Let it be? Pain control attempts critically amplify attention to somatosensory input

Psychological Research - Recent studies have suggested that the threat of pain may redirect attention towards specific features of the pain stimulus via attentional control settings. For instance,...     

Haptic and visual perception of roughness

In this study, we are interested in the following two questions: (1) how does perceived roughness correlate with physical roughness, and (2) how do visually and haptically perceived roughness compare? We used 96 samples of everyday materials, such as wood, paper, glass, sandpaper, ceramics, foams, textiles, etc. The samples were characterized by various different physical roughness measures, all determined from accurately measured roughness profiles. These measures consisted of spectral densities measured at different spatial scales and industrial roughness standards (R(a), R(q) and R(z)). In separate haptic and visual conditions, 12 na?ve subjects were instructed to order the 96 samples according to perceived roughness. The rank orders of both conditions were correlated with the various physical roughness measures. With most physical roughness measures, haptic and visual correspondence with the physical ordering was about equal. With others, haptic correspondence was slightly better. It turned out that different subjects ordered the samples using different criteria; for some subjects the correlation was better with roughness measures that were based on higher spatial frequencies, while others seemed to be paying more attention to the lower spatial frequencies. Also, physical roughness was not found to be the same as perceived roughness.     

Motor-Skill Learning in Alzheimer’s Disease: A Review with an Eye to the Clinical Practice

Since elderly people suffering from dementia want to go on living independently for as long as possible, they need to be able to maintain familiar and learn new practical skills. Although explicit or declarative learning methods are mostly used to train new skills, it is hypothesized that implicit or procedural techniques may be more effective in this population. The present review discusses 23 experimental studies on implicit motor-skill learning in patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). All studies found intact implicit motor-learning capacities. Subsequently, it is elaborated how these intact learning abilities can be exploited in the patients’ rehabilitation with respect to the variables ‘practice’ and ‘feedback.’ Recommendations for future research are provided, and it is concluded that if training programs are adjusted to specific needs and abilities, older people with AD are well able to (re)learn practical motor skills, which may enhance their autonomy.     

The power of ideas: esotericism,historicism, and the limits of discourse

This article is a response to the reviews by Giovanni Filoramo, Olav Hammer, Bernd-Christian Otto, Marco Pasi, and Michael Stausberg of Wouter J. Hanegraaff's book Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture. The author attempts to clarify his view of the relation between history and theory, and between intellectual history and discourse theory in particular; he provides a summary of his motivations for writing the book and of its main argument; he concludes by addressing a number of theoretical issues raised by the respondents.     

A late locus of the distractor frequency effect in picture–word interference: Evidence from event-related potentials

In this study, we investigated how people deal with irrelevant contextual information during speech production. Two main models have been proposed. WEAVER++ assumes that irrelevant information is removed from the production system by an early blocking mechanism. On the other hand, the response exclusion hypothesis assumes a blocking mechanism that operates late, after lexical selection has finished. To delineate between these models, we focused on the distractor frequency effect (i.e., longer picture naming latencies in the context of low-frequency compared to high-frequency words) and measured ERPs concurrently. Behaviorally, the distractor frequency effect was replicated. In the ERPs, three effects were found. One effect occurred very early and is interpreted as an effect of low-level visual feature processing. The two other effects occurred after lexical access and are thus in line with the response exclusion hypothesis.     

Multi‐level aspects of social cohesion of secondary schools and pupils' feelings of safety

Background. School safety and corresponding feelings of both pupils and school staff are beginning to receive more and more attention. The social cohesion characteristics of a school may be useful in promoting feelings of safety, particularly in pupils. Aims. To conceptualize theoretically, and check empirically a two‐level model of social cohesion between and within schools, in order to explain a pupil's feelings of safety at school. Samples. Data were collected aided by a national Dutch survey in secondary education carried out via the Internet. In 2008, digital questionnaires were completed by about 78,800 pupils, 6,200 teachers and educational support staff, and 600 school managers. Methods. Data were checked for reliability and representativity. Social cohesion was indicated by self‐reported measures of individual pupils and by aggregating scale and item scores of school managers, teachers, and other support staff within schools. Multi‐level analysis using individual pupil data and school‐level data was performed using MLwiN. Results. A pupil's age, educational attainment level, experience of mild physical violence, prosocial rules of conduct and joint control of these rules, and school measures against playing truant, show positive influences on a pupil's feelings of safety at school. Negative influences are exerted by not feeling most at home in The Netherlands, peers taking drugs and weapons into school, and by experiencing social violence, severe physical violence, and sexual violence. Negative school effects exist simultaneously in severe physical violence experienced by teachers and other staff, and in curriculum differentiation applied by teachers and other staff; a positive school effect is school size. Some interaction effects between pupil and school‐level variables were explored. Conclusions. The variance at school level is relatively low compared with the variance at pupil level. However, a much higher percentage of variance at school level than at pupil level is explained with respect to the pupils' feelings of safety at school. The resulting two‐level model also reflects the streaming of pupils in Dutch secondary schools. To improve school safety, the national results emphasize the need to enhance prosocial behaviour rules and to enhance the shared control of these rules between teachers and pupils. They also emphasize the need for the school to take measures that prevent truancy and redefine curriculum differentiation procedures. National educational policy and research can combine efforts to assist schools in developing reliable and valid procedures to increase effectively safety in and around schools.     

