Do boys with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder have positive illusory self-concepts?

One hundred ninety-five boys with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) were compared with 73 comparison boys (M = 9.83 years, SD = 1.30) on self-perceptions relative to a teacher-rated criterion. Emphasis was placed on ADHD subgroup comparisons according to level of aggression, academic achievement, and depression compared with control boys. Consistent with the authors' prediction, ADHD boys overestimated relative to teacher report, more than did controls, in the scholastic competence, social acceptance, and behavioral conduct domains. Examination of discrepancy scores (child rating - teacher rating) by comorbidity subgroups suggested that aggressive and low-achieving ADHD boys tended to overestimate their competence the most in the domains in which they were the most impaired. Results are discussed in terms of prior literature on "positive illusions" in ADHD children.     

Discrimination of individual vocalizations by black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapilla)

The auditory perceptual abilities of male black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapilla) were examined using an operant go/no-go discrimination among 16 individual vocalizations recorded at 5 m. The birds learned to discriminate about equally well among eight male chickadee fee-bee songs and eight female zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata) distance calls. These results do not indicate that chickadees have a species-specific advantage in individual recognition for conspecific over heterospecific vocalizations. We then transferred the chickadees to a discrimination of the same songs and calls rerecorded at a moderate distance. These results showed accurate transfer of discrimination from 16 vocalizations recorded at 5 m to novel versions of the same 16 songs and calls rerecorded at 25 m. That is, chickadees recognized individual songs and calls despite degradation produced by rerecording at 25 m. Identifying individual vocalizations despite their transformation by distance cues is here described as a biologically important example of perceptual constancy.     

Psychiatric patient- and informant-reported personality: predicting concurrent and future behavior

The authors investigated the criterion and incremental validity of personality reports from psychiatric patients and knowledgeable informants in predicting patient substance use, social and risky behaviors, and psychological distress. Patient and informant reports of patient personality and behavior were collected from an adult psychiatric sample (N = 94). Hierarchical regressions indicated that patient reports of personality accounted for significant variance in both concurrent (17%-42%) and future behavior assessed 1 year later (17%-40%). Informant reports contributed significantly to the prediction of several behaviors and most strongly to social behaviors. Behaviors were predicted equally well by self-reports and informant reports in prospective as in concurrent regressions. Thus, both patient and informant reports of personality contribute importantly to prediction of behavior, and predictive ability is stable across time.     

Developmental changes in source memory

Remembering how one learned a fact can be important in itself (e.g. for considering the value of information). However, source memory is also important, along with the temporal and perceptual information on which it is based, in giving memory an episodic or autobiographical quality. The present study investigated developmental changes in children’s ability to monitor source, in a paradigm adapted from Schacter, Harbluk and McLachlan (1984). This task, unlike previous source monitoring tasks used with children, has the potential to show the existence of a serious kind of source error called source amnesia. Children of 4, 6 and 8 years participated. They also completed measures believed to assess prefrontal function. Children showed a steady improvement with age in their ability to remember facts, but showed abrupt improvement between 4 and 6 years in their ability to monitor the source of those facts. Most notably, 4–year–old children displayed a great deal of source amnesia (i.e. errors of the kind committed by populations with frontal dysfunction), but 6– and 8–year–old children showed very few such errors. In addition, source memory was related, in some analyses although not in others, to behavioral measures often used to assess prefrontal functioning. The timing of the transition in source monitoring ability is discussed, including implications for childhood amnesia.     

Reconsolidation Reconsidered

Some of the considerations that led to a consolidation interpretation of retrograde amnesia (RA), which states that RA results from the disruption of memory processing and storage when neural activity is interrupted by a brain insult, are reviewed here. The time-dependent gradient of memory loss (i.e., new memories are more vulnerable to amnesia than old memories) that characterizes RA seemed to fit nicely with the notion of a cascade of cellular events occurring during the immediate post-acquisition period that would transform a labile representation into a more stable form (i.e., consolidate the memory). However, a variety of observations came to challenge the storage-disruption model, and among these was the finding of amnesia for old but reactivated memories. A recent study by Nader, Schafe, and LeDoux (2000) provides an important analytic extension of the work on "reconsolidation" by showing that inhibition of protein synthesis in the lateral and basal nuclei of the amygdala immediately following the reactivation of old memory will induce retrograde amnesia. We offer a retrieval-oriented conceptualization to account for the temporal gradient and the "reconsolidation" phenomena.     

哈茨霍恩的后现代宗教观

关于C．哈茨霍恩(Charles HartShorne,1887--2000年,美国名宗教哲学家、过程神学主要代表人物之一。——译),人们知道得最多、讨论得最多的也许是他关于神的本质和存在的观念。的确,他的许多最重要的贡献都来自这一主题。     

Effects of acoustic degradation on syntactic processing: implications for the nature of the resource system used in language processing

This study investigated the effect of noise masking on on-line syntactic processing. Ninety college students were tested on measures of working memory and on-line sentence comprehension. Subjects were divided equally into three listening conditions: no noise masking, -3 dB signal-to-noise ratio (S:N), -4.5 dB S:N. The auditory moving windows (AMW) paradigm was used to measure on-line sentence processing. In the AMW paradigm, subjects pressed a button for the successive presentation of each phrase in two types of sentences (syntactically simple and complex), and listening times were recorded for each phrase. Previous studies have shown that the verb in the more complex sentence type is the most capacity demanding portion of the sentence. Listening times were longer overall with increased noise masking, and listening times were longer overall at the verb of the harder sentence type. However, the increase at the verb was not larger with increased noise masking. All three groups showed similar effects of syntactic structure in the on-line data. The on-line syntactic effects were not due to problems in word recognition. Correlational analyses did not indicate a relationship between the increase in processing time at the capacity demanding region of the harder sentence types and any of the measures of working memory capacity in any of the three listening conditions. Results indicate that on-line sentence processing is not affected by noise masking if lexical access (e.g., word recognition) remains intact.