The relationship between political participation and civic community of migrants in the Netherlands

This article examines the relationship between different forms of political participation and the civic participation in organizations of ethnic minorities in the Netherlands. We have investigated the turnout rates and voting behaviour of migrants, the participation of councillors from ethnic minority groups and party of officials in four cities and the organizations of ethnic minorities in Amsterdam and on a national level. The combination of all this information supplies us with a picture of the civic community of the ethnic groups in the Netherlands and we theorize about explanations on differences between these groups.     

Reinforcement sensitivity of sex offenders and non‐offenders: An experimental and psychometric study of reinforcement sensitivity theory

This study tested predictions of Gray's Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory (RST) in subgroups of sex offenders and male non‐offenders using an experimental choice task consisting of a reward and a non‐reward phase. In addition, RST‐related psychometric measures were used. Both experimental and psychometric data were of interest to determine whether sex offenders could be reliably differentiated from non‐offenders. Paraphilic (N=50) and impulse control‐disordered (N=48) sex offenders showed greater sensitivity to continuous reward than male non‐offenders (N=51). Impulse control‐disordered sex offenders showed less behavioural adaptation under non‐reward than both paraphilic sex offenders and male non‐offenders. In addition, reward sensitivity, rash‐spontaneous impulsivity, and anxiety measures discriminated sex offenders from male non‐offenders. The results suggest that reinforcement sensitivity is a promising personality trait for differentiating subgroups of sex offenders from non‐offenders. The experimental and psychometric results illustrate that predictive accuracy in forensic settings could be improved by combining several types of data.     

The relationship of maternal mentalization and executive functioning to maternal recognition of infant cues and bonding

The study examined associations between maternal mentalization ability, executive functioning, recognition of infant cues, and bonding in a non‐clinical sample of mothers. It employed a correlational design. Sixty‐four mothers of young infants completed assessments of mentalization ability, executive functioning, and bonding. Photographs of infant facial expressions were utilized to assess ability to recognize infant cues of emotion, but this was not found to correlate with either maternal mentalization or executive functioning ability. Whilst a trend towards a significant positive relationship between mothers' cued ability to attribute mental states and their ability to recognize infant facial expressions was observed, no significant relationships were found between bonding scores and performance on the executive functioning and mentalization measures. The present study contributes to our current understanding of the influence of maternal cognitive factors, specifically mentalization and executive functioning, on the development of the mother–infant relationship. Future research, methodological issues, and clinical and theoretical implications are discussed.     

Visual homing in the absence of feature-based landmark information

Despite that fact that landmarks play a prominent role in human navigation, experimental evidence on how landmarks are selected and defined by human navigators remains elusive. Indeed, the concept of a ‘landmark’ is itself not entirely clear. In everyday language, the term landmark refers to salient, distinguishable, and usually nameable objects, rendering the problem of landmark recognition a special case of the general object recognition problem. In contrast, in the insect and robot literature, this notion of landmarks is often replaced by the “local position information” [e.g., Trullier, O., Wiener, S., Berthoz, A., &; Meyer, J.-A. (1997). Biologically based artificial navigation systems: Review and prospects. Progress in Neurobiology, 51, 483–544], referring to the entire set of sensor readings obtained at one location. This set may then serve as a characteristic of the particular location. Honey bees have been shown to base place recognition and homing on a snapshot-like memory of the place’s visual environment, not on the distances to recognized objects [Cartwright, B., &; Collett, T. (1983). Landmark learning in bees. Experiments and models. Journal of Comparative Physiology A, 151, 521–543]. A number of theoretical models of snapshot-based homing [e.g., Franz, M., Schölkopf, B., Mallot, H. A., Bülthoff, H. H. (1998). Where did I take that snapshot? Scene-based homing by image matching. Biological Cybernetics, 79, 191–202; Vardy, A., &; Möller, R. (2005). Biologically plausible visual homing methods based on optical flow techniques. Connection Science, 17, 47–89] predict that the accuracy of snapshot-based homing should depend on image contrast. For rodent hippocampal place fields, models have been developed using additional image information such as three-dimensional depth and allocentric orientations (e.g., room axes) and are thus less sensitive to image contrast and noise [e.g. Barry, C., Lever, C., Hayman, R., Hartley, T., Burton, S., O’Keefe, J., et al. (2006). The boundary vector cell model of place cell firing and spatial memory. Reviews in the Neurosciences, 17, 71–79]. Here, we study human visual homing in a virtual environment void of objects and readily detected image features. The environment was a circular room with a homogenous colour gradient covering the wall and uniform floor and ceiling. Subjects were able to approach remembered places. Accuracy decreased with colour gradient modulation and room size, in qualitative agreement with the snapshot model but not with other models of place recognition. We conclude that human memory for places can make use of a snapshot algorithm.     

Connectionist models of artificial grammar learning: what type of knowledge is acquired?

Two experiments are presented that test the predictions of two associative learning models of Artificial Grammar Learning. The two models are the simple recurrent network (SRN) and the competitive chunking (CC) model. The two experiments investigate acquisition of different types of knowledge in this task: knowledge of frequency and novelty of stimulus fragments (Experiment 1) and knowledge of letter positions, of small fragments, and of large fragments up to entire strings (Experiment 2). The results show that participants acquired all types of knowledge. Simulation studies demonstrate that the CC model explains the acquisition of all types of fragment knowledge but fails to account for the acquisition of positional knowledge. The SRN model, by contrast, accounts for the entire pattern of results found in the two experiments.

---

The influence of information redundancy on probabilistic inferences

Information redundancy affects the accuracy of inference strategies. A simulation study illustrates that under high-information redundancy simple heuristics that rely on only the most important information are as accurate as strategies that integrate all available information, whereas under low redundancy integrating information becomes advantageous. Assuming that people exercise adaptive strategy selection, it is predicted that their inferences will more often be captured by simple heuristics that focus on part of the available information insituations ofhigh-information redundancy, especially when information search is costly. This prediction is confirmed in two experiments. The participants' task was to repeatedly infer which of two alternatives, described by several cues, had a higher criterion value. In the first experiment, simple heuristics predicted the inference process better under high-information redundancy than under low-information redundancy. In the second experiment, this result could be generalized to an inference situation in which participants had no prior opportunity to learn about the strategies' accuracies through outcome feedback. The results demonstrate that people are able to respond adaptively to different decision environments under various learning opportunities.     

The neural regions sustaining episodic encoding and recognition of objects

In this functional MRI experiment, encoding of objects was associated with activation in left ventrolateral prefrontal/insular and right dorsolateral prefrontal and fusiform regions as well as in the left putamen. By contrast, correct recognition of previously learned objects (R judgments) produced activation in left superior frontal, bilateral inferior frontal, and right cerebellar regions, whereas correct rejection of distractor objects (N judgments) was associated with activation in bilateral prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortices, in right parietal and cerebellar regions, in the left putamen, and in the right caudate nucleus. The R minus N comparison showed activation in the left lateral prefrontal cortex and in bilateral cingulate cortices and precunei, while the N minus R comparison did not reveal any positive signal change. These results support the view that similar regions of the frontal lobe are involved in episodic encoding and retrieval processes, and that the successful episodic retrieval of newly learned objects is mainly based on a frontoparietal network.