Effects of prior contect on lexical access during sentence comprehension: A replication and reinterpretation

In a phoneme monitoring task, prior biasing context eliminates the effect of lexical ambiguity, replicating and extending the results of Swinney and Hakes (1976). It is argued, however, that the conclusions drawn by Swinney and Hakes are not justified by the data and that a different model of the effects of context on lexical processing is more theoretically plausible than theirs.     

Behavioral Microanalysis of Helping Interactions Between Mothers and Adult Children with Mental Retardation

Although direct observation has provided much information regarding caregiver-care recipient interactions, our understanding of the applications of this technique remains incomplete. This study expands upon earlier observational work by examining adults with mental retardation (MR) and their family caregivers in the home setting. Specialized computer software was used to conduct real-time observation and recording of interactional styles of maternal caregivers of eight younger (M = 23 years old) and eight older (M = 49 years old) MR adults during two cognitive tasks: block design and card sorting. Differences in the amount and type of assistance provided by the caregiver were examined by coding the occurrence and duration of seven interactional behaviors. The results demonstrated that the caregivers of the younger adults used more positive statements and modeling/gestural prompts, whereas the caregivers of the older adults provided more physical assistance and performed more of the tasks themselves. More importantly, this project provided information regarding interactions between MR adults and their maternal caregivers and demonstrated the utility of computer-assisted data collection technology with a community-based, nondemented population.     

On the identification of clinically significant client changes: Reinterpretation of Jacobson's cut scores

Cut points or cut scores play a central role in Jacobson's popular method of identifying clinically significant changes in psychotherapy. When pre- and posttherapy scores of a client are on different sides of one of these cut scores, the change is considered clinically significant, provided that it is also reliable (i.e., not due to measurement errors). This article critically examines the meanings and implications of these cut scores. Contrary to popular beliefs, they are generallynot the test scores for which the probability of belonging to the Functional population is equal to the probability of belonging to the Dysfunctional population. When the Functional population distribution is above that of the Dysfunctional population, persons scoring above these cut scores can, in fact, have much greater probabilities of belonging to the Dysfunctional than to the Functional population. Goals of Jacobson's method can be attained only with Bayesian methods. Bayesian modifications of Jacobson's cut scores are proposed, although their use is limited by the availability of relevant base rates. Bayesian methods (a) can provide information about the probability that an individual belongs to each population, given his (her) score, and (b) are expected to yield total misdiagnosis rates that are many times lower than those of Jacobson's method. Users of Jacobson's method are cautioned against interpreting ratios of likelihoods as if they were ratios of posterior probabilities.     

Social anxiety among East Asians in North America: East Asian socialization or the challenge of acculturation?

North American research has consistently reported higher social anxiety among people of Asian heritage compared to people of Western heritage. The present study used a cross-national sample of 692 university students to explore explanatory hypotheses using planned contrasts of group differences in social anxiety and related variables. The East Asian socialization hypothesis proposed social anxiety would show a linear relation corresponding to the degree of exposure to East Asian cultural norms. This hypothesis was not supported. The cultural discrepancy hypothesis examined whether bicultural East Asian participants (residing in Canada) would endorse higher social anxiety in comparison to unicultural participants (Western-heritage Canadians and native Koreans and Chinese). Compared to unicultural participants, bicultural East Asian participants reported higher social anxiety and depression, a relation that was partially mediated by bicultural participants' reports of lower self-efficacy about initiating social relationships and lower perceived social status. Overall, the results suggest higher reports of social anxiety among bicultural East Asians may be conceptualized within the context of cultural discrepancy with the mainstream culture.     

With or without a hole: young infants' sensitivity for topological versus geometric property

Evidence from adult psychophysics, brain imaging, and honeybee's behaviour has been reported to support the notion that topological properties are the primitives of visual representation (Chen, 1982 Science 218 699-700). Here, we ask how the sensitivity to topological property might originate during development. Specifically, we tested 1.5- to 6-month-old infants' visual sensitivity for topological versus geometric properties with the forced-choice novelty preference technique. A disk and a ring were used in the topologically different condition (experiment 1), while a disk and a triangle were used in the geometrically different condition (experiment 2). Spontaneous preferences for the disk, the ring, and the triangle were measured pairwise using the preferential looking-time technique (experiment 3). The results showed that infants could reliably discriminate stimuli based on topological differences, but failed to do so with geometric differences. Moreover, in the generalisation task, infants showed higher novelty preference for the topologically different figure (the ring). In addition, the results of both experiments cannot be attributed to a spontaneous preference for the ring or for the disk. Further analysis on individual infants' age and performance revealed two distinct developmental trends. Infants seem to be sensitive to topological differences as young as 1.5 months, while their ability to discriminate geometric differences was at chance before 3 months and gradually improved with age. Taken together, our findings suggested an early sensitivity for topological property, at least for the detection of stimuli with or without a hole.     

