Domain-dependent activation during spatial and nonspatial auditory working memory

Visual system has been proposed to be divided into two, the ventral and dorsal, processing streams. The ventral pathway is thought to be involved in object identification whereas the dorsal pathway processes information regarding the spatial locations of objects and the spatial relationships among objects. Several studies on working memory (WM) processing have further suggested that there is a dissociable domain-dependent functional organization within the prefrontal cortex for processing of spatial and nonspatial visual information. Also the auditory system is proposed to be organized into two domain-specific processing streams, similar to that seen in the visual system. Recent studies on auditory WM have further suggested that maintenance of nonspatial and spatial auditory information activates a distributed neural network including temporal, parietal, and frontal regions but the magnitude of activation within these activated areas shows a different functional topography depending on the type of information being maintained. The dorsal prefrontal cortex, specifically an area of the superior frontal sulcus (SFS), has been shown to exhibit greater activity for spatial than for nonspatial auditory tasks. Conversely, ventral frontal regions have been shown to be more recruited by nonspatial than by spatial auditory tasks. It has also been shown that the magnitude of this dissociation is dependent on the cognitive operations required during WM processing. Moreover, there is evidence that within the nonspatial domain in the ventral prefrontal cortex, there is an across-modality dissociation during maintenance of visual and auditory information. Taken together, human neuroimaging results on both visual and auditory sensory systems support the idea that the prefrontal cortex is organized according to the type of information being maintained in WM.     

Grammatical Gender in Speech Production: Evidence from Czech

Three experiments demonstrate gender congruency effects (i.e., naming times of a picture are faster when the name of the target picture and a distractor noun are gender congruent) in Czech. In the first experiment, subjects named the pictures by producing gender-marked demonstrative pronouns and a noun. In the second and third experiments, subjects produced a gender-marked numeral (marked with a suffix) plus a noun. Two types of such suffixes exist in Czech. Some numerals vary in nominative singular with gender, others do not. The results show significant gender congruency effects in all experiments. They suggest that gender congruency effects can be obtained not only with free, but also with bound morphemes. In the second and third experiment the effect only emerged when the suffix was gender-marked (as opposed to gender-invariant), supporting the view that the gender congruency effect is due to competition at the level of phonological forms rather than at the grammatical level.     

Was William James a Patient at McLean Hospital for the Mentally Ill?

Rumors that William James was a patient at McLean Asylum near Boston have persisted for several decades. I focus on the reasons why the question has been so difficult to answer in any definitive way; assess the evidence presented in support of the rumors; note that two different periods in James’s life (late twenties and early sixties) have been judged the most likely; and explore the diagnostic question as well: If he was in fact a patient, for what was he being treated? I also discuss evidence that his younger brother Robertson was a patient at McLean and consider the bearing of this evidence on the question of whether William James was a patient at McLean and on the diagnostic issue.     

Proper Semantics for Substructural Logics,from a Stalker Theoretic Point of View

We study filters in residuated structures that are associated with congruence relations (which we call -filters), and develop a semantical theory for general substructural logics based on the notion of primeness for those filters. We first generalize Stone’s sheaf representation theorem to general substructural logics and then define the primeness of -filters as being “points” (or stalkers) of the space, the spectrum, on which the representing sheaf is defined. Prime FL-filters will turn out to coincide with truth sets under various well known semantics for certain substructural logics. We also investigate which structural rules are needed to interpret each connective in terms of prime -filters in the same way as in Kripke or Routley-Meyer semantics. We may consider that the set of the structural rules that each connective needs in this sense reflects the difficulty of giving the meaning of the connective. A surprising discovery is that connectives , ⅋ of linear logic are linearly ordered in terms of the difficulty in this sense. Presented by Wojciech Buszkowski     

Do wild New Caledonian crows (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Corvus moneduloides</Emphasis>) attend to the functional properties of their tools?

