The abstraction of visual prototypes by children

The present studies demonstrated that children as young as second graders could form prototypical representations from a set of highly similar stimuli. The prototype-plus-transformation model of this performance (Franks & Bransford, 1971) was contrasted with an attribute-frequency model (Neumann, 1974). Results supported the latter model when trigram stimuli were used to test differential predictions from the models.     

Imagining Disability Futurities

This article explores twelve short narrative films created by women and trans people living with disabilities and embodied differences. Produced through Project Re?Vision, these micro documentaries uncover the cultures and temporalities of bodies of difference by foregrounding themes of multiple histories: body, disability, maternal, medical, and/or scientific histories; and divergent futurities: contradictory, surprising, unpredictable, opaque, and/or generative futures. We engage with Alison Kafer's call to theorize disability futurity by wrestling with the ways in which “the future” is normatively deployed in the service of able‐bodiedness and able‐mindedness (Kafer 2013 ), a deployment used to render bodies of difference as sites of “no future” (Edelman 2004 ). By re‐storying embodied difference, the storytellers illuminate ongoing processes of remaking their bodily selves in ways that respond to the past and provide possibilities for different futures; these orientations may be configured as “dis‐topias” based not on progress, but on new pathways for living, uncovered not through evoking the familiar imaginaries of curing, eliminating, or overcoming disability, but through incorporating experiences of embodied difference into time. These temporalities gesture toward new kinds of futures, giving us glimpses of ways of cripping time, of cripping ways of being/becoming in time, and of radically re‐presencing disability in futurity.     

Target-biting behavior of individually and group-housed mice and rats

The effects of housing conditions (individual or grouped) on the biting of an inanimate target by confined male mice and rats were measured. It was observed that, for both mice and rats, individual housing markedly increased the number of target bites per session. These results indicate that the target-biting paradigm is sensitive to those factors responsible for the increase in fighting behavior following individual housing.     

A pilot study of the effects of expressive writing on psychological and behavioral adjustment in patients enrolled in a Phase II trial of vaccine therapy for metastatic renal cell carcinoma.

Forty-two patients with metastatic renal cell carcinoma who were participating in a Phase II clinical trial were randomly assigned to an expressive writing (EW) or neutral writing (NW) group. Patients in the EW group wrote about their cancer, and patients in the NW group wrote about health behaviors. No statistically significant group differences were found in symptoms of distress, perceived stress, or mood disturbance, except for the Vigor subscale of the Profile of Mood States. However, patients in the EW group reported significantly less sleep disturbance, better sleep quality and sleep duration, and less daytime dysfunction compared with patients in the NW group. The results suggest that EW may have sleep-related health benefits in terminally ill cancer patients.