consider its basic behaviorism to have been radical behaviorism and continue to look to develop behavior therapy (including behavior analysis and behavioral assessment) within that framework. But that approach turns out to be much less than maximal because there is a more advanced, better developed behaviorism within which to conduct and project the field. There is much that behavior therapy is not doing in practice and research because it is not making full use of that behaviorism foundation.     

Development of time sensitivity: Duration ratios in time bisection

This study investigated the development of children's abilities to discriminate durations as a function of their ratio and examined whether the ability to discriminate durations that differed by a very difficult ratio is related to the development of attention capacities. Children aged 5 and 8 years, as well as adults, performed a series of temporal bisection tasks with a ratio between the short and the long anchor duration that was changed to control the difficulty of the task (5:6, 2:3, and 1:2) in two duration ranges (<1 s and >3 s). In addition, they completed neuropsychological tests in order to assess their short-term memory, working memory, and visual attention abilities. The results showed that, at ratios of 2:3 and 1:2, most participants were able to discriminate the anchor durations in bisection. However, their sensitivity to time improved, whatever the duration range, both as the distance between the anchor durations increased and with increasing age. For the smallest duration ratio (5:6), few of the children were able to discriminate the anchor durations in the bisection task in comparison to adults. Hierarchical regression analyses performed on the neuropsychological tests revealed that, for the 2:3 ratio between anchor durations, the participants' visual attention scores explained a large part of the variance in time sensitivity. The children's lower temporal sensitivity was probably due to their limited visual attention abilities, thus explaining the difficulty they experienced in discriminating very close durations (5:6).     

The hyphen as a segmentation cue in triconstituent compound processing: it's getting better all the time

Bertram, R., Kuperman, V., Baayen, R. H. & Hyönä, J. (2011). The hyphen as a segmentation cue in triconstituent compound processing: It’s getting better all the time. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 52, 530–544. Inserting a hyphen in Dutch and Finnish compounds is most often illegal given spelling conventions. However, the current two eye movement experiments on triconstituent Dutch compounds like voetbalbond“footballassociation” (Experiment 1) and triconstituent Finnish compounds like lentokenttätaksi“airporttaxi” (Experiment 2) show that inserting a hyphen at constituent boundaries does not have to be detrimental to compound processing. In fact, when hyphens were inserted at the major constituent boundary (voetbal‐bond“football‐association”; lentokenttä‐taksi“airport‐taxi”), processing of the first part (voetbal“football”; lentokenttä“airport”) turns out to be faster when it is followed by a hyphen than when it is legally concatenated. Inserting a hyphen caused a delay in later eye movement measures, which is probably due to the illegality of inserting hyphens in normally concatenated compounds. However, in both Dutch and Finnish we found a learning effect in the course of the experiment, such that by the end of the experiments hyphenated compounds are read faster than in the beginning of the experiment. By the end of the experiment, compounds with a hyphen at the major constituent boundary were actually processed equally fast as (Dutch) or even faster than (Finnish) their concatenated counterparts. In contrast, hyphenation at the minor constituent boundary (voet‐balbond“foot‐ballassociation”; lento‐kenttätaksi“air‐porttaxi”) was detrimental to compound processing speed throughout the experiment. The results imply that the hyphen may be an efficient segmentation cue and that spelling illegalities can be overcome easily, as long as they make sense.     

If it's an animal it has axons: Experience and culture in preschool children's reasoning about animates

To claim that young children's biological thought is anthropocentric or that their induction depends on similarity rather than categories is to overlook the role of experience in reasoning. We tested four groups of 4-year-olds differing in two aspects of exposure to biological information: (a) their direct experience with nature (urban versus rural) and (b) biological expertise of their parents (expert biologists versus laypeople). We used a modified version of a novel feature projection task—in which projections are made from humans, mammals and insects to an array of nine targets representing various ontological kinds. Children's exposure to biology had consequences on their patterns of induction. There was an effect of parents’ expertise: laypeople's children's projections were based on similarity, while experts’ children's projections were based on the category animal. There was also an effect of direct experience: rural children were more restricted in their responses than were urban children. Although we found asymmetries in projections between humans and animals, humans were not a better source of knowledge about animates than were mammals or insects. These results show that the early emergence of domain specific biological thought and the use of biological categories in induction are highly contingent on children's experience.     

Incremental validity of the Ego Impairment Index: it's fine when it's there

The results published by W. Perry (2001) demonstrate that with a different criterion more incremental validity can be achieved with the Ego Impairment Index than R. M. Dawes (1999) found using the criterion available to him. Attempting to find statistical rationale for various Rorschach characteristics is, indeed, desirable, especially as a basis for the statistical use of the test. The degree of predictability indicated by most of these statistics, however, still presents a sizable gap between well established validity and much practice, particularly in legal settings. Further, both W. Perry (2001) and D. J. Viglione and M. J. Hilsonroth (2001) raise the issue of evaluating incremental validity in a context where there is some degree of multicolinearity and nesting. The logical equivalence of a nested with a non-nested analysis is established algebraically, and it is noted that the standard concerns about multicolinearity involve the estimations of the coefficients of predictive models--not the degree of predictability per se.     

