The “Rod and Fran Test”: Relationship Priming Influences Cognitive-Perceptual Performance

We theorized that interpersonal relationships can provide structures for experience. In particular, we tested whether primes of same-sex versus mixed-sex relationships could foster cognitive-perceptual processing styles known to be associated with independence versus interdependence respectively. Seventy-two participants visualized either a same-sex or other-sex relationship partner and then performed two measures of cognitive-perceptual style. On a computerized Rod and Frame Test, individuals were more field-dependent after visualizing a mixed-sex versus same-sex relationship partner. On a measure involving perceptions of group behavior, participants demonstrated more holistic/contextually based perception after being primed with a female versus male relationship partner. These findings support the hypothesis that activated cognitive structures representing interpersonal relationships can shape individuals’ cognitive-perceptual performance.     

Resting Heart Rate,Vagal Tone,and Reactive and Proactive Aggression in Chinese Children

Abundant research conducted in Western contexts has shown that biological risk factors such as low resting heart rate (HR) might be related to childhood aggression. However, it was unclear (1) how resting HR, as well as other markers of cardiac functions such as resting vagal tone, may be related to subtypes of aggression such as reactive and proactive aggression, and (2) whether the HR-aggression relation can be replicated in non-Western contexts. Therefore, this study examined the concurrent and prospective relations between resting HR, vagal tone, and Chinese children’s reactive and proactive aggression. Participants were 183 children (M age?=?7.64 years, 91 girls) recruited from an elementary school in Zhenjiang, PRC. Children’s resting HR and vagal tone were assessed in the second grade (T1). Teachers rated children’s reactive and proactive aggression in the second (T1) and fourth grade (T2). Results showed that lower resting HR at T1 was associated with higher reactive and proactive aggression at T1 and T2, and higher vagal tone was associated with lower HR, which in turn was related to higher reactive and proactive aggression at T1 and T2. Lower vagal tone was directly related to higher reactive but not proactive aggression at T1 and T2, whereas lower HR was related to higher reactive aggression at T2 for children with low or moderate vagal tone but was not for children with high vagal tone. These psychophysiological findings from a non-Western context add additional support for both similarities and differences between reactive and proactive aggression in childhood.     

Epistemic contextualism can be stated properly

It has been argued that epistemic contextualism faces the so-called factivity problem and hence cannot be stated properly. The basic idea behind this charge is that contextualists supposedly have to say, on the one hand, that knowledge ascribing sentences like “S knows that S has hands” are true when used in ordinary contexts while, on the other hand, they are not true by the standard of their own context. In my paper, I want to show that the argument to the factivity problem fails because it rests on the mistaken premise that contextualists are committed to the truth of particular ordinary knowledge attributions.     

A Call for an Unbiased Search for Moderators in Disfluency Research: Reply to Oppenheimer and Alter (2014)

In a commentary to our article, Oppenheimer and Alter stressed the importance of searching for moderators in disfluency research. We agree, but we would like to clarify two issues. First, unlike Oppenheimer and Alter, we assume that learner characteristics might indeed moderate the effects of disfluency. Second, conclusions concerning the impact of disfluency in educational settings might be biased because of the file‐drawer problem. To counteract this possibility, we want to encourage other researchers to publish their studies––regardless of whether they found (positive) effects of disfluency or not. Until then, any recommendation concerning the use of disfluency as an educational intervention seems premature.     

Fjodor Stepun and Ernst Jünger: intellectuals at war

The article provides a comparison of two intellectual accounts of experiences in the First World War—From the Letters of an Artillery Ensign (1918) by the Russian philosopher and writer Fjodor Stepun and The Storm of Steel by the German essayist Ernst Jünger. The aim of this article is to reveal similarities and differences between the “optics” of Jünger and Stepun who are reporting one and the same event but deal with two different images of the Great War.     

Common and specific cognitive deficits in schizophrenia: relationships to function

The goals of the present study were to assess the interrelationships among tasks from the MATRICS and CNTRACS batteries, to determine the degree to which tasks from each battery capture unique variance in cognitive dysfunction in schizophrenia, and to determine the ability of tasks from each battery to predict functional outcome. Subjects were 104 schizophrenia patients and 132 healthy control subjects recruited as part of the CNTRACS initiative. All subjects completed four CNTRACS tasks and two tasks from the MATRICS battery: Brief Assessment of Cognition in Schizophrenia Symbol Coding and the Hopkins Verbal Learning Test. Functional outcome was also assessed in the schizophrenia subjects. In both the patient and control groups, we found significant intercorrelations between all higher order cognitive tasks (episodic memory, goal maintenance, processing speed, verbal learning) but minimal relationships with the visual task. For almost all tasks, scores were significantly related to measures of functional outcome, with higher associations between CNTRACS tasks and performance-based measures of function and between one of the MATRICS tasks and self-reported functioning, relative to the other functioning measures. After regressing out variance shared by other tasks, we continued to observe group differences in performance among task residuals, particularly for measures of episodic memory from both batteries, although these residuals did not correlate as robustly with functional outcome as raw test scores. These findings suggest that there exists both shared and specific variance across cognitive tasks related to cognitive and functional impairments in schizophrenia and that measures derived from cognitive neuroscience can predict functional capacity and status in schizophrenia.     

Granger Causality—Statistical Analysis Under a Configural Perspective

The concept of Granger causality can be used to examine putative causal relations between two series of scores. Based on regression models, it is asked whether one series can be considered the cause for the second series. In this article, we propose extending the pool of methods available for testing hypotheses that are compatible with Granger causation by adopting a configural perspective. This perspective allows researchers to assume that effects exist for specific categories only or for specific sectors of the data space, but not for other categories or sectors. Configural Frequency Analysis (CFA) is proposed as the method of analysis from a configural perspective. CFA base models are derived for the exploratory analysis of Granger causation. These models are specified so that they parallel the regression models used for variable-oriented analysis of hypotheses of Granger causation. An example from the development of aggression in adolescence is used. The example shows that only one pattern of change in aggressive impulses over time Granger-causes change in physical aggression against peers.     

Sensory memory of illusory depth in structure-from-motion

When multistable displays (stimuli consistent with two or more equally plausible perceptual interpretations) are presented intermittently, their perceptions are stabilized by sensory memory. Independent memory traces are generated not only for different types of multistable displays (Maier, Wilke, Logothetis, & Leopold, Current Biology 13:1076–1085, 2003), but also for different ambiguous features of binocular rivalry (Pearson & Clifford, Journal of Vision 4:196–202, 2004). In the present study, we examined whether a similar independence of sensory memories is observed in structure-from-motion (SFM), a multistable display with two ambiguous properties. In SFM, a 2-D planar motion creates a vivid impression of a rotating 3-D volume. Both the illusory rotation and illusory depth (i.e., how close parts of an object appear to the observer) of an SFM object are ambiguous. We dissociated the sensory memories of these two ambiguous properties by using an intermittent presentation in combination with a forced-ambiguous-switch paradigm (Pastukhov, Vonau, & Braun, PLoS ONE 7:e37734, 2012). We demonstrated that the illusory depth of SFM generates a sensory memory trace that is independent from that of illusory rotation. Despite this independence, the specificities levels of the sensory memories were identical for illusory depth and illusory rotation. The history effect was weakened by a change in the volumetric property of a shape (whether it was a hollow band or a filled drum volume), but not by changes in color or size. We discuss how these new results constrain models of sensory memory and SFM processing.