Computational and reasoning abilities in arithmetic: Cross-generational change in China and the United States

A Chinese advantage over Americans was found for economically relevant computational and reasoning abilities in arithmetic for groups of 6th- and 12th-grade students matched or equated on general intelligence. No cross-national difference for computational or reasoning abilities was found for samples of older (60- to 80-year-old) Chinese and American adults equated on general intelligence. The pattern of change in arithmetical competencies across cohorts suggests that the Chinese advantage in 6th and 12th grade is due to a cross-generational decline in competencies in the United States and a cross-generational improvement in China.     

Pediatric Psychology: Child Psychological Health in the Next Century

The future of pediatric psychology is reviewed and placed in brief historical context in relation to children's psychological health care. Contemporary trends affecting the delivery of psychological services, research, and clinical training are highlighted, with suggestions for future development. Pediatric psychology is a child-based, developmentally-focused multidisciplinary practice directed toward psychosocial and neuropsychological issues of health and illness in children and youth. Pediatric psychologists need to develop strong professional identities as health care psychologists combined with a collegial and collaborative arrangement with physicians to ensure the future growth and development of pediatric psychology in the next century as a major vehicle to promote children's health care.     

Language-specific listening

Languages differ in their phonological structure and physcholinguists have begun to explore the conseqence, of this fact for speech perception. We review research documenting that listeners attune their perceptual processes finaly to exploit the phonological regularities of their nativ language. As a consequence, these perceptual process are fill-adapted to listening to languages that do not display such, regularities. Thus, not only do late language-learners have trouble speaking a second language, also they do not hear it as native speakers do; worse, they apply their native language listening prosedures which may actually interfere with successful processing of the non-native input. We also present data from studies on infants showing that the initial attuning occurs early in life; very yong infants are sensitive to the relevant phonological regularities which distinguish different languages, and quickly distinguish the native language of their environment from languages with different regularities.     

Light at the End of the Tunnel? Philosophy of Religion and the Near Death Experience

This article argues that currently many aspects of the Near Death Experience (NDE) remain a mystery, even after the more than two decades of discussion and analysis triggered by the publication of Raymond Moody's ground‐breaking study, Life After Life in 1975. It suggests that one reason for this continuing mystery is connected to the current under‐representation of studies of the phenomenon from within philosophy generally, and philosophy of religion in particular. It questions why this under‐representation should exist, suggesting that the very complexity of the NDE demands a thoroughgoing philosophical analysis, and arguing that philosophy and philosophy of religion have a crucial and rightful role alongside other disciplines within any attempt to gain a total understanding of what NDEs, in essence, are.     

Auditory grouping

Although our subjective experience of the world is one of discrete sound sources, the individual frequency components that make up these separate sources are spread across the frequency spectrum. Listeners. use various simple cues, including common onset time and harmonicity, to help them achieve this perceptual separation. Our ability to use harmonicity to segregate two simultaneous sound sources is constrained by the frequency resolution of the auditory system, and is much more effective for low-numbered, resolved harmonics than for higher-numbered, unresolved ones. Our ability to use interaural time-differences (ITDs) in perceptual segregation poses a paradox. Although ITDs are the dominant cue for the localization of complex sounds, listeners cannot use ITDs alone to segregate the speech of a single talker from similar simultaneous sounds. Listeners are, however, very good at using ITD to track a particular sound source across time. This difference might reflect two different levels of auditory processing, indicating that listeners attend to grouped auditory objects rather than to those frequencies that share a common ITD.     

An object-oriented simulation of a brain system underlying human aggression

Neural structures involved in aggression were incorporated into a model on the basis of neuro-anatomical data. A software program written in Smalltalk, the Brain Structure Simulator (Seguin, 1994) was used to simulate the effects of activity levels of different brain structures. Relationships among brain structures were then tested by changing activity levels of key structures. Results were consistent with research reports on the brain basis of aggression (Albert, Walsh, & Jonik, 1993; Pontius, 1984).     

Operate your own World-Wide Web server

Although many researchers wishing to use the World-Wide Web for academic purposes rely on centralized Web services, they should be aware that it is neither expensive nor difficult to operate their own server. Doing so provides research-related benefits such as complete control over their host name and documents provided, the guaranteed ability to execute common gateway interface and server-side include programs, immediate access to their collected data, and the ability to better control who participates in their experiments. This paper surveys Web-server software features likely to be of interest to psychologists and conceptually summarizes their operation and use. The basic steps required to set up a Web server on popular microcomputers are reviewed, and security issues concerning Web-server operation are discussed. An accompanying resource Web page can assist users in setting up their own servers.     

Mathematica: A flexible design environment for neural networks

Several neural networks were developed inMathematica in order to explore the role of “spiky” neurons in neural network memory simulations. UsingMathematica for this task confirmed its value as a powerful tool for neural network development: It exhibited distinct advantages over other environments in programming ease, flexibility of data structures, and the graphical assessment of network performance.