Reactions to a survey among those who were and were not sexually assaulted while serving in the military

Surveys are among the most common methods for evaluating military sexual assault experiences among members of the U.S. military; however, little research has examined how receiving surveys about such sexual assaults might affect recipients. In the present sample of 530 active duty and veteran military personnel, just 10% reported unexpected upset, 11% reported regretting participation in the survey, and 22% reported benefitting from that participation overall. A minority of respondents with a history of sexual assault while in the military reported unexpected upset, although the prevalence was three times higher than that of participants without such history (24% vs 8%). There were no statistically significant differences in perceived regret and benefit of participation in the survey between those with and without a history of sexual assault while in the military. Although limited in number, male military sexual assault survivors (n = 8) were significantly more likely than female survivors to report being more upset by the survey than they had anticipated. Implications for future research are discussed.     

The many directions of time

Event duration perception is fundamental to cognitive functioning. Recent research has shown that localized sensory adaptation compresses perceived duration of brief visual events in the adapted location; however, there is disagreement on whether the source of these temporal distortions is cortical or pre-cortical. The current study reveals that spatially localized duration compression can also be direction contingent, in that duration compression is induced when adapting and test stimuli move in the same direction but not when they move in opposite directions. Because of its direction-contingent nature, the induced duration compression reported here is likely to be cortical in origin. A second experiment shows that the adaptation processes driving duration compression can occur at or beyond human cortical area MT+, a specialized motion center located upstream from primary visual cortex. The direction-specificity of these temporal mechanisms, in conjunction with earlier reports of pre-cortical temporal mechanisms driving duration perception, suggests that our encoding of subsecond event duration is driven by activity at multiple levels of processing.     

Loud versus quiet praise: A direct behavioral comparison in secondary classrooms

The purpose of the present study was to compare the effects of teacher public (i.e., loud) and private (i.e., quiet) praise on students' appropriately engaged behavior (AEB) and disruptive behaviors (DB). Employing a combined multiple-baseline withdrawal design, the effects of loud and quiet praise were assessed across two pairs of secondary classrooms. Each classroom's mean percentage of observed intervals of AEB and DB across loud and quiet praise intervention phases was assessed and compared. Overall, visual analysis of the data, multilevel modeling, and effect sizes showed that both loud and quiet praises were more effective than no treatment at increasing AEB and decreasing DB. In addition, there were no statistical or clinically significant differences between the loud and quiet praise interventions. The results are discussed in light of appropriate practices and controversies in the literature.     

Keith Lehrer on Compatibilism

Keith Lehrer has been publishing on free will and compatiblism since 1960. Our concern here is to present an account of the development on his work on the subject.     

A comparison of intra- and inter-limb relative motion information in modelling a novel motor skill

The importance of intra- and inter-limb relative motion in modelling a whole body coordination skill was examined. Participants were assigned to one of four groups: Full-Body point light model of a cricket bowler, INTRA-LIMB relative motion of the bowling arm, INTER-LIMB relative motions of the right and left wrists or NO-Relative motion, showing only the motions of the right wrist. During 60 acquisition trials, participants viewed the model five times before each 10-trial block. Retention was examined the following day. Although all groups improved on intra-limb coordination of the bowling arm, the INTRA-LIMB and FULL-BODY groups were more accurate than the INTER-LIMB group in acquisition, although these groups did not differ in retention. For inter-limb coordination, the three groups who received relative motion information performed more like the model than the NO-Relative motion group (even though the INTRA-LIMB group did not see the other limb). The amount of information within a display plays a constraining role on acquisition, perhaps more so than the type of information, such that the acquisition of coordination is more an emergent feature of observational learning, rather than a direct approximation of the model.     

Suppression of emotional and nonemotional content in memory: effects of repetition on cognitive control

Two experiments utilized a think/no-think paradigm to examine whether cognitive control of memories differs depending on whether they contain information with negative or neutral emotional content. During a training phase, participants learned face-word pairs (Experiment 1) or face-picture pairs (Experiment 2). In a subsequent experimental phase, participants were shown faces and told to think of the items paired with some of the faces and to try not to think of the items paired with other faces. Finally, in a test phase, participants were again shown each face and asked to recall the item with which it had been paired previously. Results for both verbal (Experiment 1) and nonverbal (Experiment 2) items indicated that the facilitatory and inhibitory influences of cognitive control were larger for negative than neutral items.     

When memory fails, intuition reigns: midazolam enhances implicit inference in humans

People often make logically sound decisions using explicit reasoning strategies, but sometimes it pays to rely on more implicit "gut-level" intuition. The transitive inference paradigm has been widely used as a test of explicit logical reasoning in animals and humans, but it can also be solved in a more implicit manner. Some researchers have argued that the hippocampus supports relational memories required for making logical inferences. Here we show that the benzodiazepene midazolam, which inactivates the hippocampus, causes profound explicit memory deficits in healthy participants, but enhances their ability in making implicit transitive inferences. These results are consistent with neurocomputational models of the basal ganglia-dopamine system that learn to make decisions through positive and negative reinforcement. We suggest that disengaging the hippocampal explicit memory system can be advantageous for this more implicit form of learning.