The effects of attention and task-relevance on the processing of syntactic violations during listening to two concurrent speech streams

The notion of automatic syntactic analysis received support from some event-related potential (ERP) studies. However, none of these studies tested syntax processing in the presence of a concurrent speech stream. Here we present two concurrent continuous speech streams, manipulating two variables potentially affecting speech processing in a fully crossed design: attention (focused vs. divided) and task (lexical – detecting numerals vs. syntactical – detecting syntactic violations). ERPs elicited by syntactic violations and numerals as targets were compared with those for distractors (task-relevant events in the unattended speech stream) and attended and unattended task-irrelevant events. As was expected, only target numerals elicited the N2b and P3 components. The amplitudes of these components did not significantly differ between focused and divided attention. Both task-relevant and task-irrelevant syntactic violations elicited the N400 ERP component within the attended but not in the unattended speech stream. P600 was only elicited by target syntactic violations. These results provide no support for the notion of automatic syntactic analysis. Rather, it appears that task-relevance is a prerequisite of P600 elicitation, implying that in-depth syntactic analysis occurs only for attended speech under everyday listening situations.     

Altered behavioral and neural responsiveness to counterfactual gains in the elderly

Counterfactual information processing refers to the consideration of events that did not occur in comparison to those actually experienced, in order to determine optimal actions, and can be formulated as computational learning signals, referred to as fictive prediction errors. Decision making and the neural circuitry for counterfactual processing are altered in healthy elderly adults. This experiment investigated age differences in neural systems for decision making with knowledge of counterfactual outcomes. Two groups of healthy adult participants, young (N = 30; ages 19–30 years) and elderly (N = 19; ages 65–80 years), were scanned with fMRI during 240 trials of a strategic sequential investment task in which a particular strategy of differentially weighting counterfactual gains and losses during valuation is associated with more optimal performance. Elderly participants earned significantly less than young adults, differently weighted counterfactual consequences and exploited task knowledge, and exhibited altered activity in a fronto-striatal circuit while making choices, compared to young adults. The degree to which task knowledge was exploited was positively correlated with modulation of neural activity by expected value in the vmPFC for young adults, but not in the elderly. These findings demonstrate that elderly participants’ poor task performance may be related to different counterfactual processing.     

The role of Gray's impulsivity in anxiety‐mediated differences in resistance to extinction

Choice behaviour and extinction learning were studied in a group of 108 undergraduates classified according to the Sensitivity to Punishment and Sensitivity to Reward scales (that measure Gray's anxiety and impulsivity dimensions, respectively). The learning task consisted of continuous choosing between two response alternatives: one was continuously reinforced with a small reward and the other was partially reinforced with a greater reward. After 200 trials, one of the responses remained as in the previous phase, and the other was never rewarded in order to attain extinction. The main aims of the study were: (i) to replicate Avila's finding of lesser resistance to extinction of subjects having high scores on the Sensitivity to Punishment scale; (ii) to investigate whether impulsives (subjects having high scores on the Sensitivity to Reward scale) chose more than non‐impulsives the response associated with a continuous, small reward; and (iii) to test, following the model of Patterson and Newman, whether impulsive subjects had a great resistance to extinction of responses highly associated with reward. Results supported all three predictions. Discussion is based on the compatibility of the models of disinhibition of Gray and of Patterson and Newman. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Brain potentials for derivational morphology: an ERP study of deadjectival nominalizations in Spanish

This study investigates brain potentials to derived word forms in Spanish. Two experiments were performed on derived nominals that differ in terms of their productivity and semantic properties but are otherwise similar, an acceptability judgment task and a reading experiment using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in which correctly and incorrectly formed derived words were presented in sentence contexts. The first experiment indicated productivity differences between the different nominalization processes in Spanish. The second experiment yielded a pattern of ERP responses that differed from both the familiar lexical-semantic and grammatical ERP effects. Violations of derivational morphology elicited an increased N400 component plus a late positivity (P600), unlike gender-agreement violations, which produced the biphasic LAN/P600 ERP pattern known from previous studies of morpho-syntactic violations. We conclude that the recognition of derived word forms engages both word-level (lexical-semantic) and decompositional (morpheme-based) processes.     