New Caledonian crows are the most proficient non-hominin tool manufacturers but the cognition behind their remarkable skills remains largely unknown. Here we investigate if they attend to the functional properties of the tools that they routinely use in the wild. Pandanus tools have natural barbs along one edge that enable them to function as hooking implements when the barbs face backwards from the working tip. In experiment 1 we presented eight crows with either a non-functional (‘upside-down’) or a functional pandanus tool in a baited hole. Four of the crows never flipped the tools. The behaviour of the four flipping birds suggested that they had a strategy of flipping a tool when it was not working. Observations of two of the eight crows picking up pandanus tools at feeding tables in the wild supported the lack of attention to barb direction. In experiment 2 we gave six of the eight crows a choice of either a barbed or a barbless pandanus tool. Five of the crows chose tools at random, which further supported the findings in experiment 1 that the crows paid little or no attention to the barbs. In contrast, a third experiment found that seven out of eight crows flipped non-functional stick tools significantly more than functional ones. Our findings indicate that the crows do not consistently attend to the presence or orientation of barbs on pandanus tools. Successful pandanus tool use in the wild seems to rely on behavioural strategies formed through associative learning, including procedural knowledge about the sequence of operations required to make a successful pandanus tool. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.     

Pop-out and pop-in: Visual working memory advantages for unique items

Attentional control is thought to play a critical role in determining the amount of information that can be stored and retrieved from visual working memory (VWM). We tested whether and how task-irrelevant feature-based salience, known to affect the control of visual attention, affects VWM performance. Our results show that features of a task-irrelevant color singleton are more likely to be recalled from VWM than non-singleton items and that this increased memorability comes at a cost to the other items in the display. Furthermore, the singleton effect in VWM was negatively correlated with an individual’s baseline VWM capacity. Taken together, these results suggest that individual differences in VWM storage capacity may be partially attributable to the ability to ignore differences in task-irrelevant physical salience.     

Changes in the Social Responsibility Attitudes of Engineering Students Over Time

This research explored how engineering student views of their responsibility toward helping individuals and society through their profession, so-called social responsibility, change over time. A survey instrument was administered to students initially primarily in their first year, senior year, or graduate studies majoring in mechanical, civil, or environmental engineering at five institutions in September 2012, April 2013, and March 2014. The majority of the students (57 %) did not change significantly in their social responsibility attitudes, but 23 % decreased and 20 % increased. The students who increased, decreased, or remained the same in their social responsibility attitudes over time did not differ significantly in terms of gender, academic rank, or major. Some differences were found between institutions. Students who decreased in social responsibility initially possessed more positive social responsibility attitudes, were less likely to indicate that college courses impacted their views of social responsibility, and were more likely to have decreased in the frequency that they participated in volunteer activities, compared to students who did not change or increased their social responsibility. Although the large percentage of engineering students who decreased their social responsibility during college was disappointing, it is encouraging that courses and participation in volunteer activities may combat this trend.     

Zur Therapie von ADHS bei komorbiden Autismus-Spektrum-Störungen

Until recently, research on the co-occurrence of ADHD with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has been limited by the fact that current classification systems did not allow a dual diagnosis of these two neurodevelopmental disorders. Since the DSM-5 permits a double diagnosis of ADHD plus ASD, research on their comorbidity has substantially increased. In addition to shared and distinct etiological factors, studies have revealed a high clinical impact of the combined symptomatology on affected individuals. This article provides a selective overview of evidence-based, mainly pharmacological treatment strategies in ADHD/ASD phenotypes.     

Probabilistic numerical discrimination in mice

Previous studies showed that both human and non-human animals can discriminate between different quantities (i.e., time intervals, numerosities) with a limited level of precision due to their endogenous/representational uncertainty. In addition, other studies have shown that subjects can modulate their temporal categorization responses adaptively by incorporating information gathered regarding probabilistic contingencies into their time-based decisions. Despite the psychophysical similarities between the interval timing and nonverbal counting functions, the sensitivity of count-based decisions to probabilistic information remains an unanswered question. In the current study, we investigated whether exogenous probabilistic information can be integrated into numerosity-based judgments by mice. In the task employed in this study, reward was presented either after few (i.e., 10) or many (i.e., 20) lever presses, the last of which had to be emitted on the lever associated with the corresponding trial type. In order to investigate the effect of probabilistic information on performance in this task, we manipulated the relative frequency of different trial types across different experimental conditions. We evaluated the behavioral performance of the animals under models that differed in terms of their assumptions regarding the cost of responding (e.g., logarithmically increasing vs. no response cost). Our results showed for the first time that mice could adaptively modulate their count-based decisions based on the experienced probabilistic contingencies in directions predicted by optimality.