A modified counterconditioning procedure prevents the renewal of conditioned fear in rats

Two studies using an ABA design examined the Extinction and renewal of conditioned barpress suppression. Following lights-off and foot shock pairings in Context A, rats were placed in Context B and were given either a standard counterconditioning procedure where the lights-off CS was paired with a novel food US delivered freely or a modified counterconditioning procedure where CS-US pairings only occurred if the rat earned the US by performing a required behavior during the CS. Results indicated that the modified counterconditioning procedure thwarted ABA renewal but the conventional counterconditioning procedure did not reduce ABA renewal any more than nonreinforced exposure to the CS alone. Furthermore, the response required during the modified counterconditioning procedure could be one used as a baseline response during Acquisition of fear or it could be a novel response. Implications of the results for theories of Extinction and renewal of fear are discussed.     

Effects of stimulus characteristics and sex of subject on perceived emotion

To determine the influence of pupil size, eye size, sex of stimulus face, and sex of subject on perceived emotion, 308 college students filled in missing features on stimulus faces. Each face was independently rated by two male judges on a continuum of negative to positive emotion. Analysis indicated that sex of subject was the only variable to affect perceived emotion. Women (n = 175) tended to draw faces that were judged to be more positive than faces drawn by men (n = 133).     

Relations among age, visual memory, and resting cerebral metabolism in 40 healthy men

Visual memory, as measured by the Benton Visual Retention Test (BVRT), and resting regional cerebral metabolic rates for glucose (rCMRglc), as measured by positron emission tomography (PET) and [18-F]fluorodeoxyglucose, were examined in 40 very healthy men, aged 21 to 83 years. Age-related differences in visual memory were found but were significantly smaller than differences reported in the general population. This discrepancy is attributable to our rigorous health screening. The age-related differences found in this sample are estimates of the lower limit of population differences unconfounded by disease. Age-related differences on undistracted delayed visual memory were greater than differences on immediate visual memory, suggesting age-related differences in spontaneous elaborative visual information processing. No relation between visual memory and resting rCMRglc was found, supporting the hypothesis that mental abilities are unrelated to resting brain metabolism unless both functions are influenced by disease.     

Nonadversarial Methods for Sensitizing Jurors to Eyewitness Evidence

Tested the effects, on juror decision making, of court-appointed expert testimony and judge's instructions designed to sensitize jurors to eyewitness evidence. Subjects ( N = 144) viewed a videotaped trial in which the primary evidence was the testimony of and identification by an eyewitness. Three levels of expert advice (court-appointed expert, judge's instructions, no expert advice) were crossed with two levels of witnessing and identification conditions and two levels of witness confidence The court-appointed expert produced skepticism toward the identification but did not improve juror sensitivity to the eyewitness evidence. The judge's instructions produced neither skepticism or sensitization effects.     

The relative accessibility of phonemes and syllables

Previous research comparing detection times for syllables and for phonemes has consistently found that syllables are responded to faster than phonemes. This finding poses theoretical problems for strictly hierarchical models of speech recognition, in which smaller units should be able to be identified faster than larger units. However, inspection of the characteristics of previous experiments’ stimuli reveals that subjects have been able to respond to syllables on the basis of only a partial analysis of the stimulus. In the present experiment, five groups of subjects listened to identical stimulus material. Phoneme and syllable monitoring under standard conditions was compared with monitoring under conditions in which near matches of target and stimulus occurred on no-response trials. In the latter case, when subjects were forced to analyze each stimulus fully, phonemes were detected faster than syllables.     

Phoneme-monitoring reaction time as a function of preceding intonation contour

An acoustically invariant one-word segment occurred in two versions of one syntactic context. In one version, the preceding intonation contour indicated that a stress would fall at the point where this word occurred. In the other version, the preceding contour predicted reduced stress at that point. Reaction time to the initial phoneme of the word was faster in the former case, despite the fact that no acoustic correlates of stress were present. It is concluded that a part of the sentence comprehension process is the prediction of upcoming sentence accents.     

Speeded detection of vowels: A cross-linguistic study

In four experiments, listeners’ response times to detect vowel targets in spoken input were measured. The first three experiments were conducted in English. In two, one using real words and the other, nonwords, detection accuracy was low, targets in initial syllables were detected more slowly than targets in final syllables, and both response time and missed-response rate were inversely correlated with vowel duration. In a third experiment, the speech context for some subjects included all English vowels, while for others, only five relatively distinct vowels occurred. This manipulation had essentially no effect, and the same response pattern was again observed. A fourth experiment, conducted in Spanish, replicated the results in the first three experiments, except that miss rate was here unrelated to vowel duration. We propose that listeners’ responses to vowel targets in naturally spoken input are effectively cautious, reflecting realistic appreciation of vowel variability in natural context.     

The Driving Appraisal Inventory: Psychometric Characteristics and Construct Validity1

Four studies examined the dimensionality, reliability and construct validity of the Driving Appraisal Inventory (DAI), a self-report measure of driving habits and skills. In Study 1, analysis of 127 items led to the formation of four unidimensional, internally reliable scales: Carelessness, Drunken Driving, Vehicle Safety, and Self-Evaluation. In Study 2, all were found to have acceptable test-retest reliability. In Study 3, convergent validity support was obtained for the Carelessness and Vehicle Safety scales. In Study 4, concurrent criterion-related validity support was obtained for the Carelessness and Drunken Driving scales. Scores on the Self-Evaluation scale appear to be more a function of self-confidence and/or ego-involvement in driving skills and less a function of actual driving skills. Men score higher than women do on the Carelessness, Drunken Driving, and Self-Evaluation scales, and in Study 4, criterion-related validity of the Self-Evaluation scale was stronger among women than among men.     

Lexical tone in Cantonese spoken-word processing

In three experiments, the processing of lexical tone in Cantonese was examined. Cantonese listeners more often accepted a nonword as a word when the only difference between the nonword and the word was in tone, especially when theF0 onset difference between correct and erroneous tone was small.Same-different judgments by these listeners were also slower and less accurate when the only difference between two syllables was in tone, and this was true whether theF0 onset difference between the two tones was large or small. Listeners with no knowledge of Cantonese produced essentially the samesame-different judgment pattern as that produced by the native listeners, suggesting that the results display the effects of simple perceptual processing rather than of linguistic knowledge. It is argued that the processing of lexical tone distinctions may be slowed, relative to the processing of segmental distinctions, and that, in speeded-response tasks, tone is thus more likely to be misprocessed than is segmental structure.     

The Possible-Word Constraint in the Segmentation of Continuous Speech

We propose that word recognition in continuous speech is subject to constraints on what may constitute a viable word of the language. This Possible-Word Constraint (PWC) reduces activation of candidate words if their recognition would imply word status for adjacent input which could not be a word - for instance, a single consonant. In two word-spotting experiments, listeners found it much harder to detectapple,for example, infapple(where [f] alone would be an impossible word), than invuffapple(wherevuffcould be a word of English). We demonstrate that the PWC can readily be implemented in a competition-based model of continuous speech recognition, as a constraint on the process of competition between candidate words; where a stretch of speech between a candidate word and a (known or likely) word boundary is not a possible word, activation of the candidate word is reduced. This implementation accurately simulates both the present results and data from a range of earlier studies of speech segmentation.