Influence of time-of-day on joint Navon effect

The shared attention theory suggests that people devote greater cognitive resources to those features co-attended simultaneously with others, determining better performance in several types of tasks. When co-actors performed a go/no-go Navon task attending different features of target letters, the performance was impaired, reflecting a joint Navon effect (the representation of a co-actor’s attentional focus made it more difficult to select and apply one’s own focus of attention), probably due to asynchronous co-attention with a decrease in cognitive resources involved. Researches in chronobiology and chronopsychology demonstrated that not only selective attention (involved in a Navon task), but also cognitive resources have a daily fluctuations, mainly paralleling the circadian rhythm of body temperature (i.e. increasing values from the morning to evening with a subsequent decline in the night). The study was conducted to assess whether the presence of joint attention, as measured by the joint Navon effect, was influenced by the time-of-day. Sixteen pairs of participants sitting next to each other were required to respond to the identity letters in a go/no-go Navon task twice: in the morning (09:00–10:00) and early afternoon (13:00–14:00). The results showed a joint Navon effect in the morning session only, suggesting that joint attention was affected by the time-of-day effect on cognitive resources.     

Determinants of Quality of Life in Pre-Frail Older Adults According to Phenotypic Criteria: the VERISAUDE Study

Frailty is a dynamic clinical syndrome considered as part of an age-associated continuum of severity, including pre-frailty as an intermediate frailty status with potential reversibility to robustness. The main purpose of this study was to analyse the relationship between the different domains of quality of life, functional dependence and depressive symptomatology in older adults diagnosed as pre-frail, before progression to frailty occurs. Logistic regression analyses were conducted to examine whether sex, age, level of education and scores in the Geriatric Depression Scale 15-item Short Form (GDS-SF) and the Instrumental Activities of Daily Living Lawton scale determine the worst score in the WHOQOL-BREF (World Health Organization Quality of Life) in older adults meeting one or two frailty phenotypic criteria. Depressive symptomatology (GDS-SF score) was the main determinant of poor quality of life in both groups, and in all areas of WHOQOL-BREF. Age was only associated with poor satisfaction with own health. Female sex and low educational level were linked to low physical QOL and poor self-rated health, respectively, but only in older adults meeting one frailty criterion. Association between functional status and WHOQOL-BREF scores was only found in the univariate analysis. These results underline the importance of identifying multiple aspects, but mainly the presence of depressive symptomatology, as risk factors for all dimensions of quality of life in the pre-frailty process, where interventions might be targeted to reduce the progression of pre-frailty and frailty in older adults.     

Prospective Memory Impairment in Mild Cognitive Impairment: An Analytical Review

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a heterogeneous condition characterized by the presence in an otherwise healthy elderly individual of cognitive deficits involving specific domains in the absence of significant functional impairments. Reports indicate that prospective memory (PM), that is, the ability to remember to execute delayed intentions, is impaired in individuals with MCI. The present review discusses the current debate in the literature on PM functioning in MCI by focusing on the relationship between prospective retrieval and retrospective memory functioning. Analysis of the reported evidence revealed that both the prospective component and the retrospective component of PM can be impaired in MCI. Declarative memory dysfunction may account for the retrospective memory impairment, while either reduced executive abilities or a deficit of reflexive mechanisms could explain the prospective component impairment.     

Now you see it, now you don't: explicit versus implicit measures of the personal/group discrimination discrepancy

When making explicit self-report ratings, members of status- and racial-minority groups report less personal experience with discrimination than that encountered by their group—a phenomenon called the personal/group discrimination discrepancy (PGDD). This study provides evidence, for the first time, that the PGDD may be, in part, a product of the procedure used to measure it. White women and men completed explicit and implicit measures of personal and group discrimination based on sex. The PGDD surfaced among women in the explicit measures, but not in the implicit measures. These findings suggest that explicit and implicit measures might provide different assessments of experience with discrimination.     

