Rapid proportion comparison with spatial arrays of frequently used meaningful visual symbols

It has been shown that when two arrays of Arabic numerals were briefly presented, observers could accurately indicate which array contained the larger number of a target numeral. This study investigated whether this rapid proportion comparison can be extended to other meaningful symbols that share some of notable properties of Arabic numerals. We tested mainly several Japanese Kanji letters, each of which represents a meaning and can work as a word. Using physically identical stimulus sets that could be interpreted as different types of letters, Experiment 1 first confirmed the rapid proportion comparison with Arabic numerals for Japanese participants. Experiment 2 showed that the rapid proportion comparison can be extended to Kanji numerals. Experiment 3 successfully demonstrated that rapid proportion judgments can be found with non-quantitative Kanji letters that are used frequently. Experiment 4 further demonstrated the rapid proportion comparison with frequently used meaningful non-letter symbols (gender icons). The rapid processing cannot be attributed to fluent processing of familiar items, because it was not found with familiar phonograms (Japanese Kana letters). These findings suggest that the rapid proportion comparison can be commonly found with frequently used meaningful symbols, even though their meaning is not relevant to the task.     

White bear everywhere: Exploring the boundaries of the attentional white bear phenomenon

Some failures of selective attention may be explained by the attentional white bear (AWB) phenomenon Tsal & Makovski (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 32:351?C363, 2006), which indicates that prior knowledge of a distractor location causes attention to be actively allocated to it. The AWB effect is demonstrated in a task that includes infrequent trials that involve two simultaneous dots embedded among flanker trials. The dot positioned at an expected distractor location is perceived as appearing before the dot at an expected empty location, indicating that attentional resources have initially been allocated to the expected distractor locations. The main goal of this study was to explore the boundaries of the AWB phenomenon by imposing perceptual, memory, and sensory constraints on the flanker task. The results showed that the AWB effect was obtained even when additional constraints severely taxed the information-processing system. We propose that a mandatory mechanism guides a fixed minimal amount of attention to expected distractor locations in a top-down manner.     

Associations of Psychosocial Factors with Maternal Confidence Among Japanese and Vietnamese Mothers

We conducted this cross-sectional study among 392 Japanese and 294 Vietnamese mothers who attended routine child health visits in a Japanese city and at a tertiary hospital in Vietnam, in order to investigate the prevalence and associated sociodemographic, parenting, and psychological characteristics of low maternal confidence in child rearing among them. All data were collected from medical files in Japan, and from medical files and self-administered questionnaires in Vietnam. The proportion of mothers without secure feeling of confidence in the present study was 22% in Japan and 66% in Vietnam. Significant factors associated with a lack of confidence were first-time motherhood and unintended pregnancy in the Japanese dataset and younger age in the Vietnamese dataset. In both groups, a higher proportion of mothers who lacked confidence reported negative parenting outcomes than did confident mothers. Among the three psychological measurements (mood, self-efficacy and depression), higher self-efficacy was associated independently with a significantly reduced risk of not having confidence in child rearing. These results suggest the importance of developing parenting support programs to help Japanese and Vietnamese mothers, particularly those who are young, first-time mothers or who became pregnant unexpectedly, improve their self-efficacy.     

Autophosphorylation of alphaCaMKII is differentially involved in new learning and unlearning mechanisms of memory extinction

Accumulating evidence indicates the key role of alpha-calcium/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II (alphaCaMKII) in synaptic plasticity and learning, but it remains unclear how this kinase participates in the processing of memory extinction. Here, we investigated the mechanism by which alphaCaMKII may mediate extinction by using heterozygous knock-in mice with a targeted T286A mutation that prevents the autophosphorylation of this kinase (alphaCaMKII(T286A+/-)). Remarkably, partial reduction of alphaCaMKII function due to the T286A(+/-) mutation prevented the development of extinction without interfering with initial hippocampus-dependent memory formation as assessed by contextual fear conditioning and the Morris water maze. It is hypothesized that the mechanism of extinction may differ depending on the interval at which extinction training is started, being more akin to "new learning" at longer intervals and "unlearning" or "erasure" at shorter intervals. Consistent with this hypothesis, we found that extinction conducted 24 h, but not 15 min, after contextual fear training showed spontaneous recovery (reappearance of extinguished freezing responses) 21 d following the extinction, representing behavioral evidence for new learning and unlearning mechanisms underlying extinction 24 h and 15 min post-training, respectively. Importantly, the alphaCaMKII(T286A+/-) mutation blocked new learning of contextual fear memory extinction, whereas it did not interfere with unlearning processes. Our results demonstrate a genetic dissociation of new learning and unlearning mechanisms of extinction, and suggest that alphaCaMKII is responsible for extinguishing memories specifically through new learning mechanisms.     

The Contemporary Freudian Tradition: Past and Present,edited by Ken Robinson and Joan Schächter,Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2021, 370 pp

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

Mapping of interneurons that contribute to food aversive conditioning in the slug brain

To determine the distribution of neurons that contribute to memory formation induced by odor-taste associative conditioning in the slug's brain, we examined neuronal activity of the central nervous system of the slug Limax marginatus using a fluorescent activity marker [Lucifer yellow (LY)]. When LY was injected into the body cavity just after the conditioning, many of the procerebral (PC) interneurons were labeled. The PC lobe was considered to play important roles in the olfaction of the slug, because the olfactory afferent fibers from both the inferior and the superior tentacular noses innervate it. Such strong dye-uptake activity of PC interneurons was not observed when LY was injected just after unpaired control treatment. Thus, it was suggested that enhancement of dye-uptake activity upon conditioning was caused by the association of a conditioning stimulus (CS) with an unconditioned stimulus (UCS). The distribution patterns of PC interneurons that were labeled by LY after conditioning showed a characteristic feature: They usually formed a belt-shaped cluster parallel to the dorsoventral axis. This feature of the distribution was maintained when different odors were used as a CS. Furthermore, the number of the clusters reflected the number of CS odors but not the number of conditioning sessions. From these observations, we considered that enhancement of the neural activity involving dye uptake in each belt-shaped cluster contributed to formation of each odor memory.