Is there semantic interference in delayed naming?

The semantic interference effect in the picture-word interference task is interpreted as an index of lexical competition in prominent speech production models. Janssen, Schirm, Mahon, and Caramazza (2008) challenged this interpretation on the basis of experiments with a novel version of this task, which introduced a task-switching component. Participants either named the picture or read the word, depending on the word's color. Janssen et al. reported semantic interference in picture naming, regardless of whether the word appeared simultaneously with the picture (immediate naming) or 1,000 ms after the picture (delayed naming). Because picture name retrieval is completed in less than 1,000 ms, the finding in delayed naming was taken as evidence against the lexical competition account. In 3 sets of experiments conducted in German and English, we tested for semantic effects in Janssen et al.'s task-switching version and in the standard picture-word interference task. Using identical materials, we obtained sizeable interference effects in the standard task (Experiments 2, 4, and 6) but no effects in the task-switching version (Experiments 1, 3, and 5). When the word reading trials of the task-switching version were replaced with no-go trials (Experiment 7), semantic interference reemerged in immediate naming but was still absent in delayed naming. The experiments question the reliability of Janssen et al.'s critical finding and suggest that theoretical inferences about the origin of semantic effects in the standard picture-word interference task based on results from the task-switching version used by Janssen et al. are difficult to draw.     

Shape constancy and theory of mind: is there a link?

In three experiments, children aged between 4 and 7 years viewed a circular disc oriented at a slant. The disc was made of luminous material and situated in a darkened chamber. Children of all ages exaggerated the circularity of the disc when they knew that the object was really a circle (the circle task), and the effect was greatest in the younger members of the sample. Crucially, however, a group of children in Experiment 3 who viewed an identical shape that they knew emanated from an actual ellipse did not exaggerate circularity. In the second experiment, children tackled three standard theory of mind tasks in addition to the circle task mentioned above. A significant correlation emerged (even with age partialed) between the extent of exaggeration made by those who knew that the shape was a circle and ability to pass the theory of mind tests. It seems knowledge of reality contaminates judgements of appearance in the circle task. This might be the same bias that features in realist errors in theory of mind tasks.     

Are semantic errors actually semantic?: Evidence from alzheimer's disease

Patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) produce a high rate of semantic errors when naming to confrontation. This is considered to be one of the many consequences of their semantic memory deficit. However, it has been shown, in aphasic patients with focal lesions, that semantic errors could arise from impairment to any one of the levels in the naming process. To check this hypothesis in AD, we assessed in 15 patients the capacity to name and access semantic knowledge (by multiple-choice probe questions) about 14 objects presented successively in the visual, tactile, auditory, and verbal modalities. In the visual naming task, 33 errors were recorded: 26 (78.8%) were semantic and 7 (21.2%) were unrelated errors. Of the 26 semantic errors, 8 were related to a deficit of the semantic knowledge related to the item and 17 to a deficit in the retrieval of the phonological form of the word. One was associated with a deficit of access to semantic knowledge in the visual modality. The 7 unrelated errors were associated with a loss of semantic knowledge for 4 and deficit of access to the phonological form for 3. In conclusion, this study shows that semantic errors do not systematically reflect a deficit of semantic knowledge in Alzheimer's disease. It also seems that unrelated errors are more frequently related to semantic deficits than semantic errors in this population.     

X-rated material and perpetration of sexually aggressive behavior among children and adolescents: is there a link?

