Selective improvement of strain-dependent performances of cognitive tasks by food restriction

Temporary food restriction affects strain differences for behavioral phenotypes in the inbred strains of mice C57BL/6 (C57) and DBA/2 (DBA). Since food restriction is a routine procedure to motivate learning, we evaluated its influence on differences for spatial and non-spatial discrimination between these strains of mice by using two non-associative tasks: the Spatial Novelty Test (SNT) and the Spontaneous Object Recognition Test (SORT). The results confirmed the poor performance of the DBA mice in SNT. Nonetheless, DBA mice were perfectly able to recognize the novel object in SORT. By contrast, C57 mice were good performers in SNT but failed to recognize a novel object in SORT. Finally, food restriction selectively improved C57 performance in SNT and DBA performance in SORT. These results support the view that a food restricting procedure enhances strain differences for discrimination of configurational information.     

Updating and inhibition processes in working memory: a comparison between Alzheimer's type dementia and frontal lobe focal damage

A large debate has recently focused on the componential nature of the working-memory system (), as evidenced by functional-imaging studies and by using more sophisticated experimental paradigms. The present work aims at further disentangling the role and effects of central executive (CE) and of phonological loop (PL). It is suggested that maintaining active verbal information mostly relates to an intact PL, while the inhibition of interfering information preponderantly involves the CE. To distinguish these effects, two groups of brain damaged patients were administered with an updating task. Frontal lobe patients showed major difficulties in inhibiting interfering information, an ability requiring an involvement of the CE component. In contrast, Alzheimer's dementia patients evidenced a relative impairment in maintaining relevant information, requiring the intervention of the PL.     

Rethinking the ontogeny of mindreading

We propose a mentalistic and nativist view of human early mental and social life and of the ontogeny of mindreading. We define the mental state of sharedness as the primitive, one-sided capability to take one's own mental states as mutually known to an interactant. We argue that this capability is an innate feature of the human mind, which the child uses to make a subjective sense of the world and of her actions. We argue that the child takes all of her mental states as shared with her caregivers. This allows her to interact with her caregivers in a mentalistic way from the very beginning and provides the grounds on which the later maturation of mindreading will build. As the latter process occurs, the child begins to understand the mental world in terms of differences between the mental states of different agents; subjectively, this also corresponds to the birth of privateness.     

Change in children's understanding of others' intentional actions

The study investigated children's intention understanding using a longitudinal design. Thirty-two Italian children were tested on the 'Demonstration of Intention' in the Re-enactment paradigm devised by Meltzoff (1995a), at two ages. Mean age was 12 months at the first session and 15 months at the second session. Previous research by Meltzoff showed that 18-month-olds are able to re-enact what the adult intended to do, when an adult tried but failed to perform certain target acts. Bellagamba and Tomasello (1999) found that, compared to 18-month-olds, 12-month-olds are less able to imitate unsuccessful goal-directed actions. The current study had two main goals. The first was to replicate earlier findings on intention understanding in 12- and 15-month-olds longitudinally assessed. The second goal was to analyse which actions children perform when not producing the target act. A coding scheme was devised to evaluate these non-target actions. Results confirmed previous findings, i.e. children's tendency to produce the target act was higher at an older age. At a younger age the most frequent response was 'undifferentiated manipulation' of target objects, followed by 'approximation to the target action'. Since children differed in their intention understanding performance at the first session, we decided to check whether these individual differences remained stable at the second session. Individual children with high intention understanding performance at 12 months tended to remain high at 15 months of age.     

The genetic relationship between individual differences in social and nonsocial behaviours characteristic of autism

Two types of behaviours shown in children - those reflecting social impairment and nonsocial obsessive repetitive behaviours - are central to defining and diagnosing autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Parent and teacher data on social and nonsocial behaviours were obtained from a community sample of >3000 7-year-old twin pairs. Social and nonsocial behaviours were only modestly correlated, and it was found that some individuals had extreme scores on either social or nonsocial scales but not both. Genetic model-fitting showed that social and nonsocial behaviours are both highly heritable, but their genetic overlap is modest, with most of the genetic influence being specific to either social or nonsocial behaviours. Considering these behaviours separately might help clarify gene-brain-behaviour pathways in future research.     

