"... As you would have them do unto you": Does imagining yourself in the other's place stimulate moral action?

Philosophers, psychologists, and religious teachers have suggested that imagining yourself in another's place will stimulate moral action. The authors tested this idea in two different situations. In Experiment 1, participants had the opportunity to assign themselves and another research participant to tasks, with one task clearly more desirable than the other. Imagining oneself in the other's place did little to increase the morality (fairness) of the decision. A different form of perspective taking, imagining the other's feelings, increased direct assignment of the other to the desirable task, apparently due to increased empathy. In Experiment 2, participants confronted a different decision: either accept an initial task assignment that would give them highly positive consequences and the other participant nothing or change the assignment so they and the other would each receive moderately positive consequences. In this situation, imagining oneself in the other's place did significantly increase moral action.     

How "fun/importance" fit affects performance: relating implicit theories to instructions

People experience a regulatory fit when they employ means of goal pursuit that fit their regulatory orientation, and this fit increases motivation that can enhance performance. The present studies extend previous research on regulatory fit to the classic motivational variables of fun and importance. They also examine for the first time the effect on performance of the fit between individuals' implicit theories about a task's fun or importance and their strategic engagement of the task as fun or important as induced by task instructions. In all three studies, task performance was better when the external task instructions "fit" rather than did not fit participants' implicit theory for the task. The implications of these findings for understanding the motivational effects of fun and importance are discussed.     

Motor facilitation following action observation: a behavioural study in prehensile action

Previous research has shown that the observation of actions and the execution of actions activate common neural systems. More recently, we have presented data showing that action observation of prehension primes subsequent execution (Castiello, Lusher, Mari, Edwards, & Humphreys, 2002). In the current paper we examined action priming under conditions in which the size of the prime did not predict the size of the target (only 20% of trials were valid). We demonstrated reliable priming under these conditions, consistent with the effect occurring automatically. In addition, we show priming even when observers saw just the object rather than the object and a reaching action on the prime trial. We discuss the findings in relation to the role of mirror neurons and object affordances.     

Aging and maintaining intentions over delays: do it or lose it

When execution of retrieved intentions must be briefly delayed, older adults display deficits in performing those intentions (G. O. Einstein, M. A. McDaniel, M. Manzi, B. Cochran, & M. Baker, 2000). This initial finding was extended by showing age-related deficits with 5-s unfilled delays, with instructions to rehearse during the delay, and with divided attention during initial retrieval of the intention. Performance increased with a break at the end of the delay period, such that when combined with full attention (during retrieval), older adults' performance approached that of younger adults. These results suggest that age compromises maintenance of information in awareness. Consequently, when forced to delay execution of retrieved intentions, older adults may rely more on plan reformulation and subsequent retrieval of the intention from long-term memory at the end of the delay.     

Topiramate in the preventive treatment of episodic migraine: a combined analysis from pilot,double-blind,placebo-controlled trials

The safety and efficacy of medications for preventive treatment of migraine is the subject of current concern and investigation in health care. Two single-center, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies were conducted to evaluate the efficacy and safety of topiramate for migraine prophylaxis. Seventy patients with a diagnosis of migraine were randomly assigned to topiramate-treated and placebo groups. The studies consisted of a 4-week baseline phase, a 6-8 week titration, and 8-12 weeks of maintenance. Topiramate was titrated from an initial dose of 25 mg/day to a target dose of 100 mg BID. The primary efficacy measure, the mean 28-day migraine frequency, was lower in topiramate-treated patients than in the placebo group (3.2 versus 3.8, P=.001). Similarly, topiramate treatment resulted in a significantly greater mean reduction in migraine frequency than did placebo (1.55 versus 0.47, P=.001) and a significantly higher responder rate (35.3% versus 8.3%, P=.008). Paresthesia was the most common side effect reported with topiramate treatment. Other topiramate-associated adverse events included altered taste, memory impairment, diarrhea, and appetite suppression/weight loss. The rates of discontinuation were similar for the topiramate group (n=10) and the placebo group (n=8). These results suggest that topiramate is effective and well tolerated in the preventive treatment of migraine headaches.     

Cross-language positive priming disappears, negative priming does not: Evidence for two sources of selective inhibition

The authors used a unilingual and bilingual primed lexical decision task to investigate priming effects produced by attended and ignored words. In the unilingual experiment, accelerated lexical decisions to probe target words resulted when the word matched the preceding target word, whereas slowed lexical decisions to probe target words resulted when the word matched the preceding ignored nontarget word. In the bilingual (English-Spanish) experiment, between-language, rather than within-language, priming manipulations were used. Although the ignored repetition negative priming effect replicated across languages, cross-language attended repetition positive priming did not. This dissociation of priming effects in the inter- versus intralanguage priming conditions contradicts episodic retrieval accounts of negative priming that deny the existence of selective inhibitory processes. On the other hand, these results support an extension of inhibition-based accounts of negative priming, because they indicate that inhibition can operate at two levels of abstraction--local word and global language--simultaneously.     

Selective attention in obsessive-compulsive disorder

Recent information-processing studies have suggested that a selective attention deficit may be involved in the symptomatology of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). In this study, individuals diagnosed with OCD were distinguished from those with panic disorder and from control participants by their relatively poorer performance on a series of psychometric tasks of selective attention. These results are interpreted as supporting the hypothesis of a diminished ability of people with OCD to selectively ignore competing external (sensory) and internal (cognitive) stimuli, especially intrusive thoughts.     

Infants’ coding of location in continuous space

The ability to code location in continuous space is fundamental to spatial behavior. Existing evidence indicates a robust ability for such coding by 12 months, but systematic evidence on earlier origins is lacking. A series of studies investigated 5-month-olds’ ability to code the location of an object hidden in a sandbox, using a looking-time paradigm. In Experiment 1, after familiarization with a hiding-and-finding sequence at one location, infants looked longer at an object being disclosed from a location 12 inches (30 cm) away than at an object emerging from the hiding location, showing they were able to code location in continuous space. In Experiment 2, infants reacted with greater looking when objects emerged from locations 8 inches (20 cm) away from the hiding location, showing that location coding was more finely grained than could be inferred based on the first study. In Experiment 3, infants were familiarized with an object shown in hiding-and-finding sequences at two different locations. Infants looked longer at objects emerging 12 inches (30 cm) away from the most recent hiding location than to emergence from the other location, showing that infants could code location even when events had previously occurred at each location. In Experiment 4, after familiarization with two objects with different shapes, colors, and sounding characteristics, shown in hiding-and-finding sequences in two locations, infants reacted to location violations as they had in Experiment 3. However, they did not react to object violations, that is, events in which the wrong object emerged from a hiding location. Experiment 5 also found no effect of object violation, even when the infants initially saw the two objects side by side. Spatiotemporal characteristics may play a more central role in early object individuation than they do later, although further study is required.