Electrophysiological evidence for cognitive control during conflict processing in visual spatial attention

Event-related potentials were measured to investigate the role of visual spatial attention mechanisms in conflict processing. We suggested that a more difficult target selection leads to stronger attentional top-down control, thereby reducing the effects of arising conflicts. This hypothesis was tested by varying the selection difficulty in a location negative priming (NP) paradigm. The difficult task resulted in prolonged responses as compared to the easy task. A behavioral NP effect was only evident in the easy task. Psychophysiologically the easy task was associated with reduced parietal N1, enhanced frontocentral N2 and N2pc components and a prolonged P3 latency for the conflict as compared to the control condition. The N2pc effect was also obvious in the difficult task. Additionally frontocentral N2 amplitudes increased and latencies of N2pc and P3 were delayed compared to the easy task. The differences at frontocentral and parietal electrodes are consistent with previous studies ascribing activity in the prefrontal and parietal cortex as the source of top-down attentional control. Thus, we propose that stronger cognitive control is involved in the difficult task, resulting in a reduced behavioral NP conflict.     

Left gaze bias in humans, rhesus monkeys and domestic dogs

While viewing faces, human adults often demonstrate a natural gaze bias towards the left visual field, that is, the right side of the viewee’s face is often inspected first and for longer periods. Using a preferential looking paradigm, we demonstrate that this bias is neither uniquely human nor limited to primates, and provide evidence to help elucidate its biological function within a broader social cognitive framework. We observed that 6-month-old infants showed a wider tendency for left gaze preference towards objects and faces of different species and orientation, while in adults the bias appears only towards upright human faces. Rhesus monkeys showed a left gaze bias towards upright human and monkey faces, but not towards inverted faces. Domestic dogs, however, only demonstrated a left gaze bias towards human faces, but not towards monkey or dog faces, nor to inanimate object images. Our findings suggest that face- and species-sensitive gaze asymmetry is more widespread in the animal kingdom than previously recognised, is not constrained by attentional or scanning bias, and could be shaped by experience to develop adaptive behavioural significance.     

PERCEPTUAL DEFENSE MECHANISMS REGISTERED BY THE META-CONTRAST TECHNIQUE IN NORMAL AND PATHOLOGIC CHILDREN

L indbom , K. Perceptual defense mechanisms registered by the meta-con-trast technique in normal and pathologic children. Scand. J. Psychol ., 1968, 9, 109–116.—Patterns of perceptual defense mechanisms in lo-year-old children, on the whole, agree with adult patterns, as measured with the meta-contrast technique (MCT). The technique clearly differentiates between a clinical and a normal group and, in the clinical group of children, also between psychiatric symptom classes.     

Deadly combinations: how leadership contexts undermine the activation and enactment of followers’ high core self-evaluations in performance

Employees with high core self-evaluations (CSE) generally perform well in their jobs. The enactment of CSE in performance occurs within contexts, and leadership is one form of context that influences the activation and expression of CSE. Drawing on theories of CSE and leader–member exchange (LMX), we characterized the leadership context as the interaction between leader CSE and LMX quality. Examination of 173 followers and their 31 leaders in a manufacturing organization showed a positive association between follower CSE and performance when the context comprised high leader CSE and high LMX. Conversely, leadership contexts comprising high leader CSE and low LMX, or low leader CSE and high LMX, resulted in a negative relationship between follower CSE and performance. We also show that low CSE followers have relatively high performance under some circumstances. Thus, we contribute to understanding how some leadership contexts undermine high CSE followers’ performance and promote low CSE followers’ performance.     

Using mu rhythm desynchronization to measure mirror neuron activity in infants

The Mirror Neuron System hypothesis stating that observed actions are projected onto the observer’s own action system assigns an important role to development, because only actions mastered by the observer can be mirrored. The purpose of the present study was to investigate whether there is evidence of a functioning mirror neuron system (MNS) in 8-month-old infants. High-density EEG was used to assess the mu rhythm desynchronization in an action observation task where the infants observed a live model. To reduce noise, ICA decompositions were used. The results show a higher desynchronization of the mu rhythm when infants observed a goal-directed action than when they observed a spatially similar non-goal-directed movement. The localizations of the sources are in agreement with those proposed by the MNS hypothesis. This indicates that the MNS is functioning at this age.     

