Effect of a total smoking ban in a maximum security psychiatric hospital

An archival study was performed in a maximum security forensic hospital to evaluate the effects of a total ban on smoking and all tobacco products. One hundred and forty patients were characterized as nonsmokers or light, moderate or heavy smokers. Patient records for the four weeks prior to the ban were compared with their records for the four weeks subsequent to the ban. Numbers of sick calls, total disruptive behaviors and verbal aggression declined markedly and significantly following the ban in those patients previously classified as moderate or heavy smokers. Weight increased significantly, but almost equally regardless of previous smoking status. Patients, and eventually staff, tolerated the smoking ban without significant negative effects. Patients relied very little on treatment modalities to alleviate nicotine withdrawal. Pre-ban apprehension by staff and patients dissipated with time after the smoking ban started.     

Is inhibition of return a reflexive effect?

The inhibition of return (IOR) phenomenon is routinely considered an effect of reflexive attention because the paradigm used to generate IOR employs peripheral cues that are uninformative as to where a target will appear. Because the cues are spatially unreliable it is thought that there is no reason for attention to be committed volitionally to them, and hence, the IOR effect is considered reflexive. What has been generally overlooked, however, is that the cues provide reliable temporal information as to when a target will occur. This predictive information is used by participants to prepare volitionally for when a target is likely to appear. We investigated whether the IOR effect is a product of the volitional application of attention to peripheral cues for the use of their temporal information. To test this idea we rendered the temporal information provided by peripheral cues unreliable. While this eliminated participants using the cues volitionally, it did not abolish the IOR phenomenon. These data demonstrate two new findings. First, the IOR effect is fundamentally a reflexive phenomenon. Second, when peripheral cues are not used volitionally, the IOR effect is attenuated. Together, the present findings indicate that the IOR effect can be modulated by volitional (top-down) processes but it is not the product of them. We argue that an intimate link between fronto-parietal regions and the superior colliculus provide a functional neural mechanism for this volitional effect to impact IOR.     

Use of a lag differential reinforcement contingency to increase varied selections of classroom activities

The present study evaluated the effects of a lag differential reinforcement contingency on 2 students' activity selections using reversal designs. Results showed that the lag contingency was responsible for promoting increased novel selections, engagement in diverse activities, and greater progress with respect to programmed academic activities.     

From egocentric to exocentric spatial orientation: development of posture control in bimanual and trunk inclination tasks

The authors investigated the emergence of independent control of body segments in bimanual tasks involving either voluntary or involuntary trunk motion by tracking the transition from an ego- to an exocentric mode of postural control during childhood (i.e., from body-referenced orientation to externally referenced action). A paradigm combining a seated manual task and various trunk manipulations described the coordination strategies used by 24 children at different ages (2 to 9 years) and by adults. The following questions were asked: (a) When do children begin to dissociate upper limb movements from those of the trunk? (b) What segmental strategies are exhibited by each age group (2-3, 4-6, and 7-9 years, and adults)? Kinematic analyses revealed that younger children (2-6 years) used either the trunk or the support surface as reference to orient the limbs. Older children (7-9 years) began to use a gravitational reference frame similar to that of adults; they uncoupled upper limb motion from the trunk in either voluntary or imposed conditions. Young children patterned the forearm trajectory after the initiating segment (support surface or the trunk), thus reducing the degrees of freedom during the dual task. Echoing previous reports, 7-9 years of age appears to be a critical period in which children master postural control and develop an internal representation of body scheme.     

MORPHINE TOLERANCE AS A FUNCTION OF RATIO SCHEDULE: RESPONSE REQUIREMENT OR UNIT PRICE?

Key pecking by 3 pigeons was maintained by a multiple fixed-ratio 10, fixed-ratio 30, fixed-ratio 90 schedule of food presentation. Components differed with respect to amount of reinforcement, such that the unit price was 10 responses per 1-s access to food. Acute administration of morphine, l-methadone, and cocaine dose-dependently decreased overall response rates in each of the components. When a rate decreasing dose of morphine was administered daily, tolerance, as measured by an increase in the dose that reduced response rates to 50% of control (i.e., the ED50 value), developed in each of the components; however, the degree of tolerance was smallest in the fixed-ratio 90 component (i.e., the ED50 value increased the least). When the l-methadone dose-effect curve was redetermined during the chronic morphine phase, the degree of cross-tolerance conferred to l-methadone was similar across components, suggesting that behavioral variables may not influence the degree of cross-tolerance between opioids. During the chronic phase, the cocaine dose-effect curve shifted to the right for 2 pigeons and to the left for 1 pigeon, which is consistent with predictions based on the lack of pharmacological similarity between morphine and cocaine. When the morphine, l-methadone, and cocaine dose-effect curves were redetermined after chronic morphine administration ended, the morphine and l-methadone ED50s replicated those obtained prior to chronic morphine administration. The morphine data suggest that the fixed-ratio value (i.e., the absolute output) determines the degree of tolerance and not the unit price.     

Asymmetric interference between sex and emotion in face perception

Previous research with speeded-response interference tasks modeled on the Garner paradigm has demonstrated that task-irrelevant variations in either emotional expression or facial speech do not interfere with identity judgments, but irrelevant variations in identity do interfere with expression and facial speech judgments. Sex, like identity, is a relatively invariant aspect of faces. Drawing on a recent model of face processing according to which invariant and changeable aspects of faces are represented in separate neurological systems, we predicted asymmetric interference between sex and emotion classification. The results of Experiment 1, in which the Garner paradigm was employed, confirmed this prediction: Emotion classifications were influenced by the sex of the faces, but sex classifications remained relatively unaffected by facial expression. A second experiment, in which the difficulty of the tasks was equated, corroborated these findings, indicating that differences in processing speed cannot account for the asymmetric relationship between facial emotion and sex processing. A third experiment revealed the same pattern of asymmetric interference through the use of a variant of the Simon paradigm. To the extent that Garner interference and Simon interference indicate interactions at perceptual and response-selection stages of processing, respectively, a challenge for face processing models is to show how the same asymmetric pattern of interference could occur at these different stages. The implications of these findings for the functional independence of the different components of face processing are discussed.     

Object Exploration and a Problem with Reductionism

The purpose of this paper is to use neuroscientific evidence to address the philosophical issue of intertheoretic reduction. In particular, we present a literature review and a new experiment to show that the reduction of cognitive psychology to neuroscience is implausible. To make this case, we look at research using object exploration, an important experimental paradigm in neuroscience, behavioral genetics and psychopharmacology. We show that a good deal of object exploration research is potentially confounded precisely because it assumes that psychological generalizations can be reduced to neuroscientific ones.     

Bilingualism affects picture naming but not picture classification

Bilinguals named pictures in their dominant language more slowly (and with more errors) than did monolinguals. In contrast, bilinguals named the same pictures as quickly as did monolinguals on the fifth presentation (in Experiment 2) and classified them (as human made or natural) as quickly and accurately as did monolinguals (in Experiment 1). In addition, bilinguals retrieved English picture names more quickly if they knew the name in both Spanish and English (on the basis of a translation test that bilinguals completed after the timed tasks), and monolingual response times for the same materials suggested that this finding was not obtained simply because names that were easier to translate were easier in general. These findings suggest that bilinguals differ from monolinguals at a postconceptual processing level, that implicit activation of lexical representations in the nontarget language can facilitate retrieval in the target language, and that being bilingual is analogous to having a lexicon full of lower frequency words, relative to monolinguals.