Temporal preparation,response inhibition and impulsivity

Temporal preparation and impulsivity involve overlapping neural structures (prefrontal cortex) and cognitive functions (response inhibition and time perception), however, their interrelations had not been investigated. We studied such interrelations by comparing the performance of groups with low vs. high non-clinical trait impulsivity during a temporal preparation go no-go task. This task measured, in less than 10 min, how response inhibition was influenced both by temporal orienting of attention (guided by predictive temporal cues) and by sequential effects (produced by repetition/alternation of the duration of preparatory intervals in consecutive trials). The results showed that sequential effects produced dissociable patterns of temporal preparation as a function of impulsivity. Sequential effects facilitated both response speed (reaction times – RTs – to the go condition) and response inhibition (false alarms to the no-go condition) selectively in the low impulsivity group. In the high impulsivity group, in contrast, sequential effects only improved RTs but not response inhibition. We concluded that both excitatory and inhibitory processing may be enhanced concurrently by sequential effects, which enables the temporal preparation of fast and controlled responses. Impulsivity could hence be related to less efficient temporal preparation of that inhibitory processing.     

Can Community Indicators Live Up to Their Expectations? The Case of the Flemish City Monitor for Livable and Sustainable Urban Development

The City Monitor is a policy instrument and has been used to measure the state of 13 Flemish cities in 2004, 2006 and 2008. The community indicators of the City Monitor provide feedback on the evolution of a multitude of phenomena, and so they represent an opportunity for policy learning about the livability and sustainability of those cities. Indicators simplify the representation of societal problems and in that sense they are helping the communication between city authorities and their stakeholders. In this article we also focus on two innovative characteristics of the co-design methodology of the City Monitor. First of all, indicators were constructed on the basis of a normative vision about urban sustainability. We argue that a sustainability framework can give value added to map vital signs of the quality of life in Flemish cities. Secondly, the City Monitor was being developed with the participation of about 200 experts, coming from city governments and other administrations, civil society and academic world. It is our argument that the participatory approach fosters the use of community indicators and generates interesting side effects. As a third argument, we indicate the importance of the attitude of city authority people for its implementation within the city organisation. The City Monitor is certainly meant as an input for urban policy debate about the quality of life in the major Flemish cities. Does it live up to its expectations? And will the vision and indicators on urban sustainability stir up the debate about urban sustainable development?     

Adults' perception of children's height and reaching capability

This study investigated the influence of some characteristics of the task, the model, and the observer, in the estimation errors of adults while judging children's affordances. One hundred and eighteen adults, divided in 4 height groups, estimated height and vertical reaching capability of 3 girls (3.55-, 4.74- and 7.06-years old), in the presence and in the absence of the model. Constant errors (CE) (estimation-real value), absolute percent errors (APE) (|1 − estimation/real value| × 100), and error tendency (underestimations, right judgments, or overestimations) were calculated. A model and a condition effect were verified on APE. APE for the younger model were greater than for the other models (p < 0.001), and APE in the absence of the model were greater than in her presence (p < 0.05). Generally, adults underestimated height (51.8% of underestimations vs. 32.3% of overestimations) and overestimated reachability (51.3% of overestimations vs. 37.7% of underestimations). The overestimation of reachability was more notorious for the younger model, which might reflect adults' difficulty to consider the specificity of younger children's body proportions. Actually, the overestimation bias may suggest that adults perceive young children as on the basis of adult's geometrical proportions.     

Processing fluency affects behavior more strongly among people higher in trait mindfulness

Processing fluency is the ease of processing information about a stimulus, which people can attribute to the experience of enjoyment. Despite consistent findings that processing fluency can affect self-reported judgments, little research has examined whether processing fluency or its interactions with personality traits can affect behavior. The current studies demonstrate that processing fluency is more likely to affect behavior among people higher in trait mindfulness. We manipulated processing fluency with rhyming versus nonrhyming maxims in Study 1 and with regulatory fit versus nonfit in Study 2. Participants higher in mindfulness showed a stronger positive effect for processing fluency on the dependent variable: the number of ideas they listed in a task they continued for as long as they enjoyed it.     

Data‐driven Methods for Modeling Social Perception

How do we model the complexity of social perception? A major methodological problem is that the space of possible variables driving social perceptions is infinitely large, thus posing an insurmountable hurdle for conventional approaches. Here, we describe a set of data‐driven methods whose objective is to identify quantitative relationships between high‐dimensional variables (e.g., visual images) and behaviors (e.g., perceptual decisions) with as little bias as possible. We focus on social perception of faces, although the methods could be applied to other visual and nonvisual categories. We review two reverse correlation approaches: (a) psychophysical methods based on judgments of images altered with randomly generated noise, where the analysis relates the random variations of the images to judgments; and (b) methods based on judgments of randomly generated faces from a statistical, multidimensional face space model, where the analysis relates the dimensions of the face model to judgments.     

Illusory conjunctions reflect the time course of the attentional blink

Illusory conjunctions in the time domain are binding errors for features from stimuli presented sequentially but in the same spatial position. A similar experimental paradigm is employed for the attentional blink (AB), an impairment of performance for the second of two targets when it is presented 200–500 msec after the first target. The analysis of errors along the time course of the AB allows the testing of models of illusory conjunctions. In an experiment, observers identified one (control condition) or two (experimental condition) letters in a specified color, so that illusory conjunctions in each response could be linked to specific positions in the series. Two items in the target colors (red and white, embedded in distractors of different colors) were employed in four conditions defined according to whether both targets were in the same or different colors. Besides the U-shaped function for hits, the errors were analyzed by calculating several response parameters reflecting characteristics such as the average position of the responses or the attentional suppression during the blink. The several error parameters cluster in two time courses, as would be expected from prevailing models of the AB. Furthermore, the results match the predictions from Botella, Barriopedro, and Suero’s (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 27, 1452–1467, 2001) model for illusory conjunctions.     

A place for nouns and a place for verbs? A critical review of neurocognitive data on grammatical-class effects

It is generally held that noun processing is specifically sub-served by temporal areas, while the neural underpinnings of verb processing are located in the frontal lobe. However, this view is now challenged by a significant body of evidence accumulated over the years. Moreover, the results obtained so far on the neural implementation of noun and verb processing appear to be quite inconsistent. The present review briefly describes and critically re-considers the anatomo-correlative, neuroimaging, MEG, TMS and cortical stimulation studies on nouns and verbs with the aim of assessing the consistency of their results, particularly within techniques. The paper also addresses the question as to whether the inconsistency of the data could be due to the variety of the tasks used. However, it emerged that neither the different investigation techniques used nor the different cognitive tasks employed fully explain the variability of the data. In the final section we thus suggest that the main reason for the emergence of inconsistent data in this field is that the cerebral circuits underlying noun and verb processing are not spatially segregated, at least for the spatial resolution currently used in most neuroimaging studies.     

Effects of long-term blindness on preparatory emg modulation in humans performing landing movements

To investigate the long-term effect of blindness on the task of leaping down to a lower landing surface, five blind individuals were compared with 10 sighted individuals who performed landing movements with and without sight. Participants performed six consecutive drop-landings from four different heights, during which the prelanding modulation of EMG timing and amplitude in four lower-limb muscles were recorded. Analysis showed that blind individuals showed specific prelanding EMG modulation, suggesting that long-term dependence on somesthetic and vestibular cues leads to different preparatory measures for vertical falls.