Testing the Relationship Between Parents’ and Their Children’s Subjective Well-Being

Casas et al. (J Happiness Stud 9(2):197–205, 2008) found no significant relationship between paired answers given by parents and their 12–16-year-old children (N?=?266) for a single-item scale on overall life satisfaction (OLS). However, a significant, but low (.19) parent–child relationship did appear for the PWI multi-item scale. Overall, children reported higher subjective well being than parents. In this article, we present the results obtained from confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), using more scales and a bigger sample (N?=?1,250) of paired parents and children. The study uses three multiple-item scales: the PWI, the SWLS and the BMSLSS, and six single-item scales: the OLS, two items from Russell’s scale on core affects, one on overall happiness, Fordyce’s happiness item and the optional item of the BMSLSS on overall life satisfaction. Separate CFA for each of the 3 multi-item scales showed good fit statistics. In order to check comparability between parents and children, we tested equal loading and intercept constraints. The models with restricted loadings fit only for the PWI and BMSLSS, but none of the models with restricted intercepts fit. Therefore, it was only possible to estimate two factor correlations for parents and their children, both very low (.16 for the PWI, .18 for BMSLSS), and it was not possible to compare factor means. When correlating scores from the 6 single-item scales for parents and children, they were all found to be significant but very low. As regards items from the multiple-item scales for parents and children many correlations are positive and significant, although very low, but others are non significant. The means of some items were substantially higher for children than for parents. For some items, differences were minor, non-significant or even reversed. All of the results suggest that parents’ well-being is very weakly related to their own children’s well-being, in spite of socialization, common material welfare and genetic influences. However, one outstanding result is that in our Catalan sample, parents’ well-being seems to have a greater influence on their female child’s well-being than on their male child’s.     

Psychometric properties of the Basic Family Relations Inventory (BFRI)

The aim of this study was to analyze the factor structure and internal consistency of the Basic Family Relations Inventory (BFRI) in a non-probabilistic convenience sample of 442 participants (221 couples). Exploratory factor analysis resulted in three components. In a second-order factor analysis, the three components were grouped into two factors: the Conjugal factor, which refers to how the people who exercise the parental role interact with each other (generally, the parental couple), and the Parenting factor, which represents the way in which the parental couple treat their children. Both first- and second-order factors had high reliability indices. It was concluded that the 25-item BFRI is a valid instrument to evaluate the two-dimensional model of the basic family relations theory.     

Evaluation of a novel translational task for assessing emotional biases in different species

Changes in the processing of emotional information are key features of affective disorders. Neuropsychological tests based on emotional faces or words are used to detect emotional/affective biases in humans, but these tests are not applicable to animal species. In the present study, we investigated whether a novel affective tone discrimination task (ATDT), developed to study emotion-related behaviour in rats, could also be used to quantify changes in affective states in humans. To date, the methods used in human neuropsychology have not been applicable to animal experiments. Participants completed a training session in which they learnt to discriminate specific tone frequencies and to correctly respond in order to gain emotionally valenced outcomes, to obtain rewards (money), or to avoid punishment (an aversive sound clip). During a subsequent test session, additional ambiguous probe tones were presented at frequencies intermediate between the reward and avoidance paired tones. At the end of the task, participants completed self-report questionnaires. All participants made more avoidance responses to the most ambiguous tone cues, suggesting a bias towards avoidance of punishment. Individual differences in the degrees of bias observed were correlated with anxiety measures, suggesting the task’s sensitivity to differences in state anxiety within a healthy population. Further studies in clinical populations will be necessary to assess the task’s sensitivity to pathological anxiety states. These data suggest that this affective tone discrimination task provides a novel method to study cognitive affective biases in different species, including humans, and offers a novel assessment to study anxiety.