Nightmare frequency and femininity/masculinity

Several large-scale studies showed that women tend to report nightmares more often than men. Despite this robust finding, empirically tested interpretations of these sex differences are lacking. Levin and Nielsen put forward the hypothesis that sex-specific socialization might be one of the risk factors for nightmare occurrence. The present findings of an online survey indicate that expressivity/femininity and instrumentality/masculinity were related to nightmare fre quency and, thus, supported this hypothesis. Since the sex difference in nightmare frequency was not fully explained by these two variables, future studies should investigate other variables--in addition to sex-role orientation--like depressive symptoms, history of sexual and/or physical abuse, ruminative coping styles, and physiological measures of processing emotional stimuli within the brain.     

Emotions in cognitive conflicts are not aversive but are task specific

It has been suggested that cognitive conflicts require effortful processing and, therefore, are aversive (Botvinick, 2007). In the present study, we compared conflicts emerging from the inhibition of a predominant response tendency in a go/no-go task with those between incompatible response activations in a Simon task in a within-subjects design, using the same type of stimuli. Whereas no-go trials elicited reduced skin conductance and pupillometric responses, but prolonged corrugator muscle activity, as compared with go trials, incompatible and compatible Simon trials were indistinguishable with respect to these parameters. Furthermore, the conflictsensitive N2 components of the event-related brain potential were similar in amplitude, but showed significantly different scalp distributions, indicating dissociable neural generator systems. The present findings suggest the involvement of different emotional and cognitive processes in both types of cognitive conflicts—none being aversive, however. In addition, the N2 findings call into question claims of common monitoring systems for all kinds of cognitive conflicts.     

Prismatic Equivalence – A New Case of Underdetermination: Goethe vs. Newton on the Prism Experiments

Goethe's objections to Newton's theory of light and colours are better than often acknowledged. You can accept the most important elements of these objections without disagreeing with Newton about light and colours. As I will argue, Goethe exposed a crucial weakness of Newton's methodological self-assessment. Newton believed that with the help of his prism experiments, he could prove that sunlight was composed of variously coloured rays of light. Goethe showed that this step from observation to theory is more problematic than Newton wanted to admit. By insisting that the step to theory is not forced upon us by the phenomena, Goethe revealed our own free, creative contribution to theory construction. And Goethe's insight is surprisingly significant, because he correctly claimed that all of the results of Newton's prism experiments fit a theoretical alternative equally well. If this is correct, then by suggesting an alternative to a well-established physical theory, Goethe developed the problem of underdetermination a century before Duhem and Quine's famous arguments.     

Only time will tell – why temporal information is essential for our neuroscientific understanding of semantics

Theoretical developments about the nature of semantic representations and processes should be accompanied by a discussion of how these theories can be validated on the basis of empirical data. Here, I elaborate on the link between theory and empirical research, highlighting the need for temporal information in order to distinguish fundamental aspects of semantics. The generic point that fast cognitive processes demand fast measurement techniques has been made many times before, although arguably more often in the psychophysiological community than in the metabolic neuroimaging community. Many reviews on the neuroscience of semantics mostly or even exclusively focus on metabolic neuroimaging data. Following an analysis of semantics in terms of the representations and processes involved, I argue that fundamental theoretical debates about the neuroscience of semantics can only be concluded on the basis of data with sufficient temporal resolution. Any “semantic effect” may result from a conflation of long-term memory representations, retrieval and working memory processes, mental imagery, and episodic memory. This poses challenges for all neuroimaging modalities, but especially for those with low temporal resolution. It also throws doubt on the usefulness of contrasts between meaningful and meaningless stimuli, which may differ on a number of semantic and non-semantic dimensions. I will discuss the consequences of this analysis for research on the role of convergence zones or hubs and distributed modal brain networks, top-down modulation of task and context as well as interactivity between levels of the processing hierarchy, for example in the framework of predictive coding.     

Tracking the Decision‐Making Process in Multiple‐Choice Assessment: Evidence from Eye Movements

This study investigated students' decision‐making processes in a knowledge‐assessing multiple‐choice (MC) test using eye‐tracking methodology. More precisely, the gaze bias effect (more attention to more preferred options) and its relation to domain knowledge were the focus of the study. Eye movements of students with high (HPK) and low (LPK) prior domain knowledge were recorded while they solved 21 MC items. Afterwards, students rated every answer option according to their subjective preference. As expected, both HPK and LPK students showed a gaze bias towards subjectively preferred answer options, whereby HPK students spent more time on objectively correct answers. Furthermore, a fine‐grained time‐course analysis showed similar patterns of attention distribution over time for both HPK and LPK students, when focusing on subjective preference levels. Thus, these data offer a new perspective on knowledge‐related MC item solving and provide evidence for the generalizability of the gaze bias effect across decision tasks. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.