Discrimination of Facial Identity and Facial Affect by Temporal and Frontal Lobectomy Patients

The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which lobectomy affects ability to discriminate facial identity or facial expression. Fifteen right temporal, 15 left temporal, 5 right frontal, and 4 left frontal lobectomy patients, pair-matched for age, sex, and education to normal control subjects, participated in this study. Tasks included a Facial Identity Matching Task and a Facial Affect Matching task. The lobectomized patients as a whole were significantly impaired on both tasks (22% decrement in performance). The patients made twice as many errors resulting from perseveration of response-set of the first condition (identity or emotion matching) into the second condition. The site of lobectomy did not influence general performance on any one task or selective performance on any subset of affective categories. It was concluded that all four brain regions play a significant and equal role in face processing, and that circuits more specifically dedicated to visual face processing, which are responsible for hemispheric dominance affects and affect/identity dissociations, are probably located more posteriorly in the brain. Finally, it was concluded that perseveration of acquired habit may, under specific conditions, characterize temporal lobe dysfunction just as much as frontal lobe dysfunction.     

Antecedents of information-processing skills in infants: Habituation, novelty responsiveness, and cross-modal transfer

Three skills which characterize cognitive functioning in human infants in the middle of the first year of life—habituation, novelty responsiveness, and cross-modal transfer—predict mental ability in later childhood. Antecedents of each skill at 5 months postnatal were examined in a short-term prospective longitudinal study of infant ability and maternal intelligence and interaction style. Infant perceptuocognitive performance at 2 months, maternal intelligence, and maternal responsiveness at 5 months relate to the expression of the three infant cognitive skills, but in different ways. Variation in infant information-processing abilities can be explained by specific child and maternal factors that are evident soon after birth.     

Aspects of preschoolers' comprehension of indoor and outdoor gender-typed toys

Forty-nine 44- to 81-month-old predominantly white children's classification of and clustering in recall of gender-typed indoor and outdoor toys, and their gender schematicity, were assessed. Consistent with predictions, children high in gender schematicity demonstrated significantly greater clustering in their recall by gender type than children low in schematicity. As expected, all children demonstrated more accurate classification of same-sex than other-sex gender-typed toys in general. However, boys and girls showed distinctively different patterns in their abilities to accurately classify same-sex and other-sex indoor and outdoor gender-typed toys. Results are discussed in terms of the different social and play contexts inhabited by preschool boys and girls.Completion of this project was facilitated by funds received when the author was a National Institute of Mental Health Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Denver; Grant 5T32 MH 15780-09, in addition to an Academic Challenge Award from the University of Toledo. This support is gratefully acknowledged. Special thanks to Maryjo Jones for her data collection efforts and to the faculty, children, and parents of Iliff Preschool of Denver, Colorado, and especially to Director Jean True for assisting in the completion of this research. Thanks also to Joan M. Barth, Narina N. Nightingale, Kathy A. Park, and Peg Hull-Smith for their comments on earlier versions of this article. A shorter version of this paper was presented at the Conference on Human Development, Richmond, Virginia, March 1990.To whom reprint requests should be addressed at Department of Psychology, University of Wyoming, P.O. Box 3415, Room 135 Biological Sciences Building, Laramie, WY 82071-3415.     

Changes in desire for control over time: Gender differences in a ten-year longitudinal study

Undergraduate students from a predominantly white middle class student body who were administered the Desirability of Control Scale in 1980 completed the scale again in 1990. Males scored significantly higher on the scale than females, indicating a higher desire for control, in the initial sample. The males' scores did not differ significantly over the ten-year period. However, the female subjects' scores increased over the course of the decade to a point not significantly different from that of the males. Possible explanations of this effect concern changes in gender role expectations in the 1980's and changes in the women's preference for control following school and career experiences.Some of the data reported in this paper were presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, San Francisco, 1991.Reprint requests should be addressed to either Jerry M. Burger at Department of Psychology, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA 95053, or Cecilia H. Solano at Department of Psychology, Box 7778, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC 27109.     

The functional role of attention for spatial coding in the Simon effect

Summary Two experiments investigated relative spatial coding in the Simon effect. It was hypothesized that relative spatial coding is carried out with reference to the position of the focus of visual attention. The spatial code for an imperative stimulus presented exactly at the position of focal attention should be neutral on the horizontal plane, and therefore no Simon effect should be observed. However, when the imperative stimulus is presented to the left or to the right of the current position of focal attention, the spatial code should not be neutral, thus producing a Simon effect. In both experiments, focal attention was manipulated either by a peripherally presented onset precue (Experiment 1) or by a centrally presented symbolic precue (Experiment 2). Results showed that the Simon effect was substantially reduced in both experiments when a valid precue preceded the imperative stimulus just in time to conclude refocusing of attention to the position of the imperative stimulus before it was presented. However, conditions with neutral precues yielded a normally sized Simon effect. In both experiments, the Simon effect decreased as the SOA grew when the precue was valid. At least for the Simon effect, the results can be interpreted as evidence that relative spatial coding is functionally related to the position of the focus of attention.     

The impact of sexual harassment simulations on women's thoughts and feelings

Sex Roles - Women's thoughts and feelings in response to interpersonal and environmental sexual harassment simulations from co-workers with equal or greater organizational status were explored....     

An extension of the partial credit model with an application to the measurement of change

The partial credit model is considered under the assumption of a certain linear decomposition of the item × category parameters _ih into basic parameters _j. This model is referred to as the linear partial credit model. A conditional maximum likelihood algorithm for estimation of the j is presented, based on (a) recurrences for the combinatorial functions involved, and (b) using a quasi-Newton approach, the so-called Broyden-Fletcher-Goldfarb-Shanno (BFGS) method; (a) guarantees numerically stable results, (b) avoids the direct computation of the Hesse matrix, yet produces a sequence of certain positive definite matricesB _k ,k=1, 2, ..., converging to the asymptotic variance-covariance matrix of the . The practicality of these numerical methods is demonstrated both by means of simulations and of an empirical application to the measurement of treatment effects in patients with psychosomatic disorders.The authors thank one anonymous reviewer for his constructive comments. Moreover, they thankfully acknowledge financial support by the Österreichische Nationalbank (Austrian National Bank) under Grant No. 3720.     

Formation of transitivity in conditional matching to sample by pigeons

Four homing pigeons were trained over 5 months in a zero-delay, “arbitrary” matching-to-sample procedure with sample and comparison stimuli presented on any of three response keys. Birds were also required to complete a fixed-ratio 10 requirement on both sample and comparison stimuli to terminate their presentation. The procedure resulted in the establishment of relations that were not specifically trained and that can be characterized by the property of transitivity in a stimulus equivalence context. This result was in contrast with the findings obtained from most previous research with nonhuman subjects.