An exploratory mapping of college girls’ identity and some of its concomitant variables

Two hundred and thirty undergraduate girls drawn from three colleges located in and around Patna, Bihar, participated in a study that aimed to explore their identity pattern and the pattern its relationships with family and college environments as well as the socio-economic status and parents’ characteristics. Factor analysis yielded five factors of identity: Confident, emotional, uncertain, conscious of one’s physical and religious self. Family environment had two facets: Cohesiveness of the family and external exposure to the family. Academic emphasis and fun and freedom were the two dimensions of college environment. The findings showed that both the academic emphasis and fun and freedom in the college environment played a crucial role in shaping the girls’ identity. Cohesive family was another important contributor to girl’s identity. Mother’s education was positively related to girls’ emotional self and father’s education contributed negatively to girls’ uncertain, religious, and consciousness of physical self.     

Health Related Quality of Life After Percutaneous Coronary Revascularisation in Patients with Previous Coronary Artery Bypass Grafts: A Two-Year Follow Up Study

Percutaneous coronary revascularisation [PCR] improves angina and health related quality of life [HRQOL] compared to standard medical therapy. It is unknown whether PCR has the same benefits for patients with a history of CABG. Over a period of 5 years, we assessed HRQOL of patients undergoing PCR using Part 1 of the Nottingham Health Profile [NHP] at baseline 3, 12 and 24 months. We compared HRQOL after PCR in 255 patients with CABG to 2680 without. There were more males [81.1% v 69.6% p = 0.002] and older patients [mean age 60.1 years v. 58.0 p = 0.03] in CABG group. Perceived HRQOL improved at 24 months for pain, energy and emotional reaction but the improvement was less in the CABG group. However, mean NHP scores at 24 months for those with CABG had returned to baseline levels for sleep [34.9] and for physical function was worse than at baseline [22.0 vs 30.7]. This relationship persisted after adjustment for male sex, history of previous MI and coronary stent usage. Patients with previous CABG had less improvement in HRQOL after PCR. Further work is needed to assess the benefits and cost effectiveness of PCR in these patients.     

Dynamics of attention in depth: evidence from multi-element tracking

We examined the allocation of attention in depth using a multi-element tracking paradigm. Observers were required to track a predefined subset of from two to eight elements in displays containing up to sixteen identical moving elements. We first show that depth cues, such as binocular disparity and occlusion through T-junctions, improve performance in a multi-element tracking task in the case where element boundaries are allowed to intersect in the depiction of motion in a single frontoparallel plane. We also show that the allocation of attention across two perceptually distinguishable planar surfaces, either frontoparallel or receding at a slanting angle and defined by coplanar elements, is easier than allocation of attention within a single surface. The same result was not found when attention was required to be deployed across items of two-color populations rather than across items of a single color. Our results suggest that, when surface information does not suffice to distinguish between targets and distractors that are embedded in these surfaces, division of attention across two surfaces aids in tracking moving targets. A final experiment with populations of elements moving within distinct volumes produced similar results, suggesting that spatial separation in three dimensions, rather than confinement to surfaces as such, may explain the improved performance for the two-surface case.     

An enquiry into the process of categorization of pictures and words

This paper reports a series of experiments conducted to study the categorization of pictures and words. Whereas some studies reported in the past have found a picture advantage in categorization, other studies have yielded no differences between pictures and words. This paper used an experimental paradigm designed to overcome some methodological problems to examine picture-word categorization. The results of one experiment were consistent with an advantage for pictures in categorization. To identify the source of the picture advantage in categorization, two more experiments were conducted. Findings suggest that semantic relatedness may play an important role in the categorization of both pictures and words. We explain these findings by suggesting that pictures simultaneously access both their concept and visually salient features whereas words may initially access their concept and may subsequently activate features. Therefore, pictures have an advantage in categorization by offering multiple routes to semantic processing.     

