Terms of the debate on the format and structure of visual memory

Our ability to actively maintain information in visual memory is strikingly limited. There is considerable debate about why this is so. As with many questions in psychology, the debate is framed dichotomously: Is visual working memory limited because it is supported by only a small handful of discrete “slots” into which visual representations are placed, or is it because there is an insufficient supply of a “resource” that is flexibly shared among visual representations? Here, we argue that this dichotomous framing obscures a set of at least eight underlying questions. Separately considering each question reveals a rich hypothesis space that will be useful for building a comprehensive model of visual working memory. The questions regard (1) an upper limit on the number of represented items, (2) the quantization of the memory commodity, (3) the relationship between how many items are stored and how well they are stored, (4) whether the number of stored items completely determines the fidelity of a representation (vs. fidelity being stochastic or variable), (5) the flexibility with which the memory commodity can be assigned or reassigned to items, (6) the format of the memory representation, (7) how working memories are formed, and (8) how memory representations are used to make responses in behavioral tasks. We reframe the debate in terms of these eight underlying questions, placing slot and resource models as poles in a more expansive theoretical space.     

Using spatial frequency adaptation to study word recognition

The study of spatial frequency is being used increasingly often to investigate processes underlying visual word recognition. However, research in this area has adopted techniques that require the physical deformation of word targets used in experiments (e.g., filtered images of words, words embedded in visual noise), and this approach may limit the inferences that can be made about the role of spatial frequencies in normal word recognition. Spatial frequency adaptation is described in this article as an additional technique for studying the role of spatial frequency information in word recognition. The advantage of this technique is that it alters participants' sensitivity to particular spatial frequencies and so allows the study of spatial frequency involvement in word recognition using normal images of word stimuli. The application of the adaptation technique to studies of word recognition is explained in detail and its potential is then demonstrated by an example word recognition experiment in which spatial frequency adaptation was used.     

“Bad Girls” Say No and “Good Girls” Say Yes: Sexual Subjectivity and Participation in Undesired Sex During Heterosexual College Hookups

Young people’s sexuality is often discursively constructed within the confines of a masculine/feminine binary that minimizes young women’s sexual subjectivity (i.e., desire, pleasure, and agency) while taking young men’s subjectivity for granted. Accordingly, young women who acknowledge themselves as sexual subjects are constructed as “bad girls” who incite males’ purportedly uncontrollable desire and, thus, invite undesired sexual attention. However, there is reason to hypothesize that young women who view themselves as sexual subjects may be less likely than other women to engage in undesired sexual activity (i.e., sex that their partners desire, but they do not desire for themselves). In this study, I used data from the Online College Social Life Survey (N = 7255) to explore relationships between two measures of sexual subjectivity (i.e., pleasure prioritization and sexual agency) and college women’s participation in undesired sexual activity during hookups (i.e., performance of undesired sexual acts to please a partner and succumbing to verbal pressure for intercourse). Logistic regression analyses suggest that pleasure prioritization and sexual agency are associated with lower odds of performing undesired sexual acts to please a partner—and sexual agency is associated with lower odds of succumbing to verbal pressure for intercourse. These findings point to the importance of sexuality education that includes discussions of women’s sexual subjectivity.     

Auditory access,language access,and implicit sequence learning in deaf children

Developmental psychology plays a central role in shaping evidence‐based best practices for prelingually deaf children. The Auditory Scaffolding Hypothesis (Conway et al., 2009) asserts that a lack of auditory stimulation in deaf children leads to impoverished implicit sequence learning abilities, measured via an artificial grammar learning (AGL) task. However, prior research is confounded by a lack of both auditory and language input. The current study examines implicit learning in deaf children who were (Deaf native signers) or were not (oral cochlear implant users) exposed to language from birth, and in hearing children, using both AGL and Serial Reaction Time (SRT) tasks. Neither deaf nor hearing children across the three groups show evidence of implicit learning on the AGL task, but all three groups show robust implicit learning on the SRT task. These findings argue against the Auditory Scaffolding Hypothesis, and suggest that implicit sequence learning may be resilient to both auditory and language deprivation, within the tested limits. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://youtu.be/EeqfQqlVHLI [Correction added on 07 August 2017, after first online publication: The video abstract link was added.]     

‘You have to treat the person,not the mouth only’: UK dentists’ perceptions of communication in patient consultations

Effective communication between patients and health professionals is a key component of patient-centred care. Although there is a large body of literature focusing on doctor-patient communication, there has been limited research related to dentist-patient communication, especially presented from the dentists’ perspective. The aim of our study was to explore UK dentists’ perceptions of communication in their consultations, and the factors they perceive may influence this. We conducted semi-structured interviews with eight dentists in UK dental NHS practices. Thematic analysis revealed three themes (‘Treating the whole person’, ‘Barriers to patient-centred communication’ and ‘Mutuality of communication’), which reflected the dentists’ perceptions of their own communication during consultations, the patients’ interaction skills, attitudes (and characteristics that may affect them), and external factors, such as time constraints, that can influence dentist-patients’ encounters. These in-depth accounts are valuable, in that we see what dentists perceive is important, obstructive and facilitative. They report using a patient-centred approach in their everyday dental practice; however this is often difficult due to factors such as time constraints. Although they emphasized that the patient has an active role to play in the communication process, it may be the case that they also need to play their part in facilitating this.     

On the relation between theory of mind and executive functioning: A developmental cognitive neuroscience perspective

Theory of mind (ToM) and executive functioning (EF) show marked interrelatedness across childhood, and developmental psychologists have long been interested in understanding the nature of this association. The present review addresses this issue from a cognitive neuroscience perspective by exploring three hypotheses regarding their functional overlap: (1) ToM relies on EF (EF→ToM); (2) EF relies on ToM (ToM→EF); and (3) ToM and EF are mutually related, owing to shared neural structures or networks (ToM?EF). Drawing on evidence from normative brain development, neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative diseases, patient lesion studies, and brain-imaging studies, we suggest that only a strict version of the ToM?EF proposal of complete neural overlap can be confidently ruled out on the basis of existing evidence. The balance of evidence suggests that separable neurobiological mechanisms likely underlie ToM and EF, with shared mechanisms for domain-general processing that support both abilities. We highlight how future studies may empirically substantiate the nature of the ToM–EF relationship using various biobehavioral approaches.