Response priming driven by local contrast, not subjective brightness

We demonstrate qualitative dissociations of brightness processing in visuomotor priming and conscious vision. Speeded keypress responses to the brighter of two luminance targets were performed in the presence of preceding dark and bright primes (clearly visible and flanking the targets) whose apparent brightness values were enhanced or attenuated by a visual illusion. Response times to the targets were greatly affected by consistent versus inconsistent arrangements of the primes, relative to the targets (response priming). Priming effects could systematically contradict subjective brightness matches, such that one prime could appear brighter than the other but could prime as if it were darker. Systematic variation of the illusion showed that response-priming effects depended only on local flanker-background contrast, not on the subjective appearance of the flankers. Our findings suggest that speeded motor responses, as opposed to conscious perceptual judgments, access an early phase of lightness and brightness processing prior to full lightness constancy.     

How does attention spread across objects oriented in depth?

Previous evidence suggests that attention can operate on object-based representations. It is not known whether these representations encode depth information and whether object depth, if encoded, is in viewer- or objectcentered coordinates. To examine these questions, we employed a spatial cuing paradigm in which one corner of a 3-D object was exogenously cued with 75% validity. By rotating the object in depth, we can determine whether validity effects are modulated by 2-D or 3-D cue-target distance and whether validity effects depend on the position of the viewer relative to the object. When the image of a 3-D object was present (Experiments 1A and 1B), validity effects were not modulated by changes in 2-D cue-target distance, and shifting attention toward the viewer led to smaller validity effects than did shifting attention away from the viewer. When there was no object in the display (Experiments 2A and 2B), validity effects increased linearly as a function of 2-D cue-target distance. These results demonstrate that attention spreads across representations of perceived objects that encode depth information and that the object’s orientation in depth is encoded in viewer-centered coordinates.     

The “dual usage problem” in the explanations of “joint attention” and children’s socioemotional development: A reconceptualization

The term “joint attention”, which first gained currency in the early 1960s in studies of the development of language and symbolic thought, remains significant in the developmental literature. However, its meaning is unclear. A definitional problem exists similar to what Patterson [Patterson, M. L. (1982). A sequential functional model of nonverbal exchange. Psychological Review, 89, 231–249] described as the “dual usage” problem in the study of behaviour. The dual usage problem manifests when the behaviours of interest are used interchangeably with the function served by those behaviours. Similarly, the behaviours or skills that are taken to show joint attention are used interchangeably with the functions served by these behaviours. Scant attention is given to how the behaviours are generated and regulated and how they contribute to development. The purpose of the present position paper was: (1) to identify and illustrate the ways in which the behaviours and functions of joint attention have been confounded in the literature; (2) to provide a revised operationalization of joint attention incorporating the idea of Consummative Joint Attention, which is defined as a process variable that integrates these two theoretically different and complementary aspects of “joint attention;” and (3) to test this revised definition with evidence from a sample of hearing mothers and their 18- to 36-month-old hearing or deaf toddlers. We suggest that a reconceptualization and revised definition of joint attention as a process served by a particular sequence of complementary and well-timed events in the behaviour of mother–child interaction are particularly well-suited to testing joint attention as an early prelingual mechanism and to detecting early problems with psychosocial and adaptive development created by ineffective patterns of social interaction.     

Deliberate practice predicts performance over time in adolescent chess players and drop‐outs: A linear mixed models analysis

In this study, the longitudinal relation between deliberate practice and performance in chess was examined using a linear mixed models analysis. The practice activities and performance ratings of young elite chess players, who were either in, or had dropped out of the Dutch national chess training, were analysed since they had started playing chess seriously. The results revealed that deliberate practice (i.e. serious chess study alone and serious chess play) strongly contributed to chess performance. The influence of deliberate practice was not only observable in current performance, but also over chess players' careers. Moreover, although the drop‐outs' chess ratings developed more slowly over time, both the persistent and drop‐out chess players benefited to the same extent from investments in deliberate practice. Finally, the effect of gender on chess performance proved to be much smaller than the effect of deliberate practice. This study provides longitudinal support for the monotonic benefits assumption of deliberate practice, by showing that over chess players' careers, deliberate practice has a significant effect on performance, and to the same extent for chess players of different ultimate performance levels. The results of this study are not in line with critique raised against the deliberate practice theory that the factors deliberate practice and talent could be confounded.     

