Scene congruency biases Binocular Rivalry

Contextual regularities, that is, objects’ tendency to appear with certain other objects, facilitate the processing of visual scenes and confer contextually incongruent objects with a special attentional status. This study was aimed at investigating the mechanisms underlying this attentional advantage using Binocular Rivalry (BR). In two experiments, congruent and incongruent images (e.g., a man drinking from a glass vs. a man “drinking” from a hairbrush) were pitted against each other, yielding a version of BR in which two objects rival within a given scene. Incongruent objects predominated in awareness longer than congruent ones. This effect stemmed from the fact that their dominance epochs lasted longer on the average than those of congruent objects, suggesting a difficulty to disengage attention from such objects. On the other hand, no support was found for the notion that incongruent objects also attract attention.     

Will Capitalists Live Happily Ever After? – Political Myth: On the Use and Abuse of Biblical Themes – By Roland Boer

What would our world be like if all oppositions to capitalism were to be removed? The author describes a doomsday scenario instead of everlasting plenitude if capitalists have their ways. This conclusion comes from the author's masterful discussion of political myth and analysis of the narrative of Genesis to Joshua as a political myth. The narrative of the Hexateuch constructs and at the same time punishes all sorts of rebels who oppose the theocratic state it wishes to establish. But myth is uncanny in that the rebellion hides what it fears the most, the impossibility of such a state to come true, and needs what it desires to annihilate in order to persist as an unfulfilled fantasy that powers a political movement. The author argues that some politicians in Australia and the USA are abusing the logic of the political myth of the Hexateuch in order to support their capitalistic agendas and, therefore, the Left must tell the ending of the capitalist fantasy of endless production and expansion in order to reveal its contradictions.     

Posterior cingulate cortex: adapting behavior to a changing world

When has the world changed enough to warrant a new approach? The answer depends on current needs, behavioral flexibility and prior knowledge about the environment. Formal approaches solve the problem by integrating the recent history of rewards, errors, uncertainty and context via Bayesian inference to detect changes in the world and alter behavioral policy. Neuronal activity in posterior cingulate cortex - a key node in the default network - is known to vary with learning, memory, reward and task engagement. We propose that these modulations reflect the underlying process of change detection and motivate subsequent shifts in behavior.     

Positive Affect and College Success

This study investigated the relation between positive affect and a variety of variables related to college success for undergraduate students matriculating at 21 academically selective 4-year colleges and universities in the United States. Positive affect??cheerfulness??is generally positively related to students?? self-rated academic abilities, self-predicted likelihoods of various college outcomes, self-stated major and academic-degree intentions, and self-reported subjective college outcomes, but negatively related to most objective college-success variables (e.g., cumulative college grade-point average) recorded by the institution of matriculation, and not related to objective college outcomes reported by the student. Positive affect is thus associated with ??positive illusions?? about college-success variables.     

Young infants' generalization of emotional expressions: effects of familiarity

From birth, infants are exposed to a wealth of emotional information in their interactions. Much research has been done to investigate the development of emotion perception, and factors influencing that development. The current study investigates the role of familiarity on 3.5-month-old infants' generalization of emotional expressions. Infants were assigned to one of two habituation sequences: in one sequence, infants were visually habituated to parental expressions of happy or sad. At test, infants viewed either a continuation of the habituation sequence, their mother depicting a novel expression, an unfamiliar female depicting the habituated expression, or an unfamiliar female depicting a novel expression. In the second sequence, a new sample of infants was matched to the infants in the first sequence. These infants viewed the same habituation and test sequences, but the actors were unfamiliar to them. Only those infants who viewed their own mothers and fathers during the habituation sequence increased looking. They dishabituated looking to maternal novel expressions, the unfamiliar female's novel expression, and the unfamiliar female depicting the habituated expression, especially when sad parental expressions were followed by an expression change to happy or to a change in person. Infants are guided in their recognition of emotional expressions by the familiarity of their parents, before generalizing to others.     

