Ethical and practical considerations in managing incidental findings in functional magnetic resonance imaging

Functional magnetic resonance imaging has emerged as a powerful tool for mapping the neurologic underpinnings of sensory, motor and cognitive function. Much of this evolution carries assumptions about the subject population under study and, in particular, the neurologic status of subjects entered into studies either as healthy controls or as belonging to a specific disease group. Recent reports of incidental MRI abnormalities in normal volunteers for fMRI studies have brought to attention a variety of practical challenges and ethical dilemmas for researchers, many of whom are not physicians and most of whom have no formal radiological training. We propose a minimum standard for consenting subjects in fMRI protocols, and consider strategies over the longer term that call for expert physician participation, archiving of incidental findings including false positives, and the adoption of guidelines for handling variation in neural activations or performance that appear outside expected norms.     

The Use of Multitrait–Multimethod Data for Detecting Nonlinear Relationships: The Case of Psychological Climate and Job Satisfaction

Previous monomethod research has found mixed support for nonlinear effects between certain job characteristics (e.g., job autonomy, job complexity) and outcome variables (e.g., job performance). We hypothesized that these weak nonlinear findings may be due to the prevalence of monomethod research that can lead to a lack of complete measurement and/or introduce common methods variance, either of which may mask the true shape of relationships. Using hierarchical regression analyses and a multitrait–multimethod (MTMM) research design, we found strikingly different results between monomethod and MTMM data when considering the relationships between three psychological climate variables and job satisfaction. While the monomethod results mirrored earlier inconclusive findings, the MTMM data indicated that nonlinear equations explained significantly more of the relationship between all three climate dimensions and job satisfaction. These results suggest that the use of MTMM data allows one to more effectively test for nonlinear effects. Furthermore, these nonlinear results suggest that the format of employee questionnaires should probably change from asking how much an employee has of certain constructs to asking does the employee want more or less of these constructs.     

The antiemetic drug ondansetron interferes with lithium-induced conditioned rejection reactions, but not lithium-induced taste avoidance in rats

Conditioned rejection reactions displayed in the taste reactivity test are exclusively produced by treatments that elicit nausea. The present experiments demonstrate that pretreatment with the antinausea agent ondansetron interferes with both the establishment and the expression of conditioned rejection reactions. Ondansetron did not interfere with lithium-induced taste avoidance in either a 1-bottle or a 2-bottle test. In fact, when rejection reactions were measured during a consumption test, ondansetron selectively attenuated rejection reactions, with only a slight modification of consumption. These results suggest that conditioned rejection reactions, but not conditioned taste avoidance, reflect nausea in rats that can be attenuated by ondansetron pretreatment.     

Reducing the Effects of Performance Expectations on Behavioral Ratings

In this study, we develop and test two strategies for reducing the effects of performance expectations on behavioral ratings. A 3 × 3 experimental design (N = 169), manipulating preobservation performance cues (positive, negative, or none) and the type of intervention (halo error training, structured recall memory, or none), was conducted. The results of this study indicate that both interventions reduced the effects of performance expectations on behavioral ratings. However, analyses of rating accuracy and measures from both recognition memory and recall memory tests suggest that the structured recall memory intervention has distinct advantages. These analyses indicate that the structured recall intervention can reduce raters' reliance on heuristics and increase the correspondence between raters' memory and their subsequent ratings.     

Characteristics of auditory agnosia in a child with severe traumatic brain injury: a case report

We present a case that is unusual in many respects from other documented incidences of auditory agnosia, including the mechanism of injury, age of the individual, and location of neurological insult. The clinical presentation is one of disturbance in the perception of spoken language, music, pitch, emotional prosody, and temporal auditory processing in the absence of significant deficits in the comprehension of written language, expressive language production, or peripheral auditory function. Furthermore, the patient demonstrates relatively preserved function in other aspects of audition such as sound localization, voice recognition, and perception of animal noises and environmental sounds. This case study demonstrates that auditory agnosia is possible following traumatic brain injury in a child, and illustrates the necessity of assessment with a wide variety of auditory stimuli to fully characterize auditory agnosia in a single individual.     