Duemmler, Kerstin; Nagel, Alexander-Kenneth: Governing Religious Diversity: Top-down and bottom-up initiatives in Germany and Switzerland

In recent years religious pluralization has become a significant policy issue in Western societies as a result of a new awareness of religion and of religious minorities articulating themselves and becoming more visible. The article explores the variety of social and political reactions to religious diversity in urban areas and in doing so it brings together theoretical concepts of political and cultural sociology. The notion of diversity governance as joint endeavour of state and societal actors managing societies is linked to the notion of boundary work as interplay of state and/or societal actors maintaining or modifying boundaries between religious traditions. Based on two case studies the article illustrates two idealtypical settings of diversity governance: The first case from the German Ruhr Area stands for a bottom-up approach which is based on civic self-organization of interreligious activities whereas the second case from the Swiss canton of Lucerne exhibits a model of top-down governance based on state interventions in religious instruction at schools. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and participant observation the authors show how different governance settings shape the construction and blurring of boundaries in the religious field. Both approaches operate differently when incorporating religious diversity and rendering former homogenous notions of we-groups more heterogeneous. Despite of the approaches initial aim of inclusion, patterns of exclusion are equally reproduced since the idea of ‘legitimate religion’ rooted in Christian majority culture is present.     

How Information Availability Interacts with Visual Attention during Judgment and Decision Tasks

Decisions in front of a supermarket shelf probably involve a mix of visually available information and associated memories—and interactions between those two. Several cognitive processes, such as decision making, search, and various judgments, are therefore likely to co‐occur, and each process will influence visual attention. We conducted two eye‐tracking experiments capturing parts of these features by having participants make either judgments or decisions concerning products that had been previously encoded. Half the time, participants made their choices with full information about the available products and half the time with crucial task‐relevant information removed. By comparing participants' use of visual attention during decisions and search‐based and memory‐based judgments, we can better understand how visual attention is differently employed between tasks and how it depends on the visual environment. We found that participants' visual attention during decisions is sensitive to evaluations already made during encoding and strongly characterized by preferential looking to the options later to be chosen. When the task environment is rich enough, participants engage in advanced integrative visual behavior and improve their decision quality. In contrast, visual attention during judgments made on the same products reflects a search‐like behavior when all information is available and a more focused type of visual behavior when information is removed. Our findings contribute not only to the literature on how visual attention is used during decision making but also to methodological questions concerning how to measure and identify task‐specific features of visual attention in ecologically valid ways. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cuban health psychology: A priority is the primary health care system

Cuban health psychology has experienced a great expansion during the last 25 years, both in the number of psychologists and in range of activities in the field. Today, psychologists are integrated at all levels of the national health system, an achievement which is particularly interesting in that Cuba is a developing country. In a position isolated from trends in international psychology, Cuba has developed a role for psychologists within the field of health which is adapted to its situation as a poor and socialistic country. Priority is given to preventive and community-based psychology within primary health care facilities. Psychologists in primary health care serve a composite client-group, with high priority given to pregnant women and to children. The work of these psychologists covers a wide range of health problems—-physical as well as mental—and focuses upon individuals as bio-psycho-social units. Their responsibilities include health promotion, disease prevention, consultation and treatment, rehabilitation, research and education. This report is based on a 2½ month long field study in Cuba, where Cuban health psychology, particularly as it relates to primary health care, was explored.     

Settler Colonialism,Decolonization, and Climate Change

The article proposes that climate change makes enduring colonial injustices and structures visible. It focuses on the imposition and dominance of colonial concepts of land and self-determination on Indigenous peoples in settler states. It argues that if the dominance of these colonial frameworks remains unaddressed, the progressing climate change will worsen other colonial injustices, too. Specifically, Indigenous self-determination capabilities will be increasingly undermined, and Indigenous peoples will experience the loss of what they understand as relevant land from within their own ontologies of land. The article holds that even if settler states strive to repair colonial injustices, these efforts will be unsuccessful if climate change occurs and decolonization is pursued within the framework of a settler colonial ontology of land. Therefore, the article suggests, decolonization of the ontologies of land and concepts of self-determination is a precondition for a just response to climate change.     

Keys and seats: Spatial response coding underlying the joint spatial compatibility effect

Spatial compatibility effects (SCEs) are typically observed when participants have to execute spatially defined responses to nonspatial stimulus features (e.g., the color red or green) that randomly appear to the left and the right. Whereas a spatial correspondence of stimulus and response features facilitates response execution, a noncorrespondence impairs task performance. Interestingly, the SCE is drastically reduced when a single participant responds to one stimulus feature (e.g., green) by operating only one response key (individual go/no-go task), whereas a full-blown SCE is observed when the task is distributed between two participants (joint go/no-go task). This joint SCE (a.k.a. the social Simon effect) has previously been explained by action/task co-representation, whereas alternative accounts ascribe joint SCEs to spatial components inherent in joint go/no-go tasks that allow participants to code their responses spatially. Although increasing evidence supports the idea that spatial rather than social aspects are responsible for joint SCEs emerging, it is still unclear to which component(s) the spatial coding refers to: the spatial orientation of response keys, the spatial orientation of responding agents, or both. By varying the spatial orientation of the responding agents (Exp. 1) and of the response keys (Exp. 2), independent of the spatial orientation of the stimuli, in the present study we found joint SCEs only when both the seating and the response key alignment matched the stimulus alignment. These results provide evidence that spatial response coding refers not only to the response key arrangement, but also to the—often neglected—spatial orientation of the responding agents.