Temporal production and visuospatial processing

Current models of prospective timing hypothesize that estimated duration is influenced either by the attentional load or by the short-term memory requirements of a concurrent nontemporal task. In the present study, we addressed this issue with four dual-task experiments. In Exp. 1, the effect of memory load on both reaction time and temporal production was proportional to the number of items of a visuospatial pattern to hold in memory. In Exps. 2, 3, and 4, a temporal production task was combined with two visual search tasks involving either pre-attentive or attentional processing. Visual tasks interfered with temporal production: produced intervals were lengthened proportionally to the display size. In contrast, reaction times increased with display size only when a serial, effortful search was required. It appears that memory and perceptual set size, rather than nonspecific attentional or short-term memory load, can influence prospective timing.     

Dominance of global visual properties at birth

Six experiments are reported that were aimed at demonstrating the presence in newborns of a perceptual dominance of global over local visual information in hierarchical patterns, similar to that observed in adults (D. Navon, 1977, 1981). The first four experiments showed that, even though both levels of visual information were detectable by the newborn (Experiments 1A and 1B), global cues enjoyed some advantage over local cues (Experiments 2 and 3). Experiments 4A and 4B demonstrated that the global bias was strictly dependent on the low spatial frequency content of the stimuli and vanished after selective removal of low spatial frequencies. The results are interpreted as suggesting parallels between newborns' visual processing and processing later in development.     

The Correlation Between Right-Wing Authoritarianism and Social Dominance Orientation: The Moderating Effects of Political and Religious Identity

In a secondary analysis performed on a representative sample of the Italian population (N = 887), we examined the correlation between right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO), analyzing the moderating effect exerted on such correlation by political interest and religion importance. RWA and SDO showed a positive, significant correlation (r = .38), moderated by political interest (which heightened it) and religion importance (which lowered it). Limits, implications, and possible developments of the research are discussed.     

Is ‘object-centred neglect’ a homogeneous entity?

The nature of object-centred (allocentric) neglect and the possibility of dissociating it from egocentric (subject-centred) forms of neglect are controversial. Originally, allocentric neglect was described by  and  in patients who reproduced all the elements of a multi-object scene, but left unfinished the left side of one or more of them. More recently, however, Karnath, Mandler, and Clavagnier (2011) have claimed that the severity of allocentric neglect worsens when a complex ‘object’ shifts from an ipsilesional to a contralesional egocentric position. On the basis of these and of other clinical data, showing that allocentric and egocentric neglect are strongly associated, they have questioned the possibility of dissociating these two forms of neglect, suggesting that egocentric and allocentric neglect constitute different manifestations of the same disturbed system. Since these statements were inconsistent with the clinical findings which had prompted the construct of object-centred neglect, we checked in a group of right brain-damaged patients, who had copied the original multi-object scene, if the degree of neglect for the left side of figures varied as a function of their position on the horizontal axis. Furthermore, we reviewed all papers where copies of other multi-object scenes had been reported. Results of both studies failed to confirm the assumption of a relationship between spatial location of the stimulus and severity of object-centred neglect. This discrepancy between our data and those obtained by Karnath et al. (2011) could be due to the characteristics of stimuli and of procedures used to evaluate ‘object-centred’ neglect. If the stimulus is complex and the task requires its thorough exploration, the spatial location of the stimulus will influence the severity of ‘object-centred neglect’. If, on the contrary, the stimulus is simple and can be identified with few eye fixations, the spatial location of the stimulus should not influence the severity of ‘object-centred neglect’. In any case, our data confirm the possibility of dissociating allocentric from egocentric neglect.     

Teaching General Safety and Body Safety Training Skills to a Latino Preschool Male with Autism

This case study describes the implementation of a safety training program with a 5-year-old Latino boy diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder. The program focused on teaching him general safety rules and body safety in an effort to reduce his likelihood of sexual victimization and injury. The boy was treated in conjunction with another child by two therapists, while his caretakers participated in a caretaker group. Both groups consisted of 10 h of safety education instruction. Results show that the boy was able to learn a few safety concepts as well as increase his knowledge of personal safety. Caregiver data revealed a minor increase in knowledge of general safety and an increase in family communication regarding safety issues. However, upon a 3-month follow-up, the boy appeared to lose some knowledge. Recommendations for implementing the Body Safety Training program with children with disabilities and providing their caretakers with information regarding the risk of child sexual abuse is provided.