Brief communication: The role of category structure in determining the effects of stimulus preexposure on categorization accuracy

What are the effects of preexposure of stimuli on participants' subsequent ability to categorize them accurately? An experiment employing artificial, abstract, visual stimuli confirms that, for adult humans, the effect of preexposure is dependent upon category structure. Whether preexposure has beneficial or detrimental effects is shown to be dependent on the way category examples are generated from the category base patterns. The results are predicted by salience reduction accounts of perceptual learning but may be problematic for stimulus differentiation accounts.     

Categorization and Perceptual Learning: An Analogue of the Face Inversion Effect

This paper reports two experiments that investigate the extent to which it is plausible to suppose that an associatively based mechanism for perceptual learning acts as the basis for the effects of inversion on identification, recognition, matching and discrimination of faces (and certain other stimuli rendered familiar by expertise, e.g. gundogs). In the first experiment, an inversion effect that is contingent both on familiarity with a category and on the category possessing prototypical structure is demonstrated using discrimination learning of chequerboard stimuli. The second experiment demonstrates that the inversion effect found in Experiment 1 can generalize to a recognition paradigm as well. These results are discussed within the framework provided by associative learning theory, and a parallel is drawn with models employing a norm-based coding in similarity space. The conclusion is that it would be remarkable if the inversion effects demonstrated with the abstract categories used in the experiments reported here were not implicated in the inversion effects found with other classes of stimuli,whilstconceding thatthe analogy is notcomplete,particularly in the case of faces.     

Decolonizing Feminism Through Intersectional Praxis

Transnational feminism should have normative force and be anti-imperialist. This article addresses the possibility of an anti-imperialist transnational feminism in conversation with Serene Khader’s Decolonizing Universalism. Khader argues that the key to an anti-imperialist feminism is separating universalism from the features that result in imperialism, such as ethnocentrism and justice monism. This article shares Khader’s commitment to anti-imperialist feminism and further explores three relevant issues: human rights, the definition of feminism, and economic justice. It proposes a decolonizing view of rights that advocates a critical examination of their uses, applications, and origins. It argues that transnational feminism should engage with issues of economic justice. And it proposes that feminism as an intersectional praxis should include normative dimensions in addition to antisexism, such as antiracism and economic justice.     

Retardation in Human Discrimination Learning as a Consequence of Pre-exposure: Latent Inhibition or Negative Priming?

A series of experiments with human subjects, using black-and-white chequerboard patterns, demonstrated that non-reinforced pre-exposure could impair performance in a subsequent learning task. Subjects were invited to take part in a scenario similar to that of a computer simulated card game. Their task was to turn over a series of cards by mouse-clicking on a pack of cards lying face-down, and then to classify these cards intoone of twocategories. In a subsequent task, subjects were asked todiscriminate betweenpairs ofchequerboards, some of which had previously appeared in the initialcategorizationphase: either directly ('fronts') or incidentally ('backs') involved in categorization. In Experiment 1, for those stimuli used as the backs ofthe cards (thatis,those visible ontopof the packof cards), there was asignificant impairment in performance relative to non-pre-exposed control stimuli. Although the impairment appeared to be specific to the stimuli pre-exposed, when the pre-exposed 'backs' were minimally distorted in the discrimination task of Experiment 2, performance was still significantly impaired relative to non-pre-exposed control stimuli. The results of Experiment 2 donot support the interpretation that retardation in learning following masked pre-exposure in human experiments is comparable to latent inhibition following simple preexposure in other animals. Whilst the impairment in performance appears to be similar to that of latent inhibition, the results may, instead, be better understood in terms of the inhibitory processes involved in negative priming. If this is so, then serious doubt is cast on whether latent inhibition has ever been reliably demonstrated in adult humans.     

How are depression and autobiographical memory retrieval related to culture?