Affective priming with pictures of emotional scenes: the role of perceptual similarity and category relatedness

Prime pictures portraying pleasant or unpleasant scenes were briefly presented (150-ms display; SOAs of 300 or 800 ms), followed by probe pictures either congruent or incongruent in emotional valence. In an evaluative decision task, participants responded whether the probe was emotionally positive or negative. Affective priming was reflected in shorter response latencies for congruent than for incongruent prime-probe pairs. Although this effect was enhanced by perceptual similarity between the prime and the probe, it also occurred for probes that were physically different, and the effect generalized across semantic categories (animals vs. people). It is concluded that affective priming is a genuine phenomenon, in that it occurs as a function of stimulus emotional content, in the absence of both perceptual similarity and semantic category relatedness between the prime and the probe.     

Third International Conference on Spatial Cognition: “Dynamics in Spatial Interactions”. Rome - Perugia, Italy: September 12th–15th 2006. www.icsc2006.org - committee@icsc2006.org

Call for Papers

Third International Conference on Spatial Cognition: “Dynamics in Spatial Interactions”. Rome - Perugia, Italy: September 12th–15th 2006. www.icsc2006.org - committee@icsc2006.org     

From models to rules: mechanization of reasoning as a way to cope with cognitive overloading in combinatorial problems

It is hypothesized that the transition from unfamiliar problems to familiar, well-learned problems coincides with the transition from a model-based style of reasoning to a rule-based style of reasoning; model-based style of reasoning helps understanding the problem structure, but can overload working memory when the number of models required increases; rule-based style of reasoning avoids cognitive overloading, at the cost of making individuals liable to mechanization errors. In Experiment 1, the number of models required to respond to a verification task affected response latencies with unfamiliar problems, but not with familiar problems, supporting the initial hypothesis. In Experiment 2, participants were prone to mechanization errors when confronted with slightly modified problems in the late stages of the experiment, supporting the hypothesis that they had developed a reasoning rule in the early stages and were blindly applying it. The findings suggest that model-based reasoning and rule-based reasoning serve different purposes and have different costs and benefits, are both available to human reasoners, and familiarization with a problem may induce the transition from the former to the latter. The findings also suggest that mechanization of reasoning may be the first step along a gradient of decreasing cognitive load, whose end-point is automatization, as discussed in theories of automatization of information processing.     

Parafoveal semantic processing of emotional visual scenes

The authors investigated whether emotional pictorial stimuli are especially likely to be processed in parafoveal vision. Pairs of emotional and neutral visual scenes were presented parafoveally (2.1 degrees or 2.5 degrees of visual angle from a central fixation point) for 150-3,000 ms, followed by an immediate recognition test (500-ms delay). Results indicated that (a) the first fixation was more likely to be placed onto the emotional than the neutral scene; (b) recognition sensitivity (A') was generally higher for the emotional than for the neutral scene when the scenes were paired, but there were no differences when presented individually; and (c) the superior sensitivity for emotional scenes survived changes in size, color, and spatial orientation, but not in meaning. The data suggest that semantic analysis of emotional scenes can begin in parafoveal vision in advance of foveal fixation.     

Personality disorders in patients with burning mouth syndrome

Burning Mouth Syndrome (BMS) presents high rates of comorbid Axis I disorders while no controlled studies have addressed the question of Axis II comorbidities. The aim of the present study was to examine DSM-IV (APA, 1994) Axis II comorbidity in BMS patients and to control for the specificity of this association. Seventy BMS patients were compared to a nonpsychiatric population sample and to patients with other Somatoform Disorders for the presence of personality disorders (assessed with the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Axis II Personality Disorders [SCID-II; First, Gibbon, Spitzer, & Williams, 1997). Prevalence rates were compared using the Pearson's chi square test. At least one personality disorder (PD) was found in 85.7%, 24.3%, and 88.6% of subjects in the three groups, respectively. When examining PD subgroups, significant differences emerged even between the BMS and the somatoform disorder group, with BMS patients showing more Cluster A and fewer Cluster B PDs. Our results suggest that BMS is associated with a specific pattern of Axis II comorbidity.