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.     

Murine vocalizations: Experimental validation of a novel detector

A new device to detect vocalizations by mice or rats is described. Of modest cost and incorporating integrated circuits and controls that permit rapid setting of center frequency and sensitivity, the device is based on phase-locked tone decoding and can operate at sonic or ultrasonic frequencies. Circuit operation and schematics are provided, as are data from two studies of mice in which reliable discrimination of distress and submission calls from background noise was demonstrated.     

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.     

Effects of S-R and R-R compatibility on bimanual movement time

Bimanual asymmetrical movements are generally found to be slower than symmetrical movements but asymmetrical movement normally involves visual separation of targets which might account for the effect. By using a system in which the subject controls two cursors on an oscilloscope screen by moving two levers the S-R relationship on either hand can be reversed, thus providing an asymmetrical movement task without visual separation of targets. Movement times for five right-handed subjects were recorded on four unimanual and six bimanual conditions varying with respect to both S-R and R-R compatibility. In the unimanual conditions, the left hand was found to be as fast as the right when the opposite S-R relationship was used. In the bimanual tasks visual separation of targets was a relatively minor factor movement time being strongly influenced by S-R compatibility and to a lesser degree by R-R compatibility. The results suggest that compatibility, rather than being a property of a single central channel, differs, as between the two cerebral hemispheres.     

A revised Emotional Intelligence Scale: factor re-evaluation and item reduction

The original Emotional Intelligence Scale of Fukunishi utilized 65 items measuring 3 basic dimensions: intrapersonal, interpersonal, and situational. 170 psychiatric outpatients (84 men and 86 women) completed the inventory. The mean age of the sample was 41.1 yr. (SD= 12.4). Compared with the 65-item scale, factor re-analysis yielded a new 34-item solution with significant correlations for the Intrapsychic (.97) and Interpersonal dimensions (.96) of the larger scale, but not with the Situational dimension (.43). The correlation between the total inventory scores was also significant (.94).