Developmental and seasonal changes in canary song and their relation to changes in the anatomy of song-control nuclei

Young male canaries become sexually mature in late winter, 8-12 months after hatching. During the months between hatching and sexual maturity they develop adult song. The successive stages in the development of adult song are subsong, plastic song, and stable or full song. Once stable song is achieved it lasts for the duration of the breeding season. After the end of the breeding season there is a recurrence of song instability during summer and early fall. This plastic song is followed, once more, by stable song. New song syllables are added to the song of adult male canaries and some of the earlier syllables disappear. The song repertoire sung at 2 years of age is substantially larger, and different, from that sung during the first breeding season, when the birds were 1 year old. A comparable change occurs between the second and third breeding seasons. Most of the syllables acquired by adult males are formed during the summer-fall period of song instability. Developmental and seasonal changes in song are accompanied by anatomical changes in two forebrain nuclei known to be involved in song control, the hyperstriatum ventralis, pars caudalis (HVc), and the robust nucleus of the archistriatum (RA). HVc and RA grow during the subsong and plastic song periods of song development. These nuclei reach adult size by the time stable adult song is first produced, and retain this size during the breeding season. However, the size of HVc and RA diminishes by late summer, when it becomes comparable to that of a 3- to 4-month-old bird. This reduction in size is temporary and has been corrected by the following breeding season. It is suggested that these seasonal changes in volume reflect circuit changes which are under hormonal control, and that these changes are related to processes of learning and, possibly, forgetting. Despite earlier reports of left hemispheric dominance in canary song production, we failed to find any evidence of right-left systematic differences in the size of HVc and RA during development or in adulthood. Various hypotheses relating song learning to changes in the underlying anatomy are offered.     

A systemic approach to the treatment of depression with only one family member present

The purpose of the present article was to demonstrate a systemic treatment of depression for a 70 year-old woman. In this treatment, other family members were unavailable, but a family therapy systems perspective was used throughout. Results of the demonstration ABAB single case design and two year followup were suggestive of treatment effectiveness in decreasing depression. The need for additional replication of the study was noted.     

Job Evaluation and Gender: The Case of University Faculty

This study examined the effects of students' and professors' sex on student evaluations of professors' teaching effectiveness. Ratings of over four hundred faculty made by over nine thousand students were analyzed. After controlling for a large number of variables, the main results showed that (a) male faculty were given significantly higher evaluations on global teacher effectiveness and academic competence than female faculty; (b) when controlling for extraneous variables, female faculty were not found to be rated as more sensitive to student needs than male faculty; and (c) when making overall, global judgments of faculty performance, students seem to place more weight on academic competence for male faculty than for female faculty.     

Information available In brief tactile presentations

Two experiments investigated characteristics of Immediate recall for brief tactile stimuli applied to the 24 interjoint regions of the fingers of both hands (thumbs excluded) The obtained Immediate-memory span varied from 35 to 7,5 stimulus positions correct after correction for guessing, similar to the results In analogous visual studies, Properties of any hypothetical tactile short-term memory were studied by requiring subjects to report only a specified portion of the stimuli presented, and by varying the time of occurrence of the marker specifying which portion of the stimuli to report, In this partial-report condition, subjects had more stimulus information available at the time of reporting than their immediate memory spans indicated, provided that the stimulus marker occurred within 0.8 sec after stimulus termination, The data suggest that at least for the amount of training employed here, any tactile short-term memory has much less capacity than an analogous visual short-term memory.     

Tactile perception of sequentially presented spatial patterns

Tactile pattern recognition was studied by presenting pairs of alphabetic shapes in rapid succession at the same anatomical location, the subject being required on each trial to identify bath of the patterns. Experimental variables were the duration of each stimulus and the time between stimuli. Three aspects of the observed interaction were (1) an increase in letter reversals for very short interstimulus intervals; (2) a greater percentage of first-response errors for short-stimulus onset intervals and a greater percentage of second-response errors for long-stimulus onset intervals; and (3) a crossover in the first- and second-response error rates in the range of 100 to 200 msec. after the onset of the first stimulus. These results are consistent with some of the temporal properties of models proposed for analogous visual tasks.     

The lasting effects of process‐specific versus stimulus‐specific learning during infancy

The capacity to tell the difference between two faces within an infrequently experienced face group (e.g. other species, other race) declines from 6 to 9 months of age unless infants learn to match these faces with individual‐level names. Similarly, the use of individual‐level labels can also facilitate differentiation of a group of non‐face objects (strollers). This early learning leads to increased neural specialization for previously unfamiliar face or object groups. The current investigation aimed to determine whether early conceptual learning between 6 and 9 months leads to sustained behavioral advantages and neural changes in these same children at 4–6 years of age. Results suggest that relative to a control group of children with no previous training and to children with infant category‐level naming experience, children with early individual‐level training exhibited faster response times to human faces. Further, individual‐level training with a face group – but not an object group – led to more adult‐like neural responses for human faces. These results suggest that early individual‐level learning results in long‐lasting process‐specific effects, which benefit categories that continue to be perceived and recognized at the individual level (e.g. human faces).     

Philosophy of science and the study of religion

This paper responds to the six papers from the Tokyo IAHR session.     

The positive and negative framing of affirmative action: a group dominance perspective

Using a sample of 328 White, Latino, and Black Los Angeles County adults, the authors examined the tendency to employ various affirmative action "frames" (e.g., affirmative action as a "tie-breaking" device or as a quota-based policy). All three groups agreed about which frames cast affirmative action in a positive light and which cast it in a negative light. Although minorities had a tendency to frame affirmative action in terms that most people find morally acceptable, Whites had a tendency to frame affirmative action in terms most people find unacceptable. In addition, compared to minorities, Whites were less supportive of affirmative action regardless of how it was framed. LISREL modeling also was employed to test two competing models regarding predictors of the tendency to use frames that one personally finds to be relatively negative versus positive. Consistent with the expectations of social dominance theory and a motivated cognition perspective, the authors found that social dominance orientation (SDO) had significant net direct and indirect effects on one's framing of affirmative action.