Obesity and intellectual disability

While much of the industrialized world struggles for clues to the growing rise in obesity in their respective countries, researchers and service providers involved in understanding the health characteristics and health behaviors of persons with intellectual disability (ID) struggle with their own issues regarding the increased prevalence of obesity in this segment of the population. What is particularly alarming is that adults with ID residing in the United States in smaller, less supervised settings (e.g., group homes and family households) have a significantly higher rate of obesity compared to other countries and those living in larger and more supervised settings (e.g., institutions). These differences support the theory that the environment appears to exert a powerful influence on obesity in this population. Obesity presents a substantial threat to the livelihood of persons with ID and may have an effect on community participation, independent living, and healthy years of life. The lack of research on successful weight reduction strategies for obese persons with ID makes this an important and greatly needed area of research.     

Conditioned taste aversion is enhanced when the unconditioned stimulus is presented in a different context

Using a conditioned taste aversion procedure with rats as the subjects, two experiments examined the effect of presenting a conditioned stimulus (CS saccharin solution) in one context followed by an unconditioned stimulus (US LiCl) in a different context. Experiment 1 showed that animals which received the above-mentioned procedure (Group D) showed a more marked conditioned aversion to the CS than animals which were given both the CS and the US in the same context (Group S). Experiment 2 found that in both Group D and Group S, aversion to the CS increased when the subjects were exposed to the conditioned context after the conditioning. These findings supported the argument that the strength of the CS-US association acquired during conditioning is compared with that of the context-US to determine the magnitude of aversion revealed to the CS.     

Motion induction from biological motion

A new type of motion illusion is described in which ambiguous motion becomes unidirectional on superimposition of a human figure walking on a treadmill. A point-light walker in profile was superimposed on a vertical counterphase grating backdrop. Eleven na?ve observers judged the apparent direction of motion against the grating as left or right in a two-alternative forced-choice task and found that the grating appeared to drift in a direction opposite to the walking. The illusion disappeared when the point lights moved in scrambled configurations. This indicates that the illusion is caused by biological motion that provides recognition of gaits. A human figure walking backwards produced no illusion because of the difficulty in identifying the gait. This indicates that the illusion is determined by translational motion rather than form represented from biological motion.     

Flow Experience,Culture, and Well-being: How Do Autotelic Japanese College Students Feel,Behave, and Think in Their Daily Lives?

This study attempted to show how autotelic people who live in a non-Western culture feel, behave, and think in their daily lives. Using a sample of 315 Japanese college students, a series of correlation analyses were conducted between the frequency of flow experience as an indicator of autotelic personality and a broad range of well-being measures. A distribution analysis revealed that on average Japanese college students experienced flow more than a “few times a year,” but less than “once a month.” In the examination of relations between flow and well-being measures, autotelic Japanese college students, or those who experienced flow more often in their daily lives, were more likely to show higher self-esteem and lower anxiety, use active coping strategies more often and use passive coping strategies less often, as compared to their less autotelic counterparts. They were more likely to report active commitments to college life, search for future career, and daily activities in general. They also reported more Jujitsu-kan, a Japanese sense of fulfillment, and greater satisfaction with their lives. Implications of these findings are discussed in terms of what experiencing flow means and what effects flow potentially has for college students in a non-Western culture.     

An infant chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) follows human gaze

The ability of non-human primates to follow the gaze of other individuals has recently received much attention in comparative cognition. The aim of the present study was to investigate the emergence of this ability in a chimpanzee infant. The infant was trained to look at one of two objects, which an experimenter indicated by one of four different cue conditions: (1) tapping on the target object with a finger; (2) pointing to the target object with a finger; (3) gazing at the target object with head orientation; or (4) glancing at the target object without head orientation. The subject was given food rewards independently of its responses under the first three conditions, so that its responses to the objects were not influenced by the rewards. The glancing condition was tested occasionally, without any reinforcement. By the age of 13 months, the subject showed reliable following responses to the object that was indicated by the various cues, including glancing alone. Furthermore, additional tests clearly showed that the subject's performance was controlled by the "social" properties of the experimenter-given cues but not by the non-social, local-enhancing peripheral properties. Electronic Publication     

Regional brain activity during face and word discrimination: simultaneous recording of event-related potentials and positron emission tomography

In order to clarify the brain mechanisms involved in the recognition of faces, words, and figures, spatiotemporal analyses were carried out with event-related potentials (ERPs) and positron emission tomography (PET) in normal subjects. In the first experiment, we analyzed the ERPs of eight normal subjects under a passive habituation paradigm using pictures of faces and letters. In the second experiment, regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) measured using PET was obtained simultaneously with the ERP recordings during a continuous performance task (CPT) in 12 normal subjects. This required the active discrimination of famous people's faces, meaningful words consisting of two Japanese hiragana characters, and simple geometric figures. There were similar deflections in the global field power (GFP) in the first 200 ms of the passive and active tasks, regardless of type of stimuli. This suggests a common time course in the visual information processing mechanisms during the preattentive stage. Mesiotemporal activity, dominant on the right, was seen during the face discrimination task in both the PET results and the ERP topographies. In the word task, activity that was clearly dominant on the left was observed at around a 160 ms latency in the posteriotemporal region of the ERP topography and this again coincided well with the PET data. The spatiotemporal resolution of the analyses was improved by combining PET and topographic ERP studies, and this provided additional neurophysiological information concerning cognitive processing.     

Attenuation of latent inhibition after compound conditioning

Using a conditioned suppression procedure with rats, three experiments examined the effects of compound conditioning on the degree of latent inhibition. Experiment 1 suggested that latent inhibition of the preexposed target was not enhanced but rather attenuated when a second stimulus was presented in compound conditioning. Experiment 2 showed that a similar result was obtained when, in subjects given only compound conditioning, the salience of the target was reduced to the level where it was overshadowed by the second stimulus. Experiment 3 proved that addition of the second stimulus only during preexposure, or during both preexposure and conditioning, did not attenuate the latent inhibition to the target. These results are difficult to explain by any model of Pavlovian conditioning which assumes that both latent inhibition and overshadowing effects are a consequence of acquisition deà cit; other possible accounts are discussed.     

Eye contact does not facilitate detection in children with autism

Eye contact is crucial in achieving social communication. Deviant patterns of eye contact behavior are found in individuals with autism, who suffer from severe social and communicative deficits. This study used a visual oddball paradigm to investigate whether children with high functioning autism have difficulty in detecting mutual gaze under experimental conditions. The results revealed that children with autism were no better at detecting direct gaze than at detecting averted gaze, which is unlike normal children. This suggests that whereas typically developing children have the ability to detect direct gaze, children with autism do not. This might result in altered eye-contact behavior, which hampers subsequent development of social and communicative skills.     

Cultural variations on optimistic and pessimistic bias for self versus a sibling: is there evidence for self-enhancement in the west and for self-criticism in the east when the referent group is specified?

A culturally relevant framework was used to examine variations on optimistic and pessimistic bias in Westerners and Easterners. Study 1 showed that 136 European Americans compared with 159 Japanese were more likely to predict typical positive events to occur to self than to a sibling. The opposite pattern emerged in the prediction of typical negative events. Study 2 replicated these findings on the basis of predictions for atypical events in 175 European Americans and 130 Japanese. Across both studies, within-groups analyses indicated that European Americans held an optimistic bias in the prediction of positive and negative events, whereas Japanese held a pessimistic bias for negative events. These findings are taken to offer support for presumed cultural differences in self-enhancement and self-criticism between Westerners and Easterners, respectively.