Manual disfluency in drawing while producing and listening to disfluent speech

This study investigated the extent to which manual fluency was associated with speech fluency in fluent speakers engaged in dual motor tasks. Thirteen right-handed adult females repeatedly drew circles with a pen on a digitizer tablet under five conditions: (1) a baseline (without reading or listening to speech), (2) reading fluently, (3) reading disfluently, (4) listening to fluent speech, and (5) listening to disfluent speech. The primary measure of disfluency was normalized mean squared jerk (NJ) in the pen strokes. Pen stroke time (ST) and pressure (PP) were also measured. NJ of the circle movements was significantly increased in both the disfluent reading and the disfluent listening conditions (p < 0.05), compared to the baseline condition. In the fluent listening and reading conditions, NJ in circle drawing was unaltered compared to the baseline condition. Relative to baseline, ST increased significantly (p < 0.05), but to a similar extent in all experimental conditions. Significantly (p < .05) greater pen pressure were also found in the disfluent versus fluent conditions. Positive correlations (r = 0.33–0.63) were found between NJ and ST across conditions. These findings demonstrate that in dual-tasks, speech fluency can influence manual fluency. This is consistent with the corpus of data showing neural connectivity between manual and speech tasks, as well between perception and production. The mirror neuron system is implicated as a mechanism involved in forging these links.     

Detecting objects is easier than categorizing them

Two experiments compared performance in an object detection task, in which participants categorized photographs as objects and nonobject textures, and an object categorization task, in which photographs were categorized into basic-level categories. The basic-level categorization task was either easy (e.g., dogs vs. buses) or difficult (e.g., dogs vs. cats). Participants performed similarly in the detection and the easy-categorization tasks, but response times to the difficult-categorization task were slower. This latter finding is difficult to reconcile with the conclusions of Grill-Spector and Kanwisher (2005) who reported equivalent performance on detection and basic-level categorization tasks and took this as evidence that figure-ground segregation and basic-level categorization are mediated by the same mechanism.     

Suicidal behavior, negative affect, gender, and self-reported delinquency in college students

The associations among suicidal behavior, negative affect, and delinquency were assessed via an anonymous self-report survey administered to male and female college students ( N = 383). Contrary to our hypothesized results, there were no gender differences in rates of suicidal ideation and attempts. Confirming our hypotheses about gender differences, college men did report significantly more delinquent behavior than college women. College men also scored higher on the suicide-proneness scale, which contained a mixture of death-related, risk-related, and negative self- and health-related items. Furthermore, as predicted, college students with a history of depression, suicide ideation, and/or suicide attempts all reported significantly more delinquent behavior. Self-reported delinquency and current levels of depressive symptomology emerged as significant predictors of suicide-prone behavior for both college men and women, explaining 34% of the variance for women and 17% for men. Levels of engagement in suicide-prone behavior and feelings of depression were elevated in college students with any type of juvenile arrest history. Students with an arrest history were also more likely to have had a diagnosis of depression and to have engaged in suicide ideation in their past. These findings suggest there are complex links between depression, delinquency, and suicidal behavior in college men and women.     

In defense of abstractionist theories of repetition priming and word identification

There is a great deal of interest in characterizing the representations and processes that support visual word priming and written word identification more generally. On one view, these phenomena are supported by abstract orthographic representations that map together visually dissimilar exemplars of letters and words (e.g., the lettersA/a map onto a common abstract letter codea*). On a second view, orthographic codes consist in a collection of episodic representations of words that interact in such a way that it sometimes looksas if there are abstract codes. Tenpenny (1995) contrasted these general approaches and concluded by endorsing the episodic account, arguing that no evidence demands that we posit abstract orthographic representations. This review reconsiders the evidence and argues that a variety of priming and nonpriming research strongly supports the conclusion that abstract orthographic codes exist and support priming and word identification. On this account, episodic representations are represented separately from abstract orthographic knowledge and contribute minimally to these functions.     

TPL—KATS-card sort: A tool for assessing structural knowledge

The study of how individuals organize knowledge has been a popular endeavor for several decades. As a result, techniques have been developed to assess how individuals represent and organize knowledge internally. Although several conceptual knowledge elicitation methods have been developed and used to assess the organization of knowledge, their use is often labor intensive and time consuming. Presented here is a software tool that was developed to reduce the problems associated with manually administering the conceptual knowledge elicitation technique, or card sorting. The TPL—KATS-card sort software not only simplifies the administration of the task, but also adds features to the card-sorting task such as media insertion, time stamping, and instructorless administration. In the present article, an introduction to the card-sorting technique is provided, the new software tool is described, and the advantages of the software are detailed.     

Expressive writing disorders: an analysis of theoretical views

Three prominent theories of writing were found in a literature review of Psychlit, educational journals and Medline, and a fourth global theory relating writing to intact cerebral integrity was also hypothesized. These theories were then tested by attempting to predict writing scores among a sample of 44 individuals with academic difficulties. Significant support was found for a memory and attention model, the dysgraphia model, and an abstract sequential analysis model. Surprisingly, measures of the overall cortical integrity were not significantly related to writing behavior in this sample, but this finding may reflect excluding brain damaged subjects in this study. Also, the abstract sequential analysis model appeared to function differently than expected. The results indicate it is important to assess the cognitive contributions of writing difficulties to guide remediation. Larger scale research on the sources of writing disorders is also recommended.     

Cerebral lateralization of spatial abilities: a meta-analysis

There is a substantial disagreement in the existing literature regarding which hemisphere of the brain controls spatial abilities. In an attempt to resolve this dispute, we conducted a meta-analysis to decipher which hemisphere truly dominates and under what circumstances. It was found that across people and situations, the right hemisphere is the more dominant for spatial processing. However, consideration of specific moderator variables yielded a more complex picture. For example, females showed no hemisphere preference while males showed a right hemisphere advantage. Also, no hemisphere preference was indicated for spatial visualization tasks while subjects performing spatial orientation and manual manipulation tasks displayed a predictable right hemisphere preference. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for exiting theoretical positions as well as future empirical research.     

Age-of-acquisition effects in visual word recognition: evidence from expert vocabularies

Three experiments assessed the contributions of age-of-acquisition (AoA) and frequency to visual word recognition. Three databases were created from electronic journals in chemistry, psychology and geology in order to identify technical words that are extremely frequent in each discipline but acquired late in life. In Experiment 1, psychologists and chemists showed an advantage in lexical decision for late-acquired/high-frequency words (e.g. a psychologist responding to cognition) over late-acquired/low-frequency words (e.g. a chemist responding to cognition), revealing a frequency effect when words are perfectly matched. However, contrary to theories that exclude AoA as a factor, performance was similar for the late-acquired/high-frequency and early-acquired/low-frequency words (e.g. dragon) even though their cumulative frequencies differed by more than an order of magnitude. This last finding was replicated with geologists using geology words matched with early-acquired words in terms of concreteness (Experiment 2). Most interestingly, Experiment 3 yielded the same pattern of results in naming while controlling for imageability, a finding that is particularly problematic for parallel distributed processing models of reading.