Longitudinal linkages between intentional exposure to x-rated material and sexually aggressive behavior were examined among youth 10-15 year olds surveyed nationally in the United States. At Wave 1 in 2006, participants (n = 1,588) were queried about these exposures and outcomes in the preceding 12 months. Wave 2 data (n = 1,206) were collected approximately 12 months after Wave 1 and Wave 3 data (n = 1,159) were collected approximately 24 months after Wave 1. Thus, data for this project represent a 36-month time frame. A marginal model with generalized estimating equations was used to represent the population-average odds of sexually aggressive behavior over the 36 months as a function of exposure to x-rated material over the same time and to account for clustering in the data within person over time. An average of 5% of youth reported perpetrating sexually aggressive behavior and 23% of youth reported intentional exposure to x-rated material. After adjusting for other potentially influential proximal (i.e., sexual aggression victimization) and distal characteristics (e.g., substance use), we found that intentional exposure to violent x-rated material over time predicted an almost 6-fold increase in the odds of self-reported sexually aggressive behavior (aOR: 5.8, 95% CI: 3.2, 10.5), whereas exposure to nonviolent x-rated material was not statistically significantly related (aOR: 1.7, 95% CI: 0.94, 2.9). Associations were similar for boys and girls (boys nonviolent x-rated material aOR = 2.0, 95% CI: 0.8, 4.7; violent x-rated material aOR = 6.5, 95% CI: 2.7, 15.3; girls nonviolent x-rated material aOR = 1.2, 95% CI: 0.5, 3.2; violet x-rated material aOR = 6.1, 95% CI: 2.5, 14.8).     

Pastoral counseling and pastoral care: is there a difference?

The author argues that there is little difference between pastoral counseling and pastoral care. Utilizing an evidence-based and narrative approach, he examines the ideas of a variety of historical and contemporary writers to illustrate this thesis. Along with historical and contemporary writings on the topic, the author includes his own clinical experiences and associations to illustrate his conviction that pastoral counseling and pastoral care are more alike than different.     

Is there a “strength effect” in automatic semantic priming?

According to spreading activation models of automatic priming, highly related associates should yield stronger priming effects than weakly related associates. The strength of relations is usually based on word association norms. However, this strength effect has been found in some studies but not in others. The present study suggests that one factor that might be responsible for this inconsistency is whether the weak associate is the primary or nonprimary response in the word association norms This possibility was explored by comparing priming effects of weak nonprimary and primary associates with those of strong primary associates. Comparable priming effects were found for the strong and weak primary associates whereas the weak nonprimary associates did not yield any priming effects. These results were obtained both in paired (Experiment 1) and single (Experiment 2) presentation priming procedures. Thus, the rank of the associate is an important factor in predicting the magnitude of the priming effect.     

Suppressing unwanted memories: where there is a will,there is a way?

Research suggests that suppressing unwanted thoughts, generally, is an ineffective thought control strategy, because suppression attempts oftentimes fail, and, furthermore, result in a paradoxical increase of unwanted thoughts, later on. The present study sought to investigate whether manipulated expectations about suppression efficacy determine actual effects of suppression attempts. To test this hypothesis, participants listened to an audiotaped story, and were subsequently appointed to one of four conditions: a no-instruction-control (n = 20), suppression (n = 20), suppression-works (n = 20; participants were told that suppression generally is a fruitful strategy), or suppression-does-not-work (n = 25; participants were told that suppression primarily has paradoxical effects) condition. Two hours later, participants' memories of the story were tested, and several metamemory questions were answered. Induced expectations actually determined the perceived efficacy of suppression attempts, as well as thought frequency, although perceived or actual accuracy of recollections was not affected by the instructions.     

Working and long-term memory deficits in schizophrenia: is there a common prefrontal mechanism?

This study tested the hypothesis that dorsolateral prefrontal cortex deficits contribute to both working memory and long-term memory disturbances in schizophrenia. It also examined whether such deficits were more severe for verbal than nonverbal stimuli. Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to assess cortical activation during performance of verbal and nonverbal versions of a working memory task and both encoding and recognition tasks in 38 individuals with schizophrenia and 48 healthy controls. Performance of both working memory and long-term memory tasks revealed disturbed dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activation in schizophrenia, although medial temporal deficits were also present. Some evidence was found for more severe cognitive and functional deficits with verbal than nonverbal stimuli, although these results were mixed.     

How semantic is automatic semantic priming?

Priming for semantically related concepts was investigated using a lexical decision task designed to reveal automatic semantic priming. Two experiments provided further evidence that priming in a single presentation lexical decision task (McNamara & Altarriba, 1988) derives from automatic processes. Mediated priming, but no inhibition or backward priming was found in this type of lexical decision task. Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrated that automatic priming was found only for associated word pairs, as determined by word association norms, and not for word pairs that are semantically related but not associated. It is argued that automatic priming in the lexical decision task occurs at a lexical level not at a semantic level.     

Working memory in multilingual children: is there a bilingual effect?

