Snoddy (1926) Revisited: Time Scales of Motor Learning

A new 3-stage model based on neuroimaging evidence is proposed by Chein and Schneider (2012). Each stage is associated with different brain regions, and draws on cognitive abilities: the first stage on creativity, the second on selective attention, and the third on automatic processing. The purpose of the present study was to scrutinize the validity of this model for 1 popular learning paradigm, visuomotor adaptation. Participants completed tests for creativity, selective attention and automated processing before attending in a pointing task with adaptation to a 60° rotation of visual feedback. To examine the relationship between cognitive abilities and motor learning at different times of practice, associations between cognitive and adaptation scores were calculated repeatedly throughout adaptation. The authors found no benefit of high creativity for adaptive performance. High levels of selective attention were positively associated with early adaptation, but hardly with late adaptation and de-adaptation. High levels of automated execution were beneficial for late adaptation, but hardly for early and de-adaptation. From this we conclude that Chein and Schneider's first learning stage is difficult to confirm by research on visuomotor adaptation, and that the other 2 learning stages rather relate to workaround strategies than to actual adaptive recalibration.     

On the parity of structural persistence in language production and comprehension

Structural priming creates structural persistence. That is, differences in experience with syntax can change subsequent language performance, and the changes can be observed in both language production and comprehension. However, the effects in comprehension and production appear to differ. In comprehension, persistence is typically found when the verbs are the same in primes and targets; in production, persistence occurs without verb overlap. The contrast suggests a theoretically important hypothesis: parsing in comprehension is lexically driven while formulation in production is structurally driven. A major weakness in this hypothesis about comprehension-production differences is that its empirical motivation rests on the outcomes of experiments in which the priming manipulations differ, the primed sentence structures differ, and the measures of priming differ. To sharpen the comparison, we examined structural persistence with and without verb overlap in both reading comprehension and spoken production, using the same prime presentation procedure, the same syntactic structures, the same sentences, and the same participants. These methods yielded abstract structural persistence in comprehension as well as production. A measure of the strength of persistence revealed significant effects of priming and verb overlap without significant comprehension—production differences. This argues for uniformity in the structural mechanisms of language processing.     

Resolving Conflicts in Natural and Grammatical Gender Agreement: Evidence from Eye Movements

The present research investigated the attraction phenomenon, which commonly occurs in the domain of production but is also apparent in comprehension. It particularly focused on its accessibility to conceptual influence, in analogy to previous findings in production in Hebrew (Deutsch and Dank, J Mem Lang, 60:112–143, 2009). The experiments made use of the contrast between grammatical and natural gender in Hebrew, using complex subject noun phrases containing head nouns and prepositional phrases with local nouns. Noun phrases were manipulated to produce (a) matches and mismatches in grammatical gender between heads and local nouns; and (b) inanimate nouns and animate nouns with natural gender that served either as head or as local nouns. These noun phrases were the subjects of sentences that ended with predicates agreeing in gender with the head noun, with the local noun, or both. The ungrammatical sentences were those in which the gender of the predicate and the head noun did not match. To assess the impact of conflicts in grammatical and natural gender on the time course of reading, participants’ eye movements were monitored. The results revealed clear disruptions in reading the predicate due to grammatical-gender mismatches with head and local nouns, in analogy to attraction in production. When the head nouns conveyed natural gender these effects were amplified, but variations in the natural gender of local nouns had negligible consequences. The results imply that comprehension and production are similarly sensitive to the control of grammatical agreement by grammatical and natural gender in subject noun phrases.     

Proprioception plays a different role for sensorimotor adaptation to different distortions

If proprioceptive feedback is degraded by agonist-antagonist muscle vibration, then adaptation to rotated vision remains intact while adaptation to a velocity-dependent force field worsens. Here we evaluate whether this differential effect of vibration is related to the physical nature of the distortion - visual versus mechanical - or to their kinematic coupling to the subjects’ hand - velocity versus position dependent. Subjects adapted to a velocity-dependent visual distortion, to a position-dependent force, or to a velocity-dependent force; one half of the subjects adapted with, and the other half without agonist-antagonist vibration at the wrist, elbow, and shoulder. We found, as before, that vibration slowed down adaptation to a velocity-dependent force. However, vibration did not modify adaptation to the other two distortions, nor did it influence the aftereffects of any distortion. From this we conclude that intact proprioception supports strategic compensatory processes when proprioceptive signals agree with visual ones, and provide relevant (dynamic) information not available to the visual system.     

