Effects of context on eye movements when reading about possible and impossible events

Plausibility violations resulting in impossible scenarios lead to earlier and longer lasting eye movement disruption than violations resulting in highly unlikely scenarios (K. Rayner, T. Warren, B. J. Juhasz, & S. P. Liversedge, 2004; T. Warren & K. McConnell, 2007). This could reflect either differences in the timing of availability of different kinds of information (e.g., selectional restrictions, world knowledge, and context) or differences in their relative power to guide semantic interpretation. The authors investigated eye movements to possible and impossible events in real-world and fantasy contexts to determine when contextual information influences detection of impossibility cued by a semantic mismatch between a verb and an argument. Gaze durations on a target word were longer to impossible events independent of context. However, a measure of the time elapsed from first fixating the target word to moving past it showed disruption only in the real-world context. These results suggest that contextual information did not eliminate initial disruption but moderated it quickly thereafter.     

Event-related potentials, reaction time, and response selection of skilled and less-skilled cricket batsmen

The differences in P300 latency, P300 amplitude, response selection, and reaction time between skilled and less-skilled cricket batsmen have been investigated. Eight skilled and ten less-skilled right-handed batsmen each viewed 100 in-swing, 100 out-swing, and 40 slower deliveries displayed in random sequence from projected video footage whilst their responses and electroencephalograms were recorded. Logistic regression was used to derive a discriminative function for the P300 data. This was done to determine whether the skilled batsmen differed from the less-skilled batsmen on the basis of pooled P300 amplitude and latency data. All the batsmen were correctly characterised as being skilled or less-skilled. Logistic regression equations with reaction time and correctness of response data indicated that behavioural data do not correctly classify skilled performance. It is suggested that skilled cricket batsmen have a superior perceptual decision-making ability compared with less-skilled cricket batsmen, as measured by P300 latency and amplitude. This appears to be the first study showing a link between skill and cerebral cortical activity during a perceptual cricket batting task and it could pave the way for future studies on mental processing in cricket batsmen.     

Social Psychology and Media: Critical Considerations

In this paper, we argue that media saturate everyday living, and that people engage with and are engaged by media in diverse and complex ways. We suggest a need for an informed social psychology of media that conceptualises media as social practice, and attends to media practices as they occur. We propose that much media psychology research is limited because it: (i) focuses too strongly on documenting causal, and usually negative, media effects; (ii) continues to apply unsuitable research methodologies and theories to investigating media and ignores advances in media research and theory arising outside the discipline; and (iii) largely ignores the social contexts in which media engagements occur. These arguments are illustrated by studies that take a more social and critical approach to media research and that show possibilities for overcoming these limitations and developing insights into psychological concerns enmeshed in media practices.     

Why did I right that? Factors that influence the production of homophone substitution errors

Despite considerable research on language production errors involving speech, little research exists in the complementary domain of writing. Two experiments investigated the production of homophone substitution errors, which occur when a contextually appropriate word (e.g., beech) is replaced with its homophone (e.g., beach tree). Participants wrote down auditorily presented sentences containing dominant or subordinate homophones. Homophones were preceded by a lexical prime that overlapped in phonology and orthography (e.g., teacher) or only orthography (e.g., headmaster) with the target homophone. Results showed more substitution errors when the context elicited a subordinate homophone than when it elicited a dominant homophone. Furthermore, both types of primes equivalently increased production of homophone errors relative to control words (e.g., lawyer), suggesting that only orthographic overlap between the prime and target was necessary to influence errors. These results are explained within dual-route models of spelling, which postulate an interaction between lexical and sublexical routes when spelling.     

