Influence of Different Sitting Positions on Healthy Infants' Reaching Movements

The authors analyze the influence of different sitting positions (ring and flexion) on the reaching performance (spatiotemporal variables) of full-term infants 6 and 7 months old. In addition, they correlated level of trunk control, measured by the Segmental Assessment of Trunk Control, with performance during reaching. The different sitting positions only influenced the reaching movements of 6-month-old infants, who showed the best performance in the ring position. However, this influence was observed only for the trunk displacement, deceleration time, movement units, straightness index and mean velocity. In contrast, there was no influence of positions on 7-month-old infants’ reaching performance. Regarding the correlations, it was observed that infants with more level of trunk control showed a better performance when reaching, regardless of position and the age assessed.     

Indirect Effects of Parenting Practices on Internalizing Problems among Adolescents: The Role of Expressive Suppression

Negative parenting practices are thought to be essential for the development of adolescents’ internalizing problems. However, mechanisms linking parental practices to adolescents’ internalizing problems remain poorly understood. A potential pathway connecting parental behaviors to internalizing problems could be through adolescent expressive suppression—the tendency to inhibit the observable expression of emotions.This study examined the indirect effects of three individual parenting practices—poor monitoring, inconsistent discipline and use of corporal punishment—on adolescents’ internalizing problems through adolescents’regular use of expressive suppression in a sample of 1132 adolescents (10–14 years). Structural Equation Modeling indicated that parenting practices were related both directly and indirectly to adolescents’ internalizing problems through their relationship with suppression. Clinical implications and future directions are discussed.     

The impact of category structure and training methodology on learning and generalizing within-category representations

When interacting with categories, representations focused on within-category relationships are often learned, but the conditions promoting within-category representations and their generalizability are unclear. We report the results of three experiments investigating the impact of category structure and training methodology on the learning and generalization of within-category representations (i.e., correlational structure). Participants were trained on either rule-based or information-integration structures using classification (Is the stimulus a member of Category A or Category B?), concept (e.g., Is the stimulus a member of Category A, Yes or No?), or inference (infer the missing component of the stimulus from a given category) and then tested on either an inference task (Experiments 1 and 2) or a classification task (Experiment 3). For the information-integration structure, within-category representations were consistently learned, could be generalized to novel stimuli, and could be generalized to support inference at test. For the rule-based structure, extended inference training resulted in generalization to novel stimuli (Experiment 2) and inference training resulted in generalization to classification (Experiment 3). These data help to clarify the conditions under which within-category representations can be learned. Moreover, these results make an important contribution in highlighting the impact of category structure and training methodology on the generalization of categorical knowledge.     

The influence of synesthesia on eye movements: no synesthetic pop-out in an oculomotor target selection task

Recent research on grapheme-colour synesthesia has focused on whether visual attention is necessary to induce a synesthetic percept. The current study investigated the influence of synesthesia on overt visual attention during an oculomotor target selection task. Chromatic and achromatic stimuli were presented with one target among distractors (e.g. a ‘2’ (target) among multiple ‘5’s (distractors)). Participants executed an eye movement to the target. Synesthetes and controls showed a comparable target selection performance across conditions and a ‘pop-out effect’ was only seen in the chromatic condition. As a pop-out effect was absent for the synesthetes in the achromatic condition, a synesthetic element appears not to elicit a synesthetic colour, even when it is the target. The synesthetic percepts are not pre-attentively available to distinguish the synesthetic target from synesthetic distractors when elements are presented in the periphery. Synesthesia appears to require full recognition to bind form and colour.     

Prime Filters, Normality and Irreducibility in Lattices

We recall some notions introduced and developed by António Aniceto Monteiro, and show how these notions have been used and generalised, thus establishing a direct and indirect influence of Monteiro??s work that extends to this day.     

On the syndrome of the "spare limb": one case

We describe a case of a brain-damaged patient who had a peculiar bodily illusion which could not be labelled an hallucination but seemed somatognosically and phenomenologically similar to the phantom limb without amputation. The patient, who showed left hemiplegia, felt a third upper limb (without seeing it) which he himself defined as "spare." The spare limb was not deformed; it could be moved and controlled by the patient, and there was no sensation of pain. The patient did not show psychopathological or cognitive disorders. A possible interpretation of the phenomenon is as a "phantom movement" of the paralysed limb: the mental representation of the movement of the limb was dissociated from the bodily representation of his own limb and so was still present in his consciousness despite the paralysis.     

Decoding speech prosody: do music lessons help?

Three experiments revealed that music lessons promote sensitivity to emotions conveyed by speech prosody. After hearing semantically neutral utterances spoken with emotional (i.e., happy, sad, fearful, or angry) prosody, or tone sequences that mimicked the utterances' prosody, participants identified the emotion conveyed. In Experiment 1 (n=20), musically trained adults performed better than untrained adults. In Experiment 2 (n=56), musically trained adults outperformed untrained adults at identifying sadness, fear, or neutral emotion. In Experiment 3 (n=43), 6-year-olds were tested after being randomly assigned to 1 year of keyboard, vocal, drama, or no lessons. The keyboard group performed equivalently to the drama group and better than the no-lessons group at identifying anger or fear.     

Pharmacological and physiological aspects of sexual exhaustion in male rats

The present article reviews the current findings on the interesting phenomenon of sexual satiety. Knut Larsson in 1956 reported on the development of sexual exhaustion in the male rat after repeated copulation. We have studied the process and found the following results. (1) One day after 4 hours of ad libitum copulation, two-thirds of the population showed complete inhibition of sexual behavior, while the other third displayed a single ejaculatory series from which they did not recover. (2) Several pharmacological treatments, including 8-OH-DPAT, yohimbine, naloxone and naltrexone, reverse this sexual satiety, indicating that the noradrenergic, serotonergic and opiate systems are involved in this process. Indeed, direct neurochemical determinations showed changes in various neurotransmitters during sexual exhaustion. (3) Given enough stimulation, by changing the stimulus female, sexual satiety was prevented, suggesting that there are motivational components of the sexual inhibition that characterizes sexual exhaustion. (4) The GABA antagonist bicuculline, or the electrical stimulation of the medial preoptic area, did not reverse sexual exhaustion. These data suggest, on the one hand, that sexual exhaustion and the postejaculatory interval (which is shortened by bicuculline administration) are not mediated by similar mechanisms and, on the other, that the medial preoptic area does not regulate sexual satiety. (5) The androgen receptor density in brain areas closely related to the expression of masculine sexual behavior, such as the medial preoptic nucleus, was drastically reduced in sexually exhausted animals. Such reduction was specific to certain brain areas and was not related to changes in the levels of androgens. These results suggest that changes in brain androgen receptors account for the inhibition of sexual behavior present during sexual exhaustion. (6) The recovery process of sexual satiety after 4 hours of ad libitum copulation reveals that, after 4 days, only 63% of the males are able to show sexual behavior while after 7 days all animals display copulatory activity.     

She Needs to See it to be it: The Importance of Same-Gender Athletic Role Models

Sex Roles - In four studies, we examined the importance of gender-matched athletic role models for women. Although both women and men may benefit most from exposure to high profile athletes in...