Lack of color integration in visual short-term memory binding

Bicolored objects are retained in visual short-term memory (VSTM) less efficiently than unicolored objects. This is unlike shape–color combinations, whose retention in VSTM does not differ from that observed for shapes only. It is debated whether this is due to a lack of color integration and whether this may reflect the function of separate memory mechanisms. Participants judged whether the colors of bicolored objects (each with an external and an internalcolor) were the same or different across two consecutive screens. Colors had to be remembered either individually or in combination. In Experiment 1, external colors in the combined colors condition were remembered better than the internal colors, and performance for both was worse than that in the individual colors condition. The lack of color integration observed in Experiment 1 was further supported by a reduced capacity of VSTM to retain color combinations, relative to individual colors (Experiment 2). An additional account was found in Experiment 3, which showed spared color–color binding in the presence of impaired shape–color binding in a brain-damaged patient, thus suggesting that these two memory mechanisms are different.     

What gives victims satisfaction when they seek revenge?

The present paper aims to elucidate under what conditions victims of injustice who seek revenge feel satisfied and perceive that everybody got what he or she deserved. Two hypotheses are discussed: The comparative suffering hypothesis states that seeing the offender suffer from fate is sufficient for evoking satisfaction and perceptions of deservingness among victims. The understanding hypothesis states that revenge can only be satisfactory when the offender understands it as a response to his or her prior behavior. These hypotheses were tested in three experimental studies. The comparative suffering hypothesis received only weak support. The understanding hypothesis, on the other hand, received much stronger support: When the offender understood revenge as punishment, revenge led to satisfaction and deservingness among victims. These findings are discussed with regard to the question why people take revenge. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Stalkers and harassers of British royalty: an exploration of proxy behaviours for violence

Study of risk factors for violence to prominent people is difficult because of low base rates. This study of harassers of the royal family examined factors suggested in the literature as proxies for violence--breaching security barriers, achieving proximity, approach with a weapon, and approach with homicidal ideation. A stratified sample of different types of approach behaviour was randomly extracted from 2,332 Royalty Protection Police files, which had been divided into behavioural types. The final sample size was 275. Significant differences in illness symptomatology and motivation were found for each proxy group. Querulants were significantly over-represented in three of the four groups. There was generally little overlap between the proxy groups. There is no evidence of the proxy items examined being part of a "pathway to violence". Different motivations may be associated with different patterns of risk. Risk assessment must incorporate knowledge of the interactions between motivation, mental state, and behaviour.     

False reports from patients with frontotemporal dementia: delusions or confabulations?

Patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) can make false statements consistent with delusions or confabulations. It is unclear whether bvFTD is primarily associated with either delusions or with confabulations and whether they can be explained by the pathophysiology of this disease. In order to clarify this, we retrospectively surveyed the records of 48 patients with bvFTD for the presence of any false reports and identified four patients. Their false reports included continued interaction with a favorite but dead relation, fictitious marriages with movie stars, and two who claimed that their partner was having an affair. When confronted with the falsity of their statements, the patients conveyed a lack of certainty regarding their external or internal source but persisted in the constancy of their reports. On functional neuroimaging, the patients had predominant frontal involvement. This report found that patients with bvFTD can have both fantastic, wish fulfilling confabulations and typical content-specific delusions. We propose that both phenomena result from known disturbances of ventromedial prefrontal cortex in bvFTD, including deficits in source monitoring and in activating an automatic "doubt tag" for false reports.     

Feeling socially powerless makes you more prone to bumping into things on the right and induces leftward line bisection error

Social power affects the manner in which people view themselves and act toward others, a finding that has attracted broad interest from the social and political sciences. However, there has been little interest from those within cognitive neuroscience. Here, we demonstrate that the effects of power extend beyond social interaction and invoke elementary spatial biases in behavior consistent with preferential hemispheric activation. In particular, participants who felt relatively powerless, compared with those who felt more powerful, were more likely to bisect horizontal lines to the left of center, and bump into the right-hand (as opposed to the left-hand) side when walking through a narrow passage. These results suggest that power induces hemispheric differences in visuomotor behavior, indicating that this ubiquitous phenomenon affects not only how we interact with one another, but also how we interact with the physical world.     

Conceptual Change,Crucial Experiments and Auxiliary Hypotheses. A Theoretical Contribution

Theories about conceptual change have been generally related to historical and philosophical analysis of science. Yet, there is still much debate on how ideas coming from the history of science and their implications can be applied in this field. Our study intends to investigate the complex structure of conceptual change, by making use of some particularly representative features of the History and Philosophy of science, while considering the structure of so-called crucial experiments and the specific role of implicit hypotheses. Due to their historical importance and logical reasoning aspects, examining these issues may contribute to understand how conceptual change may take place.     

Evidence for specificity of ERP abnormalities during response inhibition in ADHD children: A comparison with reading disorder children without ADHD

Executive function and working memory deficits are not only present in ADHD, but also in reading disorder (RD). Here, high-density ERPs were recorded during the Stop Signal Task in 53 children and adolescents: An ADHD-combined type group, a group with RD, and a healthy control group. The ADHD-C group displayed unique abnormalities of the frontal N200. Both healthy controls and RD groups showed a success-related right frontal N200 modulation, which was absent in the ADHD group. Second, for Success Inhibition trials, the ADHD-C had smaller right frontal N200 waves relative to healthy controls, while the RD group did not. In contrast, NoGo-P3 abnormalities were present both in the ADHD-C and RD groups. Impaired early response inhibition mechanisms, indexed by the frontal N200, appear to be limited to ADHD-C. In contrast, deficits in later cognitive control and error monitoring mechanisms, indexed by the NoGo-P3, appear to be present in both conditions.     

Squares in Fork Arrow Logic

In this paper we show that the class of fork squares has a complete orthodox axiomatization in fork arrow logic (FAL). This result may be seen as an orthodox counterpart of Venema's non-orthodox axiomatization for the class of squares in arrow logic. FAL is the modal logic of fork algebras (FAs) just as arrow logic is the modal logic of relation algebras (RAs). FAs extend RAs by a binary fork operator and are axiomatized by adding three equations to RAs equational axiomatization. A proper FA is an algebra of relations where the fork is induced by an injective operation coding pair formation. In contrast to RAs, FAs are representable by proper ones and their equational theory has the expressive power of full first-order logic. A square semantics (the set of arrows is U×U for some set U) for arrow logic was defined by Y. Venema. Due to the negative results about the finite axiomatizability of representable RAs, Venema provided a non-orthodox finite axiomatization for arrow logic by adding a new rule governing the applications of a difference operator. We address here the question of extending the type of relational structures to define orthodox axiomatizations for the class of squares. Given the connections between this problem and the finitization problem addressed by I. Németi, we suspect that this cannot be done by using only logical operations. The modal version of the FA equations provides an orthodox axiomatization for FAL which is complete in view of the representability of FAs. Here we review this result and carry it further to prove that this orthodox axiomatization for FAL also axiomatizes the class of fork squares.     

Evidence of cross‐cultural invariance of the big five personality dimensions in work settings

This article explores the cross‐cultural invariance (construct validity) of two work‐related personality inventories based upon the Five Factor Model (the HPI and the IP/5F). The results show a good convergent and discriminant validity between scales that measure the Big Five personality dimensions. A factor analysis indicates that all personality scales load on the hypothesized Big Five dimensions. Some implications of these findings for the research and practice of personality measurement in personnel selection are discussed. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.