Neuropsychological identification of motor problems: Can we learn something from the feet and legs that hands and arms will not tell us?

The degree of structural and functional specialization that differentiates between upper and lower limb use in humans is quite unparalleled among primates. It is argued that less neural resources are devoted to leg and foot control than to arm and hand control, and that this aspect of lower limb innervation, together with the uniquely restricted use of the lower limb, renders lower limb function more sensitive to general neural insult. In addition, the status of leg and foot control differs from that of arm and hand control both early in life and during the later years of decline.     

Marked sex differences on a fine motor skill task disappear when finger size is used as covariate

Purdue Pegboard performance of 16 male and 25 female right-handed college students were compared, and results were replicated with 25 male and 28 female subjects. In agreement with the literature, women performed significantly better than men. When measures of index finger and thumb thickness were used as covariate, all significant sex differences in performance disappeared. Negative correlations between performance and finger size were observed in both sexes. Sex differences in fine manual dexterity tasks may therefore be confounded by sex differences in finger size.     

Endogenous and symptomatic schizophrenia. Wherein lies the difference?

It is the opinion of the present writer that endogenous and symptomatic schizophrenia are two completely different matters. By classical symptomatology it is impossible to establish the distinction in every individual case. Nevertheless, in not one of the published cases known to us did Bonhoeffer err in his diagnosis of the one or the other. Evidently he made use of additional characteristica gathered in practice, about which he himself may not always have been quite clear.     

Gender Differences in Intercepting A Moving Target by Using a Throw or Button Press

Humans are a throwing species just as much as a talking species (Calvin, 1982), but preadaptations for throwing remain largely unexplored. The ability of undergraduate students (N = 165) to intercept a stimulus with a thrown object was determined for 10 stimulus speeds, ranging from 2 to 5 m/s. The inclusion of a condition in which the moving stimulus was intercepted. via button press allowed the role of the perceptual aspect of velocity estimation to be evaluated separately from the act of throwing. Gender differences were observed in both the button and the throwing intercept tasks: The men had smaller timing errors and higher accuracy than the women. Contrary to expectations, the male and female patterns of intercept errors as a function of stimulus speed were more similar in the throwing task than in the button intercept task     

Personality and charismatic experience among adult christians

A sample of 368 committed Christian adults completed the Index of Charismatic Experience together with the short form Revised Eysenck Personality Questionnaire and the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). The data demonstrate that, according to the MBTI typology, Christians who prefer “thinking” are likely to score higher on the Index of Charismatic Experience than Christians who prefer “feeling”. According to the Eysenckian dimensional model of personality, the charismatic experience is associated with stable extraversion.     

Evaluating the Impact of a National AIDS Prevention Radio Campaign in St. Vincent and the Grenadines1

Based on extensive formative research in the three Eastern Caribbean countries of St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Grenada (Fishbein, Middlestadt, & Trafimow, 1993; Fishbein, Trafimow, et al., 1993), a three-nation, mass media, condom use campaign was developed. In order to assess the impact of the campaign, a follow-up survey was conducted in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. This paper examines the effectiveness of the campaign by comparing responses on this survey by respondents who were or were not exposed to the campaign. A statistically significant impact of exposure to the campaign was obtained, indicating that a well-designed, empirically based, mass media campaign can be an effective tool in the battle to prevent the spread of AIDS.     

Decision strategies and visual-field asymmetries in same-different judgments of word meaning

The accuracy with which observers judged whether two words belonged to the same semantic category was determined from a detection-theoretic analysis ofsame-different judgments. In Experiment 1, one word was presented centrally and the other word in either the left visual field (LVF) or the right visual field (RVF); in Experiment 2, both words were presented to either the LVF or the RVF. In order to obtain receiver-operating characteristics (ROCs) of performance, observers were asked to rate their confidence that the two words belonged to the same semantic category. Two models of the decision strategy were fitted to the obtained characteristics: a differencing model, in which the decision variable was the difference between the two observations; and an optimal model, in which each observation was judged in relation to a criterion. In both experiments, the optimal model provided a better fit than the differencing model to the obtained characteristics. Maximum-likelihood estimates of both the criterion-free parameter,d′, and the area under the operating characteristic,p(A), were greater for words presented in the RVF than for those presented in the LVF.