Language switching and the effects of orthographic specificity and response repetition

In two experiments, Greek-English bilinguals alternated between performing a lexical decision task in Greek and in English. The cost to performance on switch trials interacted with response repetition, implying that a source of this "switch cost" is at the level of response mapping or initiation. Orthographic specificity also affected switch cost. Greek and English have partially overlapping alphabets, which enabled us to manipulate language specificity at the letter level, rather than only at the level of letter clusters. Language-nonspecific stimuli used only symbols common to both Greek and English, whereas language-specific stimuli contained letters unique to just one language. The switch cost was markedly reduced by such language-specific orthography, and this effect did not interact with the effect of response repetition, implying a separate, stimulus-sensitive source of switch costs. However, we argue that this second source is not within the word-recognition system, but at the level of task schemas, because the reduction of switch cost with language-specific stimuli was abolished when these stimuli were intermingled with language-nonspecific stimuli.     

Emotion Socialization in Families of Children With an Anxiety Disorder

Compared emotion socialization in 26 children with anxiety disorders ages 8–12 years and their mothers to 26 nonclinical counterparts without psychopathology. Children and their mothers participated in an emotion interaction task in which they discussed occasions when the child felt worry, sadness, and anger. Responses were coded for length of discussion, proportion of words spoken by child vs. mother, frequency of positive and negative emotion words, explanatory discussion of emotion, and maternal facilitation of emotion discussion. Children and their mothers also completed the Expressiveness and Control scales of the Family Environment Scale. Results indicated that mothers of children with an anxiety disorder spoke less frequently than their child, used significantly fewer positive emotion words, and discouraged their childrens emotion discussions more than did mothers of nonclinical children. Nonclinical children and their mothers indicated significantly more emotional expressiveness in their families than did children with an anxiety disorder and their mothers. These results highlight the potential role of truncated family emotional expressivity in the emotional development and functioning of children with an anxiety disorder.     

Processing homonymy and polysemy: effects of sentential context and time-course following unilateral brain damage

The present study investigated the abilities of left-hemisphere-damaged (LHD) non-fluent aphasic, right-hemisphere-damaged (RHD), and normal control individuals to access, in sentential biasing contexts, the multiple meanings of three types of ambiguous words, namely homonyms (e.g., "punch"), metonymies (e.g., "rabbit"), and metaphors (e.g., "star"). Furthermore, the predictions of the "suppression deficit" and "coarse semantic coding" hypotheses, which have been proposed to account for RH language function/dysfunction, were tested. Using an auditory semantic priming paradigm, ambiguous words were incorporated in dominant- or subordinate-biasing sentence-primes followed after a short (100 ms) or long (1,000 ms) interstimulus interval (ISI) by dominant-meaning-related, subordinate-meaning-related or unrelated target words. For all three types of ambiguous words, both the effects of context and ISI were obvious in the performance of normal control subjects, who showed multiple meaning activation at the short ISI, but eventually, at the long ISI, contextually appropriate meaning selection. Largely similar performance was exhibited by the LHD non-fluent aphasic patients as well. In contrast, RHD patients showed limited effects of context, and no effects of the time-course of processing. In addition, although homonymous and metonymous words showed similar patterns of activation (i.e., both meanings were activated at both ISIs), RHD patients had difficulties activating the subordinate meanings of metaphors, suggesting a selective problem with figurative meanings. Although the present findings do not provide strong support for either the "coarse semantic coding" or the "suppression deficit" hypotheses, they are viewed as being more consistent with the latter, according to which RH damage leads to deficits suppressing alternative meanings of ambiguous words that become incompatible with the context.     

Premovement activity of the pre-supplementary motor area and the readiness for action: studies of time-resolved event-related functional MRI

The supplementary motor area (SMA) is thought to play in important role in the preparation and organisation of voluntary movement. It has long been known that cortical activity begins to increase up to 2s prior to voluntary self-initiated movement. This increasing premovement activity measured in EEG is known as the Bereitschaftspotential or readiness potential. Modern functional brain imaging methods, using event-related and time-resolved functional MRI techniques, are beginning to reveal the role of the SMA, and in particular the more anterior pre-SMA, in premovement activity associated with the readiness for action. In this paper we review recent studies using event-related time-resolved fMRI methods to examine the time-course of activation changes within the SMA throughout the preparation, readiness and execution of action. These studies suggest that the pre-SMA plays a common role in encoding or representing actions prior to our own voluntary self-initiated movements, during motor imagery, and from the observation of others' actions. We suggest that the pre-SMA generates and encodes motor representations which are then maintained in readiness for action.     

