Sensory mediation of stimulus-driven attentional capture in multiple-cue displays

Three location-cuing experiments were conducted in order to examine the stimulus-driven control of attentional capture in multiple-cue displays. These displays consisted of one to four simultaneously presented direct location cues. The results indicated that direct location cuing can produce cue effects that are mediated, in part, by nonattentional processing that occurs simultaneously at multiple locations. When single cues were presented in isolation, however, the resulting cue effect appeared to be due to a combination of sensory processing and attentional capture by the cue. This suggests that the faster responses produced by direct cues may be associated with two different components: an attention-related component that can be modulated by goal-driven factors and a nonattentional component that occurs in parallel at multiple direct-cue locations and is minimally affected by goal-driven factors.     

A person-fit index for polytomous rasch models,latent class models,and their mixture generalizations

A normally distributed person-fit index is proposed for detecting aberrant response patterns in latent class models and mixture distribution IRT models for dichotomous and polytomous data.This article extends previous work on the null distribution of person-fit indices for the dichotomous Rasch model to a number of models for categorical data. A comparison of two different approaches to handle the skewness of the person-fit index distribution is included.Major parts of this paper were written while the first author worked at the Institute for Science Education, Kiel, Germany. Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the authors and not necessarily of Educational Testing Service. The results presented in this paper were improved by valuable comments from J. Rost, K. Yamamoto, N.D. Verhelst, E. Bedrick and two anonymous reviewers.     

The nature and treatment of stuttering as revealed by fMRI A within- and between-group comparison

This article reviews some of our recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of stuttering. Using event-related fMRI experiments, we investigated brain activation during speech production. Results of three studies comparing persons who stutter (PWS) and persons who do not stutter (PWNS) are outlined. Their findings point to a region in the right frontal operculum (RFO) that was consistently implicated in stuttering. During overt reading and before fluency shaping therapy, PWS showed higher and more distributed neuronal activation than PWNS. Immediately after therapy differential activations were even more distributed and left sided. They extended to frontal, temporal, and parietal regions, anterior cingulate, insula, and putamen. These over-activations were slightly reduced and again more right sided two years after therapy. Left frontal deactivations remained stable over two years of observation, and therefore possibly indicate a dysfunction. After therapy, we noted higher activations in persons who stutter moderately than in those who stutter severely. These activations might reflect patterns of compensation. We discuss why these findings suggest that fluency-inducing techniques might synchronize a disturbed signal transmission between auditory, speech motor planning, and motor areas.

Educational objectives: The reader will learn about and be able to: (1) identify regions of brain activations and deactivations specific for PWS; (2) describe brain activation changes induced by fluency shaping therapy; and (3) discuss the correlation between stuttering severity and brain activation.     

Using broad measures of maladjustment to assess psychological states of outpatients with schizophrenia

Two broad indexes of maladjustment derived from two projective tests and administered at two separate points to the same 50 outpatients with schizophrenia showed substantial convergent validity at both testings (r=.52, p<.001; r=.58, p<.001). Conversely, test-retest reliabilities for both indexes were nonsignificant. These findings suggest that broad measures of maladjustment may be more suitable for reflecting current states of adjustment for subjects known to be diagnosed with certain symptoms, the manifestations of which fluctuate over time.     

On the lateralization of emotional prosody: an event-related functional MR investigation

In order to investigate the lateralization of emotional speech we recorded the brain responses to three emotional intonations in two conditions, i.e., "normal" speech and "prosodic" speech (i.e., speech with no linguistic meaning, but retaining the 'slow prosodic modulations' of speech). Participants listened to semantically neutral sentences spoken with a positive, neutral, or negative intonation in both conditions and judged how positive, negative, or neutral the intonation was on a five-point scale. Core peri-sylvian language areas, as well as some frontal and subcortical areas were activated bilaterally in the normal speech condition. In contrast, a bilateral fronto-opercular region was active when participants listened to prosodic speech. Positive and negative intonations elicited a bilateral fronto-temporal and subcortical pattern in the normal speech condition, and more frontal activation in the prosodic speech condition. The current results call into question an exclusive right hemisphere lateralization of emotional prosody and expand patient data on the functional role of the basal ganglia during the perception of emotional prosody.     

Coping responses of adolescent suicide attempters and their relation to suicidal ideation across a 2-year follow-up: a preliminary study

The coping responses of 23 hospitalized adolescent suicide attempters were compared to those of 19 hospitalized non-attempters matched on diagnosis and demographics. Relative to the comparison group, suicide attempters made fewer effortful-approach and more automatic-approach coping responses, and were judged by trained raters to have coped less effectively. Coders' ratings of greater coping effectiveness among suicide attempters were associated with a greater decline in suicidal symptoms assessed at 6-month follow-up intervals across a 2-year period. The findings are discussed in light of a model of coping that incorporates both individual differences and situational characteristics.     

Terminal decline and cognitive performance in very old age: does cause of death matter?

Cross-sectional differences and longitudinal changes in cognitive functioning in relation to mortality across a 7-year follow-up period, with 3 times of measurement, were examined in a population-based sample of very old adults. The authors also sought to determine whether cause of death (cerebro/cardiovascular disease [CVD]; non-CVD) modified the magnitude of mortality-related cognitive deficits. Cognitive performance was indexed by tests of general cognitive ability, episodic memory, primary memory, verbal fluency, and visuospatial ability. Results indicated cross-sectional differences on all domains of functioning, with persons who would die within 3 years after baseline testing performing more poorly. Longitudinally, greater decrements were observed on all domains for persons who would die after the first follow-up period, as compared with survivors. Cause of death failed to modify the magnitude of the cross-sectional and longitudinal deficits. The pattern of results point to the general nature of this phenomenon.     

Sit-and-wait strategies in dynamic visual search

The role of memory in visual search has lately become a controversial issue. Horowitz and Wolfe (1998) observed that performance in a visual search task was little affected by whether the stimuli were static or randomly relocated every 111 ms. Because a memory-based mechanism, such as inhibition of return, would be of no use in the dynamic condition, Horowitz and Wolfe concluded that memory is likewise not involved in the static condition. However, Horowitz and Wolfe could not effectively rule out the possibility that observers adopted a different strategy in the dynamic condition than in the static condition. That is, in the dynamic condition observers may have attended to a subregion of the display and waited for the target to appear there (sit-and-wait strategy). This hypothesis is supported by experimental data showing that performance in their dynamic condition does not differ from performance in another dynamic condition in which observers are forced to adopt a sit-and-wait strategy by being presented with a limited region of the display only.     

On fatalism, pessimism, and depressive symptoms among Mexican-American and other adolescents attending an obstetrics-gynecology clinic

There is growing evidence that Mexican-American adolescents may be at increased risk for depressive symptoms. We sought to replicate and explain this result in a study of adolescent girls attending an obstetric-gynecologic clinic. Three hundred and four girls of diverse ethnic backgrounds completed measures of depressive symptoms, negative attributional style, and locus of control. Consistent with predictions, we found that Mexican-American adolescent girls reported more depressive symptoms than adolescent girls from other ethnic backgrounds, and that Mexican-American adolescent girls displayed more negative cognitive styles than girls from other ethnic backgrounds. Depression differences appeared to be partly explained by differences in negative cognitive style. Implications of the results for a theory of increased Mexican-American adolescent depression, and for applied work, were discussed.