Event-related brain potentials reflect traces of echoic memory in humans

In sequences of identical auditory stimuli, infrequent deviant stimuli elicit an event-related brain potential component called mismatch negativity (MMN). MMN is presumed to reflect the existence of a memory trace of the frequent stimulus at the moment of presentation of the infrequent stimulus. This hypothesis was tested by applying the recognition-masking paradigm of cognitive psychology. In this paradigm, a masking sound presented shortly before or after a test stimulus diminishes the recognition memory of this stimulus, the more so the shorter the interval between the test and masking stimuli. This interval was varied in the present study. It was found that the MMN amplitude strongly correlated with the subject’s ability to discriminate between frequent and infrequent stimuli. This result strongly suggests that MMN providesa measure for a trace of sensory memory, and further, that with MMN, this memory can be studied without performance-related distortions.     

Group therapy with inner city hispanic acting-out adolescent males: Some theoretical observations

Group therapy with inner city Hispanic acting-out adolescent males is described as an effective psychotherapeutic modality in treating this difficult population. Topics addressed include the development of personality during adolescence, Hispanic family dynamics and gender roles, group therapy as a pseudofamily structure, stages of group development as they pertain to this population, and the group therapist's role and characteristics in the treatment situation.     

Medical ethics in Latin America: a new interest and commitment.

Recent visits to five Latin American nations indicate that some medical professionals are eager to increase the role of bioethics in their countries. Conversations with key figures there point up similarities and differences among Latin nations, and between Latin countries and the United States, in their approaches to ethics. Opportunities exist for U.S. bioethicists to help get bioethics teaching and research off the ground in Latin America.     

The society for community research and action on a path toward conocimiento: From silences and statements to solidarities in action in U.S. community psychology

A first-person narrative essay is presented through a critically reflexive auto-ethnography of a community psychologist's experiences as a member of the Society for Community Research and Action (SCRA) and (as of this writing) co-chair of the Cultural, Ethnic and Racial Affairs council. Through this methodological orientation, an analysis of some of the discourses that circulated within the SCRA listserv in relation to the murder of Mr. George Floyd, and amidst an ensuing pandemic are analyzed and discussed in relation to Anzaldúa's seven stages of conocimiento. The intentions that guide and ground this first-person account are to animate deeper reflection, accountability, and solidarity-in-action, as well as an organizational shift in the culture of the SCRA. Guided by a set of questions—What accounts for the organizational silences within the SCRA? How did the SCRA respond or engage with the murder of Mr. Floyd, anti-Blackness, Black Lives Matter, and related racial justice efforts?—the purpose is to turn a critical social analysis gaze to the SCRA in order to align its purpose, values, and mission with liberation and a decolonial feminist praxis. Anzaldúa's seven-stage framework of conocimiento is utilized to describe the possibilities for an organizational cultural shift in the SCRA that aligns with racial justice and liberatory decolonial feminist praxes.     

Spontaneous object recognition in capuchin monkeys: assessing the effects of sex,familiarization phase and retention delay

Animal Cognition - The spontaneous object recognition (SOR) task is a versatile and widely used memory test that was only recently established in nonhuman primates (marmosets). Here, we extended...     

Enhanced Verbal Statistical Learning in Glossolalia

Glossolalia (“speaking in tongues”) is a rhythmic utterance of word-like strings of sounds, regularly occurring in religious mass gatherings or various forms of private religious practices (e.g., prayer and meditation). Although specific verbal learning capacities may characterize glossolalists, empirical evidence is lacking. We administered three statistical learning tasks (artificial grammar, phoneme sequence, and visual-response sequence) to 30 glossolalists and 30 matched control volunteers. In artificial grammar, participants decide whether pseudowords and sentences follow previously acquired implicit rules or not. In sequence learning, they gradually draw out rules from repeating regularities in sequences of speech sounds or motor responses. Results revealed enhanced artificial grammar and phoneme sequence learning performances in glossolalists compared to control volunteers. There were significant positive correlations between daily glossolalia activity and artificial grammar learning. These results indicate that glossolalists exhibit enhanced abilities to extract the statistical regularities of verbal information, which may be related to their unusual language abilities.     

Experience With a Linguistic Variant Affects the Acquisition of Its Sociolinguistic Meaning: An Alien-Language-Learning Experiment

How do speakers learn the social meaning of different linguistic variants, and what factors influence how likely a particular social–linguistic association is to be learned? It has been argued that the social meaning of more salient variants should be learned faster, and that learners' pre-existing experience of a variant will influence its salience. In this paper, we report two artificial-language-learning experiments investigating this. Each experiment involved two language-learning stages followed by a test. The first stage introduced the artificial language and trained participants in it, while the second stage added a simple social context using images of cartoon aliens. The first learning stage was intended to establish participants' experience with the artificial language in general and with the distribution of linguistic variants in particular. The second stage, in which linguistic stimuli were accompanied by images of particular aliens, was intended to simulate the acquisition of linguistic variants in a social context. In our first experiment, we manipulated whether a particular linguistic variant, associated with one species of alien in the second learning phase, had been encountered in the first learning phase. In the second experiment, we manipulated whether the variant had been encountered in the same grammatical context. In both cases we predicted that the unexpectedness of a new variant or a new grammatical context for an old variant would increase the variant's salience and facilitate the learning of its social meaning. This is what we found, although in the second experiment, the effect was driven by better learners. Our results suggest that unexpectedness increases the salience of variants and makes their social distribution easier to learn, deepening our understanding of the role of individual language experience in the acquisition of sociolinguistic meaning.     

Parents,friends and immigrant youths' academic engagement: A mediation analysis

Parents and friends can help facilitate the academic engagement of newcomer immigrant youth during the early post-migration years. Using an accelerated longitudinal design and the integrative risk and resilience framework, we examined how parent home involvement and friendships were directly and indirectly associated with the development of newcomer immigrant youths' academic engagement. We used data from three waves (Years 3–5) of the Longitudinal Immigrant Student Adaptation study where a culturally diverse group of immigrant youth (N = 354, ages 10–17, M_timeinUS = 3.98 years, SD = 1.39) in the United States reported on their perceptions of parent home involvement (educational values and communication) and friendship (educational values and academic support) in Year 3 and on their academic engagement (behavioural and emotional) across 3 years. Findings showed high-stable behavioural and emotional engagement and direct positive associations between perceptions of parent home involvement and initial levels of behavioural and emotional engagement and between perceptions of friend educational values and initial levels of emotional engagement. Additionally, perceptions of parents' educational values indirectly contributed to initial levels of emotional engagement through positive associations with perceptions of friends' educational values. These findings can inform family–school partnerships and school-interventions targeting newcomer immigrant youths' engagement.