Visualizing the perisaccadic shift of spatiotopic coordinates

A point light source flickering on and off during a horizontal saccade projects a horizontal array onto the retina. The apparent visual direction of the tail end of the perceived (phantom) array reflects the amount of perisaccadic shift of spatiotopic coordinates that has been completed by the end of the saccade. Four men, saccading 8° to the right across a flashing light, judged the horizontal visual direction of the left (tail) end of the phantom array relative to the left end of a standard 8° array that had projected an image onto the retina before the saccade began. On average, the left ends appeared to be aligned when the last flash in the phantom array was imaged on the retina 7.4° to the right of the image of the left end of the standard array. This result implies that the shift of spatiotopic coordinates is virtually complete by the end of the saccade.     

Personal,Social, Academic,and Career Problems Expressed by Minority College Students

Minority freshman college students were asked about their vocational, educational, personal and social concerns while attending a predominantly White university.     

Sexual,body-image,and personality attitudes in anorexia nervosa

Assessment of adolescent females with anorexia nervosa was carried out at the time of hospitalization and again at discharge. Findings were compared to those from a normal weight control group. The anorexic subjects at the start of treatment indicated significantly negative attitudes about sexual issues. They also reported a significantly poorer self-evaluation of their body, personality, and social skills than was evident in the comparison group. An improvement in attitude regarding these issues was demonstrated by the end of treatment. The function of weight loss in dealing with these problem areas was discussed.     

Dependability of personality, life satisfaction, and affect in short-term longitudinal data

The consistency of individual differences across time has implications for theory building and clinical applications. Indeed, personality psychologists have long worked to place constructs on the continuum of consistency of more trait-like to more state-like constructs. Recently, Chmielewski and Watson () highlighted the importance of dependability coefficients for interpreting the results of stability studies. These coefficients provide an estimate of how strongly short-term transient error affects retest correlations for a given measure. In this article, we use a modified version of Kenny and Zautra's (, ) STARTS model to estimate dependability of personality, life satisfaction, and affect in a 2-month longitudinal study of 8 waves. Results from 226 undergraduate students indicated that personality ratings were least influenced by transient state factors, whereas affect was most influenced. We discuss these findings in terms of their implications for the continuum of consistency and for the practical issue of selecting retest intervals for dependability analyses.     

Cognitive control of language production in bilinguals involves a partly independent process within the domain-general cognitive control network: evidence from task-switching and electrical brain activity

In highly proficient, early bilinguals, behavioural studies of the cost of switching language or task suggest qualitative differences between language control and domain-general cognitive control. By contrast, several neuroimaging studies have shown an overlap of the brain areas involved in language control and domain-general cognitive control. The current study measured both behavioural responses and event-related potentials (ERPs) from bilinguals who performed picture naming in single- or mixed-language contexts, as well as an alphanumeric categorisation task in single- or mixed-task context. Analysis of switch costs during the mixed-context conditions showed qualitative differences between language control and domain-general cognitive control. A 2 × 2 ANOVA of the ERPs, with domain (linguistic, alphanumeric) and context (single, mixed) as within-participant factors, revealed a significant interaction, which also suggests a partly independent language-control mechanism. Source estimations revealed the neural basis of this mechanism to be in bilateral frontal-temporal areas.     

Using trait–state models to evaluate the longitudinal consistency of global self-esteem from adolescence to adulthood

The present research used a latent variable trait–state model to evaluate the longitudinal consistency of self-esteem during the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Analyses were based on ten administrations of the Rosenberg self-esteem scale (Rosenberg, 1965) spanning the ages of approximately 13–32 for a sample of 451 participants. Results indicated that a completely stable trait factor and an autoregressive trait factor accounted for the majority of the variance in latent self-esteem assessments, whereas state factors accounted for about 16% of the variance in repeated assessments of latent self-esteem. The stability of individual differences in self-esteem increased with age consistent with the cumulative continuity principle of personality development.     

Towards a mathematical model of within-session operant responding

Operant response rate changes within the course of a typical free-operant experimental session. These changes are orderly, and reliably demonstrated with subjects from different species, responding under different experimental conditions. Killeen (1995) postulated that the response rate changes are a function of the interplay between arousal and satiation and offered a mathematical model for this hypothesis. Here we analyze Killeen's model, demonstrating that, although solid in its principles, it presents some flaws in its implementation. Then, based on the same principles, we build and test a new model of within-session motivation dynamics. We also demonstrate that, by representing arousal as a variable that ranges between 0 and 1, we can obtain a surprisingly simple model of free-operant response rate.