Enhanced saccadic control in young people with Tourette syndrome despite slowed pro‐saccades

Tourette syndrome (TS) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by motor and vocal tics. Tics are repetitive and uncontrolled behaviours that have been associated with basal ganglia dysfunction. We investigated saccadic eye movements in a group of young people with TS but without co‐morbid ADHD. Participants performed two tasks. One required them to perform only pro‐saccade responses (pure pro‐saccade task). The other involved shifting, unpredictably, between executing pro‐ and anti‐saccades (mixed saccade task). We show that in the mixing saccade task, the TS group makes significantly fewer errors than an age‐matched control group, while responding equally fast. By contrast, on the pure pro‐saccade task, the TS group were shown to be significantly slower to initiate and to complete the saccades (longer movement duration and decreased peak velocity) than controls, while movement amplitude and direction accuracy were not different. These findings demonstrate enhanced shifting ability despite slower reflexive responding in TS and are discussed with respect to a disorder‐related adaptation for increased cognitive regulation of behaviour.     

Rescue of newborn ants by older <Emphasis Type="Italic">Cataglyphis</Emphasis><Emphasis Type="Italic">cursor</Emphasis> adult workers

Cataglyphis cursor worker ants are capable of highly sophisticated rescue behaviour in which individuals are able to identify what has trapped a nestmate and to direct their behaviour towards that obstacle. Nonetheless, rescue behaviour is constrained by workers’ subcaste: whereas foragers, the oldest workers, are able both to give and to receive the most help, the youngest workers, inactives, neither give nor receive any help whatsoever; nurses give and receive intermediate levels of aid, reflecting their intermediate age. Such differences in rescue behaviour across subcastes suggest that age and experience play a critical role. In this species, as in many others in which a sensitive period for nestmate recognition exists, newly enclosed ants, called callows, are adopted by ants belonging not only to different colonies but also to different species; foreign callows receive nearly the same special care provided to resident newborns. Because callows are younger than inactives, which are incapable of soliciting rescue, we wondered whether entrapped callows would receive such aid. In the present study, we artificially ensnared individual callows from their own colony (homocolonial), from a different colony (heterocolonial), and from a different species (heterospecific), and tested each one with groups of five potential C. cursor rescuers, either all foragers or all nurses. Our results show that all three types of callows are able to elicit rescue behaviour from both foragers and nurses. Nonetheless, nurse rescuers are better able to discriminate between the three types of callow victims than are foragers.     

The principals of meaning: Extracting semantic dimensions from co-occurrence models of semantics

Notable progress has been made recently on computational models of semantics using vector representations for word meaning (Mikolov, Chen, Corrado, & Dean, 2013; Mikolov, Sutskever, Chen, Corrado, & Dean, 2013). As representations of meaning, recent models presumably hone in on plausible organizational principles for meaning. We performed an analysis on the organization of the skip-gram model’s semantic space. Consistent with human performance (Osgood, Suci, & Tannenbaum, 1957), the skip-gram model primarily relies on affective distinctions to organize meaning. We showed that the skip-gram model accounts for unique variance in behavioral measures of lexical access above and beyond that accounted for by affective and lexical measures. We also raised the possibility that word frequency predicts behavioral measures of lexical access due to the fact that word use is organized by semantics. Deconstruction of the semantic representations in semantic models has the potential to reveal organizing principles of human semantics.     

Rethinking Debt: Theology,Indebted Subjects,and Student Loans

This article focuses on the way in which a theological understanding of debt resonates with moral and economic debt, with particular attention paid to student loan debt. Although the so‐called satisfaction theory of atonement, which grounds itself in the debt we owe to God, resonates with the logic of contemporary capitalism, this article suggests that other theological traditions concerning debt, which conceive of debt variously as something owed to the devil or as something that God owes to us, provide avenues for rethinking debt, theologically, morally, and economically.     

A Review of “Where did the gods go?”

Gods in Everyman: A New Psychology of Men's Lives and Loves. By Jean Shinoda Bolen. New York: Harper & Row, 1989.