Knowledge of a second language influences auditory word recognition in the native language

Many studies in bilingual visual word recognition have demonstrated that lexical access is not language selective. However, research on bilingual word recognition in the auditory modality has been scarce, and it has yielded mixed results with regard to the degree of this language nonselectivity. In the present study, we investigated whether listening to a second language (L2) is influenced by knowledge of the native language (L1) and, more important, whether listening to the L1 is also influenced by knowledge of an L2. Additionally, we investigated whether the listener's selectivity of lexical access is influenced by the speaker's L1 (and thus his or her accent). With this aim, Dutch-English bilinguals completed an English (Experiment 1) and a Dutch (Experiment 3) auditory lexical decision task. As a control, the English auditory lexical decision task was also completed by English monolinguals (Experiment 2). Targets were pronounced by a native Dutch speaker with English as the L2 (Experiments 1A, 2A, and 3A) or by a native English speaker with Dutch as the L2 (Experiments 1B, 2B, and 3B). In all experiments, Dutch-English bilinguals recognized interlingual homophones (e.g., lief [sweet]-leaf /li:f/) significantly slower than matched control words, whereas the English monolinguals showed no effect. These results indicate that (a) lexical access in bilingual auditory word recognition is not language selective in L2, nor in L1, and (b) language-specific subphonological cues do not annul cross-lingual interactions.     

Increased Stroop interference with better second-language reading skill

Skilled readers demonstrate remarkable efficiency in processing written words, unlike beginning readers for whom reading occurs more serially and places higher demands on visual attention. In the present study, we used the Stroop paradigm to investigate the relationship between reading skill and automaticity, in individuals learning a second language with a different orthographic system. Prior studies using this paradigm have presented a mixed picture, finding a positive, a negative, or no relationship between the size of Stroop interference and reading skills. Our results show that Stroop interference in the second language was positively related to reading skill (when controlled for interference in the first language). Furthermore, interference was positively related to objective but not subjective indices of the amount of exposure to the second language. We suggest that the lack of consistency in the results of earlier studies may be due, at least in part, to these studies looking at Stroop interference in isolation, rather than comparing interference between languages.     

Discrimination thresholds for haptic perception of volume, surface area, and weight

The present study investigated the human ability to discriminate the size of 3-D objects by touch. Experiment 1 measured the just noticeable differences (JNDs) for three tasks: (1) discrimination of volume without availability of weight information, (2) discrimination of volume with weight information available, and (3) discrimination of surface area. Stimuli consisted of spheres, cubes, and tetrahedrons. For all shapes, two reference sizes were used (3.5 and 12 cm(3)). No significant effect of task on the discriminability of objects was found, but the effects of shape and size were significant, as well as the interaction between these two factors. Post hoc analysis revealed that for the small reference, the Weber fractions for the tetrahedron were significantly larger than the fractions for the cube and the sphere. In Experiment 2, the JNDs for haptic perception of weight were measured for the same objects as those used in Experiment 1. The shape of objects had no significant effect on the Weber fractions for weight, but the Weber fractions for the small stimuli were larger than the fractions for the large stimuli. Surprisingly, a comparison between the two experiments showed that the Weber fractions for weight were significantly larger than the fractions for volume with availability of weight information. Taken together, the results reveal that volume and weight information are not effectively combined in discrimination tasks. This study provides detailed insight into the accuracy of the haptic system in discriminating objects' size. This substantial set of data satisfies the need for more fundamental knowledge on haptic size perception, necessary for a greater understanding of the perception of related properties, as well as of more general perceptual processes.