The other side of the coin: Cognitive properties of nonreward

In this comment, I examine Amsel’s theory in the light of rats’ reaction not to frustrative non-reward per se, but to the more complicated case in which frustrative nonreward is part of a rule-based sequence of reward quantities. The discussion goes beyond Amsel’s emphasis on dispositional memory to consider cognitive and representational memory—the signaling properties of reinforcement and nonreinforcement. The strengths and weaknesses of Amsel’s theory are discussed with the fresh perspective that this viewpoint provides, and some issues emerge that may be fruitful for further study.     

An empirical study of the diathesis-stress theory of disease

One thousand, one hundred and twenty-one Jewish concentration camp survivors were compared with 367 Jewish controls who had not been in a concentration camp, and had not lost any family members in such a camp. Of interest was the mortality of camp and comparison groups, on the hypothesis that the stress of being in a camp would adversely affect inmates. It was found that former camp inmates were over twice as likely to die of cancer, coronary heart diesease, or other causes as the comparison subjects of similar age and sex composition, and that severity of stress was correlated with mortality in the expected direction. Diathesis, determined by means of a special interviewer-administrated questionnaire, was found to interact synergistically with stress in producing high mortality.     

Psychosocial knowledge and allopathic medicine: Points of convergence and departure

The past 15 years have witnessed a call for allopathic medicine to incorporate psychosocial perspectives into education and clinical practice. While a biopsychosocial perspective has influenced academic medicine in areas such as primary care and psychiatry, its direct impact on clinical medicine has been questionable. One barrier to the incorporation of psychosocial information into medicine which has only recently received attention has been different cultural assumptions which govern medicine versus the social-behavioral sciences. These assumptions are examined in the context of four issues: knowledge paradigms, models of education, acculturation of psychosocial knowledge into medicine, and patient autonomy. This cultural analysis provides a vantage point for understanding similarities as well as points of divergence between psychosocial and biomedical knowledge and practice.     

Cognitive function after open-heart surgery: Are postoperative neuropsychological deficits caused by cardiopulmonary bypass?

Despite the many technological developments in arterial perfusion and cardiac surgical procedures, open-heart surgery is still believed to pose a significant risk for cerebral injury. There are several potential causes of brain damage during open-heart surgery, including prolonged or severe arterial hypotension, as well as emboli emanating from the cardiopulmonary bypass circuit or the operative field. This article reviews the available neuropsychological studies of outcome following cardiac valve replacement and coronary artery bypass grafting. Because both procedures are life-saving operations, the research in this area has been quasi-experimental and fraught with methodological problems. Nonetheless, the findings converge to suggest that cognitive dysfunction occurs after open-heart surgery, and that the deficits are attributable, at least in part, to factors specific to the operation or to the patient being maintained on cardiopulmonary bypass. Preliminary findings suggest that embolization is the primary cause of perioperative deficits in uncomplicated operations. Studies have also consistently found preoperative deficits in this population, suggesting that neuropsychological dysfunction is caused by severe chronic cardiac disease as well as open-heart surgery.     

Sensorimotor synchronization: Motor responses to pseudoregular auditory patterns

Musically trained and untrained subjects (N=30) were asked to synchronize their finger tapping with stimuli in auditory patterns. Each pattern comprised six successive tonal stimuli of the same duration, the first of which was accented by a different frequency. The duration of interstimulus onset intervals (ISIs) gradually increased or decreased in constant steps toward the end of the patterns. Four values of such steps were used in different trials: 20, 30, 45, and 60 msec. Various time-control mechanisms are hypothesized as being simultaneously responsible for subjects’ incorrect reproduction of the internal temporal ratios of the stimulus patterns. The mechanism of assimilation (of a central tendency) led subjects to enforce a regular (isochronous) structure on the patterns. The influence of other time-control mechanisms (distinction, subjective expression of an accent, sequential transfer) was expressed mainly in differences between intertap onset intervals (ITIs) and the corresponding ISIs at the beginning of the patterns. The duration of the first two ITIs was in the majority of the trials in an inverse ratio to the ratio of the respective ISIs. The distortions resulting from the timing mechanisms concerned were more pronounced in the performance of nonmusicians than in that of musicians.     

On the scaling of visual space from motion—in response to Pizlo and Salacfa-Golyska

Pizlo and Salack-Golyska (1994) have raised an important question about the validity of the interpretation of experiments reported by Lappin and Love (1992)—based on the fact that alternative cues in the image plane might have supported the shape discriminations in those experiments. The meaning of the hypothesis that visual space may be scaled by congruence under motion is clarified, pertinent evidence is reviewed, and new experimental evidence is reported We conclude that visual space can be metrically scaled by congruence of moving shapes.