Social Cognition,Accuracy, and Physiology

Existing norms for scientific communication are rooted in anachronistic practices of bygone eras making them needlessly inefficient. We outline a path that moves away from the existing model of scientific communication to improve the efficiency in meeting the purpose of public science—knowledge accumulation. We call for six changes: (a) full embrace of digital communication; (b) open access to all published research; (c) disentangling publication from evaluation; (d) breaking the “one article, one journal” model with a grading system for evaluation and diversified dissemination outlets; (e) publishing peer review; and (f) allowing open, continuous peer review. We address conceptual and practical barriers to change and provide examples showing how the suggested practices are being used already. The critical barriers to change are not technical or financial; they are social. Although scientists guard the status quo, they also have the power to change it.     

The Cognitive Effectiveness of Subtitle Processing

In an experimental study, we analyzed the cognitive processing of a subtitled film excerpt by adopting a methodological approach based on the integration of a variety of measures: eye-movement data, word recognition, and visual scene recognition. We tested the hypothesis that the processing of subtitled films is cognitively effective: It leads to a good understanding of film content without requiring a significant tradeoff between image processing and text processing. Following indications in the psycholinguistic literature, we also tested the hypothesis that two-line subtitles whose segmentation is syntactically incoherent can have a disruptive effect on information processing and recognition performance. The results highlighted the effectiveness of subtitle processing: Regardless of the quality of line segmentation, participants had a good understanding of the film content, they achieved good levels of performance in both word and scene recognition, and no tradeoff between text and image processing was detected. Eye-movement analyses enabled a further characterization of cognitive processing during subtitled film viewing. This article discusses the theoretical implications of the findings for both subtitling and multiple-source communication and highlights their methodological and applied implications.     

A Genetically Informed Study of the Covariation Between Childhood Anxiety Dimensions and Social Competence

We investigated the nature of latent shared etiological elements in 398 Italian twin pairs aged 8–17, explaining covariation between high levels of anxiety symptoms and low social competence. We found significant negative correlations between Child Behaviour Checklist/6–18 Social Competence Scale and three (Panic Anxiety, Separation Anxiety, Social Anxiety) out of five Screen for Child Anxiety Related Disorders anxiety subscales. Results from causal analysis seem to exclude the hypothesis that co-occurrence between Anxiety Symptoms and Social Competence could be due to a direct phenotypic effect of one trait upon the other. Multivariate analysis suggested that both genetic and shared environmental components contribute to the phenotypic correlation between Social Competence and Anxiety Subscales, whereas unique environmental factors have a negligible influence. This means that both common genetic and shared environmental causal factors contribute simultaneously to increase risk of having low Social Competence and high Anxiety scores. In particular, covariation with Social Competence seems to be influenced by both genetic and shared environmental causal components in Separation Anxiety and Social Anxiety, whereas environmental factors have an irrelevant influence for covariation with Panic/Somatic Anxiety Subscale. Our results support the adoption of a broader view of the relationships between psychopathology and diminished social competences in childhood for both clinicians and educators.     

Anticipatory reaching of seven- to eleven-month-old infants in occlusion situations

The present study examined 7- to 11-month-old infants’ anticipatory and reactive reaching for temporarily occluded objects. Infants were presented with laterally approaching objects that moved at different velocities (10, 20, and 40 cm/s) in different occlusion situations (no-, 20 cm-, and 40 cm-occlusion), resulting in occlusion durations ranging between 0 and 4 s. Results show that except for object velocity and occlusion distance, occlusion duration was a critical constraint for infants’ reaching behaviors. We found that the older infants reached more often, but that an increase in occlusion duration resulted in a decline in reaching frequency that was similar across age groups. Anticipatory reaching declined with increasing occlusion duration, but the adverse effects for longer occlusion durations diminished with age. It is concluded that with increasing age infants are able to retain and use information to guide reaching movements over longer periods of non-visibility, providing support for the graded representation hypothesis (Jonsson &; von Hofsten, 2003) and the two-visual systems model (Milner &; Goodale, 1995).     

Dichotic listening and left-right confusion

The present study examined the relationship between individual differences in dichotic listening (DL) and the susceptibility to left-right confusion (LRC). Thirty-six men and 59 women completed a consonant-vowel DL test, a behavioral LRC task, and an LRC self-rating questionnaire. Significant negative correlations between overall DL accuracy and LRC rates in men (behavioral task) and self-ratings in women, indicated that the more participants struggled with left-right discrimination, the fewer DL syllables they reported correctly. However, there was no relationship between LRC and the typical right ear advantage. Thus, there is a sex- and task-dependent relationship between LRC and overall DL accuracy, but not between LRC and ear asymmetry. It is concluded that (a) atypical ear asymmetries, as in certain clinical populations, cannot be explained by associated deficits in left-right discrimination, and (b) LRC can negatively affect task performance, even when participants do not have to make explicit "left" versus "right" decisions.     

