Degeneracy and cognitive anatomy

Cognitive models indicate that there are multiple ways of completing the same task. This implicit degeneracy cannot be revealed by functional imaging studies of normal subjects if more than one of the sufficient neural systems is activated. Nor can it be detected by neuropsychological studies of patients because their performance might not be impaired when only one degenerate system is damaged. We propose that degenerate sets of sufficient neural systems can only be identified by an iterative approach that integrates the lesion-deficit model and functional imaging studies of normal and neurologically damaged subjects.     

Syntactic priming and the lexical boost effect during sentence production and sentence comprehension: An fMRI study

Behavioral syntactic priming effects during sentence comprehension are typically observed only if both the syntactic structure and lexical head are repeated. In contrast, during production syntactic priming occurs with structure repetition alone, but the effect is boosted by repetition of the lexical head. We used fMRI to investigate the neuronal correlates of syntactic priming and lexical boost effects during sentence production and comprehension. The critical measure was the magnitude of fMRI adaptation to repetition of sentences in active or passive voice, with or without verb repetition. In conditions with repeated verbs, we observed adaptation to structure repetition in the left IFG and MTG, for active and passive voice. However, in the absence of repeated verbs, adaptation occurred only for passive sentences. None of the fMRI adaptation effects yielded differential effects for production versus comprehension, suggesting that sentence comprehension and production are subserved by the same neuronal infrastructure for syntactic processing.     

Contingent auditory feedback of arm movement facilitates reaching behavior in infancy

The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of contingent auditory feedback on the development of infant reaching. Eleven full-term infants were observed biweekly from the age of 10 weeks to 16 weeks, and their arm kinematics were recorded. Auditory feedback that was contingent on arm kinematics was provided in the form of: (a) the mother's voice; and (b) musical tones. Results showed that providing auditory feedback (mother's voice or musical tones): (i) increased the amplitude of exploratory arm movements before the onset of reaching; and (ii) increased the number of reaches at the onset of reaching. These results show that infants are able to use contingent auditory feedback to explore the relevant possibilities for action that are subsequently shaped into goal-directed movements.     

Literatur in Examensarbeiten

After the Second World War up to the 1980s Harald Schultz-Hencke’s so-called German neopsychoanalysis was an important theoretical reference for psychoanalysts in the German Psychoanalytical Society (DPG). Simultaneously, however, references were increasingly being made to quintessential psychoanalytical sources which of course had an impact on the psychoanalytical training. The references in final papers of a DPG psychoanalytical institute from 1971–2008 were compared to the references in clinical papers of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. It can be shown that the influence of German neopsychoanalysis in the final theses of the psychoanalytical institute in question has diminished since the 1990s and has become irrelevant in the twenty-first century.     

Improving the Performance of Failing Students by Overcoming Their Self-Serving Attributional Biases

The causal impact of attributions on academic performance was examined by changing low-scoring students' attributions regarding their poor performances. Initially, when students who were failing a college course identified the cause of the performance, they emphasized external, uncontrollable causes. Because these self-serving attributions could have perpetuated poor performance on subsequent examinations, students in the experimental condition were exposed to information that suggested that grades in college are caused by internal, controllable factors such as effort and motivation. As predicted, on subsequent tests and on the final examination, these students earned higher grades than control students who received no attributional information. These findings lend support to an attributional model of academic achievement and also suggest that educational interventions that shift attributions away from a self-serving pattern to a performance-facilitating pattern may improve academic outcomes.     

Active inference, sensory attenuation and illusions

Active inference provides a simple and neurobiologically plausible account of how action and perception are coupled in producing (Bayes) optimal behaviour. This can be seen most easily as minimising prediction error: we can either change our predictions to explain sensory input through perception. Alternatively, we can actively change sensory input to fulfil our predictions. In active inference, this action is mediated by classical reflex arcs that minimise proprioceptive prediction error created by descending proprioceptive predictions. However, this creates a conflict between action and perception; in that, self-generated movements require predictions to override the sensory evidence that one is not actually moving. However, ignoring sensory evidence means that externally generated sensations will not be perceived. Conversely, attending to (proprioceptive and somatosensory) sensations enables the detection of externally generated events but precludes generation of actions. This conflict can be resolved by attenuating the precision of sensory evidence during movement or, equivalently, attending away from the consequences of self-made acts. We propose that this Bayes optimal withdrawal of precise sensory evidence during movement is the cause of psychophysical sensory attenuation. Furthermore, it explains the force-matching illusion and reproduces empirical results almost exactly. Finally, if attenuation is removed, the force-matching illusion disappears and false (delusional) inferences about agency emerge. This is important, given the negative correlation between sensory attenuation and delusional beliefs in normal subjects—and the reduction in the magnitude of the illusion in schizophrenia. Active inference therefore links the neuromodulatory optimisation of precision to sensory attenuation and illusory phenomena during the attribution of agency in normal subjects. It also provides a functional account of deficits in syndromes characterised by false inference and impaired movement—like schizophrenia and Parkinsonism—syndromes that implicate abnormal modulatory neurotransmission.     

Obtaining 16 PF Scores from the MMPI,and MMPI Scores from the 16 PF

Recent statistical analyses of the relation of the MMPI surface traits to the source traits in the 16 P.F. were extended to (a) the calculation of beta weights for estimating MMPI scale scores from the 16 P.F. and (b) deriving the MMPI item composition in terms of 16 P.F. scores from the MMPI, and vice versa. It has been argued from the specific nature of surface and source traits that additional diagnostic insight can be gained from their comparison, a principle which has been designated as depth psychometry.     

Models for the Detection of Deviations from the Expected Processing Strategy in Completing the Items of Cognitive Measures

This paper presents confirmatory factor models with fixed factor loadings that enable the identification of deviations from the expected processing strategy. The instructions usually define the expected processing strategy to a considerable degree. Simplification is a deviation from instructions that is likely to occur in complex cognitive measures. Since simplification impairs the validity of the measure, its identification is important. Models representing simplicity and instruction-based processing strategies were considered in investigating the data of 345 participants obtained by a working memory measure in order to find out whether and how the use of these strategies influences model-data fit. As expected, the consideration of simplicity strategies improved the model-data fit achieved for the instruction-based strategy.