Paralinguistic processing in children with callosal agenesis: emergence of neurolinguistic deficits

Recent research revealed impaired processing of both nonliteral meaning and affective prosody in adults with agenesis of the corpus callosum (ACC) and normal intelligence. Since normal children have incomplete myelination of the corpus callosum, it was hypothesized that paralanguage deficits in children with ACC would be less apparent relative to their peers. The Familiar and Novel Language Comprehension Test (FANL-C) and Prosody Test were given to 18 children with ACC and normal intelligence and 17 controls matched for age (7-13 years), education, and IQ (83-122). When controlling for age, children with ACC were significantly poorer in comprehension of the precise meaning of both literal and nonliteral items on the FANL-C. Adults with ACC had previously been shown to have difficulty only on nonliteral items. The effect size for nonliteral comprehension in children with ACC was smaller than that seen in adults. There was only a trend for the child ACC group to perform worse on the recognition of affective prosody. Thus, while deficits in paralinguistic processing were apparent, children with ACC were not as clearly different from age peers as adults, and were equally deficient at comprehending literal and nonliteral expressions. The differences in results between adults and children with ACC are thought to reflect incomplete callosal development in normal children, and the importance of the corpus callosum in the early stages of the development of the ability to process literal language.     

Structure and stimulus familiarity: a study of memory in chess-players with functional magnetic resonance imaging

A grandmaster and an international chess master were compared with a group of novices in a memory task with chess and non-chess stimuli, varying the structure and familiarity of the stimuli, while functional magnetic resonance images were acquired. The pattern of brain activity in the masters was different from that of the novices. Masters showed no differences in brain activity when different degrees of structure and familiarity where compared; however, novices did show differences in brain activity in such contrasts. The most important differences were found in the contrast of stimulus familiarity with chess positions. In this contrast, there was an extended brain activity in bilateral frontal areas such as the anterior cingulate and the superior, middle, and inferior frontal gyri; furthermore, posterior areas, such as posterior cingulate and cerebellum, showed great bilateral activation. These results strengthen the hypothesis that when performing a domain-specific task, experts activate different brain systems from that of novices. The use of the experts-versus-novices paradigm in brain imaging contributes towards the search for brain systems involved in cognitive processes.     

Weathering the storm: children's long-term recall of Hurricane Andrew

Children who experienced a highly stressful natural disaster, Hurricane Andrew, were interviewed within a few months of the event, when they were 3-4 years old, and again 6 years later, when they were 9-10 years old. Children were grouped into low, moderate, or high stress groups depending on the severity of the experienced storm. All children were able to recall this event in vivid detail 6 years later. In fact, children reported over twice as many propositions at the second interview as at the first. At the initial interview, children in the high stress group reported less information than children in the moderate stress group, but 6 years later, children in all three stress groups reported similar amounts of information. However children in the high stress group needed more questions and prompts than children in the other stress groups. Yet children in the high stress group also reported more consistent information between the two interviews, especially about the storm, than children in the other stress groups. Implications for children's developing memory of stressful events are discussed.     

Sleep, dreams, and memory consolidation: the role of the stress hormone cortisol

We discuss the relationship between sleep, dreams, and memory, proposing that the content of dreams reflects aspects of memory consolidation taking place during the different stages of sleep. Although we acknowledge the likely involvement of various neuromodulators in these phenomena, we focus on the hormone cortisol, which is known to exert influence on many of the brain systems involved in memory. The concentration of cortisol escalates over the course of the night's sleep, in ways that we propose can help explain the changing nature of dreams across the sleep cycle.     

Praxis and Agency in Foucault’s Historiography

This paper examines the consequences for agency that Foucaults historiographical approach constructs. The analysis begins by explaining the difference between legislative history and exemplary history, drawing parallels to similar theoretical distinctions offered in the works of Max Weber, J.L. Austin, and Zygmunt Bauman. The analysis continues by reading Habermass critique of Foucault through the tropological lenses suggested by White [Metahistory. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973]; it argues that Habermass critique misrecognizes the tropes of Foucaultian genealogy. The paper draws implications for education by articulating possibilities for praxis and agency in terms of pedagogy specifically related to the distinction between didactics and modeling. The paper concludes by suggesting that genealogy does not play by Hegels rules, but rather exemplifies agency in ways that are not recognizable from a modernist perspective.