Neonatal auditory evoked responses are related to perinatal maternal anxiety

Maternal stress and anxiety during pregnancy are related to negative developmental outcomes for offspring, both physiological and psychological, from the fetal period through early adolescence. This robust relationship is likely to be partly explained by alterations in fetal neurodevelopmental programming, calling for further examination of neurophysiologically-based cognitive markers that may be related to the altered structure–function relationships that contribute to these negative developmental outcomes. The current investigation examined the relationship between perinatal maternal anxiety and neonatal auditory evoked responses (AERs) to mother and stranger voices. Results indicated that neonates of low-anxiety mothers displayed more negative frontal slow wave amplitudes in response to their mother’s voice compared to a female stranger’s voice, while neonates of high-anxiety mothers showed the opposite pattern. These findings suggest that neonates of perinatally anxious mothers may demonstrate neurophysiologically-based differences in attentional allocation. This could represent one pathway to the negative psychological outcomes seen throughout development in offspring of anxious mothers.     

Investigations of closure processes: What source-monitoring judgments suggest about what is “closing”

On many occasions, the perception of an object is based on incomplete information because portions of the object are occluded from view. Nevertheless, people are able to identify an occluded object, suggesting that the identification is mediated by the activation of completion processes which “fill in” the missing information. Although these completion processes are invoked as causal mechanisms for many phenomena, the processes mediating the “completion” have not been specified. The present experiments tested two potential explanations for closure processes. In each experiment, participants were presented with pictures, complete or incomplete in form, and, on a surprise source-monitoring task, they were then asked to remember whether pictures had been presented complete or incomplete in form. Whether viewing pictures of objects, faces, or camouflaged objects, participants showed a pronounced tendency to claim that incomplete pictures were actually presented complete in form. This bias was evident after the participants described functions for objects (Experiments 1, 1A, and 2), after they evaluated properties of faces (Experiment 4), and after they searched for objects hidden in a complex scene (Experiment 5). However, this bias was not evident after they simply named objects portrayed in pictures (Experiment 3). This bias is interpreted as evidence for the activation of implicit imaginal processing. The results of these experiments are informative in their contribution to our understanding of the bases of closure, an intuitively appealing notion frequently invoked to account for object identification, but, as yet, not fully understood.     

A System for Relational Reasoning in Human Prefrontal Cortex

The integration of multiple relations between mental representations is critical for higher level cognition. For both deductive- and inductive-reasoning tasks, patients with prefrontal damage exhibited a selective and catastrophic deficit in the integration of relations, whereas patients with anterior temporal lobe damage, matched for overall IQ but with intact prefrontal cortex, exhibited normal relational integration. In contrast, prefrontal patients performed more accurately than temporal patients on tests of both episodic memory and semantic knowledge. These double dissociations suggest that integration of relations is a specific source of cognitive complexity for which intact prefrontal cortex is essential. The integration of relations may be the fundamental common factor linking the diverse abilities that depend on prefrontal function, such as planning, problem solving, and fluid intelligence.     

High school and college students' attitudes toward rape

This study explored the relationship between agreement with myths about rape and the tendency to blame the victim in a sample of high school and college students. It was found that high school males believed more strongly than did both high school females and college males in myths about rape, and they assigned greater blame to the victims of rape. For both high school males and females, belief in myths about rape was associated with assigning more blame to the victims.     

When does visual attention select all features of a distractor?

What happens after visual attention is allocated to an object? Although many theories of attention assume that all of its features are selected and processed, there has been little direct evidence that an irrelevant feature dimension of an attended nontarget is processed. In 5 experiments presented here, the authors used a singleton paradigm to investigate the effect of attention on nontarget objects. Participants made a speeded feature discrimination of a target for which the response was either compatible or incompatible with an irrelevant feature dimension of a distractor. The results show that the irrelevant distractor features were processed to the point that they interfered with the response to the target. The response compatibility effect was observed even when the location of the target or the distractor was invariant, although it was much weaker when both locations were invariant. These results demonstrate that in many circumstances, an attended distractor is completely selected and fully processed, and the complete processing of distractors depends on a number of factors, many of which are related to the strength of attention to the distractor.