Dreaming of white bears: the return of the suppressed at sleep onset

The present study examined the effects of thought suppression on sleep-onset mentation. It was hypothesized that the decrease of attentional control in the transition to sleep would lead to a rebound of a suppressed thought in hypnagogic mentation. Twenty-four young adults spent two consecutive nights in a sleep laboratory. Half of the participants were instructed to suppress a target thought, whereas the other half freely thought of anything at all. To assess target thought frequency, three different measures were used in the wake state and mentation reports were repeatedly prompted by a computer at sleep onset. In support of the hypothesis, results revealed a reversal of target thought frequency at sleep onset: Participants instructed to suppress reported fewer target thoughts than did controls before falling asleep, but more target thoughts afterwards.     

A comparative study of adolescent risk assessment instruments: predictive and incremental validity

Promising new adolescent risk assessment tools are being incorporated into clinical practice but currently possess limited evidence of predictive validity regarding their individual and/or combined use in risk assessments. The current study compares three structured adolescent risk instruments, Youth Level of Service/Case Management Inventory (YLS/CMI), Structured Assessment of Violence Risk in Youth (SAVRY), and Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version (PCL:YV), for both predictive and incremental validity with respect to general and violent recidivism. Receiver operating characteristic and hierarchical logistic regression analyses revealed that the risk tools predicted general and violent recidivism to varying degrees of accuracy, but the SAVRY offered the most in incremental validity. Clinical implications and future directions for youth risk assessment are discussed.     

Unspoken Ethics: A Multi-Religion Group and Building a Public Identity

Dealing with the differences among its participants has been one of the most difficult aspects which the Council for Religious Studies (CONER/SC) has faced. Formed by different religions, the Council was founded in 1998 to assist the State of Santa Catarina, Brazil, in the implementation of Religous Studies in state run schools. As a public identity was necessary to legitimize its purpose to the state and to religious studies teachers, the group had to deal with tensions provoked by the differences among Christians of various denominations and representatives from Catholic and Protestant (among them only one Pentecostal), Hindu, Muslim and Afro-Brazilian religions. The strategies used to avoid conflict and produce an agreed discourse include resort to silence when hot topics were broached and discussion of issues which were considered to be possible to discuss. The article focuses on the ethical values expressed, but not spoken of in this process, and on some challenges to the group's unity.     

Personal Respect, Private Property, And Market Economy: What Critical Theory Can Learn From Hegel

The aim of the present paper is to show that Hegel’s concept of personal respect is of great interest to contemporary Critical Theory. The author first analyzes this notion as it appears in the Philosophy of Right and then offers a new interpretation of the conceptual relation between personal respect and the institutions of (private) property and (capitalist) markets. In doing so, he shows why Hegel’s concept of personal respect allows us to understand markets as possible institutionalizations of this kind of recognition, and why it is compatible with a critique of neoliberal capitalism. He argues that due to these features Hegel’s notion of personal respect is of great interest to theoreticians within the tradition of critical theory.

Visual attention amplifies response priming of pointing movements to color targets

We studied the influence of spatial visual attention on the time course of primed pointing movements. We measured pointing responses to color targets preceded by color stimuli priming either the same response as the target or the opposite response. The effects of visual attention at the prime and target locations were studied by varying both the cue-prime and prime-target intervals when presenting either exogenous attentional cues or, in a separate experiment, endogenous cues whose processing was a precondition for performing the task. Pointing trajectories revealed large priming effects in which pointing responses were first controlled by prime signals and then captured in midflight by target signals. Priming effects were strongly amplified when the relevant prime locations were visually attended at optimal cue-prime SOAs, with attention modulating the entire time course of the primed pointing movements. We propose that visual attention amplifies the earliest waves of visuomotor feedforward information, elicited in turn by primes and by targets.