Written Responses in a Musical Situation as a Function of the Stability of Emotional Behavior

The present study investigated the degree to which learning sets developed during formation of 20 successive concepts. Forty S s were evenly distributed among eight experimental conditions. Conditions compared were rule with attribute identification, conjunctive with disjunctive concepts, and random with ordered arrays of figures. Results showed that learning sets formed with rule identification for both conjunctive and disjunctive concepts, but not with attribute identification. Concepts were easier to learn when using systematic compared to random arrays of figures (of questionable significance), when forming conjunctive rather than disjunctive concepts (not significant), and when using rule identification instead of attribute identification. Procedural differences among studies in this area appear to be major contributors to differences among studies in the results found.     

Sifting through the Hyperbole: One Hundred Years of Marijuana Coverage in The New York Times

The contemporary media has often portrayed marijuana as a “slacker drug”; however, this portrayal is somewhat novel. Several scholars have argued in the early 1900s, especially in the 1930s, the media often associated marijuana with violence and mental illness. Another common argument was that marijuana was associated with Mexican immigrants. Conversely, other researchers have argued that these reports were overblown and media accounts of marijuana were not very common until recent years. The current study utilizes recently available on-line archives to conduct a more comprehensive test of how exactly marijuana was depicted in The New York Times from 1851–1950.     

Going the distance: Extra-symbolic contributions to the symbolic control of spatial attention

Over the past 30 years, researchers have used symbolic cues such as spatial words and arrows to direct observers' attention to the location of target objects that appear at a single, fixed distance in simple visual environments; however, they have done so by using symbolic cues that provide only partial—directional—information about the spatial location of target objects. Thus, it remains unclear whether observers can only shift their attention broadly in the cued direction in response to these cues or whether they can shift their attention to the specific location of the target by combining an expectation about direction (derived from apprehension of the directional cue) with an expectation about distance (derived from some extra-symbolic cue). The results of two experiments showed that observers do shift their attention to relatively coarse spatial locations by combining expectancies about direction and distance, and that the extent to which observers do so is modulated by the presence of visible markers and the expected distance of the target. These findings are important because they provide the first evidence that extra-symbolic information about distance contributes to the symbolic control of spatial attention.     

Space Fortress game training and executive control in older adults: A pilot intervention

ABSTRACT

We investigated the feasibility of using the Space Fortress (SF) game, a complex video game originally developed to study complex skill acquisition in young adults, to improve executive control processes in cognitively healthy older adults. The study protocol consisted of 36 one-hour game play sessions over 3 months with cognitive evaluations before and after, and a follow-up evaluation at 6 months. Sixty participants were randomized to one of three conditions: Emphasis Change (EC) – elders were instructed to concentrate on playing the entire game but place particular emphasis on a specific aspect of game play in each particular game; Active Control (AC) – game play with standard instructions; Passive Control (PC) – evaluation sessions without game play. Primary outcome measures were obtained from five tasks, presumably tapping executive control processes. A total of 54 older adults completed the study protocol. One measure of executive control, WAIS-III letter–number sequencing, showed improvement in performance from pre- to post-evaluations in the EC condition, but not in the other two conditions. These initial findings are modest but encouraging. Future SF interventions need to carefully consider increasing the duration and or the intensity of the intervention by providing at-home game training, reducing the motor demands of the game, and selecting appropriate outcome measures.     

Aging faces as viscal-elastic events: implications for a theory of nonrigid shape perception.

A theory for the perception of events is proposed using the concepts of transformational and structural invariants. This approach involves the application of a method of spatial coordinate transformation to characterize the remodeling of faces by growth. By construing growing faces to the viscal-elastic events, the perception of the relative age level faces in made amenable to the proposed event perception analysis. Shear and strain transformation are compared as alternative formulations of growth-produced changes in the shape of human profiles. Thes studies indicate that profiles transformed by strain elicit more reliable rank-order age judgments than those transformed by shear, although shear had a small significant effect. It is also shown that subjects are highly sensitive to small changes in strain, and that perceived identity of a shape is preserved under the strain transformation. The explanatory adequacy of the event perception theory of age information is compared to that of more traditional feature analytic theories.     

Effect of Concurrent Visual Feedback Frequency on Postural Control Learning in Adolescents

The purpose was to find better augmented visual feedback frequency (100% or 67%) for learning a balance task in adolescents. Thirty subjects were divided randomly into a control group, and 100% and 67% feedback groups. The three groups performed pretest (3 trials), practice (12 trials), posttest (3 trials) and retention (3 trials, 24 hours later). The reduced feedback group showed lower RMS in the posttest than in the pretest (p = 0.04). The control and reduced feedback groups showed significant lower median frequency in the posttest than in the pretest (p < 0.05). Both feedback groups showed lower values in retention than in the pretest (p < 0.05). Even when the effect of feedback frequency could not be detected in motor learning, 67% of the feedback was recommended for motor adaptation.