Telling the right hand from the left hand: multisensory integration, not motor imagery, solves the problem

Judging the laterality of a hand seen at unanticipated orientations evokes a robust feeling of bodily movement, even though no movement is produced. In two experiments, we tested a novel hypothesis to explain this phenomenon: A hand's laterality is determined via a multisensory binding of the visual representation of the seen hand and a proprioceptive representation of the observer's felt hand, and the felt "movement" is an obligatory aftereffect of intersensory recalibration. Consistent with the predictions implied by such a cross-modal mechanism, our results in Experiment 1 showed that manipulating observers' selective attention can evoke illusory feelings of movement in the "wrong" hand (i.e., the hand whose laterality does not match that of the stimulus). In Experiment 2, these illusions were readily extinguished in conditions in which binding was predicted to fail, a result indicating that cross-modal binding was necessary to produce them. These results are not explained by imagery, a mechanism widely assumed to account for how hand laterality is identified.     

Homogeneity computation: How interitem similarity in visual short-term memory alters recognition

Visual short-term recognition memory for multiple stimuli is strongly influenced by the study items’ similarity to one another—that is, by their homogeneity. However, the mechanism responsible for this homogeneity effect has remained unclear. We evaluated competing explanations of this effect, using controlled sets of Gabor patches as study items and probe stimuli. Our results, based on recognition memory for spatial frequency, rule out the possibility that the homogeneity effect arises because similar study items are encoded and/or maintained with higher fidelity in memory than dissimilar study items are. Instead, our results support the hypothesis that the homogeneity effect reflects trial-by-trial comparisons of study items, which generate a homogeneity signal. This homogeneity signal modulates recognition performance through an adjustment of the subject’s decision criterion. Additionally, it seems the homogeneity signal is computed prior to the presentation of the probe stimulus, by evaluating the familiarity of each new stimulus with respect to the items already in memory. This suggests that recognition-like processes operate not only on the probe stimulus, but on study items as well.     

Understanding the influence of literacy on consumer memory: The role of pictorial elements

This research examines the relationship between literacy and consumer memory. The effects of a variety of stimuli at exposure (i.e., brand names, brand signatures, and products in usage) on memory (i.e., recognition, stem-completion tasks) were examined for a range of literacy. In a series of experiments, we find that the use of pictorial representations of brands (i.e., brand signatures) results in superior brand memory for individuals with lower literacy levels when compared to those at higher literacy levels. This effect is shown to occur not due to pictorial elements per se, but due to pictorial elements with a 1-to-1 correspondence with reality, i.e., which match the form in which they were originally encoded in memory. Moreover, this effect does not persist with stimulus-rich pictures of brands in usage, pointing to boundary conditions with the use of pictorial information.     

Components of executive control with advantages for bilingual children in two cultures

The present study used a behavioral version of an anti-saccade task, called the ‘faces task’, developed by [Bialystok, E., Craik, F. I. M., & Ryan, J. (2006). Executive control in a modified anti-saccade task: Effects of aging and bilingualism. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 32, 1341-1354] to isolate the components of executive functioning responsible for previously reported differences between monolingual and bilingual children and to determine the generality of these differences by comparing bilinguals in two cultures. Three components of executive control were investigated: response suppression, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility. Ninety children, 8-years old, belonged to one of three groups: monolinguals in Canada, bilinguals in Canada, and bilinguals in India. The bilingual children in both settings were faster than monolinguals in conditions based on inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility but there was no significant difference between groups in response suppression or on a control condition that did not involve executive control. The children in the two bilingual groups performed equivalently to each other and differently from the monolinguals on all measures in which there were group differences, consistent with the interpretation that bilingualism is responsible for the enhanced executive control. These results contribute to understanding the mechanism responsible for the reported bilingual advantages by identifying the processes that are modified by bilingualism and establishing the generality of these findings across bilingual experiences. They also contribute to theoretical conceptions of the components of executive control and their development.     

Bilingualism, aging, and cognitive control: evidence from the Simon task

Previous work has shown that bilingualism is associated with more effective controlled processing in children; the assumption is that the constant management of 2 competing languages enhances executive functions (E. Bialystok, 2001). The present research attempted to determine whether this bilingual advantage persists for adults and whether bilingualism attenuates the negative effects of aging on cognitive control in older adults. Three studies are reported that compared the performance of monolingual and bilingual middle-aged and older adults on the Simon task. Bilingualism was associated with smaller Simon effect costs for both age groups; bilingual participants also responded more rapidly to conditions that placed greater demands on working memory. In all cases the bilingual advantage was greater for older participants. It appears, therefore, that controlled processing is carried out more effectively by bilinguals and that bilingualism helps to offset age-related losses in certain executive processes.