Dissoziation und Kreativität—Entrückungen im Alltag

Our everyday life is characterized by changing conditions of awareness up to ecstasy. Ecstasy is a special form of dissociation, which must be differentiated from the pathological-clinical forms of dissociation. Its psychic mechanisms are illustrated by the example of ecstasy during the process of reading. On the basic of the myths of Dionysos and Orpheus as well as in biographies of artists, the ability to reach the state of ecstasy is described as one of the presuppositions for creativity, which must be supplemented by the ability of working through. Reverie and interpretation are the corresponding creative abilities in the psychoanalytical process. Our psychic vitality and creativity results from permanent switches between these different spheres, which must be identifiable as being distinct. The disappearing fonction du réel (Janet)—because of the increasing virtualisation of our everyday life—should be discussed with respect to creativity.     

魔力与神学--本雅明历史论题中不引人注目的图像

一英国喜剧团体Monty Python's Flying Circus最杰出的滑稽短剧之一是一场滑稽模仿秀比赛——“全英总结普鲁斯特比赛”。选手们被要求在15 秒内尽可能多的总结普鲁斯特关于寻找失去的时间的论作。舞台上树立了一块黑板,它上面从下往上按照游戏“击打卢卡斯”装置(Hau-den -Lukas-Apparatur)的形式列出了文章的书籍。但是几乎没有一个选手在开头时能够超越第一册的第一页。于是,时间就卡在他们的脖子里,如普鲁斯特本人一样,他们也不可避免的一点一点遗失了时间。     

The Role of Precues in the Preparation of Motor Responses in Humans

The authors investigated how precues about the location of an upcoming target are used by the sensorimotor system to reduce manual reaction time. In 4 experiments, participants (N = 12 in each experiment) pressed a response key as fast as possible when a precued or a nonprecued visual target appeared. Precues remained effective when a visual mask was interposed between the display of the precue and the target (Experiment 1), which suggests that precues act downstream from visual sensory memory. The precue effect was abolished when precues were presented along with a task requiring attention and a verbal response (Experiment 2) but not when presented with a task that required verbal output but had no attention demands (Experiment 3). Those findings indicate that precues must be processed attentively to become effective. When the attention-demanding task was interposed between precue and target display, the precue effect was still abolished (Experiment 4), which suggests that individuals' attention must remain in the precued area until target appearance.     

Evidence for processing stages in skill acquisition: a dual-task study

We investigated the changes of resource demand during the acquisition of a sensorimotor skill, namely the tracking of a visual target under reversed visual feedback. This acquisition task was performed alone or concurrently with one of four manual reaction-time tasks as loading tasks, designed to tap different computational resources. As expected, we found tracking performance to deteriorate upon vision reversal and then to gradually improve with practice. We further found that acquisition task and loading task interfered little before vision reversal but substantially afterwards. Most importantly, we observed a different time-course of interference for each of our four loading tasks. The particular pattern led us to conclude that resources related to spatial attention and sensory transformations are in highest demand early during skill acquisition and those pertinent to movement preparation somewhat later. Our findings thus provide experimental support for the theory that motor learning progresses in stages characterized by different resource requirements.     

The role of salience in conceptual combination

The present study investigated three factors that affect the interpretation of novel noun-noun (N-N) combinations: simple feature salience, ontological category, and assessed similarity. Participants read and defined a series of novel N-N combinations in which the feature salience of N1 and N2 was manipulated. Participants also rated the combinations for similarity. The combinations were constrained to be within ontological category. All interpretations were scored in terms of the strategies (property mapping vs. relation linking) used to produce the given interpretations. Highly salient features drove property-mapping interpretations based on those features. Natural kinds produced more property-mapping interpretations than did artifacts. There was no correlation between the proportion of property-mapping interpretations and the assessed similarity of the N-N combinations. These results are discussed as an extension of Estes and Glucksberg's (2000) interactive theory of conceptual combination and argue for the importance of feature salience as a factor in conceptual combination.     

The persistence of structural priming: transient activation or implicit learning?

Structural priming in language production is a tendency to recreate a recently uttered syntactic structure in different words. This tendency can be seen independent of specific lexical items, thematic roles, or word sequences. Two alternative proposals about the mechanism behind structural priming include (a) short-term activation from a memory representation of a priming structure and (b) longer term adaptation within the cognitive mechanisms for creating sentences, as a form of procedural learning. Two experiments evaluated these hypotheses, focusing on the persistence of structural priming. Both experiments yielded priming that endured beyond adjacent sentences, persisting over 2 intervening sentences in Experiment 1 and over 10 in Experiment 2. Although memory may have short-term consequences for some components of this kind of priming, the persisting effects are more compatible with a learning account than a transient memory account.