Ear differences in simple reaction time: The influence of attentional factors

Simple motor reaction times (right-handed) to tape-recorded consonant-vowel syllables were obtained from 12 subjects under two conditions of monotic stimulation: “expected” presentation (subject informed as to ear of presentation) and “random” presentation (ear of presentation varied randomly). Significantly faster left ear reaction times were obtained in the “expected” condition. The rank order of subjects' standard dichotic listening task scores correlated negatively with reaction time ear differences in the “expected” presentation condition. Results are discussed in terms of existing theories of response lateralization in simple reaction time tasks, and an expanded hypothesis is offered. Specifically, it is suggested that two or more distinct but potentially overlapping mechanisms may be responsible for observed asymmetries in monotic auditory perception. Both an attentional or lateralized motor response bias and an inherent lateralization of function may operate side by side, differentially activated by task demands, mode of stimulus presentation, and nature of stimuli.     

Wayne G. Rollins' Soul and Psyche: An Appreciation

Professor Wayne G. Rollins has written a remarkably important book on the history of the interface between psychological and biblical studies. It is called Soul and Psyche: The Bible in Psychological Perspective. It is so comprehensive that it reaches from the words of Jesus of Nazareth to the models of Kohut and Winnicott, from the First Century to the Twenty-First, from Freud to Fowler and beyond. He definitively addresses the full range of issues relating to the psychological critique of the Bible and the history of Biblical Psychology.     

The perceptual span during foveally-demanding visual target localization

Foveally-induced processing load deteriorates target localization performance in vision-guided tasks. Here, participants searched for a target embedded among coded distractors. High processing load was effected by instructing some participants to use the coded distractors to guide their search for the target. Other participants (in the low processing load condition) were not apprised of the code. The experiment examined whether increased processing load alters the span of effective processing (i.e. perceptual span) by (a) reducing its size, (b) altering its shape, or (c) reducing its size and altering its shape. The results demonstrated a reduction in the size of the perceptual span, with no significant change to its shape. It is argued that when distractors are processed beyond simply rejecting them as non targets, the perceptual span shrinks with increasing processing load. The findings are discussed in contrast to a general interference theory that predicts a change in vision-guided performance without a shrinking of the perceptual span.     

An application of a biased version of the Bradley-Terry-Luce model to professional basketball results

Some extensions of the Bradley-Terry-Luce model for paired comparisons are presented and used to assess the existence of a home court advantage for professional basketball teams. It is shown how maximum likelihood estimates for these models can be obtained from a simple iterative scaling algorithm. Won-loss records for the regular season are used to make predictions for playoff series. The models are extended to include possible differences among divisions. These models can be applied in many other situations to incorporate group effects and order effects into analysis of paired comparisons.     

COVID-19, Sex,Addictions, Women's Health,Care of the Elderly,and Medical Education

Journal of Religion and Health -     

Visual selection mediated by location: Feature-based selection of noncontiguous locations

Experiments using two different methods and three types of stimuli tested whether stimuli at nonadjacent locations could be selected simultaneously. In one set of experiments, subjects attended to red digits presented in multiple frames with green digits. Accuracy was no better when red digits appeared successively than when pairs of red digits occurred simultaneously, implying allocation of attention to the two locations simultaneously. Different tasks involving oriented grating stimuli produced the same result. The final experiment demonstrated split attention with an array of spatial probes. When the probe at one of two target locations was correctly reported, the probe at the other target location was more often reported correctly than were any of the probes at distractor locations, including those between the targets. Together, these experiments provide strong converging evidence that when two targets are easily discriminated from distractors by a basic property, spatial attention can be split across both locations.