Protective factors and behavioral adjustment in preschool children of Iranian Martyrs

Out of 228 Iranian preschool Martyrs' children whose behaviour adjustment in the nursery settings was screened using the Preschool Behaviour Checklist, 12 well adjusted, zero scorers were compared with 8 poorly adjusted, high scorers. Using the parent's Behaviour Checklist, high scorers showed significantly more problems at home than zero scorers. On the Malaise Inventory, mothers of high scorers showed poorer mental health than mothers of zero scorers. Home observations showed that mother-child interaction was more aversive in high scorers than in zero scorers. More mothers of zero scorers had remarried.     

Spatial updating relies on an egocentric representation of space: Effects of the number of objects

Models of spatial updating attempt to explain how representations of spatial relationships between the actor and objects in the environment change as the actor moves. In allocentric models, object locations are encoded in an external reference frame, and only the actor’s position and orientation in that reference frame need to be updated. Thus, spatial updating should be independent of the number of objects in the environment (set size). In egocentric updating models, object locations are encoded relative to the actor, so the location of each object relative to the actor must be updated as the actor moves. Thus, spatial updating efficiency should depend on set size. We examined which model better accounts for human spatial updating by having people reconstruct the locations of varying numbers of virtual objects either from the original study position or from a changed viewing position. In consistency with the egocentric updating model, object localization following a viewpoint change was affected by the number of objects in the environment.     

Redundant food searches by capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella): a failure of metacognition?

This study investigated capuchin monkeys' understanding of their own visual search behavior as a means to gather information. Five monkeys were presented with three tubes that could be visually searched to determine the location of a bait. The bait's visibility was experimentally manipulated, and the monkeys' spontaneous visual searches before tube selection were analyzed. In Experiment 1, three monkeys selected the baited tube significantly above chance; however, the monkeys also searched transparent tubes. In Experiment 2, a bent tube in which food was never visible was introduced. When the bent tube was baited, the monkeys failed to deduce the bait location and responded randomly. They also continued to look into the bent tube despite not gaining any pertinent information from it. The capuchin monkeys' behavior contrasts with the efficient employment of visual search behavior reported in humans, apes and macaques. This difference is consistent with species-related variations in metacognitive abilities, although other explanations are also possible.     

The death of a mind: a study of Shakespeare's Richard III

Some of the most difficult aspects of our work involve our encounters with states of mind which are steeped in and spread violence. In these circumstances, we experience our best efforts to offer empathic presence and thought to avoid being assaulted and obliterated. In these instances, a figure from literature depicting the details in question may come to our aid. In the play popularly known as Richard III,William Shakespeare depicts how the state of mind which is etched by grievance and committed to revenge may impose the 'winter of (its) discontent' upon the sunny dispositions of others' healthy, integrated functioning. Shakespeare masterfully depicts Richard's cunning and malice, but he also illustrates how this vengeful state uses guile and 'changes of shape' to seduce its way past protective boundaries, utilizing the human qualities of trust, open-heartedness and longing as pathways for invasion, betrayal and emotional devastation. This paper will view excerpts of the play's text from a psychoanalytic perspective which suggests that several clear lessons about this obliterative state of mind may be gleaned: that grievance can only operate to spread grievance and destruction; that our open-hearted and trusting qualities do make us vulnerable to such invasion and betrayal, but that our humanity is also the only avenue for rescue from this plight. In addition a clear lesson is offered about the value of protected 'sanctuary', that is, mental space where our most potent tool in these circumstances, our discerning minds, might find residence.     

Event-related brain potentials elicited during word recognition by adult good and poor phonological decoders

Cognitive processing of lexical and sub-lexical stimuli was compared for good and poor adult phonological decoders. Sixteen good decoders and 16 poor decoders, average age 19 years, silently read 150 randomly computer presented sentences ending in incongruous regular, irregular, or nonwords and 100 congruent filler sentences. Electro-encephalographic recordings were made from the final word of each incongruous sentence. Although no significant group differences were found, good decoders showed specialised hemispheric word recognition processing at P200 and P300. Nonwords elicited greater N200 and P300 amplitudes for both good and poor decoders. Larger amplitude P200s were elicited by poor decoders when processing nonwords. These findings provide evidence for separable lexical and sub-lexical procedures and support a psychophysiological basis for a core phonological deficit in poor phonological decoders.     

The impact of retrieval suppression on conceptual implicit memory

ABSTRACT

When people suppress retrieval of episodic memories, it can induce forgetting on later direct tests of memory for those events. Recent reports indicate that suppressing retrieval affects less conscious, unintentional retrieval of unwanted memories as well, at least on perceptually-oriented indirect tests. In the current study we examined how suppressing retrieval affects conceptual implicit memory for the suppressed content, using a category verification task. Participants studied cue-target words pairs in which the targets were exemplars of 22 semantic categories, such as vegetables or occupations. They then repeatedly retrieved or suppressed the targets in response to the cues for some of those pairs. Afterwards, they were exposed to the targets intermixed with novel items, one at a time, and asked to verify the membership of each of the words in a semantic category, as quickly as possible. Judgment response times to studied words were faster than to unstudied exemplars, reflecting repetition priming, as has been previously observed. Strikingly, the beneficial effects of prior exposure on response time were eliminated for targets that had been suppressed. Follow-up explicit memory tests also demonstrated that retrieval suppression continued to disrupt episodic recall for the items that had been just been re-exposed on the category verification test. These findings support the contention that the effects of retrieval suppression are not limited to episodic memory, but also affect indirect expressions of those memories on conceptually oriented tests, raising the possibility that underlying semantic representations of suppressed content are affected.