Feast your eyes: hunger and trait reward drive predict attentional bias for food cues

Appraisal theories of emotion predict that the relevance of a stimulus to a person's needs and goals influences attentional allocation. We used a modified visual probe task to examine the influence of hunger and trait reward drive on food-related attentional bias. Both hunger and trait reward drive predicted degree of attentional "disengagement" from food images at short (100 ms), but not long (500, 2,000 ms) stimulus durations. Effects of hunger were found for both bland and appetizing foods, while effects of reward drive were restricted to appetizing foods. Our findings extend previous research showing delayed "disengagement" from threat-related stimuli, suggesting that both organismic- and goal-relevance are key biasing factors in attentional competition.     

Differential Decline of Verbal and Visuospatial Processing Speed Across the Adult Life Span

The present study compared the age-related decline in verbal and visuospatial processing speed in 131 participants aged 18 to 90 years. Participants performed four verbal and four visuospatial tasks. Age differences in processing speed were compared at the group and individual levels. For the group-level analyses, participants were divided into a young adult group and six older groups subdivided by decade. The mean verbal and visuospatial response times (RTs) for each group were regressed on the corresponding RTs of the young adult group. The slope of the visuospatial regression was greater than that for the verbal regression at all ages, and the difference between the visuospatial and verbal slopes increased with each decade. For the individual-level analyses, a verbal and a visuospatial processing-time coefficient (Hale & Jansen, 1994) was obtained for each individual, and these values were then regressed on age. Verbal processing time increased linearly by approximately 50% while visuospatial processing time increased exponentially by approximately 500% from 18 to 90 years. Taken together, the results at both the group and the individual level demonstrate that aging affects visuospatial processing to a much greater extent than verbal processing.     

Confronting Deep Moral Disagreement: The President's Council on Bioethics,Moral Status,and Human Embryos

The report of the President's Council on Bioethics, Human Cloning and Human Dignity, addresses the central ethical, political, and policy issue in human embryonic stem cell research: the moral status of extracorporeal human embryos. The Council members were in sharp disagreement on this issue and essentially failed to adequately engage and respectfully acknowledge each others' deepest moral concerns, despite their stated commitment to do so. This essay provides a detailed critique of the two extreme views on the Council (i.e., embryos have full moral status or they have none at all) and then gives theoretical grounding for our judgment about the intermediate moral status of embryos. It also supplies an account of how to address profound moral disagreements in the public arena, especially by way of constructing a middle ground that deliberately pays sincere respect to the views of those with whom it has deep disagreements.     

Human trace fear conditioning: right-lateralized cortical activity supports trace-interval processes

Pavlovian conditioning requires the convergence and simultaneous activation of neural circuitry that supports conditioned stimulus (CS) and unconditioned stimulus (US) processes. However, in trace conditioning, the CS and US are separated by a period of time called the trace interval, and thus do not overlap. Therefore, determining brain regions that support associative learning by maintaining a CS representation during the trace interval is an important issue for conditioning research. Prior functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research has identified brain regions that support trace-conditioning processes. However, relatively little is known about whether this activity is specific to the trace CS, the trace interval, or both periods of time. The present study was designed to disentangle the hemodynamic response produced by the trace CS from that associated with the trace interval, in order to identify learning-related activation during these distinct components of a trace-conditioning trial. Trace-conditioned activity was observed within dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (PFC), dorsolateral PFC, insula, inferior parietal lobule (IPL), and posterior cingulate (PCC). Each of these regions showed learning-related activity during the trace CS, while trace-interval activity was only observed within a subset of these areas (i.e., dorsomedial PFC, PCC, right dorsolateral PFC, right IPL, right superior/middle temporal gyrus, and bilateral insula). Trace-interval activity was greater in right than in left dorsolateral PFC, IPL, and superior/middle temporal gyrus. These findings indicate that components of the prefrontal, cingulate, insular, and parietal cortices support trace-interval processes, as well as suggesting that a right-lateralized fronto-parietal circuit may play a unique role in trace conditioning.     