Compression as a Universal Principle of Animal Behavior

A key aim in biology and psychology is to identify fundamental principles underpinning the behavior of animals, including humans. Analyses of human language and the behavior of a range of non‐human animal species have provided evidence for a common pattern underlying diverse behavioral phenomena: Words follow Zipf's law of brevity (the tendency of more frequently used words to be shorter), and conformity to this general pattern has been seen in the behavior of a number of other animals. It has been argued that the presence of this law is a sign of efficient coding in the information theoretic sense. However, no strong direct connection has been demonstrated between the law and compression, the information theoretic principle of minimizing the expected length of a code. Here, we show that minimizing the expected code length implies that the length of a word cannot increase as its frequency increases. Furthermore, we show that the mean code length or duration is significantly small in human language, and also in the behavior of other species in all cases where agreement with the law of brevity has been found. We argue that compression is a general principle of animal behavior that reflects selection for efficiency of coding.     

High-resolution characterization of the precipitation behavior of an Al–Zn–Mg–Cu alloy

The metastable particles in an Al–Zn–Mg–Cu alloy have been examined at atomic-resolution using high-angle annular dark field (HAADF) imaging. In under-aged conditions, thin η′ plates were formed with a thickness of seven atomic planes parallel to the {111}_Al planes. The five inner planes of the η′ phase appear to be alternatively enriched in Mg and Zn, with two outer planes forming distinct Zn-rich interfacial planes. Similar Zn-rich interfacial enrichment has also been identified for the η phase, which is a minimum 11-plane thick structure. In rare instances, particles less than seven planes were found indicating a very early preference for seven-layer particle formation. Throughout the aging, the plate thickness appears constant, while the plate radius increases and no particles between 7 and 11 planes were observed. Based on the HAADF contrast, our observations do not support the η′ models previously set forth by other authors. Clear structural similarities between η′ and η were observed, suggesting that drawing distinctions between η′ and η phases may not be necessary or useful.     

Cultural influences on willingness to seek treatment for social anxiety in Chinese- and European-heritage students

We examined culture-related influences on willingness to seek treatment for social anxiety in first- and second-generation students of Chinese heritage (Ns=65, 47, respectively), and their European-heritage counterparts (N=60). Participants completed measures that assessed their willingness to seek treatment for various levels of social anxiety. Results showed that participants were similar on willingness to seek treatment at low- and high-severity levels of social anxiety; however, at moderate levels, first-generation Chinese participants were significantly less willing to seek treatment compared to their European-heritage counterparts. The reluctance of first-generation Chinese participants to seek treatment was associated with greater Chinese-heritage acculturation, and was not related to perceiving symptoms of social anxiety as less impairing. The findings support the general contention that Asians in North America tend to delay treatment for mental health problems.     

Two-month-olds' attention and affective response to maternal still face: a comparison between term and preterm infants in Taiwan

Maternal still face is a robust experimental procedure designed to examine infants’ sensitivity to social contingency and reactivity to its violation. To extend earlier research on the still-face effect on term infants in Western cultures, the present study compared Taiwanese term and preterm infants’ attention and affective response to and recovery from a modified maternal still-face procedure that used an additional still-face reengagement sequence at 2 months of age (corrected age for preterm infants). Infants’ gaze and facial affect were coded from videos. Results showed that preterm infants were as sensitive as term infants to the interruption to social contingency. Both groups of infants reacted with decreased gaze and positive affect across episodes, together with a decreased latency to gaze aversion and an increased latency to positive affect. Both term and preterm infants also demonstrated a W-shaped pattern of decline-followed-by-recovery in their latency to negative affect. However, compared to term infants, preterm infants became distressed faster and stayed in a negative affective state longer after the first exposure to maternal still face. Effects of prematurity on infant attention and affect regulation were discussed. Implications of preterm infants’ heightened affective negativity to mild stress for intervention studies were also addressed.