The binomial distribution of right, mixed and left handedness

Right, mixed and left handers are found in binomial proportions in seven samples of varied subjects whose lateral prefernces were ascertained by several methods. These proportions have been obtained in previous studies of humans and animals when the performance of several actions has been recorded in complete samples and when consistent right and left subjects have been separated from those of mixed usage.     

Training Methods for Delivering Difficult News in Genetic Counseling and Genetics Residency Training Programs

Genetic counselors and clinical geneticists are often in the position of delivering difficult news (DDN) to patients and families. Many studies show that healthcare providers require major improvement in the skills needed in DDN in a manner that is satisfactory to their patients. The purpose of this study was to assess the amount and methodology of DDN training received by genetic counselors and medical genetics residents in their training programs, such as observations of DDN or attending didactic lectures. To our knowledge, there is no previous assessment or study of DDN training in genetic counselor and medical genetics residency programs; therefore, we aim to both assess and compare the training in DDN received by genetic counselors and by genetics residents and determine whether there is a desire for recommendations on DDN training. We invited genetic counseling (GC) and genetics residency program directors to participate in an online survey designed to assess coursework, clinical experiences, and directors’ attitudes toward teaching DDN. Response rate was 85% (28/33) for GC program directors and 26% (14/53) for genetics residency program directors. One hundred percent of GC and genetics residency directors who responded to the survey agreed that it is important for genetic counselors and medical geneticists to be able to deliver difficult news effectively and that training programs should formally teach students how to deliver difficult news. Six of the eight common teaching methods are used by at least 75% of GC programs while two of eight are used by at least 75% of genetics residency programs. Seventy-nine percent of GC and 93% of genetics residency program directors agree that there should be recommendations on how to teach students to deliver this news. Our results show that techniques for DDN are integrated more fully into GC program curricula than genetics residency curricula. Directors of both types of programs desire recommendations and more standardized education for training students to deliver difficult news.     

Electrophysiological correlates of encoding processes in a full-report visual working memory paradigm

Why are some visual stimuli remembered, whereas others are forgotten? A limitation of recognition paradigms is that they measure aggregate behavioral performance and/or neural responses to all stimuli presented in a visual working memory (VWM) array. To address this limitation, we paired an electroencephalography (EEG) frequency-tagging technique with two full-report VWM paradigms. This permitted the tracking of individual stimuli as well as the aggregate response. We recorded high-density EEG (256 channel) while participants viewed four shape stimuli, each flickering at a different frequency. At retrieval, participants either recalled the location of all stimuli in any order (simultaneous full report) or were cued to report the item in a particular location over multiple screen displays (sequential full report). The individual frequency tag amplitudes evoked for correctly recalled items were significantly larger than the amplitudes of subsequently forgotten stimuli, regardless of retrieval task. An induced-power analysis examined the aggregate neural correlates of VWM encoding as a function of items correctly recalled. We found increased induced power across a large number of electrodes in the theta, alpha, and beta frequency bands when more items were successfully recalled. This effect was more robust for sequential full report, suggesting that retrieval demands can influence encoding processes. These data are consistent with a model in which encoding-related resources are directed to a subset of items, rather than a model in which resources are allocated evenly across the array. These data extend previous work using recognition paradigms and stress the importance of encoding in determining later VWM retrieval success.     

Region-based shielding of visual search from salient distractors: Target detection is impaired with same- but not different-dimension distractors

Shielding visual search against interference from salient distractors becomes more efficient over time for display regions where distractors appear more frequently, rather than only rarely Goschy, Bakos, Müller, & Zehetleitner (Frontiers in Psychology 5: 1195, 2014). We hypothesized that the locus of this learned distractor probability-cueing effect depends on the dimensional relationship of the to-be-inhibited distractor relative to the to-be-attended target. If the distractor and target are defined in different visual dimensions (e.g., a color-defined distractor and orientation-defined target, as in Goschy et al. (Frontiers in Psychology 5: 1195, 2014), distractors may be efficiently suppressed by down-weighting the feature contrast signals in the distractor-defining dimension Zehetleitner, Goschy, & Müller (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 38: 941–957, 2012), with stronger down-weighting being applied to the frequent- than to the rare-distractor region. However, given dimensionally coupled feature contrast signal weighting (cf. Müller J, Heller & Ziegler (Perception & Psychophysics 57:1–17, 1995), this dimension-(down-)weighting strategy would not be effective when the target and the distractors are defined within the same dimension. In this case, suppression may operate differently: by inhibiting the entire frequent-distractor region on the search-guiding master saliency map. The downside of inhibition at this level is that, although it reduces distractor interference in the inhibited (frequent-distractor) region, it also impairs target processing in that region—even when no distractor is actually present in the display. This predicted qualitative difference between same- and different-dimension distractors was confirmed in the present study (with 184 participants), thus furthering our understanding of the functional architecture of search guidance, especially regarding the mechanisms involved in shielding search from the interference of distractors that consistently occur in certain display regions.

     

A mind to go out of: reflections on primary and secondary consciousness

Dreaming and waking are two brain-mind states, which are characterized by shared and differentiated properties at the levels of brain and consciousness. As part of our effort to capitalize on a comparison of these two states we have applied Edelman's distinction between primary and secondary consciousness, which we link to dreaming and waking respectively. In this paper we examine the implications of this contrastive analysis for theories of mental illness. We conclude that while dreaming is an almost perfect model of organic psychosis, it is less so for schizophrenia and major affective disorder where it must serve a primarily heuristic role helping us to model hallucinations and delusions but not the diseases themselves.     

State-dependent thinking: a comparison of waking and dreaming thought

Thinking is known to be state dependent but a systematic study of how thinking in dreams differs from thinking while awake has not been done. The study consisted of analyzing the dream reports of 26 subjects who, in addition to providing dream reports also provided answers to questions about their thinking within the dream. Our hypothesis was that thinking in dreams is not monolithic but has two distinct components, one that is similar to wake-state cognition, and another that is fundamentally different. We found that cognition within a dream scenario was similar to that of wake-state cognition, but that thinking about the scenario itself was deficient and very different than wake-state thinking.     

Cross Talk Between Native and Second Languages: Partial Activation of an Irrelevant Lexicon

Bilingualism provides a unique opportunity for exploring hypotheses about how the human brain encodes language. For example, the "input switch" theory states that bilinguals can deactivate one language module while using the other. A new measure of spoken language comprehension, headband-mounted eyetracking, allows a firm test of this theory. When given spoken instructions to pick up an object, in a monolingual session, late bilinguals looked briefly at a distractor object whose name in the irrelevant language was initially phonetically similar to the spoken word more often than they looked at a control distractor object. This result indicates some overlap between the two languages in bilinguals, and provides support for parallel, interactive accounts of spoken word recognition in general.