Postphenomenological Method and Technological Things Themselves

Human Studies - We live in a world where it is impossible to exist without, and beyond, technologies. Despite this omnipresence, we tend to overlook their influence on us. The vigorously developing...     

Evidence for altered configural body processing in women at risk of disorders characterized by body image disturbance

Two studies were conducted to assess appearance-related visual processing mechanisms in populations at risk of disorders characterized by body image disturbance. Using inverted stimuli, Experiment 1 assessed visual processing mechanisms associated with body, face, and house viewing in adolescents. Experiment 2 applied the same protocol to assess appearance-related configural processing in high- and low-risk adolescent women, and women recovering from disorders characterized by body image disturbance. Experiment 1 found evidence for typical configural face and body processing, although adolescent women reported higher levels of body image concern (BIC) and self-objectified to a greater extent than adolescent men. In Experiment 2, typical body inversion effects were seen in the low-risk group, whilst there was some evidence to suggest a disruption to the configural processing of body stimuli in high-risk adolescents and in women recovering from body image disorders. Women in recovery were also quicker to respond to all stimuli, whilst high-risk adolescents took longer to respond to bodies than to other stimuli. Configural face processing was intact in all groups, and effects did not directly relate to BIC or self-objectification. These findings have implications for future research looking to inform early interventions and treatment, suggesting that there could be a tendency to visually process individual body parts at the expense of the whole-body form in women at risk of developing body image disorders, as well as those in recovery.     

The effect of sensitization and coping style on post-traumatic stress symptoms and quality of life: two longitudinal studies

The present study investigated the effects of multiple trauma exposure and coping style on post-traumatic stress symptoms and quality of life. It was hypothesized that sensitization would occur in subjects repeatedly exposed to life-threatening situations (study 1), and different coping styles would act as a resilience or facilitating factor in symptom development (study 2). The results showed that the single-exposure group revealed a decrease in trauma specific stress reactions from three weeks to four months, with a persistent reduction at 12-month follow-up, while the repeated-exposure group showed an increase in symptom reporting over the 12-month period. The same pattern emerged for perceived quality of life-measured by the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-30). The second study revealed a correlation between scores on avoidant-focused coping style and the Impact of Event Scale-avoidance dimension, Post-traumatic Symptom Scale and GHQ-30. Furthermore, only subjects with a dominant coping style of emotion-focused or task-focused coping showed a reduction in trauma-specific symptom scores over time.     

Fifty Years of Prison Suicide in Austria: Does Legislation Have an Impact?

The absolute and relative frequency of suicides in jails and prisons in Austria over the 50 years from 1947 to 1996 is described. Important legislational changes regarding the criminal justice system are discussed with regard to possible consequences for the incidence of prisoners' suicides. Within the five decades a significant increase in the absolute numbers of jail and prison suicides was evident in spite of the considerable decrease in the total inmate population. Therefore, the suicide rate of inmates of correctional facilities increased significantly. Possible reasons for this phenomenon are discussed in relation to changes of the criminal law.     

Antecedent reactivation by surface and deep anaphora in Norwegian

Anaphora are expressions in language that depend on other linguistic entities for their full meaning. They can furthermore be divided into two types according to the level of representation where they find their antecedents: Surface anaphora, which resolve their reference at the sentence representation level, and deep anaphora, which resolve their reference at the non-grammatical level of discourse representation. The linguistic theory of these two anaphor types, and recent findings about processing differences at these two levels, combine to predict that surface anaphora should show fast and immediate reactivation of their antecedents, whereas deep anaphora should have a slower time course of antecedent re-access. These predictions were confirmed with two lexical decision task experiments with Norwegian stimuli.     

Dismal: a spreadsheet for sequential data analysis and HCI experimentation

Dismal is a spreadsheet that works within GNU Emacs, a widely available programmable editor. Dismal has three features of particular interest to those who study behavior: (1) the ability to manipulate and align sequential data, (2) an open architecture that allows users to expand it to meet their particular needs, and (3) an instrumented and accessible interface for studies of human-computer interaction (HCI). Example uses of each of these capabilities are provided, including cognitive models that have had their sequential behavior aligned with subject’s protocols, extensions useful for teaching and doing HCI design, and studies in which keystroke logs from the timing package in Dismal have been used.     

