The duality of selection: excitatory and inhibitory processes in auditory selective attention

Behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) measurements were made in an auditory selective-attention paradigm, both before and after a series of inhibition or discrimination training sessions. The presence of distractors caused poor perceptual sensitivity, weak P3 responses, conservative responding, and slow reaction times relative to baseline. Distraction prompted a frontal enhancement of ERP components occurring 100-250 ms after the onset of attended signals (N1, P2, and N2). Training ameliorated behavioral interference from distraction. Participants receiving inhibition training acquired improved inhibitory processing of distractors, an effect that peaked 200 ms after distractor onset. In a proposed model, distinct excitatory and inhibitory mechanisms work interactively to maintain sensitivity to environmental change in the face of disruption from the contextual integration of irrelevant events.     

Functional lateralization of the human premotor cortex during sequential movements

A neurological truism is that each side of the brain controls movements on the opposite side of the body. Yet some left hemisphere brain lesions cause bilateral impairment of complex motor function and/or ideomotor apraxia. We report that the left dorsal premotor cortex of normal right-handed people plays a fundamental role in sequential movement of both right and left hands. Subjects performed sequential finger movements during functional magnetic resonance imaging of the motor cortices. In right-handed subjects, the volume of activated dorsal premotor cortex showed a left hemispheric predominance during hand movements. We suggest that the observed left premotor dominance contributes to the lateralization found in lesion studies.     

A kinematic examination of dual-route processing for action imitation

The dual-route model of imitation suggests that meaningful and meaningless actions are processed through either an indirect or a direct route, respectively. Evidence indicates that the direct route is more cognitively demanding since it relies on mapping visuospatial properties of the observed action on to a performed one. These cognitive demands might negatively influence reaction time and accuracy for actions performed following a meaningless action under time constraints. However, how meaningful and meaningless action imitation processing is reflected in movement kinematics is not yet clear. We wanted to confirm whether meaningless action performance incurs a reaction time cost, whether the cost is reflected in kinematics, and, more generally, to examine kinematic markers of emblematic meaningful and meaningless action imitation. We examined participants’ reaction time and wrist movements when they imitated emblematic meaningful or matched meaningless gestures in either blocks of the same action type or mixed blocks. Meaningless actions were associated with a greater correction period at the end of the movement, possibly reflecting a strategy designed to ensure accurate completion for less familiar actions under time constraints. Furthermore, in mixed blocks, trials following meaningless actions had a significantly increased reaction time, supporting previous claims that route selection for action imitation may be stimulus-driven. However, there was only convincing evidence for this effect with an interval of ~2,948ms, but not ~3,573ms or ~2,553ms, between movements. Future work motion-tracking the entire hand to assess imitation accuracy, and more closely examining the influence of duration between movements, may help to explain these effects.     

Does Positive Attitude Matter Only for Older Workers? Evidence from Simultaneous Estimation of Job Satisfaction,Wage and Positive Attitude in the United States

The current study tests two hypotheses. First, it claims that the worker’s job satisfaction is related not only to the objective variable wage rate, but also to the psychological variable positive attitude, and that all three variables are simultaneously related. Second, the study predicts that the psychological variable positive attitude as a covariate of job satisfaction matters more for matured adults who are already settled in their desired jobs than younger workers who may still be in search of their preferred employment. Using data on matured adults and younger adults from the United States and following a two-stage procedure the current study estimates job satisfaction, wage and positive attitude equations in a simultaneous equations framework. The study confirms the presence of this simultaneous relationship, and demonstrates that the job satisfaction of matured adults in fact is related to both objective (wage) and subjective (attitude) factors. For younger workers, however, wage, and not positive attitude, emerges as a significant covariate of their job satisfaction. Since positive attitude plays a significant role in the determination of their wages, it is related to their job satisfaction only indirectly through higher wages. Positive attitude thus benefits both older and younger workers thorough different channels. The study further presents interesting results on the covariates of wage and positive attitude which remain disguised when the simultaneous relationship among these three variables is ignored.     

