Neural correlates of metacognitive monitoring during episodic and semantic retrieval

Activity in the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) has been shown to be a strong correlate of successful recognition performance. We assessed the degree to which the PPC mediates metacognitive judgments by assessing the feeling of knowing (FOK) for recently learned (episodic) and well-learned (semantic) facts (e.g., "The sport that is associated with Wimbledon is . . ."). Activity in ventral regions of the PPC was observed for strong FOKs for both sets of facts, although greater activity was observed for episodic than for semantic facts. Strong semantic FOKs activated anterior temporal regions. Weaker FOK ratings, when contrasted with strong FOKs, activated dorsal parietal regions, a finding that parallels contrasts during explicit tests in which low-confident responses were compared with high-confident responses. These findings demonstrate retrieval-related parietal activity during metacognitive judgments. Furthermore, they show that the ventral PPC is particularly engaged during context-specific, episodic retrieval, as compared to semantic retrieval.     

Interference between phonemes during phoneme monitoring: evidence for an interactive activation model of speech perception

We explore the recent finding (Newman & Dell, 1978) that the time needed to detect a target phoneme in a phoneme monitoring task is increased when the preceding word contains a phoneme similar to the target. Normal adult native speakers of English monitored auditorily presented sentences and responded as quickly as possible whenever they detected a specified phoneme. We found that preceding word-initial phonemes, despite being processed more quickly, increased the response latency to the following target phoneme more than did preceding word-medial phonemes. There was also an increase in response latency even when the subject could be highly certain that the similar preceding phoneme was not an instance of the target phoneme. We argue that the interference effects are due to fundamental characteristics of perceptual processing and that more time is needed to categorize the target phoneme. We present a computer simulation using an interactive activation model of speech perception to demonstrate the plausibility of our explanation.     

Asymmetries for the categorization of kanji nouns, adjectives, and verbs presented to the left and right visual fields

Kanji is one form of written Japanese in which the symbolic/analytic characteristics of language are dissociated from systematic phonetic characteristics; as such, it makes possible a more careful test of which aspect of language is responsible for the frequently observed superior left-hemisphere performance. In this study, subjects were asked to categorize tachistoscopically presented kanji as nouns, adjectives, or verbs. The previously reported (Hatta 1977, Neuropsychologia, 15, 685–688) left-visual-field advantage for kanji was found only in the case of nouns. Adjectives and verbs were processed more rapidly and correctly in the right visual field.     

Correlates of Burnout in Inpatient Substance Abuse Treatment Therapists

Recovering substance abuse therapists had a higher sense of personal accomplishment than nonrecovering therapists. Therapists who had more social support had a greater sense of personal accomplishment. Length of service was related to greater depersonalization and greater personal accomplishment. Burnout was strongly associated with occupational stress. Personal stress was associated with depersonalization.     

Why is that? Structural prediction and ambiguity resolution in a very large corpus of English sentences

Previous psycholinguistic research has shown that a variety of contextual factors can influence the interpretation of syntactically ambiguous structures, but psycholinguistic experimentation inherently does not allow for the investigation of the role that these factors play in natural (uncontrolled) language use. We use regression modeling in conjunction with data from the British National Corpus to measure the amount and specificity of the information available for disambiguation in natural language use. We examine the Direct Object/Sentential Complement ambiguity and the closely related issue of complementizer use in sentential complements, and find that both ambiguity resolution and complementizer use can be predicted from contextual information.     

A basis for generating expectancies for verbs from nouns

We explore the implications of an event-based expectancy generation approach to language understanding, suggesting that one useful strategy employed by comprehenders is to generate expectations about upcoming words. We focus on two questions: (1) What role is played by elements other than verbs in generating expectancies? (2) What connection exists between expectancy generation and event-based knowledge? Because verbs follow their arguments in many constructions (particularly in verb-final languages), deferring expectations until the verb seems inefficient. Both human data and computational modeling suggest that other sentential elements may also play a role in predictive processing and that these constraints often reflect knowledge regarding typical events. We investigated these predictions, using both short and long stimulus onset asynchrony priming. Robust priming obtained when verbs were named aloud following typical agents, patients, instruments, and locations, suggesting that event memory is organized so that nouns denoting entities and objects activate the classes of events in which they typically play a role. These computations are assumed to be an important component of expectancy generation in sentence processing.