Neural and behavioral effects of interference resolution in depression and rumination

Individuals diagnosed with major depressive disorder (MDD) often ruminate about their depression and their life situations, impairing their concentration and performance on daily tasks. We examined whether rumination might be due to a deficit in the ability to expel negative information from short-term memory (STM), and fMRI was used to examine the neural structures involved in this ability. MDD and healthy control (HC) participants were tested using a directed-forgetting procedure in a short-term item recognition task. As predicted, MDD participants had more difficulty than did HCs in expelling negative, but not positive, words from STM. Overall, the neural networks involved in directed forgetting were similar for both groups, but the MDDs exhibited more spatial variability in activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus (a region critical for inhibiting irrelevant information), which may contribute to their relative inability to inhibit negative information.     

Eyes wide shut: implied social presence, eye tracking and attention

People often behave differently when they know they are being watched. Here, we report the first investigation of whether such social presence effects also influence looking behavior--a popular measure of attention allocation. We demonstrate that wearing an eye tracker, an implied social presence, leads individuals to avoid looking at particular stimuli. These results demonstrate that an implied social presence, here an eye tracker, can alter looking behavior. These data provide a new manipulation of social attention, as well as presenting a methodological challenge to researchers using eye tracking.     

Assessing Adolescent and Adult Attachment: An Update

This article provides an update on two significant contributions to the assessment of attachment in adolescents and adults. Two measures of adult attachment, both based on modifications of Hazan and Shaver's (1987) model of adult attachment, are reviewed. The conceptual bases for the development of each measure are discussed, current research involving each measure is presented, and implications of attachment assessment for counseling research and practice are offered.     

English-speaking children's comprehension of relative clauses: evidence for general-cognitive and language-specific constraints on development

Children must possess some ability to process input in a meaningful manner to acquire language. The present study reports on data from an experiment investigating 3- to 5-year-old English-speaking children's understanding of restrictive relative clauses manipulated for embeddedness and focus. The results of the study showed that English-speaking children acquire right-branching before center-embedded structures. Comparisons made with data from Portuguese-speaking children suggest general-cognitive and language-specific constraints on development, and with respect to English, a clause expansion approach to processing in development.     

The referential communication skills of children with imaginary companions

The present study investigated the referential communication skills of children with imaginary companions (ICs). Twenty-two children with ICs aged between 4 and 6 years were compared to 22 children without ICs (NICs). The children were matched for age, gender, birth order, number of siblings, and parental education. All children completed the Test of Referential Communication (Camaioni, Ercolani & Lloyd, 1995). The results showed that the children with ICs performed better than the children without ICs on the speaker component of the task. In particular, the IC children were better able to identify a specific referent to their interlocutor than were the NIC children. Furthermore, the IC children described less redundant features of the target picture than did the NIC children. The children did not differ in the listening comprehension component of the task. Overall, the results suggest that the IC children had a better understanding of their interlocutor's information requirements in conversation. The role of pretend play in the development of communicative competence is discussed in light of these results.     

Training in clinical ethics: launching the clinical ethics immersion course at the Center for Ethics at the Washington Hospital Center

In May 2011, the clinical ethics group of the Center for Ethics at Washington Hospital Center launched a 40-hour, three and one-half day Clinical Ethics Immersion Course. Created to address gaps in training in the practice of clinical ethics, the course is for those who now practice clinical ethics and for those who teach bioethics but who do not, or who rarely, have the opportunity to be in a clinical setting. "Immersion" refers to a high-intensity clinical ethics experience in a busy, urban, acute care hospital. During the Immersion Course, participants join clinical ethicists on working rounds in intensive care units and trauma service. Participants engage in a videotaped role-play conversation with an actor. Each simulated session reflects a practical, realistic clinical ethics case consultation scenario. Participants also review patients' charts, and have small group discussions on selected clinical ethics topics. As ethics consultation requests come into the center, Immersion Course participants accompany clinical ethicists on consultations. Specific to this pilot, because participants' evaluations and course faculty impressions were positive, the Center for Ethics will conduct the course twice each year. We look forward to improving the pilot and establishing the Immersion Course as one step towards addressing the gap in training opportunities in clinical ethics.     

Comparing learned predictiveness effects within and across compound discriminations

In four human learning experiments, we examined the extent to which learned predictiveness depends upon direct comparison between relatively good and poor predictors. Participants initially solved (a) linear compound discriminations in which one or both of the stimuli in each compound were predictive of the correct outcome, (b) biconditional discriminations where only the configurations of the stimuli were predictive of the correct outcome, or (c) pseudodiscriminations in which no stimulus features were predictive. In each experiment, subsequent learning and test stages were used to assay changes in the associability of each stimulus brought about by its role in the initial discriminations. Although learned predictiveness effects were observed in all experiments (i.e., previously predictive cues were more readily associated with a new outcome than previously nonpredictive cues), the same changes in associability were observed regardless of whether the stimulus was initially learned about in the presence of an equally predictive, more predictive, or less predictive stimulus. The results suggest that learned associability is not controlled by competitive allocation of attention, but rather by the absolute predictiveness of each individual cue.     

Turtle epistemology

In “Justification Without Awareness”, Michael Bergmann divides internalist epistemologies into those with a strong awareness requirement and those with a weak awareness requirement; he presents a dilemma, hoisting the “strongs” on one horn, and the “weaks” on the other. Here I reply on behalf of the strong-awareness view, presenting what I take to be a more satisfactory, and more fundamental, reply to Bergmann than I believe has been offered by his other critics, and in particular by Rogers and Matheson in their “Bergmann’s dilemma: exit strategies for internalists,” with which I am in partial agreement.     

Specificity effects in training and transfer of speeded responses

In 3 experiments, participants, on signal, moved a cursor from a central position to 1 of 8 numerically labeled locations on the circumference of a clock face. Movements were controlled by a mouse in 1 of 4 conditions: vertical reversal, horizontal reversal, combined reversals, or normal (i.e., no reversals). Participants were trained in 1, 2, or 3 of these conditions and were tested 1 week later with either the same or a different condition. There were improvements across training and perfect retention across the delay. There was little or no transfer, however, even when training involved combined reversals or multiple conditions. These results illustrate severe specificity of training and are interpreted in terms of acquired inhibition of normal responses.     

The ties that keep us bound: Top-down influences on the persistence of shape-from-motion

The phenomenon of perceptual persistence after the motion stops in shape-from-motion displays (SFM) was used to study the influence of prior knowledge on the maintenance of a percept in awareness. In SFM displays an object composed of discontinuous line segments are embedded in a background of randomly oriented lines. The object only becomes perceptible when the line segments that compose the object and the lines that compose the background move in counterphase. Critically, once the movement of the line segments stops, the percept of the object persists for a short period of time. In the present study, perceptual persistence for digits exceeded that reported for nonsense shapes composed of the same line segments. This result is taken as evidence that the processes involved in the persistence of SFM, and therefore sustained perception, are sensitive to top-down influences.