Descent to the Goddess: A Way of Initiation for Women. By Sylvia Brinton Perera. Toronto: Inner City Books, 1981.

The Goddess Within: A Guide to the Eternal Myths That Shape Women's Lives. By Jennifer Barker Woolger and Roger J. Woolger. New York: Fawcett Books 1989.     

Extrapolating human judgments from skip-gram vector representations of word meaning

There is a growing body of research in psychology that attempts to extrapolate human lexical judgments from computational models of semantics. This research can be used to help develop comprehensive norm sets for experimental research, it has applications to large-scale statistical modelling of lexical access and has broad value within natural language processing and sentiment analysis. However, the value of extrapolated human judgments has recently been questioned within psychological research. Of primary concern is the fact that extrapolated judgments may not share the same pattern of statistical relationship with lexical and semantic variables as do actual human judgments; often the error component in extrapolated judgments is not psychologically inert, making such judgments problematic to use for psychological research. We present a new methodology for extrapolating human judgments that partially addresses prior concerns of validity. We use this methodology to extrapolate human judgments of valence, arousal, dominance, and concreteness for 78,286 words. We also provide resources for users to extrapolate these human judgments for three million English words and short phrases. Applications for large sets of extrapolated human judgments are demonstrated and discussed.     

The biological function of Pavlovian conditioning: Learned inhibition of aggressive behavior in territorial fish

Following Pavlovian discrimination training, stimuli predicting the appearance of a territory intruder (an excitatory conditional stimulus, CS+) or the absence of that event (an inhibitory conditional stimulus, CS−) were presented to pairs of territorial male fish immediately before their first aggressive interaction. Pairmates that both received excitatory stimuli prior to the confrontation were significantly more aggressive than a control group which received the same training but which received neither a CS+ nor a CS− in the test. Pairmates in which both received a CS− were significantly less aggressive than the control group. In these three groups, no differences in aggression were observed between the individual members of a single pair. Two additional groups were composed of pairs whose members received different stimuli prior to the test. Although no differences were found between pairmates in the group in which one member received a pretest CS− while the other member received no stimulus presentation, large differences in aggressive behavior were obtained when one fish received a CS+ and its pairmate received a CS−. We discuss the behavioral ecology of terriorial behavior in fish and attempt to show the potential importance of these results in this naturalistic context. In addition, we discuss the implications of an ecological approach for causal analyses of inhibitory learning.     

Development of visual,name, and conceptual memory codes for pictures

In a recognition memory task, 4-, 8-, and 16-year-olds quickly decided whether or not probe pictures were identical to remembered study pictures. Conceptual and visual, but not acoustic, confusion were evidenced by the longer latencies when probes were visually or conceptually related to study items than when unrelated or rhyming. Visual confusion arose only when seven or fewer pictures intervened between study and probe items, and the kinds of visual similarity that produced confusion changed with age. Conceptual confusion resulted only at longer lags, and the same kinds of conceptual relationships produced confusion at all ages. These findings are discussed in terms of the development of visual and semantic encoding processes.     

Perceptual equivalence of two acoustic cues for stop-consonant manner

The first experiment examined the effects of orthogonal variation in two acoustic cues that are both produced by the articulation of a stop consonant. One component of the articulation produces a temporal cue, the other a spectral cue. In a phonetic identification task, these quite different cues were found to engage in a trading relation: One cue could, within limits, substitute for the other. In a second experiment, the perceptual equivalence implied by that trading relation was put to a stricter test. If the cues are truly equivalent in perception, then they should have their effects on the same perceptual dimension. That being so, it should be possible to combine them in such a way that, working at cross purposes in the perceptual domain, they effectively cancel each other. Pairs of patterns so produced should, then, be harder to discriminate than pairs produced by either cue alone, and still harder than those produced when the (same) two cues are combined in the opposite way and so cooperate. That expectation was confirmed. We suggest that the equivalence thus demonstrated comes about because the two cues are processed by a system specialized to take account of their common origin in speech production. So interpreted, the equivalence may be viewed as an instance of distinctively phonetic perception.