Human spatial navigation via a visuo-tactile sensory substitution system

Spatial navigation within a real 3-D maze was investigated to study space perception on the sole basis of tactile information transmitted by means of a 'tactile vision substitution system' (TVSS) allowing the conversion of optical images-collected by a micro camera-into 'tactile images' via a matrix in contact with the skin. The development of such a device is based on concepts of cerebral and functional plasticity, enabling subjective reproduction of visual images from tactile data processing. Blindfolded sighted subjects had to remotely control the movements of a robot on which the TVSS camera was mounted. Once familiarised with the cues in the maze, the subjects were given two exploration sessions. Performance was analysed according to an objective point of view (exploration time, discrimination capacity), as well as a subjective one (speech). The task was successfully carried out from the very first session. As the subjects took a different path during each navigation, a gradual improvement in performance (discrimination and exploration time) was noted, generating a phenomenon of learning. Moreover, subjective analysis revealed an evolution of the spatialisation process towards distal attribution. Finally, some emotional expressions seemed to reflect the genesis of 'qualia' (emotional qualities of stimulation).     

Teaching pigeons to commit base-rate neglect

Whereas humans display base-rate neglect in a behavioral analogue of the base-rate problem, pigeons have been shown to behave optimally in a comparable task, appropriately weighting base-rate and case-cue information. Previous studies have shown that prior experience may interfere with optimal decisions for human subjects, a result consistent with the position that poor and illogical decisions often follow from the misapplication of learned rules. The present study shows that pigeons will also display base-rate neglect if given extensive pretraining with informative case cues. Two experiments with pigeons, in a matching-to-sample procedure designed to mimic the classic base-rate problem, show that pigeons display base-rate neglect after extensive pretraining with the matching task.     

Using cognitive models to map relations between neuropsychological disorders and human decision-making deficits

Findings from a complex decision-making task (the Iowa gambling task) show that individuals with neuropsychological disorders are characterized by decision-making deficits that lead to maladaptive risk-taking behavior. This article describes a cognitive model that distills performance in this task into three different underlying psychological components: the relative impact of rewards and punishments on evaluations of options, the rate that the contingent payoffs are learned, and the consistency between learning and responding. Findings from 10 studies are organized by distilling the observed decision deficits into the three basic components and locating the neuropsychological disorders in this component space. The results reveal a cluster of populations characterized by making risky choices despite high attention to losses, perhaps because of difficulties in creating emotive representations. These findings demonstrate the potential contribution of cognitive models in building bridges between neuroscience and behavior.     

Constructed criteria: redefining merit to justify discrimination

This article presents an account of job discrimination according to which people redefine merit in a manner congenial to the idiosyncratic credentials of individual applicants from desired groups. In three studies, participants assigned male and female applicants to gender-stereotypical jobs. However, they did not view male and female applicants as having different strengths and weaknesses. Instead, they redefined the criteria for success at the job as requiring the specific credentials that a candidate of the desired gender happened to have. Commitment to hiring criteria prior to disclosure of the applicant's gender eliminated discrimination, suggesting that bias in the construction of hiring criteria plays a causal role in discrimination.     

How global versus local perception fits regulatory focus

We propose a reciprocal relation between regulatory-focus systems and global versus local processing styles-specifically, that global processing fits a promotion focus on advancement, whereas local processing fits a prevention focus on security. In Study 1, participants were shown large letters made of small letters and decided if either of two specific letters appeared on the screen. Strength of promotion focus was positively correlated with speed of processing global letters and negatively correlated with speed of processing local letters, whereas the reverse was true for strength of prevention focus. In Study 2, participants first worked on a global or local task and later chose between two objects. Consistent with our fit proposal, participants who had performed the global task assigned a higher price to their chosen object if they had chosen it in a promotive, eager manner than if they had chosen it in a preventive, vigilant manner, whereas the reverse was true for participants who had performed the local task.