A computational feature binding model of human texture perception

We present a computational model for human texture perception which assigns functional principles to the Gestalt laws of similarity and proximity. Motivated by early vision mechanisms, in the first stage, local texture features are extracted by utilizing multi-scale filtering and nonlinear spatial pooling. In the second stage, features are grouped according to the spatial feature binding model of the competitive layer model (CLM; Wersing et al. 2001). The CLM uses cooperative and competitive interactions in a recurrent network, where binding is expressed by the layer-wise coactivation of feature-representing neurons. The Gestalt law of similarity is expressed by a non-Euclidean distance measure in the abstract feature space with proximity being taken into account by a spatial component. To choose the stimulus dimensions which allow the most salient similarity-based texture segmentation, the feature similarity metrics is reduced to the directions of maximum variance. We show that our combined texture feature extraction and binding model performs segmentation in strong conformity with human perception. The examples range from classical microtextures and Brodatz textures to other classical Gestalt stimuli, which offer a new perspective on the role of texture for more abstract similarity grouping.     

Knowledge level learning and the power law: A soar model of skill acquisition in scheduling

Zusammenfassung. Das hier vorgestellte Modell lernt graduell, Planungsaufgaben aus der Klasse der Maschinenbelegungsprobleme (job-shop-scheduling problems) zu lösen. Mit Hilfe des Chunking-Mechanismus von Soar wird episodisches Wissen über die Belegungsreihenfolge von Aufträgen auf Maschinen memoriert. Bei der Entwicklung des Modells wurden zahlreiche qualitative (z. B. Transfereffekte) und quantitative Befunde (z. B. Bearbeitungszeiten) aus einer früheren empirischen Untersuchung berücksichtigt. In einer Validierungsstudie wurden dieselben Aufgaben von 14 Probanden und dem Modell bearbeitet. Die Passung von Simulationsdaten und empirischen Ergebnissen fiel insgesamt gut aus. Allerdings löst das Modell die Aufgaben schneller und zeigt auch einen etwas besseren Lernverlauf als die Probanden. Das Modell liefert eine Erklärung für das Rauschen, das typischerweise bei Bearbeitungszeiten zu beobachten ist: es handelt sich um erworbenes Wissen, das mehr oder weniger gut und auch unterschiedlich häufig auf neue Situationen übertragen wird. Der Lernverlauf der Probanden entspricht nur für aggregierte Daten einer Potenzfunktion (power law). Der vorgestellte Mechanismus zeigt, wie ein symbolisches Modell der Informationsverarbeitung graduelle Verhaltensänderungen generiert und wie der offensichtliche Erwerb allgemeiner Prozeduren ohne explizites Lernen von deklarativen Regeln erfolgen kann. Es wird nahegelegt, daß es sich hier um die Modellierung einer Form impliziten Lernens handelt. Summary. The model presented here gradually learns how to perform a job-shop scheduling task. It uses Soar's chunking mechanism to acquire episodic memories about the order to schedule jobs. The model was based on many qualitative (e.g., transfer effects) and quantitative (e.g., solution time) regularities found in previously collected data. The model was tested with new data where scheduling tasks were given to the model and to 14 subjects. The model generally fit these data with the restrictions that the model performs the task (in simulated time) faster than the subjects, and its performance improves somewhat more quickly than the subjects' performance. The model provides an explanation of the noise typically found in problem solving times - it is the result of learning actual pieces of knowledge that transfer more or less to new situations but rarely by an average amount. Only when the data are averaged (i.e., over subjects) does the smooth power law appear. This mechanism demonstrates how symbolic models can exhibit a gradual change in behavior and how the apparent acquisition of general procedures can be performed without resorting to explicit declarative rule generation. We suggest that this may represent a type of implicit learning.     

Gender differences in a clinical sample of patients with borderline personality disorder

The aim of the study was to investigate gender differences and similarities in patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) with respect to Axis I comorbidity, Axis II comorbidity, general psychopathology (Symptom Checklist 90-Revised), and dimensional personality traits (NEO-Personality-Inventory Revised [NEO-PI-R] and the Dimensional Assessment of Personality Profile Basic questionnaire [DAPP-BQ]). Fifty-seven men and 114 women with BPD were included in the study. Regarding Axis I and II disorders in an exploratory analysis, men with BPD more often fulfilled the diagnostic criteria for binge eating disorder, antisocial personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, and conduct disorder in childhood, whereas women had higher frequencies of bulimia nervosa, posttraumatic stress disorder, and panic disorder with agoraphobia. After correcting for multiple tests, only the gender differences in narcissistic and antisocial personality disorder remained significant. In the SCL-90-R profile, no significant gender differences could be identified. In the exploratory analysis of the dimensional personality traits, women showed higher rates on the NEO-PI-R main factors (Neuroticism and Agreeableness) compared to men. In the DAPP-BQ profile, men reached higher sores on the main factor, Dissocial Behavior. When correcting for multiple tests, gender differences still existed for Neuroticism and Dissocial Behavior. Our results argue for gender differences in Axis I and II comorbidity and dimensional personality traits in BPD. However, in general, more similarities than differences were shown in this study.