Commission error rates on a continuous performance test are related to deficits measured by the Benton Visual Retention Test

This study is one in a series investigating the relationship between impulsive behavior on a Continuous Performance Test (i.e., the Immediate and Delayed Memory Task) and other cognitive deficits measured by clinical instruments. Forty-two adolescents were selected for two groups, controls and hospitalized patients with disruptive behavior disorders. Each adolescent completed the Immediate and Delayed Memory Task and the Benton Visual Retention Test. Our main findings were that, even when controlling for IQ, the Immediate and Delayed Memory Task commission errors were associated with adverse Benton performance, but only in the patient group. These results may be explained by a shared association between processes of impulsivity and other deficits of executive control that may interfere with successful performance of the Benton.     

The protestant work ethic as a cultural phenomenon

A central contention of much of the literature about the nature of work values and the meaning of work is that there is (or at least has been) a consensual work ethic operating in modern industrial societies. This premise has surprisingly, rarely been put to the test. In this paper, evidence for a modern work ethic is obtained from the European Values Survey. The link between this work ethic and religion is then explored. While one conclusion of the analysis is that it is still an identifiably Protestant ethic, contextual analysis demonstrates that the effect of a country's religious culture is more potent than the religious beliefs of the individual.     

Modification of the rat's acoustic startle response by antecedent visual stimulation.

Male hooded and albino rats were exposed to a light flash followed at various temporal intervals by a startle-eliciting 117 db. (re 20 muN/m2) burst of white noise. The visual stimulus engendered startle response inhibition (maximally when the lead time was 64-250 msec) as well as startle response latency reduction (maximally when the lead time was 2-8 msec). The temporal functions for the effects of visual stimuli paralleled those previously reported for startle modification by acoustic events. Further study revealed that, given optimal lead times, inhibition is produced reliably by weaker visual stimuli (3 X 10-6 cd-sec/cm2) than latency reduction (3 X 10-4 cd-sec/cm2). This differential sensitivity to visual stimuli is also analogous to previously reported findings for events in the acoustic environment. It reveals that the neural mechanisms that mediate latency reduction and inhibition can be engaged by either acoustic or visual stimulation.     

Affording cooperation: Embodied constraints,dynamics, and action-scaled invariance in joint lifting

Understanding the physical and interpersonal constraints that afford cooperation during real-world tasks requires consideration of the fit between the environment and task-relevant dimensions of coactors and the coactors’ fit with each other. In the present study, we examined how cooperation can emerge during ongoing interaction using the simple task of two actors’ moving long wooden planks. The system dynamics showed hysteresis: A past-action mode persisted when both solo and joint actions were possible. Moreover, pairs whose arm spans were both short, both long, or mismatched made action-mode transitions at similar points, when scaled by a relational measure. The relational measure of plank length to arm span was dictated by the pair member with the shorter arm span, who, thus, had a greater need to cooperate during the task. The results suggest that understanding affordances for cooperation requires giving more consideration to constraints imposed by the fit between coactors’ action capabilities.     

Memory as discrimination: What distraction reveals

Recalling information involves the process of discriminating between relevant and irrelevant information stored in memory. Not infrequently, the relevant information needs to be selected from among a series of related possibilities. This is likely to be particularly problematic when the irrelevant possibilities not only are temporally or contextually appropriate, but also overlap semantically with the target or targets. Here, we investigate the extent to which purely perceptual features that discriminate between irrelevant and target material can be used to overcome the negative impact of contextual and semantic relatedness. Adopting a distraction paradigm, it is demonstrated that when distractors are interleaved with targets presented either visually (Experiment 1) or auditorily (Experiment 2), a within-modality semantic distraction effect occurs; semantically related distractors impact upon recall more than do unrelated distractors. In the semantically related condition, the number of intrusions in recall is reduced, while the number of correctly recalled targets is simultaneously increased by the presence of perceptual cues to relevance (color features in Experiment 1 or speaker’s gender in Experiment 2). However, as is demonstrated in Experiment 3, even presenting semantically related distractors in a language and a sensory modality (spoken Welsh) distinct from that of the targets (visual English) is insufficient to eliminate false recalls completely or to restore correct recall to levels seen with unrelated distractors . Together, the study shows how semantic and nonsemantic discriminability shape patterns of both erroneous and correct recall.     

Psychopathy and fear: Specific impairments in judging behaviors that frighten others

Psychopathy is a disorder associated with antisocial behavior and deficits in responding to emotional stimuli, particularly fear-related stimuli. This research demonstrates that these deficits extend to judgments about behaviors that cause fear in others. We assessed whether psychopathy is associated with the ability to identify the emotional consequences of social behaviors and with judgments about these behaviors' acceptability. We found that psychopathy, as indexed by the Psychopathic Personality Inventory, is associated with impairments in identifying behaviors that cause fear and in judging the moral acceptability of these behaviors. Ratings of emotional consequences and moral acceptability were also correlated, such that individuals who less accurately identified behaviors that cause fear also judged these behaviors to be more morally acceptable. Psychopathy scores mediated the relationship between these two variables. These findings suggest that understanding that frightening others is unacceptable relies on understanding this type of behavior's emotional consequences, and have significance for understanding the relationship between psychopathy, empathy, and antisocial behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

The demands of an ongoing activity influence the success of event-based prospective memory

Four experiments were conducted to evaluate whether event-based prospective memory would be sensitive to the concurrent demands of the ongoing activity in which intention-related cues were embedded. In Experiments 1 and 2, random alternation between two judgments in the ongoing task reduced prospective memory as compared with having a single task throughout. In Experiment 3, participants' making two binary judgments on every trial resulted in worse prospective memory than did their making single four-alternative judgments. In Experiment 4, participants' making two related judgments resulted in better prospective memory than did their making two unrelated judgments. The results are consistent in spirit with a production rule account of the processing resources that are available when intention-related cues are encountered. Therefore, event-based prospective memory can inversely covary with the cognitive demands of the ongoing activity.     

On the relationship between effort toward an ongoing task and cue detection in event-based prospective memory

In recent theories of event-based prospective memory, researchers have debated what degree of resources are necessary to identify a cue as related to a previously established intention. In order to simulate natural variations in attention, the authors manipulated effort toward an ongoing cognitive task in which intention-related cues were embedded in 3 experiments. High effort toward the ongoing task resulted in decreased prospective memory only when the cognitive processing required to identify the cue was similar to the cognitive processing required to complete the ongoing activity. When the required processing was different for the 2 tasks, cue detection was not affected by manipulated effort, despite there being an overall cost to decision latencies in the ongoing tasks from possessing the intention. Resource allocation policies and factors that affect them are proposed to account for ongoing vs. prospective memory task performance.