Pierre Janet and Auguste Forel: Two Historical Contributions

This paper discusses two 19th century French-speaking authors, Pierre Janet and Auguste Forel, who both employed hypnosis and in various ways were early influences on psychoanalysis. To acquaint the reader with the clinical works of these pioneers, a long case history by Janet, and a case history by Forel are presented. The connections between these two authors and modern developments are discussed. Both historical figures were contemporaries of Freud and their at times contentious relationships became part of their legacy.     

Alertness in young healthy subjects: An fMRI study of brain region interactivity enhanced by a warning signal

An effective connectivity study was carried out on 16 young, healthy subjects performing an alertness task. The objective of this study was to develop and to evaluate a putative network model of alertness by adapting structural equation modeling to fMRI data. This study was designed to evaluate the directed interactivity of an attentional network during intrinsic and phasic alerting tasks. On the basis of theoretical hypotheses, clinical observations, behavioral data and neuroimaging studies, it was hypothesized that neural circuits in the right hemisphere including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), anterior cingulate cortex, inferior parietal cortex and the thalamus were involved. The results of this study support the existence of a common network of activated areas with significant path coefficient differences between intrinsic and phasic alertness. Functional interactivity was significantly reinforced during the phasic alertness task and appeared to preferentially involve activity in the DLPFC region, whereas the path coefficients of the model were well-balanced during intrinsic alertness. This study highlights the predominant role of the DLPFC region in maintenance of a state of alertness and in temporal preparation during an alertness task.     

Beyond single syllables: Large-scale modeling of reading aloud with the Connectionist Dual Process (CDP++) model

Most words in English have more than one syllable, yet the most influential computational models of reading aloud are restricted to processing monosyllabic words. Here, we present CDP++, a new version of the Connectionist Dual Process model (Perry, Ziegler, & Zorzi, 2007). CDP++ is able to simulate the reading aloud of mono- and disyllabic words and nonwords, and learns to assign stress in exactly the same way as it learns to associate graphemes with phonemes. CDP++ is able to simulate the monosyllabic benchmark effects its predecessor could, and therefore shows full backwards compatibility. CDP++ also accounts for a number of novel effects specific to disyllabic words, including the effects of stress regularity and syllable number. In terms of database performance, CDP++ accounts for over 49% of the reaction time variance on items selected from the English Lexicon Project, a very large database of several thousand of words. With its lexicon of over 32,000 words, CDP++ is therefore a notable example of the successful scaling-up of a connectionist model to a size that more realistically approximates the human lexical system.     

Age-related quantitative and qualitative changes in decision making ability

The "frontal aging hypothesis" predicts that brain senescence affects predominantly the prefrontal regions. Preliminary evidence has recently been gathered in favour of an age-related change in a typically frontal process, i.e. decision making, using the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), but overall findings have been conflicting. Following the traditional scoring method, coupled with a qualitative analysis, in the present study we compared IGT performance of 40 young (mean age: 27.9+/-4.7) and 40 old (mean age: 65.4+/-8.6) healthy adults and of 18 patients affected by frontal lobe dementia of mild severity (mean age: 65.1+/-7.4, mean MMSE score: 24.1+/-3.9). Quantitative findings support the notion that decision making ability declines with age; moreover, it approximates the impairment observed in executive dysfunction due to neurodegeneration. Results of the qualitative analysis did not reach statistical significance for the motivational and learning decision making components considered, but approached significance for the attentional component for elderly versus young normals, suggesting a possible decrease in the ability to maintain sustained attention during complex and prolonged tasks as the putative deficit underlying impaired decision making in normal aging.     

Prevalence and correlates of hoarding behavior in a community-based sample

Little is known about the prevalence and correlates of hoarding behavior in the community. We estimated the prevalence and evaluated correlates of hoarding in 742 participants in the Hopkins Epidemiology of Personality Disorder Study. The prevalence of hoarding was nearly 4% (5.3%, weighted) and was greater in older than younger age groups, greater in men than women, and inversely related to household income. Hoarding was associated with alcohol dependence; paranoid, schizotypal, avoidant, and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder traits; insecurity from home break-ins and excessive physical discipline before 16 years of age; and parental psychopathology. These findings suggest that hoarding may be relatively prevalent and that alcohol dependence, personality disorder traits, and specific childhood adversities are associated with hoarding in the community.