It's about time: revisiting temporal processing deficits in dyslexia

Temporal processing in French children with dyslexia was evaluated in three tasks: a word identification task requiring implicit temporal processing, and two explicit temporal bisection tasks, one in the auditory and one in the visual modality. Normally developing children matched on chronological age and reading level served as a control group. Children with dyslexia exhibited robust deficits in temporal tasks whether they were explicit or implicit and whether they involved the auditory or the visual modality. First, they presented larger perceptual variability when performing temporal tasks, whereas they showed no such difficulties when performing the same task on a non‐temporal dimension (intensity). This dissociation suggests that their difficulties were specific to temporal processing and could not be attributed to lapses of attention, reduced alertness, faulty anchoring, or overall noisy processing. In the framework of cognitive models of time perception, these data point to a dysfunction of the ‘internal clock’ of dyslexic children. These results are broadly compatible with the recent temporal sampling theory of dyslexia.     

Hindsight bias redefined: It’s about time

Four experiments introduced a new conceptual and methodological approach to hindsight bias, traditionally defined as the tendency to exaggerate the a priori predictability of outcomes after they become known. By examining likelihood estimates rooted to specific time points during an unfolding event sequence (videos and short text stories), judged both in foresight and hindsight, we conceptualized hindsight bias as a contrast between two “inevitability curves,” which plotted likelihood against time. Taking timing into account, we defined three new indicators of accuracy: linear accuracy (how well hindsight judgments capture the linear trend of foresight judgments over time), rate accuracy (how well hindsight judgments reflect the slope of foresight judgments over time), and temporal accuracy (how well hindsight judgments specify the overall timing of the full envelope of foresight judgments). Results demonstrated that hindsight judgments showed linear and rate accuracy, but were biased only in terms of lack of temporal accuracy. The oft-used catchphrase “knew it all along effect” was found to be a misnomer, in that participants were well aware in hindsight that their earlier foresight judgments reflected uncertainty. The current research therefore points to one way in which retrospective judgments can be considered biased, yet simultaneously suggests that considerable accuracy exists when people render such judgments.     

Money and subjective well-being: it's not the money, it's the motives.

Past researchers have argued that the relative importance a person attaches to money is negatively related to subjective well-being (SWB). However, the past research suffers from the theoretical problem of not including the diferent motives for making money. With a sample of 240 business students, the authors developed a set of scales to measure motives for making money. They used a sample of 492 business students to confirm the factor structure of these motives. With another sample of 266 business students, the authors found that the negative relationship between money importance and SWB was due to the two variables being the result of a common cause; namely, the motives of social comparison. seeking power, showing off, and overcoming self-doubt. This finding was replicated with a sample of 145 entrepreneurs.     

A warning about median reaction time

When used with positively skewed reaction time distributions, sample medians tend to over-estimate population medians. The extent of overestimation is related directly to the amount of skew in the reaction time distributions and inversely to the size of the sample over which the median is computed. Simulations indicate that overestimation could approach 50 ms with small samples and highly skewed distributions. An important practical consequence of the bias in median reaction time is that sample medians must not be used to compare reaction times across experimental conditions when there are unequal numbers of trials in the conditions. If medians are used with unequal sample sizes, then the bias may produce an artifactual difference in conditions or conceal a true difference. Some recent studies of cuing and stimulus probability effects provide examples of this potential artifact.     

浅议道教养生及对当代社会的积极意义

道教养生的理论和实践,源起于春秋战国时代,东汉末年张道陵创立道教以后,道教的养生术得到了不断地提高和发展。道教养生术同中华民族传统的医药卫生科学,有着一定的联系和传承关系。随着历史的前进与进步,不断完善和发展的道教养生术,在人类社会中正日益发挥着积极的影响和作用。道教养生目标的实质道教认为,生活在宇宙大自然中的人类,在与大自然的抗衡斗争中,是强者,是可以长寿的,是能够主宰自己命运的。老子《道德经》中说:“死而不亡者寿”、“玄牝之门,是谓天地根”等论述都是这个意思。道教的先辈们也不乏通过养生而长寿的人。道教的…     

Time in the mind: using space to think about time

How do we construct abstract ideas like justice, mathematics, or time-travel? In this paper we investigate whether mental representations that result from physical experience underlie people's more abstract mental representations, using the domains of space and time as a testbed. People often talk about time using spatial language (e.g., a long vacation, a short concert). Do people also think about time using spatial representations, even when they are not using language? Results of six psychophysical experiments revealed that people are unable to ignore irrelevant spatial information when making judgments about duration, but not the converse. This pattern, which is predicted by the asymmetry between space and time in linguistic metaphors, was demonstrated here in tasks that do not involve any linguistic stimuli or responses. These findings provide evidence that the metaphorical relationship between space and time observed in language also exists in our more basic representations of distance and duration. Results suggest that our mental representations of things we can never see or touch may be built, in part, out of representations of physical experiences in perception and motor action.