A test of the generality of perceptually based categories found in infants: attentional differences toward natural kinds by New World monkeys

A preference to novelty paradigm used to study human infants (Quinn, 2002) examined attention to novel animal pictures at subordinate, basic and superordinate levels in tamarins. First, pairs of pictures were presented in phases, starting with a monkey species (subordinate level) and ending with mammal and dinosaur sets (superordinate levels). After each phase, tests paired novel pictures from the familiarized set with a novel broader category. Look rates toward each picture were coded. Tamarins looked significantly longer at a novel species after being familiarized with a monkey species, a species-specific effect. Subjects attended equivalently to novel primate species after habituation to four monkey species, but looked significantly longer at pictures of mammals, marking a more global-level inclusion and exclusion. Superordinate testing revealed that more novel and diverse sets were differentiated attentionally. The evidence implies that natural categorical representation occurs at an attentional level in primates in ways similar to human infants, and is affected by recent exposure and category variability.     

Clocks,Creation and Clarity: Insights on Ethics and Economics from a Feminist Perspective

This essay discusses the origins, biases, and effects on contemporary discussions of economics and ethics of the unexamined use of the metaphor an economy is a machine. Both neoliberal economics and many critiques of capitalist systems take this metaphor as their starting point. The belief that economies run according to universal laws of motion, however, is shown to be based on a variety of rationalist thinking that – while widely held – is inadequate for explaining lived human experience. Feminist scholarship in the philosophy of science and economics has brought to light some of the biases that have supported the mechanistic worldview. Possible alternatives to the an economy is a machine include an economy is a creative process and an economy is an organism. Such metaphors are intellectually defensible as guides to scientific inquiry and provide a richer ground for moral imagination.     

Effects of September 11 on patients with obsessive compulsive disorder

Effects of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the USA were investigated in 25 patients with obsessive compulsive disorder and 27 normal controls 4-6 months after the attacks. Participants completed a 15-item questionnaire to retrospectively assess changes in mood, cognition, behavior and somatic complaints since September 11, 2001. Overall, both patients with obsessive compulsive disorder and normal controls reported minor changes in mood, behavior and somatic complaints. However, normal controls reported severe to extreme initial impact, slightly more cognitive symptoms (uncertainty about the future, intrusive recollections and greater desire to be with loved ones) and a slightly greater degree of overall impact on emotion and behavior at 1, 2 and 3 months after September 11 than did patients with obsessive compulsive disorder. Results support previous research that has found a relatively minor lasting impact of September 11 on both clinical and normal populations. Differences in cognition and coping mechanisms between normal controls and patients with obsessive compulsive disorder are proposed.     

Group interventions for patients with cancer and HIV disease: part IV. Clinical and policy recommendations

Group interventions have assumed a growing role in primary prevention and supportive care for cancer and HIV disease. Earlier sections of this Special Report examined empirical findings for these interventions and provided recommendations for future research. The current section offers brief recommendations for service providers, policymakers, and stakeholders. Group services now occupy an increasingly prominent place in primary prevention programs and medical settings. In previous sections of this Special Report (Sherman, Leszcz et al., 2004; Sherman, Mosier et al., 2004a, 2004b) we examined the efficacy of different group interventions at different phases of cancer or HIV disease, considered characteristics of the intervention and the participants that might influence outcomes, and discussed mechanisms of action. Methodological challenges and priorities for future research were highlighted. In this, the final section, we offer brief recommendations for service providers, policymakers, and other stakeholders. We consider some of the barriers that constrain use of empirically-based group interventions and note how these programs might be implemented more widely and effectively.     

Hot or not: do professors perceived as physically attractive receive higher student evaluations?

Previous research investigating the influence of perceived physical attractiveness on student evaluations of college professors has been limited to a handful of studies. In this study, the authors used naturally occurring data obtained from the publicly available Web site www.ratemyprofessors.com. The data suggested that professors perceived as attractive received higher student evaluations when compared with those of a nonattractive control group (matched for department and gender). Results were consistent across 4 separate universities. Professors perceived as attractive received student evaluations about 0.8 of a point higher on a 5-point scale. Exploratory analyses indicated benefits of perceived attractiveness for both male and female professors. Although this study has all the limitations of naturalistic research, it adds a study with ecological validity to the limited literature.     