Attitudes held by members of the clergy about alcohol

Alcohol, tobacco and other drug abuse continue to cause major threats to the physiological, psychological, sociological and spiritual health of the nation. According to recent statistics, over 80% of the illegal drugs used by youth, both male and female, is marijuana, with cocaine, opium and their derivatives comprising at least 15% of the drugs used by youth. When considering the ill effects of drug abuse, it is the legal one, alcohol that is responsible for the greatest impact on society. While it remains imperative that allied health professionals understand the many ramifications of substance abuse, it is also critical that leaders of faith communities have the knowledge and skills to meet this challenge competently. Due to the relevance of ministries as a possible resource, the focus of this exploratory study is to assess the knowledge, skills and attitudes of clergy about substance use and abuse and to determine their confidence of clergy in assisting their congregation with need related to this area.     

The sound of enemies and friends in the neighborhood

Previous studies (e.g., Pecher, Zeelenberg, & Wagenmakers, 2005) found that semantic classification performance is better for target words with orthographic neighbors that are mostly from the same semantic class (e.g., living) compared to target words with orthographic neighbors that are mostly from the opposite semantic class (e.g., nonliving). In the present study we investigated the contribution of phonology to orthographic neighborhood effects by comparing effects of phonologically congruent orthographic neighbors (book-hook) to phonologically incongruent orthographic neighbors (sand-wand). The prior presentation of a semantically congruent word produced larger effects on subsequent animacy decisions when the previously presented word was a phonologically congruent neighbor than when it was a phonologically incongruent neighbor. In a second experiment, performance differences between target words with versus without semantically congruent orthographic neighbors were larger if the orthographic neighbors were also phonologically congruent. These results support models of visual word recognition that assume an important role for phonology in cascaded access to meaning.     

Virtual conversation partner for adults with autism

Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is notable for severely impaired reciprocal social interaction skills relative to language and intellectual abilities, presenting a major barrier to social integration and vocational success. Evidence-based interventions to address these needs are lacking. We report on the development of a small, prototype conversation simulation to teach conversational skills to adolescents and adults with ASD and average to superior intellectual abilities. We also report on a test of the feasibility and acceptability of the simulation approach with a sample of the target population. The simulation engages the user in a virtual conversation with an on-screen partner whose reactions provide naturalistic feedback geared to the appropriateness of the learner's response choices. The prototype simulation, which provides for up to 12 potentially unique multi-turn conversations, was used over a period of 2 weeks by 16 adolescents and adults who then rated statements about the system on a linear scale of 1 (disagreement) to 5 (high agreement). The participants highly endorsed the majority of positive statements about the quality and credibility of the interaction and the virtual conversation partner. In contrast, agreement with positive statements about instructional features external to the conversation was moderate. Unexpectedly, most participants strongly agreed that using the simulation had been helpful to them. Further development and testing in the context of a controlled study with randomized assignment to control and experimental groups are needed to determine whether this approach is effective in improving real-world pragmatic language behavior of high-functioning adults with ASD.     

Between Islam and anti-globalization: cultural, political and religious debates in the German Muslim newspaper Islamische Zeitung

This paper examines the Islamische Zeitung (IZ), a newspaper made by German Muslims for German Muslims that informs about political, cultural, and theological topics. I argue that beyond providing information, the paper aims to create a platform of debate for a growing group of, in particular, younger pious educated Muslims who examine current politics by way of an Islamic and also an anti-globalization perspective. Of relevance for this audience are Islamic knowledge, local and global politics, everyday religious concerns and practices, and cultural affairs. I illustrate how by discussing certain topics on its pages, the makers of the IZ support specific issues of debates among some pious individuals, such as for example the participation of pious Muslims (men and women) in the democratic process by way of running in elections. Finally I argue that the IZ seeks to link the German Muslim community to the context of the global ummah and here in particular the globalized ummah as a new community marked by a shared popular culture universe. I illustrate that contrary to the claims of some of its opponents, the IZ is a platform for German Muslim affairs that participates in the broader public sphere as much as it helps to mediate a variety of possibilities for the participation of individuals and communities.