PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGICAL REACTIONS TO CIGARETTE SMOKING

Dosage and time effects of cigarette smoking were studied in nine moderate smokers, who participated in a control condition without smoking, and in two experimental conditions, in which they smoked either two weak or two strong cigarettes (nicotine content 1.3 mg/cig. and 2.3 mg/cig., respectively) at the beginning of a 90-min period. The main effects of smoking were to increase adrenaline output, blood pressure, and heart rate, and to decrease skin temperature and hand steadiness, the changes being consistently more pronounced after the larger dose. Peak effects were recorded at the first trial after smoking, whereupon followed a gradual return toward baseline levels which, however, were not reached within the 90-min period.     

Enhancement of Sander illusion in minimal form

This paper reports the effects of systematically reducing the number of component lines in the Sander parallelograms upon judgments of the relative lengths of the diagonal lines. The illusion was maximal when the parallelogram was reduced to its minimal form, viz., three parallel lines remained with all other lines, including the diagonals, omitted.     

The development of letter processing efficiency

The development of efficiency in letter processing skills was studied using a letter search task. In two experiments, subjects searched for a target letter displayed with items varying in their visual featural or conceptual categorical similarity to the target. Accuracy and reaction time of search were evaluated for evidence of the visual search “category effect.” In order to determine if subjects could efficiently use knowledge of stimulus differences to facilitate search, conditions tested search time as a function of the amount of information to be processed both within the visual display and in short-term memory. In the two experiments, subjects of ages 6 years through adulthood showed the category effect; however, efficiency of letter processing was found to be related to the amount of information that had to be processed in memory. While there were drastic changes in search speed with increasing grade level, patterns of processing were consistent, leading to the conclusion that the knowledge required to process the letter information accurately is acquired very early. Results were discussed in terms of the distinctions among accuracy, automaticity, and efficiency of skill development and the relationship of these to general reading and intellectual development.     

Induced motion of a fixated target: Influence of voluntary eye deviation

Induced motion (IM) was observed in a fixated target in the direction opposite to the real motion of a moving background. Relative to a fixation target located straight ahead, IM decreased when fixation was deviated 10° in the same direction as background motion and increased when fixation was deviated 10° opposite background motion. These results are consistent with a “nystagmus-suppression” hypothesis for subjective motion of fixated targets: the magnitude of illusory motion is correlated with the amount of voluntary efference required to oppose involuntary eye movements that would occur in the absence of fixation. In addition to the form of IM studied, this explanation applies to autokinesis, apparent concomitant motion, and the oculogyral illusion. Accounts of IM that stress visual capture of vection, afferent mechanisms, egocenter deviations, or phenomenological principles, although they may explain some forms of IM, do not account for the present results.     

Using word reading time in text processing research

A study that employed a moving-window task was designed to test the paradigm’s sensitivity to different levels of interclause integration. The program that controlled the task, implemented on a Terak 8510/a microcomputer in UCSD Pascal, is described. The results of the study indicate that word reading time is indicative of lower and “midlevel” types of integration, but not higher order domain knowledge considerations.     

Exclusion constraints facilitate statistical word learning

The roles of linguistic, cognitive, and social-pragmatic processes in word learning are well established. If statistical mechanisms also contribute to word learning, they must interact with these processes; however, there exists little evidence for such mechanistic synergy. Adults use co-occurrence statistics to encode speech-object pairings with detailed sensitivity in stochastic learning environments (Vouloumanos, 2008). Here, we replicate this statistical work with nonspeech sounds and compare the results with the previous speech studies to examine whether exclusion constraints contribute equally to the statistical learning of speech-object and nonspeech-object associations. In environments in which performance could benefit from exclusion, we find a learning advantage for speech over nonspeech, revealing an interaction between statistical and exclusion processes in associative word learning.     

The Quality of the Childrearing Environment of Refugee or Asylum‐Seeking Children and the Best Interests of the Child: Reliability and Validity of the BIC‐Q

The Best Interest of the Child Questionnaire (BIC‐Q) has been designed as an instrument for screening the quality of the rearing situation of asylum‐seeking or refugee children. It is intended to aid legal decisions in asylum procedures. The aim of this study was to determine the reliability and the construct validity of the BIC‐Q. Based on a study sample of refugee or asylum‐seeking children in the Netherlands (N = 74), the psychometric quality of the BIC‐Q was investigated using Cohen's kappa for the inter‐ and intrarater reliability and a nonparametric item response model for the construct validity. The interrater and intrarater reliabilities of the BIC‐Q were good (kappa = .65 and .74 respectively). The results of the item response model revealed that the 14 pedagogical environmental conditions formed a strong and valid measurement scale for the quality of the childrearing environment (H = .55; rho = .94). Preliminary results indicate that the BIC‐Q may be applied to support decisions on where the asylum‐seeking or refugee child has the best opportunities for development. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.