Resistance to extinction following variable-interval reinforcement: reinforcer rate and amount

Rats obtained food-pellet reinforcers by nose poking a lighted key. Experiment 1 examined resistance to extinction following single-schedule training with different variable-interval schedules, ranging from a mean interval of 16 min to 0.25 min. That is, for each schedule, the rats received 20 consecutive daily baseline sessions and then a session of extinction (i.e., no reinforcers). Resistance to extinction (decline in response rate relative to baseline) was negatively related to the rate of reinforcers obtained during baseline, a relation analogous to the partial-reinforcement-extinction effect. A positive relation between these variables emerged, however, when the unit of extinction was taken as the mean interreinforcer interval that had been in effect during training (i.e., as an omitted reinforcer during extinction). In a second experiment, rats received blocks of training sessions, all with the same variable-interval schedule but with a reinforcer of four pellets for some blocks and one pellet for others. Resistance to extinction was greater following training with the larger (four pellets) than with the smaller (one pellet) reinforcer. Taken together, these results support the principle that greater reinforcement during training (e.g., higher rate or larger amount) engenders greater resistance to extinction even when the different conditions of reinforcement are varied between blocks of sessions.     

Nonword repetition skills in young children who do and do not stutter

The purpose of this study was to assess the nonword repetition skills of 24 children who do (CWS; n = 12) and do not stutter (CWNS; n = 12) between the ages of 3;0 and 5;2. Findings revealed that CWS produced significantly fewer correct two- and three-syllable nonword repetitions and made significantly more phoneme errors on three-syllable nonwords relative to CWNS. In addition, there was a significant relationship between performance on a test of expressive phonology and nonword repetition for CWS, but not CWNS. Findings further revealed no significant fluctuation in fluency as nonwords increased in length. Taken together, findings lend support to previous work, suggesting that nonword repetition skills differ for CWS compared with CWNS, and that these findings cannot be attributed to (a) weak language performance on the part of CWS, or (b) the occurrence of stuttering in the course of nonword production. EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES: After reading this article, the learner will be able to: (a) describe one common means of assessing phonological working memory in children; (b) summarize the performance differences of children who stutter compared to peers on a nonword repetition task; (c) compare the results of the present study with previous work in this area.     

Computational principles of working memory in sentence comprehension

Understanding a sentence requires a working memory of the partial products of comprehension, so that linguistic relations between temporally distal parts of the sentence can be rapidly computed. We describe an emerging theoretical framework for this working memory system that incorporates several independently motivated principles of memory: a sharply limited attentional focus, rapid retrieval of item (but not order) information subject to interference from similar items, and activation decay (forgetting over time). A computational model embodying these principles provides an explanation of the functional capacities and severe limitations of human processing, as well as accounts of reading times. The broad implication is that the detailed nature of cross-linguistic sentence processing emerges from the interaction of general principles of human memory with the specialized task of language comprehension.     

The communicative functions of touch in humans, nonhuman primates, and rats: a review and synthesis of the empirical research

Although touch is one of the most neglected modalities of communication, several lines of research bear on the important communicative functions served by the modality. The authors highlighted the importance of touch by reviewing and synthesizing the literatures pertaining to the communicative functions served by touch among humans, nonhuman primates, and rats. In humans, the authors focused on the role that touch plays in emotional communication, attachment, bonding, compliance, power, intimacy, hedonics, and liking. In nonhuman primates, the authors examined the relations among touch and status, stress, reconciliation, sexual relations, and attachment. In rats, the authors focused on the role that touch plays in emotion, learning and memory, novelty seeking, stress, and attachment. The authors also highlighted the potential phylogenetic and ontogenetic continuities and discussed suggestions for future research.