Training clinical psychologists for rural and northern practice: Transforming challenge into opportunity

Abstract: The Rural and Northern Program (R&NP) of the University of Manitoba's Department of Clinical Health Psychology (DCHP) is a unique training and service delivery platform that was developed in response to the scarcity of psychological services in rural and northern areas of the province of Manitoba, Canada. Since 1996 rural and northern‐based psychologists, in conjunction with the faculty based in Winnipeg (Manitoba's largest city) have offered training to two interns and one postdoctoral resident (resident) yearly. The current article discusses the nature of the program, the regions of Manitoba that the program services, and recruitment and retention data. The authors conclude by offering suggestions for creating sustainable rural/northern psychological practice.     

Learning from experience: Examining the impact of client work upon two trainee therapists

This qualitative research study, focusing on the learning and change of two trainee therapists over a nine‐month period, was conducted by the trainees themselves. In collecting and analysing their data, the researchers made use of the heuristic methodology, to which some of the principles of the co‐operative inquiry methodology were added. The findings shed light on some of the ways in which trainee counsellors and psychotherapists might learn through their work with clients, the forms and contexts in which this learning may arise, and how the learning might affect the trainees. The findings additionally highlight some of the possible benefits of engaging in research for trainee counsellors and psychotherapists, in terms of their roles as practitioners. These include positive changes in the ways in which they work with clients, and changes in the ways they think about their practice.     

The Logic of Chastity: Women,Sex, and the History of Philosophy in the Early Modern Period

Before women could become visible as philosophers, they had first to become visible as rational autonomous thinkers. A social and ethical position holding that chastity was the most important virtue for women, and that rationality and chastity were incompatible, was a significant impediment to accepting women's capacity for philosophical thought. Thus one of the first tasks for women was to confront this belief and argue for their rationality in the face of a self‐referential dilemma.     

A revised semantic differential scale distinguishing between negative and positive God images

A sample of 755 school pupils between the ages of 11 and 18 years completed the Benson and Spilka semantic differential measure of God images. Factor analysis indicated the advantages of re‐scoring the measure as an eight item unidimensional index, defining semantic space relating to God images ranging from negative affect to positive affect.     

Coordination and timing of spine and hip joints during full body reaching tasks

Coupling of spine and hip joints during full body reaching tasks was investigated in 16 participants (8 male and 8 female) who performed reaching tasks at comfortable and fast-paced movement speeds to three targets located in a para-sagittal plane. The participants paused at target contact for 500ms and then returned to an upright posture. Three-dimensional joint motions of the spine and hip were recorded using an electromagnetic tracking device. We found an effect of movement phase (i.e., reach and return) on the onset timing of the spine and hip joints. For most target locations and movement speeds, spine motion onset preceded hip motion onset during the reaching phase of the movement task. In the reach phase, when averaged across all movement conditions, spine joint motion preceded hip joint motion by an average of 48.9ms. In contrast, in the return phase, hip joint motion preceded spine joint motion by an average of 63.0ms. Additionally, when participants were instructed to use either a knee flexion or knee extension strategy to perform the reaching tasks there was no effect of movement strategy on timing of the spine and hip. There was also no effect of target height on the spine-hip ratio, but as movement speed increased, the spine/hip ratio decreased for all target locations due primarily to an increase in hip joint excursion. The findings indicate clear differences in onset timing of the spine and hip joints during reaching tasks that necessitate some forward bending of the trunk and that onset timing is reversed for the return to an upright posture.     

Rats (Rattus norvegicus) encode the shape of an array of discrete objects

To navigate efficiently, a traveler must establish a heading using a frame of reference. A large body of evidence has indicated that humans and a variety of nonhuman animals utilize the geometry, or shape, of enclosed spaces as a frame of reference to determine their heading. An important and yet unresolved question is whether shape information from arrays of discrete objects and enclosed environments are represented, and utilized, in the same way. In the present study, rats were presented with a reference memory task in which they had to find water that was hidden in 1 of 4 discrete and unique objects placed at the vertices of a rectangle. The results indicate that rats could utilize both feature and geometry cues to locate the hidden goal. The rats' performance declined during transformation tests using a triangular array, indicating that the rats may have encoded the primary axis of the object array, rather than local cues, to direct their search.