This study investigated how culture influences the association between autobiographical memory retrieval and depression. Thirty clinically depressed patients and 30 controls, 15 each from Britain and Taiwan, completed the English and Chinese versions of the Autobiographical Memory Cueing Task (AMT). Overall, the depressed individuals from both cultural groups retrieved significantly fewer specific and more categoric autobiographical memories than their matched, nondepressed controls. Within the control groups, the British participants retrieved significantly more specific autobiographical memories and fewer categoric memories than their Taiwanese counterparts. These results suggest that difficulty in retrieving specific autobiographical memories typical of depression may be a cognitive bias that occurs across cultures.     

Effects of concurrent load on feature- and rule-based generalization in human contingency learning

The effect of concurrent load on generalization performance in human contingency learning was examined in 2 experiments that employed the combined positive and negative patterning procedure of Shanks and Darby (1998). In Experiment 1, we tested 32 undergraduates and found that participants who were trained and tested under full attention showed generalization consistent with the application of an opposites rule (i.e., single cues signal the opposite outcome to their compound), whereas participants trained and tested under a concurrent cognitive load showed generalization consistent with surface similarity. In Experiment 2, we replicated the effect with 148 undergraduates and provided evidence that it was the presence of concurrent load during training, rather than during testing, that was critical. Implications for associative, inferential, and dual-process accounts of human learning are discussed.     

Reducing developmental risk for emotional/behavioral problems: a randomized controlled trial examining the Tools for Getting Along curriculum

Researchers have demonstrated that cognitive-behavioral intervention strategies - such as social problem solving - provided in school settings can help ameliorate the developmental risk for emotional and behavioral difficulties. In this study, we report the results of a randomized controlled trial of Tools for Getting Along (TFGA), a social problem-solving universally delivered curriculum designed to reduce the developmental risk for serious emotional or behavioral problems among upper elementary grade students. We analyzed pre-intervention and post-intervention teacher-report and student self-report data from 14 schools, 87 classrooms, and a total of 1296 students using multilevel modeling. Results (effect sizes calculated using Hedges' g) indicated that students who were taught TFGA had a more positive approach to problem solving (g=.11) and a more rational problem-solving style (g=.16). Treated students with relatively poor baseline scores benefited from TFGA on (a) problem-solving knowledge (g=1.54); (b) teacher-rated executive functioning (g=.35 for Behavior Regulation and .32 for Metacognition), and proactive aggression (g=.20); and (c) self-reported trait anger (g=.17) and anger expression (g=.21). Thus, TFGA may reduce risk for emotional and behavioral difficulties by improving students' cognitive and emotional self-regulation and increasing their pro-social choices.     

Systems Theory,Family Attachments and Processes of Triangulation: Does the Concept of Triangulation Offer a Useful Bridge?

This article reviews the usefulness of the systemic concept of triangulation as a bridge between systemic thinking and practice and attachment theory. Traditionally attachment theory has theorized and researched with dyads, parent‐child and adult romantic partners, whereas systemic theory has worked therapeutically with the triangle as the basic human relationship; that is, when any two people interact, their interactions are influenced by their respective relationships with the same third person. Here it is argued, for example, that a child's attachment representations are shaped not only by the relationship with each parent but with the relationship between them. Thus, the process of triangulation in intimate relationships is seen in this article to link attachment theory with systemic thinking, as systemic theory needs a theory of love and attachment theory needs to consider how intimate relationships are nested and interconnected in an attachment network.     

Clinical Interviewing With Older Adults

Over the next few decades the older adult population will increase dramatically, and prevalence rates of psychiatric disorders are also expected to increase in the elderly cohort. These demographic projections highlight the need for diagnostic instruments and methods that are specifically tailored to older adults. The current paper discusses the benefits and drawbacks of clinical interviewing with older adults, using two popular interview protocols as illustrative examples. Drawing upon preexisting basic research and our own observations collected in clinical and research settings over a 10-year period, we suggest procedures and suggestions for augmenting existing interview protocols to increase their usefulness with older adults in research and clinical settings. Strategies to optimize interview duration and enhance retrospective data accuracy and the pros and cons of dimensional versus dichotomous response formats, among other relevant topics, are discussed.