Cradling side preference is associated with lateralized processing of baby facial expressions in females

Women’s cradling side preference has been related to contralateral hemispheric specialization of processing emotional signals; but not of processing baby’s facial expression. Therefore, 46 nulliparous female volunteers were characterized as left or non-left holders (HG) during a doll holding task. During a signal detection task they were then asked to detect the emotional baby faces in a series of baby portraits with neutral and emotional facial expressions, presented either to the left or the right visual field (VFP). ANOVA revealed a significant HG × VFP interaction on response bias data (p < .05). Response bias was lowest when emotional baby faces were presented in the visual field of cradling side preference, suggesting that women’s cradling side preference may have evolved to save cognitive resources during monitoring emotional baby face signals.     

Identifying mediators of training effects on performance-related psychobiosocial states: A single-case observational study in an elite female triathlete

ObjectivesRelationships between training load, psychobiosocial (PBS) states and performance are dynamic and individual-specific. The nature of these relationships can be investigated using a combination of dynamic linear models (DLMs) and mediating variable analysis, potentially assisting applied sports psychologists in planning and monitoring of individual elite athletes’ intervention programmes.DesignWe illustrate this approach by examining the relationships of training loads with a performance-related state (‘self-efficacy’) and the role of potential mediating PBS variables (‘fatigue/lack of energy’ and ‘being in shape’) in explaining these relationships in an elite triathlete across time.MethodSelf-reports of PBS states (twice weekly) and training data were collected over 137 days. Using DLMs and mediating variable analysis, direct (unmediated) and indirect (mediated) short-term associations of training load with ‘self-efficacy’ were examined.ResultsIn this triathlete, we found evidence for positive effects of training on ‘self-efficacy’, which were partly explained by feelings of ‘being in shape’ and suppressed by feelings of ‘fatigue/lack of energy’. Changes in the relationship between lagged training load and ‘fatigue/lack of energy’ were observed across time and were particularly pronounced in temporal proximity of an injury.ConclusionStrengths of the presented approach are its dynamic nature enabling the observation of changes occurring over time, use of statistical inference rather than visual data interpretation, and quantification of mediating effects to identify potential pathways of intervention. Additionally, the DLM method can identify complex nonlinear associations by examining correspondence between changes in levels of predictors and changes in magnitude and direction of predictor-outcome associations.     

The ignoring paradox: Cueing distractor features leads first to selection, then to inhibition of to-be-ignored items

Observers find a target item more quickly when they have foreknowledge of target-defining attributes, such as identity, color, or location. However, it is less clear whether foreknowledge of nontarget attributes can also speed search. Munneke, Van der Stigchel, and Theeuwes Acta Psychologica 129:101?C107, (2008) found that observers found the target more quickly when they were cued to ignore a region of space where a target would not appear. Using a similar paradigm, we explored the effects of cueing nontarget features on search. We found that when we cued observers to ignore nontarget features, search was slowed. The results from a probe-dot detection task revealed that this slowing occurred because, paradoxically, observers initially selected an item appearing in the to-be-ignored color. Finally, we found that cueing nontarget features sped search when placeholders matching the location of the to-be-ignored color preceded presentation of the search display by at least 800?ms; thus, it appears that some limited inhibition of to-be-ignored items occurs following selection. Taken together, these results suggest that observers are unable to explicitly avoid selection of items matching known nontarget features. Instead, when nontarget features are cued, observers select the to-be-ignored feature or the locations of objects matching that feature early in search, and only inhibit them after this selection process.     

MOTOR PREPARATION,MOTOR EXECUTION,ATTENTION, AND EXECUTIVE FUNCTIONS IN ATTENTION DEFICIT/HYPERACTIVITY DISORDER (ADHD)

Attention and executive functions were investigated in medicated and unmedicated children with ADHD combined type using a novel selective reaching task. This task involved responding as rapidly as possible to a target while at times having to ignore a distractor. Results indicated that unmedicated children with ADHD showed slow and inaccurate responding. Slow responding reflected problems at the stage of movement preparation but not movement execution. An attentional impairment, rather than a motor planning problem per se, appeared to underlie the slow movement preparation. Inaccurate responding reflected problems with response inhibition and selective attention, impulsivity, set-shifting, and difficulties in maintaining vigilance. Although medicated children with ADHD did not show slow movement preparation, they did show some response inaccuracy, resulting especially from impulsive responding.These findings suggest that ADHD is characterized by slow motor preparation (but not motor execution), and deficits in selective attention, vigilance, and executive functions. Preliminary results suggest that stimulant medication may resolve some of these motor, attentional and executive function deficits.     

Glass maze in women's leadership

Psychological gender discrimination explanations have changed over the past thirty years, becoming more complex in order to obtain a better understanding of the social reality. At the present moment, one of the most interesting research areas is the one referring to the 'glass maze' phenomenon in women's management careers. The main purpose of this work is to reveal the theoretical evolution in an attempt to explain the leadership study from a gender perspective. The consecutive hypotheses, starting with the labour sexual division idea, are becoming more interactive in order to understand the current labour-social situation. Social psychology has underlined the role of beliefs, observed via gender stereotyped roles, prejudiced attitudes against women, sexist and neo-sexist ideology, or masculine, feminine and androgynous identity development. New psychological interpretations insist on the variability of the gender concept, where gender is sometimes observed through men and women's behaviours, and other times through those behaviour expectations. But gender is mainly observed though the power relations between men and women during social interactions in labour organizations.     

A bilateral advantage for storage in visual working memory

Various studies have demonstrated enhanced visual processing when information is presented across both visual hemifields rather than in a single hemifield (the bilateral advantage). For example, Alvarez and Cavanagh (2005) reported that observers were able to track twice as many moving visual stimuli when the tracked items were presented bilaterally rather than unilaterally, suggesting that independent resources enable tracking in the two visual fields. Motivated by similarities in the apparent capacity and neural substrates that mediate tracking and visual working memory (WM), the present work examined whether or not a bilateral advantage also arises during storage in visual WM. Using a recall procedure to assess working memory for orientation information, we found a reliable bilateral advantage; recall error was smaller with bilateral sample displays than with unilateral displays. To demonstrate that the bilateral advantage influenced storage per se rather than just encoding efficiency, we replicated the observed bilateral advantage using sequentially presented stimuli. Finally, to further characterize how bilateral presentations enhanced storage in working memory, we measured both the number and the resolution of the stored items and found that bilateral presentations lead to an increased probability of storage, rather than enhanced mnemonic resolution. Thus, the bilateral advantage extends beyond the initial selection and encoding of visual information to influence online maintenance in visual working memory.     

Stimulus-Specific Delay Activity in Human Primary Visual Cortex

ABSTRACT— Working memory (WM) involves maintaining information in an on-line state. One emerging view is that information in WM is maintained via sensory recruitment , such that information is stored via sustained activity in the sensory areas that encode the to-be-remembered information. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we observed that key sensory regions such as primary visual cortex (V1) showed little evidence of sustained increases in mean activation during a WM delay period, though such amplitude increases have typically been used to determine whether a region is involved in on-line maintenance. However, a multivoxel pattern analysis of delay-period activity revealed a sustained pattern of activation in V1 that represented only the intentionally stored feature of a multifeature object. Moreover, the pattern of delay activity was qualitatively similar to that observed during the discrimination of sensory stimuli, suggesting that WM representations in V1 are reasonable "copies" of those evoked during pure sensory processing.