This research investigates whether early childhood bilingualism affects working memory performance in 6- to 8-year-olds, followed over a longitudinal period of 3 years. The study tests the hypothesis that bilinguals might exhibit more efficient working memory abilities than monolinguals, potentially via the opportunity a bilingual environment provides to train cognitive control by combating interference and intrusions from the non-target language. A total of 44 bilingual and monolingual children, matched on age, sex, and socioeconomic status, completed assessments of working memory (simple span and complex span tasks), fluid intelligence, and language (vocabulary and syntax). The data showed that the monolinguals performed significantly better on the language measures across the years, whereas no language group effect emerged on the working memory and fluid intelligence tasks after verbal abilities were considered. The study suggests that the need to manage several language systems in the bilingual mind has an impact on children's language skills while having little effects on the development of working memory.     

Self-reflection and well-being: is there a healthy amount of introspection?

Both extremely high and extremely low self-reflection have been considered as risk factors for psychological maladjustment. Therefore, from an integrating perspective medium amounts of self-reflection may constitute "healthy introspection." To test this hypothesis, self-reflection and psychological well-being were measured with self-report tests given a pooled sample of 647 subjects. A regressive relationship with self-reflection as a quadratic predictor of well-being was estimated using the LMS method for nonlinear structural equation modeling. No evidence for a curvilinear effect was detected in the total sample or in subgroups. Alternative theoretical assumptions are discussed on a psychological and operational level.     

Spatial patterns in tactile perception: is there a tactile field?

Previous studies of tactile spatial perception focussed either on a single point of stimulation, on local patterns within a single skin region such as the fingertip, on tactile motion, or on active touch. It remains unclear whether we should speak of a tactile field, analogous to the visual field, and supporting spatial relations between stimulus locations. Here we investigate this question by studying perception of large-scale tactile spatial patterns on the hand, arm and back. Experiment 1 investigated the relation between perception of tactile patterns and the identification of subsets of those patterns. The results suggest that perception of tactile spatial patterns is based on representing the spatial relations between locations of individual stimuli. Experiment 2 investigated the spatial and temporal organising principles underlying these relations. Experiment 3 showed that tactile pattern perception makes reference to structural representations of the body, such as body parts separated by joints. Experiment 4 found that precision of pattern perception is poorer for tactile patterns that extend across the midline, compared to unilateral patterns. Overall, the results suggest that the human sense of touch involves a tactile field, analogous to the visual field. The tactile field supports computation of spatial relations between individual stimulus locations, and thus underlies tactile pattern perception.     

Typicality effects in artificial categories: is there a hemisphere difference?

In category classification tasks, typicality effects are usually found: accuracy and reaction time depend upon distance from a prototype. In this study, subjects learned either verbal or nonverbal dot pattern categories, followed by a lateralized classification task. Comparable typicality effects were found in both reaction time and accuracy across visual fields for both verbal and nonverbal categories. Both hemispheres appeared to use a similarity-to-prototype matching strategy in classification. This indicates that merely having a verbal label does not differentiate classification in the two hemispheres.     

Is naming faces different from naming objects? Semantic interference in a face- and object-naming task

A current debate regarding face and object naming concerns whether they are equally vulnerable to semantic interference. Although some studies have shown similar patterns of interference, others have revealed different effects for faces and objects. In Experiment 1, we compared face naming to object naming when exemplars were presented in a semantically homogeneous context (grouped by their category) or in a semantically heterogeneous context (mixed) across four cycles. The data revealed significant slowing for both face and object naming in the homogeneous context. This semantic interference was explained as being due to lexical competition from the conceptual activation of category members. When focusing on the first cycle, a facilitation effect for objects but not for faces appeared. This result permits us to explain the previously observed discrepancies between face and object naming. Experiment 2 was identical to Experiment 1, with the exception that half of the stimuli were presented as face/object names for reading. Semantic interference was present for both face and object naming, suggesting that faces and objects behave similarly during naming. Interestingly, during reading, semantic interference was observed for face names but not for object names. This pattern is consistent with previous assumptions proposing the activation of a person identity during face name reading.     

