Differential indications for desipramine--results of a controlled multiclinical study]

The antidepressants desipramine and imipramine were compared within the framework of a multiclinical study performed under the conditions of a controlled clinical experiment. There has been found a time-different remission of affective symptoms, which was not detectable for the inhibition of drive. The tachythymoleptic action of desipramine is discussed with reference to these results. Evaluation of the possibility of controlling affects shows different ranges of activity of desipramine and imipramine, with desipramine influencing especially negative psychoenergetic symptoms in the area of drives and emotions and imipramine, restrictive symptoms in addition to differential phenomena of the psychomotor expression.     

Why child neuropsychiatry?]

The author gives a brief survey of the development of Child-Neuropsychiatry in the G.D.R. and subsequently gives reasons for the decision in favor of the unity of neurology and psychiatry as applied to children and juveniles, which is in contrast to developments in other countries. In addition to hygienic, economic, organizational, and medical considerations, this decision was also determined by the fact that a Child-Neuropsychiatrist must, in his practical work as a subspecialist, be able to head a multiprofessional team and, thus, help assure optimum development of a child's personality.     

Further analysis of stuttering as a phonetic transition defect

This article presents a further analysis of stuttering as a phonetic transition defect. Three types of phonetic transitions are identified. Two of these occur within words and represent sites where stutterings are readily detectable. The third transition involves movement from the end of one word to the beginning of the next. Spectrographic evidence is provided to show that stuttering also occurs at points of transition of this type. The same data are interpreted relative to their implications for stuttering theory, research, and therapy.     

The neurotic paradox and self-punitive behavior in humans

Human subjects learned a key-pressing response in order to avoid or escape shock. The reinforcement contingencies were then changed to punishment or to regular nonpunished extinction. The locus of shock onset and offset was systematically varied during the punishment phase. More subjects reported awarencess of the change in the nonpunished extinction group. By inference, the punished groups responded more, and thus the results appear analogous to animal studies on vicious circle, self-punitive responding. Discriminability of change from acquisition to extinction appeared to affect detection of the change.     

Retention of attended and unattended auditorily and visually presented material

In the first of two experiments investigating focussed attention, sets of four pairs of digits were dichotically presented to subjects who were instructed to attend to digits arriving in either the left or the right ear. Following presentation, two different report orders were used: attended followed by unattended, and unattended followed by attended. It was found that unattended items did not suffer from being recalled second rather than first. The serial position curve for unattended items was U-shaped. These results were interpreted as evidence that unattended items are not retained in a limited-capacity auditory buffer with a fast rate of loss. The experiment was repeated using visually presented pairs of letters. A similar pattern of results was obtained, consistent with the hypothesis that unattended items are recalled from a store with a large capacity and a very slow rate of loss.     

Visual texture perception and Fourier analysis

The relationship between the Fourier spectra of visual textures (represented by four hypothetical visual channels sensitive to spatial frequencies) and the perceptual appearance of the textures was investigated. Thirty textures were synthesized by combining various spatial frequencies of different amplitudes. Twenty subjects grouped the textures into 2, 3, 4, and 5 groups based on the similarity of their appearance. The groupings were analyzed by means of linear discriminant analysis using the activity of the four channels as predictor variables. The groupings were also examined by multidimensional scaling, and the resulting stimulus configuration was canonically correlated with the channel activity. The results of both analyses indicate a strong relationship between the perceptual appearance of the textures and their Fourier spectra. These findings suport a multiple-channel spatial-frequency model of perception.     

Visual discrimination of texture

Julesz (1975) proposed a theory of texture discrimination, based on an order statistics principle, which states that no two textures can be perceptually discriminated if they have identical second-order statistics. The experiments reported here demonstrate that this principle is not adequate to predict visual texture discriminability. Both letter and dot micropatterns were used to create texture pairs that either differed or were identical with respect to secondorder statistics. The subject’s task was to decide which quadrant of an array contained a disparate texture. In Experiments 1, 2, and 3, when controlling for spatial overlap, texture pairs having identical second-order statistics were discriminated more quickly than similar texture pairs having different second-order statistics, in contradiction to the principle. Although a significant effect in the direction predicted by the order statistics principle was found in Experiment 4 for texture pairs created from the dot micropatterns, other factors, such as spatial overlap, border differences, and goodness of pattern, must also be considered in predicting texture discriminability.