Experience with a talker can transfer across modalities to facilitate lipreading

Rosenblum, Miller, and Sanchez (Psychological Science, 18, 392-396, 2007) found that subjects first trained to lip-read a particular talker were then better able to perceive the auditory speech of that same talker, as compared with that of a novel talker. This suggests that the talker experience a perceiver gains in one sensory modality can be transferred to another modality to make that speech easier to perceive. An experiment was conducted to examine whether this cross-sensory transfer of talker experience could occur (1) from auditory to lip-read speech, (2) with subjects not screened for adequate lipreading skill, (3) when both a familiar and an unfamiliar talker are presented during lipreading, and (4) for both old (presentation set) and new words. Subjects were first asked to identify a set of words from a talker. They were then asked to perform a lipreading task from two faces, one of which was of the same talker they heard in the first phase of the experiment. Results revealed that subjects who lip-read from the same talker they had heard performed better than those who lip-read a different talker, regardless of whether the words were old or new. These results add further evidence that learning of amodal talker information can facilitate speech perception across modalities and also suggest that this information is not restricted to previously heard words.     

Reviews

The Gulag Archipelago (Vols. 1 and 2) by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Collins, 1974 and 1975, 600 pp. and 712 pp. £3.50 and £4.95.

Arkhipelag Gulag (Vols. 1, 2 and 3) YMCA Press, Paris, 1973, 1974 and 1976, 606 pp., 657 pp. and 581 pp. No price.

A Marxist Looks at Jesus by Milan Machovec, Darton Longman & Todd, 1976, 220 pp. £2.95.

White Book on Restrictions of Religion in the USSR by Michael Bourdeaux, Committee for the Defence of Human Rights in the USSR, Brussels, 1976, 66 pp., 65p.

Religious Liberty in the Soviet Union: WCC and USSR—A Post‐Nairobi Documentation edited by Michael Bourdeaux, Hans Hebly and Eugen Voss, Keston College (CSRC), 1976, 96 pp., £1.50.     

Book reviews

Balkan Babel: Politics, Culture and Religion in Yugoslavia by Sabrina Petra Ramet. Boulder, San Francisco and Oxford: Westview Press, 1992, xvi + 230pp. $44.95.

The Spring of Nations: Churches in the Rebirth of Central and Eastern Europe by J. Martin Bailey. New York: Friendship Press, 1991. 166pp. Paperback, $10.95.

The Christian Church in the Cold War by Owen Chadwick. London: Allen Lane the Penguin Press, viii + 230pp. £18.99, US$25.00, Can$29.99.     

Reports of recovered memories of childhood abuse in therapy in France

ABSTRACT

Recovered memories of abuse in therapy are especially controversial if the clients were not aware they were abused before therapy. In the past, such memory recovery has led to legal action, as well as a debate about whether such memories might be repressed, forgotten, or false memories. More than two decades after the height of the controversy, it is unclear to what degree such memories are still recovered today, and to what extent it occurs in France. In our French survey of 1312 participants (M_age?=?33; 53% female), 551 reported having done therapy at some point. Of that 551, 33 (6%) indicated they had recovered memories of abuse in therapy that they did not know about before therapy. Sexual abuse was the most commonly reported type that was recovered in therapy (79%). As in past research, discussing the possibility of repressed memories with therapists was associated with reports of recovered memories of abuse. Surprisingly, memory recovery occurred just as much in behavioural and cognitive therapies as it did in therapies focused on trauma. We found recovered memories in a proportion of clients who began therapy recently. Recovered memories in therapy appears to be an ongoing concern in France.     

Which processes are involved in cognitive procedural learning?

Procedural memory is characterised by a relative resistance to pathology, making its assessment of the utmost importance. However, few studies have looked at the cognitive processes involved in cognitive procedural learning. In an initial experiment, we studied the role of different cognitive functions in massed cognitive procedural learning. Our results confirmed the existence of three separate learning phases and, for the first time, demonstrated the involvement of episodic memory and executive functions in the first learning phase. In a second experiment, we studied the effect of distributed learning conditions on the dynamics of procedural learning. This second study confirmed our results but showed that these conditions slow down the process of cognitive procedural learning. Our overall findings call into question the status of functionally autonomous memory system that is currently allotted to procedural memory, and suggest that the role of nonprocedural cognitive components should be taken into account in patient rehabilitation.