Contents of Volume 20

Volume Contents

Contents of Volume 20     

Clinicians' ratings and self-reports of basic symptoms

A sample of 34 paranoid or undifferentiated schizophrenic outpatients were given the Rome Basic Disorders Scale, a self-rating questionnaire aimed to the assessment of basic symptoms, as defined by the Bonn Scale. These patients were then interviewed on the same 54 basic symptoms explored with the scale, by two independent clinicians blind to the outpatients' data. Self-ratings compared with clinicians' ratings by Student t for dependent samples yielded only one significant difference (p< .01) for the item measuring hypersensitivity to light. Present findings suggest that the Rome Basic Disorders Scale may be safely self-rated even by collaborative schizophrenic patients.     

Time course of brain activation during graphemic/phonologic processing in reading: an ERP study

The present study sought to investigate the time course of brain activation during grapheme-to-phoneme conversion and phonologic processing of legal Italian syllables. To this goal, we monitored a group of right-handed native Italian volunteers performing a phonologic decision task (same/different judgments). ERPs were recorded from 28 scalp sites during silent reading. Analysis of ERP latency showed faster responses to same syllables than to different ones as early as 105 ms at left temporal electrode site and 160 ms at frontal sites. The first effect of phonologic/graphemic incongruity on the amplitude of ERPs was observed at lateral occipital/posterior temporal sites (N185), where physiologic responses were enhanced to incongruous syllables.     

Spontaneous attention to word content versus emotional tone: differences among three cultures

A Stroop interference task was used to test the hypothesis that people in different cultures are differentially attuned to verbal content vis-à-vis vocal tone in comprehending emotional words. In Study 1, Americans showed greater difficulty ignoring verbal content than ignoring vocal tone (which reveals an attentional bias for verbal content); but Japanese showed greater difficulty ignoring vocal tone than ignoring verbal content (which reveals a bias for vocal tone). In Study 2, Tagalog-English bilinguals in the Philippines showed an attentional bias for vocal tone regardless of the language used, suggesting that the effect is largely cultural rather than linguistic. Implications for culture-and-cognition research are discussed.     

Differential involvement of NMDA and AMPA receptors within the nucleus accumbens in consolidation of information necessary for place navigation and guidance strategy of mice

Recent evidence now points to a role of glutamate transmission within the nucleus accumbens (Nacc) in spatial learning and memory. Unfortunately, the role of the distinct classes of glutamate receptors within this structure in mediating the different steps of the memorization process is not clear. The aim of this study therefore was to further investigate this issue, trying to assess the involvement of the two classes of glutamate receptors within the Nacc in consolidation of spatial information using an associative spatial task, the water maze. For this purpose, focal injections of the NMDA antagonist, AP-5, and of the AMPA antagonist, DNQX, have been performed immediately after the training phase, and mice have been tested for retention 24 h later. Two different versions of the water-maze task have been used: In the place version, animals could learn the position of the platform using visual distal cues, and in the cue version, the location of the platform was indicated by a single proximal cue. The results demonstrated that posttraining NMDA receptor blockade affects mice response in the place but not in the cue water-maze task. On the contrary, AMPA receptor blockade induced no effect in either version of the task. These data confirm a functional dissociation between glutamate receptors located in the Nacc in modulating spatial memory consolidation and indicate that they are specifically involved in consolidation of information necessary to acquire a place but not to a guidance strategy.     

Patterns of adaptation and personality disorders

Patterns of adaptation to conflict were explored with the Serial Color-Word Test, and personality disorders were assessed by means of the Coolidge Axis II Inventory in a group of 76 nonpsychotic women volunteers in the age range 18-50 yr. (M=29.1 yr., SD=8.3), who attended a psychiatric outpatients unit. Forward multiple regression analyses were performed to investigate whether patterns of adaptation were associated with personality disorders. 10 out of 13 personality scales, as measured by the Coolidge Axis II Inventory, were significantly predicted by adaptive variables. Some predictors were positive and others were negative. The variable R(AD) was a negative predictor of avoidant and dependent personalities, and a positive predictor of Extraversion, Aggressive personality, and Antisocial personality; this finding suggests that R(AD) may represent the regulative counterpart of a continuum from passive introversion to aggressive extraversion. The results encourage further research on nontrait laboratory correlates of personality disorders.     

Biological background knowledge and learning from a drug and alcohol education program

The authors asked whether having a base of relevant biological knowledge put school children in a better position to understand the effects of alcohol and cocaine and to learn about these effects when exposed to a curriculum presenting a physiological theory of drug action. Participants were 337 ethnically diverse 3rd- through 6th-grade students who were pretested, trained, and posttested. Multiple regression analyses revealed that knowledge of the basic functions of the heart, blood, and brain predicted certain drug-knowledge variables. Students with greater biological background knowledge also learned more from instruction, a finding with implications for enhancing drug and other health education programs.     

Learning Orthographic Structure With Sequential Generative Neural Networks

Learning the structure of event sequences is a ubiquitous problem in cognition and particularly in language. One possible solution is to learn a probabilistic generative model of sequences that allows making predictions about upcoming events. Though appealing from a neurobiological standpoint, this approach is typically not pursued in connectionist modeling. Here, we investigated a sequential version of the restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM), a stochastic recurrent neural network that extracts high‐order structure from sensory data through unsupervised generative learning and can encode contextual information in the form of internal, distributed representations. We assessed whether this type of network can extract the orthographic structure of English monosyllables by learning a generative model of the letter sequences forming a word training corpus. We show that the network learned an accurate probabilistic model of English graphotactics, which can be used to make predictions about the letter following a given context as well as to autonomously generate high‐quality pseudowords. The model was compared to an extended version of simple recurrent networks, augmented with a stochastic process that allows autonomous generation of sequences, and to non‐connectionist probabilistic models (n‐grams and hidden Markov models). We conclude that sequential RBMs and stochastic simple recurrent networks are promising candidates for modeling cognition in the temporal domain.     

Integrating systems of care in california for youth with severe emotional disturbance II: Initial group home expenditure and utilization findings from the California AB377 Evaluation Project

The California AB377 Evaluation Project was established to study the replication of an innovative system of care in three California counties for youth suffering from severe emotional disturbance. Development of the innovative system of care was pioneered in Ventura County, California, and the replications were legislatively enabled through Assembly Bill 377 (AB377). This paper reports evaluative findings about a central goal of the innovative care system: the reduction of use of highly restrictive out-of-home placements though creation and maintenance of coordinated and effective community-based services. Group home facilities are the focus of the evaluation work because these facilities consume the largest proportion of all public expenditures for youth in residential placements in California. More than 10 years of aggregate county and state level monthly expenditure and utilization data are presented. The results indicate that the demonstration counties have generated lower per capita inflation adjusted rates of expenditures and per capita group home placements than California as a whole. The evaluation results provide evidence that an integrated system of care can reduce group home placements. However, the nature, quality and effectiveness of any and/or all alternative services provided remains a topic for further investigation.