Asian Indian Women: Domestic Violence,Mental Health,and Sites of Resilience

ABSTRACT

Culture is foundational to human experiences. As such, different cultural contexts and systems create different realities and lived experiences. Psychological knowledge and experiences within this context are then subject to socio-cultural systems, historical events, the distribution of economic and political power, and privileged positions of people within the system. This article highlights Asian Indian women’s lived experiences with domestic violence and their ways of healing. In particular, we present personal, political, social, and cultural factors that contribute to vulnerability and resilience in Indian women both in India and within the diaspora and note the role of community as an important indigenous source of healing.     

A Scanpath Analysis of the Risky Decision‐Making Process

In the field of eye tracking, scanpath analysis can reflect the sequential and temporal properties of the cognitive process. However, the advantages of scanpath analysis have not yet been utilized in the study of risky decision making. We explored the methodological applicability of scanpath analysis to test models of risky decision making by analyzing published data from the eye‐tracking studies of Su et al. (2013); Wang and Li (2012), and Sun, Rao, Zhou, and Li (2014). These studies used a proportion task, an outcome‐matched presentation condition, and a multiple‐play condition as the baseline for comparison with information search and processing in the risky decision‐making condition. We found that (i) the similarity scores of the intra‐conditions were significantly higher than those of the inter‐condition; (ii) the scanpaths of the two conditions were separable; and (iii) based on an inspection of typical trials, the patterns of the scanpaths differed between the two conditions. These findings suggest that scanpath analysis is reliable and valid for examining the process of risky decision making. In line with the findings of the three original studies, our results indicate that risky decision making is unlikely to be based on a weighting and summing process, as hypothesized by the family of expectation models. The findings highlight a new methodological direction for research on decision making. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Estimating the Mental Health Effects of Social Isolation

It is frequently hypothesized that feelings of social isolation are detrimental for an individual’s mental health, however standard statistical models cannot estimate this effect due to reverse causality between the independent and dependent variables. In this paper we present endogeneity-corrected estimates of the mental health consequences of isolation (based on self-assessed loneliness scores) using Australian panel data. The central identification strategy comes from a natural source of variation where some people within our sample are required by work or study commitments to move home. This relocation may break individuals’ social ties, resulting in significantly higher reported feelings of loneliness and consequently may lower mental health scores. The method gives results that are significant, robust and pass a battery of diagnostic tests. Estimates indicate that feelings of isolation have large negative consequences for psychological well-being, and that the effects are larger for women and older people. The results suggest that at current levels, a 10 % reduction applied to all individuals would reduce annual expenditure on mental illness in Australia by approximately $3B AUD, or around $150 AUD per person.     

论犹太教末世论

末世论是犹太教原创性教义之一,在2000多年的发展过程中,演变成为一种复杂的思想体系。复杂不仅体现在内容繁多,更体现在各派别在认识上矛盾重重,甚至互相对立,并且在发展过程中又受到波斯等外来思想的影响。对此,本文意在对犹太教末世论思想进行简单梳理,同时对其产生的原因和本质进行比较详细地分析。     

Hippocampal differentiation without recognition: an fMRI analysis of the contextual cueing task

A central role of the hippocampus is to consolidate conscious forms of learning and memory, while performance on implicit tasks appears to depend upon other structures. Recently, considerable debate has emerged about whether hippocampal-dependent tasks necessarily entail task awareness. In the contextual cueing task, repetition facilitation is implicit, but impaired in patients with amnesia. Whether the hippocampus alone or other MTL structures are required is unclear. Event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging revealed hippocampal activity that differentiates novel from repeated arrays. This pattern of results was observed without recognition of the repeating arrays. This finding provides support for the claim that the hippocampus is involved in processes outside the domain of conscious learning and memory.     

论犹太律法的主要特征

犹太律法是犹太民族的法律制度,它对犹太民族产生深远影响,犹太民族曾有律法民族之称,它的发展深受犹太民族的宗教、历史等的影响。在这些因素的影响下,犹太律法呈现出发展上的连续性、内容上的宗教性、信守上的民族性以及属人法性等特征。其中,连续性特征常常被人所误读,属人性特征是犹太律法中最为人所知的特征,而宗教性是犹太律法的显著特征,民族性特征使犹太律法呈现民族特色。正因如此,犹太律法不仅成为犹太文化重要内容,而且也是世界法系的重要组成部分。