Is there a link between irritable bowel syndrome and left-handedness?: An exploratory study

Recent research has found that people with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) and those with Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) show a relative deficit in verbal IQ, compared to their own performance IQ, and the IQ of a healthy comparison group. It has been suggested that the elevated prevalence of left-handedness shown in previous studies investigating people with IBD is due to compromised left-hemisphere development. This may be associated with a decrement in certain cognitive functions such as verbal IQ. A shift in brain dominance from left to right has been found in many atopic and immunological diseases as well as in autonomic dysfunctions. It was uncertain whether this would apply to people with IBS, a functional disorder in which the cause or causes remain unclear. Therefore, the aim of this preliminary study was to investigate whether people with IBS have an increased prevalence of left-handedness. It was found that there was an association between IBS and left-handedness, showing that further research on this association both in IBS and other functional disorders (as well as on the similarities between IBS and IBD) is warranted.     

Is there a natural order for expressing semantic relations?

All languages rely to some extent on word order to signal relational information. Why? We address this question by exploring communicative and cognitive factors that could lead to a reliance on word order. In Study 1, adults were asked to describe scenes to another using their hands and not their mouths. The question was whether this home-made "language" would contain gesture sentences with consistent order. In addition, we asked whether reliance on order would be influenced by three communicative factors (whether the communication partner is permitted to give feedback; whether the information to be communicated is present in the context that recipient and gesturer share; whether the gesturer assumes the role of gesture receiver as well as gesture producer). We found that, not only was consistent ordering of semantic elements robust across the range of communication situations, but the same non-English order appeared in all contexts. Study 2 explored whether this non-English order is found only when a person attempts to share information with another. Adults were asked to reconstruct scenes in a non-communicative context using pictures drawn on transparencies. The adults picked up the pictures for their reconstructions in a consistent order, and that order was the same non-English order found in Study 1. Finding consistent ordering patterns in a non-communicative context suggests that word order is not driven solely by the demands of communicating information to another, but may reflect a more general property of human thought.     

Spatial organisation in passive tactile perception: is there a tactile field?

The perceptual field is a cardinal concept of sensory psychology. 'Field' refers to a representation in which perceptual contents have spatial properties and relations which derive from the spatial properties and relations of corresponding stimuli. It is a matter of debate whether a perceptual field exists in touch analogous to the visual field. To study this issue, we investigated whether tactile stimuli on the palm can be perceived as complex stimulus patterns, according to basic spatial principles. Subjects judged the intensity of a target stimulus to the palm, ignoring two brief preceding touches at nearby flanker locations. We found that the judgements of the target intensity were boosted by flankers when the target lay on the line joining the flankers in comparison to when the target lay away from this line. Therefore, we suggest that a tactile spatial organisation, i.e. a tactile field, exists; the field supports the relation of collinearity; it is automatically and implicitly activated by touch, and it groups spatially coherent perceptual contents.     

Visuo-spatial processing in congenitally blind people: is there a gender-related preference?

Several studies have shown that blind and sighted individuals are equally able to generate and process visuo-spatial images. However, differences emerge when active manipulation of information is required. A similar distinction has been reported in studies investigating gender-related preferences in visuo-spatial tasks indicating a male advantage in active tasks only. The present study investigates gender-related visuo-spatial preference in congenitally blind people by using active and passive working memory tasks. The results show significant effects due to gender and blindness; nevertheless, gender effects are more pronounced in the blind group and maximised in the active task. These data are interpreted within a theoretical framework that accounts for the different factors modulating the development of visuo-spatial abilities.     

Attention in humans and animals: is there a capacity limitation at the time of encoding?

Investigators have suggested that pigeons have a limited capacity input channel and that as a result performance suffers when information load is great. This information overload hypothesis is based on converging findings from experiments using the matching-to-sample paradigm. Fundamental among these findings are that (a) performance improves as sample duration increases, (b) performance is better when the sample contains one relevant feature (elements) than when it contains two (compounds), and (c) this element superiority effect can be reduced by making the relevant feature of compound samples predictable. Experiments 1 and 2 show that these effects occur for humans as well. However, Experiments 3, 4, and 5 show that in humans at least some of these effects do not result from information overload at the time of encoding. Thus, the assertion that these effects do reflect such a limitation in pigeons must be reevaluated.