Pictures in Test Items: Effects on Response Time and Response Correctness

Although pictures are often added to text in items of educational tests, little is known about their influence on item solving. Therefore, we conducted an experiment in which we examined how pictures affected item solving. A total of N = 158 fourth‐grade students completed a physics knowledge test under one of six experimental conditions. The experimental conditions varied according to whether or not pictures were presented in the stem and in the answer options of the test items. The results showed that pictures in the stem and in the answer options increased the correctness with which students responded to the test items. This was particularly true for test items that required the application of relationships. In addition, response time was reduced when pictures were added to the answer options of the test items. Hence, pictures are an important feature of test items that produce changes in item processing. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Reduced K+ Channel Inactivation, Spike Broadening, and After-Hyperpolarization in Kvβ1.1-Deficient Mice with Impaired Learning

A-type K⁺ channels are known to regulate neuronal firing, but their role in repetitive firing and learning in mammals is not well characterized. To determine the contribution of the auxiliary K⁺ channel subunit Kvβ1.1 to A-type K⁺ currents and to study the physiological role of A-type K⁺ channels in repetitive firing and learning, we deleted the Kvβ1.1 gene in mice. The loss of Kvβ1.1 resulted in a reduced K⁺ current inactivation in hippocampal CA1 pyramidal neurons. Furthermore, in the mutant neurons, frequency-dependent spike broadening and the slow afterhyperpolarization (sAHP) were reduced. This suggests that Kvβ1.1-dependent A-type K⁺ channels contribute to frequency-dependent spike broadening and may regulate the sAHP by controlling Ca²⁺ influx during action potentials. The Kvβ1.1-deficient mice showed normal synaptic plasticity but were impaired in the learning of a water maze test and in the social transmission of food preference task, indicating that the Kvβ1.1 subunit contributes to certain types of learning and memory.     

Zitierte zeichenreihen

We use quotation marks when we wish to refer to an expression. We can and do so refer even when this expression is composed of characters which do not occur in our alphabet. That's why Tarski's, Quine's, and Geach's theories of quotation don't work. The proposals of Davidson, Frege, and C. Washington, however, do not provide a plausible account of quotation either. The problem is to construct a Tarskian theory of truth for an object language which contains quotation marks, without appealing to quotation marks in the metalanguage. I propose to supply Tarski's truth definition with an axiom which determines the denotation of all expressions containing quotation marks. According to this axiom, quotation marks create a non-extensional context. Since our admitting such contexts does not lead to any difficulties in our recursive truth characterization, we may indeed dispense with extensionalism. Finally, I argue that we classify and denote expressions in the very same way that we classify and denote extralinguistic entities.     

Preliminary evidence for a fronto‐parietal dysfunction in able‐bodied participants with a desire for limb amputation

Background. Reports of able‐bodied participants with the persisting desire for limb amputation raise legal and ethical questions that are partly due to insufficient empirical knowledge about the condition. Here, we searched for potential neurological mechanisms in participants with desire for limb amputation in order to help develop adequate nosological classifications, diagnosis, and treatment. Methods. Semi‐structured interviews were carried out with 20 participants who self‐identified themselves as able‐bodied individuals desiring amputation of a limb. Results. The results suggest that amputation desire is not unspecific, but in most cases specific for a circumscribed part of the body. Most frequently affected was the leg, mostly on the left, non‐dominant side. Left‐sidedness and limb specificity was associated with elementary and complex somatosensory disturbances of the affected limb akin to those reported by neurological patients. The most frequent neurological co‐morbidity was migraine headache. Conclusions. These results document the existence of an unusual condition in able‐bodied participants characterized by a person's desire for the amputation of one or more particular limbs. Left‐sidedness, limb specificity and somatosensory disturbances of the affected limb are suggestive of abnormal brain mechanisms in right fronto‐parietal cortex. Based on this association we suggest that desire for limb amputation may be conceptualized as asomatognosia due to disturbed integration of multi‐sensory information of the affected body parts into a coherent cerebral representation of the own body. This suggestion has to be regarded with caution as we did not perform any neurological examination.     

The mental time line: An analogue of the mental number line in the mapping of life events

A crucial aspect of the human mind is the ability to project the self along the time line to past and future. It has been argued that such self-projection is essential to re-experience past experiences and predict future events. In-depth analysis of a novel paradigm investigating mental time shows that the speed of this “self-projection” in time depends logarithmically on the temporal-distance between an imagined “location” on the time line that participants were asked to imagine and the location of another imagined event from the time line. This logarithmic pattern suggests that events in human cognition are spatially mapped along an imagery mental time line. We argue that the present time-line data are comparable to the spatial mapping of numbers along the mental number line and that such spatial maps are a fundamental basis for cognition.     

Organization, development and function of complex brain networks

Recent research has revealed general principles in the structural and functional organization of complex networks which are shared by various natural, social and technological systems. This review examines these principles as applied to the organization, development and function of complex brain networks. Specifically, we examine the structural properties of large-scale anatomical and functional brain networks and discuss how they might arise in the course of network growth and rewiring. Moreover, we examine the relationship between the structural substrate of neuroanatomy and more dynamic functional and effective connectivity patterns that underlie human cognition. We suggest that network analysis offers new fundamental insights into global and integrative aspects of brain function, including the origin of flexible and coherent cognitive states within the neural architecture.     

EQUIWORD: A software application for the automatic creation of truly equivalent word lists

Word lists are most commonly used in the investigation of human memory. To prevent transfer effects, repeated measures of memory for words require multiple lists of different words. Yet, the psycholinguistic properties of all word lists employed should match as closely as possible to avoid confounding with the independent variable(s) in question. Although comprehensive databases for word norms exist, to our knowledge no tool is available that automates the creation of such equivalent word lists. Instead, matching different lists is often accomplished prima facie. We have therefore developed a Windows program called EQUIWORD that completely automates the creation of word lists that are truly parallel with respect to a wide range of attributes. EQUIWORD takes psycholinguistic databases of different formats as input and computes several coefficients of distance for every possible word pairing. Program output consists of a list of all word pairs sorted according to their distance. On that basis, creating equivalent word lists is simply done by selecting the pairs with the lowest distance coefficients.