Visual Geometry of Classical Japanese Gardens

Axiomathes - The concept of geometry may evoke a world of pure platonic shapes, such as spheres and cubes, but a deeper understanding of visual experience demands insight into the perceptual...     

The utility of the MAPI in the assessment of depression

The relationships between the Millon Adolescent Personality Inventory (MAPI; Millon, Green, & Meagher, 1982) and depression, as assessed by the Multiscore Depression Inventory (MDI; Berndt, 1968) were examined. Elevations on the MDI subscales were positively related to elevations on MAPI personality style Scale 2 (Inhibited) and Scale 8 (Sensitive) and on six of the eight MAPI expressed concerns scales. MAPI personality style Scale 4 (Sociable) and Scale 5 (Confident) were negatively correlated with the MDI. MAPI code types containing either Scale 2 or 8 were associated with a high MDI full-scale score. The subjects who received a MAPI computer-generated diagnosis of borderline personality disorder also had elevated MDI full-scale scores. The findings of this study appear consistent with the existing body of MAPI research, and the data suggest that the MAPI personality style scales may have both state and trait qualities.     

Facial speech gestures: the relation between visual speech processing,phonological awareness,and developmental dyslexia in 10‐year‐olds

Successful communication in everyday life crucially involves the processing of auditory and visual components of speech. Viewing our interlocutor and processing visual components of speech facilitates speech processing by triggering auditory processing. Auditory phoneme processing, analyzed by event‐related brain potentials (ERP), has been shown to be associated with impairments in reading and spelling (i.e. developmental dyslexia), but visual aspects of phoneme processing have not been investigated in individuals with such deficits. The present study analyzed the passive visual Mismatch Response (vMMR) in school children with and without developmental dyslexia in response to video‐recorded mouth movements pronouncing syllables silently. Our results reveal that both groups of children showed processing of visual speech stimuli, but with different scalp distribution. Children without developmental dyslexia showed a vMMR with typical posterior distribution. In contrast, children with developmental dyslexia showed a vMMR with anterior distribution, which was even more pronounced in children with severe phonological deficits and very low spelling abilities. As anterior scalp distributions are typically reported for auditory speech processing, the anterior vMMR of children with developmental dyslexia might suggest an attempt to anticipate potentially upcoming auditory speech information in order to support phonological processing, which has been shown to be deficient in children with developmental dyslexia.     

Frames of reference and cooperative social decision-making

Cooperative decision-making was studied as a function of the decision-makers' own, and the interdependent other party's gain or loss frame. As expected, results showed that (a) an own gain frame produced less cognitive activity than an own loss frame and (b) other's loss frame caused more cooperation than other's gain frame, but only in case of an own gain frame.     

Three- to eight-month-old infants' catching under monocular and binocular vision

We report a cross-sectional and a longitudinal experiment that examined developmental changes in the relative contribution of monocular and binocular variables in the guidance of interceptive arm movements. Three- to eight-month-old infants were observed while presented with differently sized balls that approached frontally with a constant velocity under both monocular and binocular viewing conditions. Movement onset indicated that with age infants increasingly came to rely on binocular variables in controlling the timing of the interceptive arm movements. That is, from 7 to 8 months of age movement onset was independent from object size under binocular but not under monocular viewing. In contrast, binocular viewing enhanced the spatial accuracy of the interceptive arm movements at all ages. We concluded that attunement to binocular information is a key process in infants' gaining adaptive control of goal-directed arm movements. However, interceptive arm movements entail the formation of multiple on-line couplings between optic and movement variables, each of which appears to develop at its own pace.     

Toward understanding why fairness matters: the influence of mortality salience on reactions to procedural fairness

This article focuses on the question of why fairness matters to people. On the basis of fairness heuristic theory, the authors argue that people especially need fairness when they are uncertain about things that are important to them. Following terror management theory, the authors focus on a basic kind of human uncertainty: fear of death. Integrating these two theoretical frameworks, it is proposed that thinking about their mortality should make fairness a more important issue to people. The findings of three experiments support the authors' line of reasoning: Asking participants to think about their mortality led to stronger fair process effects (positive effects of perceived procedural fairness on subsequent reactions) than not asking them to think about mortality. It is argued that these findings suggest that fairness especially matters to people when they are uncertain about fundamental aspects of human life such as human mortality.