Endogenous Covert Spatial Orienting in Audition Cost-Benefit Analyses of Reaction Times and Event related Potentials

The presentstudy examines mechanisms ofendogenous covertspatialorienting inaudition as revealed by event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and reaction times (RTs). In one experimental condition, subjects were instructed to respond to any target tone irrespective of whether it was presented in a valid (spatially predictive cue), neutral (uninformative cue), or invalid (misleading cue) trial. In another experimental condition, only target tones presented at a cued position required a response-that is, subjects could completely ignore tones presented at the uncued ear. Cue validity had an effect on RT, which consisted in benefits for valid trials and in costs for invalid trials relative to the RTs in neutral trials. There were also distinct ERP effects of cue validity in the 100-300 msec time range. These ERP effects were enlarged in the condition in which uncued tones could be ignored. The effects of cue validity onRTsandERPsdemonstratedcovertorientinginauditionbothforstimulirequiring anovert response andalso for stimuli that did not require a behavioural response. It is argued that this attentional selection is located at intermediate stages of information processing, rather than at peripheral stages such as basic sensory-specific processing or response selection.     

Against Mother's Day and Employee Appreciation Day and Other Representations of Oppressive Expectations as Opportunities for Excellence and Beneficence

Appreciation and gratitude get good press: They are central virtues in many religious and secular ethical frameworks, core in positive psychology research, and they come highly recommended by the self‐improvement set. Generally, appreciation and gratitude feature as good things, in popular consciousness. Of course, on an Aristotelian model, the belief that these are virtues implies they are something people can get right or wrong. This paper examines bad appreciation and bad gratitude, characterizing forms of appreciation and gratitude at the center of some major social norms and practices, and demonstrating that they mask familiar oppressive expectations and power relations.     

Kinematics properties of rapid aimed hand movements

Generalized motor program theory and the models of Schmidt, Zelaznik, and Frank (1978), and Meyer, Smith, and Wright (1982) of speed-accuracy relationships in aimed hand movements require that the underlying acceleration-time patterns exhibit time rescalability, in which all acceleration-time functions in an aimed hand movement are generated from one rescalable pattern. We examined this property as a function of movement time in Experiment 1, and as a function of movement time and movement distance in Experiment 2. Both experiments failed to demonstrate strict time rescalability in acceleration-time patterns, with the time to peak positive acceleration being invariant across movement time. This suggests that time rescalability is not a necessary condition for the linear relation between speed and spatial variability. A second major finding was that the variability in distance traveled at the end of positive acceleration was independent of movement time, contrary to the symmetric-impulse-variability model of Meyer et al. (1982). The findings of both experiments suggest that the processes involved in decelerating the limb play an important, but yet to be understood, role in determining the linear speed-accuracy trade-off. Finally, these results suggest that generalized motor programs are not based on simple, time-rescalable acceleration patterns.