Touch dominates haptic estimates of discordant visual-haptic size

Observers (72 college students) estimated the size of plastic squares that they held in their fingers and simultaneously viewed through a reducing lens that halved the squares’ visual size. The squares were grasped from below through a cloth that prevented direct sight of the hand. Each estimate was a match selected later, either haptically or visually, from a set of comparison squares. Vision dominated the visual estimates and touch dominated the haptic estimates, whether or not the observers knew in advance which type of estimate they would be asked to make. Neither modality inherently dominates perceived size.     

“打”出来的手机成瘾？父母粗暴养育对青少年智能手机成瘾的作用

对湖北省两所中学3219名初一至初三年级学生进行问卷调查,建立结构方程模型考察父母粗暴养育、核心自我评价、友谊质量和青少年智能手机成瘾的关系。结果发现：（1）核心自我评价在父母粗暴养育和青少年智能手机成瘾之间起部分中介作用,即父母粗暴养育既对青少年智能手机成瘾产生直接影响,也通过核心自我评价对青少年智能手机成瘾产生间接影响;（2）父母粗暴养育和核心自我评价的关系（中介作用的前半段路径）受到友谊质量的调节,即在高友谊质量和低友谊质量条件下,随着粗暴养育程度的增加,青少年核心自我评价均显著下降,但在高友谊质量的条件下,下降的程度更高。研究结果有助于揭示父母粗暴养育对青少年智能手机成瘾的影响及其作用机制,为预防和干预青少年智能手机成瘾带来一些重要的启示。     

One-trial conditioned suppression: effects of instructions on extinction

Two experimental groups of undergraduate volunteers received a single Pavlovian conditioning trial consisting of a paired presentation of a tone conditioned stimulus (CS) and a shock unconditioned stimulus (UCS). Control groups received either the CS alone or the UCS alone. Subjects from one experimental group were subsequently instructed that they would not receive further shocks, while the other experimental group received no such instructions. The CS alone was then presented once to all four groups while subjects were engaged in a button-pressing task maintained by slide reinforcement. During the latter phase, rate of button-pressing was measured. Classically conditioned suppression of button-pressing was obtained in the noninstructed experimental group but not in the instructed group. The results demonstrate that suppression can be a sensitive index of Pavlovian conditioning in humans but question the use of conditioned suppression as an adequate experimental analog of clinically observed anxiety-motivated behavior.     

Hemispheric symmetry in duration of visible persistence

Nine right-handed subjects performed a visual task requiring perceptual integration of a pattern whose parts were displayed sequentially in time. Correct performance on the task depended critically on the simultaneous visibility of all parts of the pattern; duration of visible persistence could therefore be gauged by varying the duration of the temporal interval between successive portions of the display. The pattern was displayed either foveally or parafoveally in either visual field. Analysis of overall performance and of distribution of errors at each temporal interval revealed more accurate performance for foveal displays but no hemispheric asymmetries in duration of visible persistence. These and other results reported in the literature are interpreted in terms of Moscovitch’s (1979) information-processing model of hemispheric functioning.     

Duration of visible persistence in relation to range of spatial frequencies

Five experiments examined the relationship between range of spatial frequencies contained in a visual display and duration of visible persistence. The high spatial frequency contents of the display were reduced by defocusing the image at the retina. Duration of visible persistence was measured by a task that required perceptual integration of a pattern whose parts were displayed sequentially in time. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that progressive reductions in the high-frequency contents of the display produced corresponding decrements in the duration of visible persistence. Experiments 3, 4, 5 showed that decrements in the duration of visible persistence could not be attributed to changes in the apparent size or in the brightness of the display brought about by defocusing. The results were interpreted in terms of the temporal response properties of perceptual mechanisms attuned to separate ranges of spatial frequencies. Strong parallels were drawn with the multichannel theory of visual information processing proposed by Breitmeyer and Ganz.     

Age-related changes in rate of visual information processing

Each of four groups of 12 subjects performed four psychophysical tasks. The age ranges of the four groups were 19-31, 45-57, 58-70, and 71-83 years, respectively. All four tasks required some form of visual information processing: Two were backward-masking tasks; two were temporal-integration tasks. In all four tasks increasing temporal functions over age were obtained, suggesting slower processing rates as age increased. The results support an active processing model of visual perception that interprets duration of visible persistence and duration of interval in which backward masking is effective as indices of the time course of early stages in the processing of stimulus features. The evidences also suggests that backward masking and visible persistence may be mediated by distinct mechanisms that are affected differently by aging processes. A model that conceptualizes the visual system as a multichannel processor is proposed as an explanation for some of the findings.     

Automatic syntactic computation and use of semantic information during sentence comprehension

Summary The paper represents a contribution to the issue of the differential effects of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic information in the process of sentence comprehension. The results of four experiments are reported, in which sentences containing syntactic, semantic and pragmatic violations were presented with different tasks to see how these violations affected language comprehension, how easily they were detected and whether they affected sentence comprehension even when they were not explicitly recognized. The main results can be summarized as follows. First, the most relevant cues used to comprehend a sentence are not so much syntactic, but semantic or pragmatic. Second, with difficult or anomalous linguistic input, syntactic cues become more important. Third, even when the reader is not aware of syntactic violations, these seem to affect his processing of the linguistic input. This suggests the hypothesis of an automatic computation of syntactic information, the output of which is, however, used only when evidence coming from other sources, semantic or pragmatic, is insufficient or not clear enough.     

Visual information processing in relation to age and to reading ability.

Temporal aspects of early visual information processing were studied developmentally in good and in poor reading male subjects ranging in age from 7 to 13 years. Forced-choice temporal integration and backward masking tasks, respectively, were utilized to assess duration of visual persistence and of relative rate of visual information processing. The results did not reveal differences in either visual persistence or processing rate in relation to reading ability at any age level studied. However, processing rate was found to increase markedly with chronological age in both the good and the poor readers while visual persistence did not vary significantly. The findings were discussed in relation to earlier work and in relation to current theoretical formulations of visual information processing.     

Relativism,realism, and subjective facts

Synthese - Relativists make room for the possibility of “faultless disagreement” by positing the existence of subjective propositions, i.e. propositions true from some points of view...