A Note on Justice,Care, and Immigration Policy

Should a “caring” immigration policy give special treatment to would-be immigrants who are near neighbors? It is argued that, while those on our borders requesting entry have some special claim, it should not drown out the claims of more distant applicants for citizenship.     

Feature analysis and the token test

In a picture-matching task pictures of objects had to be arranged into pairs by aphasic and nonaphasic patients and normal controls. Aphasic patients were also given the Token Test. Correlation between the rank order of error scores in both tests was highly significant in aphasic patients. The pictures were also given to a normal group for free matching. Overlapping of normal performance on free matching and aphasic performance on bound matching occurred. We hypothesized that aphasic impairment was due to a difficulty in calling up associations, difficulty in feature analysis, and in moving from one concept to another. These findings are discussed in the light of abilities needed for Token Test performance. The results indicate that the traditionally presumed fundamental difference between verbal and nonverbal cognitive tasks is rather unsatisfactory.     

Short- and long-term effects of marital disruption on children

The short- and long-term (5 years later) effects of parental marital disruption on the psychological adjustment of children were examined. A representative community sample of urban families (N = 1,034) in which 25-50% had experienced marital disruption constituted the sample. The effect of the presence and type of father figure in the home on children's adjustment, controlling for ethnic group and social class, was evaluated with respect to measures of psychological symptomatology (based on mother's report). Significant effects of the father figure variable on the dimensions measuring Noncompulsivity and Delinquency were found at both time periods. Children with natural fathers showed the least pathology on the Delinquency factor and those with surrogate fathers demonstrated the most disordered behavior on the Noncompulsivity factor. These findings complement previous research showing stability of antisocial behavior over time. Implications for preventive interventions and future research are discussed.     

A “spoon full of sugar” helps the medicine go down: How a participant friendly version of a psychophysics task significantly improves task engagement,performance and data quality in a typical adult sample

Few would argue that the unique insights brought by studying the typical and atypical development of psychological processes are essential to building a comprehensive understanding of the brain. Often, however, the associated challenges of working with non-standard adult populations results in the more complex psychophysical paradigms being rejected as too complex. Recently we created a child- (and clinical group) friendly implementation of one such technique – the reverse-correlation Bubbles approach – and noted an associated performance boost in adult participants. Here, we compare the administration of three different versions of this participant-friendly task in the same adult participants to empirically confirm that introducing elements in the experiment with the sole purpose of improving the participant experience, not only boosts the participant’s engagement and motivation for the task but results in a significantly improved objective task performance and stronger statistical results.     

Rapid communication: Sex differences in artificial grammar learning: evidence for different strategies in men and women

In this article we report an experiment that investigated differences in classification performance of women and men in artificial grammar learning (AGL). Women's and men's responses correspond to a large extent. Consistent differences, however, were found in a variable that codes overlaps between training and test items in terms of string fragments. The results are best explained by the assumption that women and men apply different cognitive strategies at test.     

The influence of depth segmentation on colour constancy

In real scenes, surfaces in different depth planes often differ in the luminance and chromatic content of their illumination. Scene segmentation is therefore an important issue when considering the compensation of illumination changes in our visual perception (lightness and colour constancy). Chromatic adaptation is an important sensory component of colour constancy and has been shown to be linked to the two-dimensional spatial structure of a scene (Werner, 2003 Vision Research 43 1611 - 1623). Here, the question is posed whether this cooperation also extends to the organisation of a scene in depth. The influence of depth on colour constancy was tested by introducing stereo disparity, whereby the test patch and background were perceived in either the same or one of five different depth planes (1.9-57 min of arc). There were no additional cues to depth such as shadows or specular highlights. For consistent illumination changes, colour constancy was reduced when the test patch and background were separated in depth, indicating a reduction of contextual influences. An interaction was found between the influences of stereo depth and spatial frequency on colour constancy. In the case of an inconsistent illumination change, colour constancy was reduced if the test patch and background were in the same depth plane (2-D condition), but not if they were separated in depth (3-D condition). Furthermore, colour constancy was slightly better in the 3-D inconsistent condition than in the 2-D inconsistent condition. It is concluded that depth segmentation supports colour constancy in scenes with inconsistent illumination changes. Processes of depth segmentation are implemented at an early sensory stage of colour constancy, and they define visual regions within which the effects of illuminant changes are discounted for separately. The results support recent models that posit such implementation of scene segmentation in colour constancy.     

Semantic ambiguity and the failure of inhibition hypothesis as an explanation for reading errors in deep dyslexia

We report evidence for dissociation between explicit and implicit access to word representations in a deep dyslexic patient (JO). JO read aloud a series of ambiguous (e.g., bank) and unambiguous (e.g., food) words and performed a lexical decision task using these same items. When required to explicitly access the items (i.e., naming), JO showed relative impairment for ambiguous compared with unambiguous words. In contrast, the same stimuli produced an advantage for ambiguous words in lexical decision. The results are discussed within a framework of deep dyslexia that considers errors in production to arise through a failure to inhibit spuriously activated candidate representations.