Daily Occupations,Routines, and Social Participation of Homeless Young People

Homelessness disrupts young people’s participation in the productive occupations that facilitate transition to adulthood, impairs social connections, and has a disorganizing effect on their time use. Semi-structured focus group interviews were used to explore how 19 homeless young people perceived their daily routines, meaningful occupations, and social participation to be impacted by the experience of homelessness. Occupational therapy practitioners can use the findings from this study to inform the development of comprehensive community-based programming aimed at increasing social opportunities, developing balanced, healthy routines, decreasing intrinsic and extrinsic barriers to residential stability, and promoting participation in productive and leisure occupations.     

Response time modeling reveals multiple contextual cuing mechanisms

Contextual cuing refers to a response time (RT) benefit that occurs when observers search through displays that have been repeated over the course of an experiment. Although it is generally agreed that contextual cuing arises via an associative learning mechanism, there is uncertainty about the type(s) of process(es) that allow learning to influence RT. We contrast two leading accounts of the contextual cuing effect that differ in terms of the general process that is credited with producing the effect. The first, the expedited search account, attributes the cuing effect to an increase in the speed with which the target is acquired. The second, the decision threshold account, attributes the cuing effect to a reduction in the response threshold used by observers when making a subsequent decision about the target (e.g., judging its orientation). We use the diffusion model to contrast the quantitative predictions of these two accounts at the level of individual observers. Our use of the diffusion model allows us to also explore a novel decision-level locus of the cuing effect based on perceptual learning. This novel account attributes the RT benefit to a perceptual learning process that increases the quality of information used to drive the decision process. Our results reveal both individual differences in the process(es) involved in contextual cuing but also identify several striking regularities across observers. We find strong support for both the decision threshold account as well as the novel perceptual learning account. We find relatively weak support for the expedited search account.     

Specifying the self for cognitive neuroscience

Cognitive neuroscience investigations of self-experience have mainly focused on the mental attribution of features to the self (self-related processing). In this paper, we highlight another fundamental, yet neglected, aspect of self-experience, that of being an agent. We propose that this aspect of self-experience depends on self-specifying processes, ones that implicitly specify the self by implementing a functional self/non-self distinction in perception, action, cognition and emotion. We describe two paradigmatic cases - sensorimotor integration and homeostatic regulation - and use the principles from these cases to show how cognitive control, including emotion regulation, is also self-specifying. We argue that externally directed, attention-demanding tasks, rather than suppressing self-experience, give rise to the self-experience of being a cognitive-affective agent. We conclude with directions for experimental work based on our framework.     

Neural and behavioral effects of interference resolution in depression and rumination

Individuals diagnosed with major depressive disorder (MDD) often ruminate about their depression and their life situations, impairing their concentration and performance on daily tasks. We examined whether rumination might be due to a deficit in the ability to expel negative information from short-term memory (STM), and fMRI was used to examine the neural structures involved in this ability. MDD and healthy control (HC) participants were tested using a directed-forgetting procedure in a short-term item recognition task. As predicted, MDD participants had more difficulty than did HCs in expelling negative, but not positive, words from STM. Overall, the neural networks involved in directed forgetting were similar for both groups, but the MDDs exhibited more spatial variability in activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus (a region critical for inhibiting irrelevant information), which may contribute to their relative inability to inhibit negative information.     

Eyes wide shut: implied social presence, eye tracking and attention

People often behave differently when they know they are being watched. Here, we report the first investigation of whether such social presence effects also influence looking behavior--a popular measure of attention allocation. We demonstrate that wearing an eye tracker, an implied social presence, leads individuals to avoid looking at particular stimuli. These results demonstrate that an implied social presence, here an eye tracker, can alter looking behavior. These data provide a new manipulation of social attention, as well as presenting a methodological challenge to researchers using eye tracking.     

Specificity effects in training and transfer of speeded responses

In 3 experiments, participants, on signal, moved a cursor from a central position to 1 of 8 numerically labeled locations on the circumference of a clock face. Movements were controlled by a mouse in 1 of 4 conditions: vertical reversal, horizontal reversal, combined reversals, or normal (i.e., no reversals). Participants were trained in 1, 2, or 3 of these conditions and were tested 1 week later with either the same or a different condition. There were improvements across training and perfect retention across the delay. There was little or no transfer, however, even when training involved combined reversals or multiple conditions. These results illustrate severe specificity of training and are interpreted in terms of acquired inhibition of normal responses.     

The ties that keep us bound: Top-down influences on the persistence of shape-from-motion

The phenomenon of perceptual persistence after the motion stops in shape-from-motion displays (SFM) was used to study the influence of prior knowledge on the maintenance of a percept in awareness. In SFM displays an object composed of discontinuous line segments are embedded in a background of randomly oriented lines. The object only becomes perceptible when the line segments that compose the object and the lines that compose the background move in counterphase. Critically, once the movement of the line segments stops, the percept of the object persists for a short period of time. In the present study, perceptual persistence for digits exceeded that reported for nonsense shapes composed of the same line segments. This result is taken as evidence that the processes involved in the persistence of SFM, and therefore sustained perception, are sensitive to top-down influences.     

Relations among categorization, induction, recognition, and similarity: comment on Sloutsky and Fisher (2004)

V. M. Sloutsky and A. V. Fisher reported 5 experiments documenting relations among categorization, induction, recognition, and similarity in children as well as adults and proposed a new model of induction, SINC (similarity, induction, categorization). Those authors concluded that induction depends on perceptual similarity rather than conceptual knowledge. Despite the useful contributions of this work, there are some important limitations. The experimental designs examined a limited range of phenomena that are not the most revealing about the use of nonperceptual information. The main results involved a simple triad task, for which the SINC model's predictions are equivalent to the predictions of previous models of inductive reasoning. It is also unclear whether the SINC model can account for the observed relations between similarity and recognition. Implications for future work on induction and related cognitive activities are discussed.     

Aging, source memory, and emotion

In 2 experiments we assessed younger and older adults' ability to remember contextual information about an event. Each experiment examined memory for 3 different types of contextual information: (a) perceptual information (e.g., location of an item); (b) conceptual, nonemotional information (e.g., quality of an item); and (c) conceptual, emotional information (e.g., safety of an item). Consistent with a large literature on aging and source memory, younger adults outperformed older adults when the contextual information was perceptual in nature and when it was conceptual, but not emotional. Age differences in source memory were eliminated, however, when participants recalled emotional source information. These findings suggest that emotional information differentially engages older adults, possibly evoking enhanced elaborations and associations. The data are also consistent with a growing literature, suggesting that emotional processing remains stable with age (e.g., Carstensen & Turk-Charles, 1994, 1998; Isaacowitz, Charles, & Carstensen, 2000).