Representations and narratives during pregnancy

In this paper, we explore how maternal representations, and in particular their contents, are structured during pregnancy. Twenty-three primiparous women were recruited for participation in a longitudinal study about mothers' thoughts and feelings about their infants. A semistructured interview was conducted with each of the subjects in the third trimester of pregnancy. During the interview, subjects were also given five adjective lists based on the semantic differential model. Results from this sample indicate similarities in the content-free aspects of representations of self and baby, but differences in the content of these presentations. Implications of these results are discussed with regard to the construction of an internal representation of the child in the third trimester of pregnancy.     

Peculiar aspects of reading and writing performances in patients with olivopontocerebellar atrophy

Olivopontocerebellar atrophy (OPCA) is a still debated condition, of which motor disruption is the most common feature. A high incidence of associated mood disorders may exist, but there are few studies on concomitant cognitive impairment. Our aim was to assess whether there is reading and writing disruption in olivopontocerebellar atrophy (OPCA). 6 patients were administered different reading and writing tasks. Scores were then compared to those obtained by healthy volunteers. There was an evident impairment in reading and writing execution in our patients compared to those of the control group. On the contrary, no difference could be found in abstraction, problem-solving, and memory tasks. We discuss the results, debating the role of the cerebellum in the conscious process of cognition or in ocular movement control (necessary for reading and writing fluidity and effective execution) and in the dynamic activation of all the cerebral cortex mediated by the diffuse projection to the reticular system.     

Mental representation of prepositional compounds: evidence from Italian agrammatic patients

The processing of Prepositional compounds (typical Neo-latin noun--noun modifications where a head noun is modified by a prepositional phrase, e.g., mulino a vento, windmill) was preliminarily studied with a group of six agrammatic aphasic patients, and, in more detail, with a further agrammatic patient (MB). Omission was the most frequent error type in naming, whereas in the other tasks (repetition, reading, writing, and completion) errors were mostly substitutions of the target preposition. This happened even with fully lexicalized compound forms, i.e., those forms where the linking preposition is syntactically and semantically opaque. These findings are interpreted in terms of a dual-route theory of lexical access to morphologically complex words.     

Decline in working memory updating through ageing: intrusion error analyses

The present research examines the decline in working memory updating through age. Two experiments compared groups of participants in different age ranges (young-old, 55-65 years, old, 66-75 years and old-old, more than 75 years and, in Experiment 2 only, young, 20-30 years). Memory updating tasks were administered, which required participants to remember the smallest items in each list. To perform the task correctly, participants had to update information efficiently, reducing interference from items no longer relevant. Intrusion errors were computed and in the first experiment these were described as "intrusions of irrelevant items" (immediate exclusion) and "intrusions of once relevant items" (delayed exclusion). The oldest adults performed worse in memory updating and made a greater number of intrusion errors of once relevant information. In the second experiment results showed that increases in memory load (number of items that had to be remembered) and updating demand (number of potentially relevant items) impaired performance. The oldest adults had greater difficulty when the task demand was increased. Furthermore, they produced a higher number of intrusion errors, particularly when the updating demand was increased. It therefore appears that elderly people have specific difficulty in updating information in working memory by excluding irrelevant information.     

Children with low motor ability have lower visual-motor integration ability but unaffected perceptual skills

The purpose of this study was to examine perceptual, visual-motor abilities and intellectual skills in children with low, average and above average motor abilities. The participants were 144 children (aged 6-10 years) attending elementary school. Three groups of children were identified on the basis of their performance at the TGMD (Test of Gross Motor Development; [Ulrich, D.A. (1985). TGMD, Test of Gross Motor Development. Austin, Texas: PRO-ED. Edizione Italiana a cura di D. Ianes, TEST TGM. Test di valutazione delle abilita grosso-motorie. 1994, Trento: Edizioni Centro Studi Erickson]). Each child received an intelligence test (K-BIT; [Kaufman, A.S., & Kaufman, N.L. (1990). K-BIT. Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test. Circle Pines, MN: American Guidance Service]) and was evaluated for perceptual and visual-motor integration abilities (DTVP; [Hammill, D.D., Pearson, N.A., & Voress, J.K. (1993). Developmental Test of Visual Perception (2nd ed.). Austin, Texas: PRO-ED. Edizione Italiana a cura di D. Ianes, TEST TPV. Test di percezione visiva e integrazione visuo-motoria. Trento: Edizioni Centro Studi Erickson]). Results highlight a significant difference in visual-motor integration between children with high and low gross-motor abilities, in the absence of significant differences in perceptual skills or intellectual ability. The findings are discussed with reference to the concept of atypical brain development [Gilger, J.W., & Kaplan, B.J. (2001). Atypical brain development: A conceptual framework for understanding developmental learning disabilities. Developmental Neuropsychology, 20, 465].     

On the behavioral consequences of infrahumanization: the implicit role of uniquely human emotions in intergroup relations

Four experiments confirmed the hypothesis that people discriminate the out-group on the basis of the expression of uniquely human emotions. In Study 1, using a lost e-mail paradigm, the expression of a uniquely human emotion resulted in "nicer" replies when the sender was an in-group compared with an out-group member. The same pattern of results was obtained in Studies 2 and 3 using a conformity paradigm. In addition, perceived similarity was measured and proposed as a potential underlying mechanism (Study 3). Finally, using an approach-avoidance procedure, Study 4 showed that people not only deprive the out-group of positive consequences as in the former studies but that people also act against the out-group. The role of infrahumanization underlying prejudice and discrimination is discussed.     

Writing errors by normal subjects

Writing is a complex process requiring visual memory, attention, phonological and semantic operations, and motor performance. For that reason, it can easily be disturbed by interfering with attention, memory, by interfering subvocalization, and so on. With 16 female third-year students (23.4 +/- 0.8 yr.) from the University of Trieste, we investigated the production of errors in three experimental conditions (control, articulatory suppression, and tapping). In the articulatory suppression condition, the participants produced significantly more linguistic impairments (such as agrammatism, unrelated substitutions, sentence omissions, and semantically deviant sentences), which are similar to linguistic impairments found in aphasia. On the tapping condition there were more perseverations, deletions, and substitutions of both letters and words. These data suggest that writing is not an automatic skill. Only after many years of experience and practice of processing information (through cortical to subcortical channels) can writing be considered an automatic skill. Limited experimental conditions can disrupt the writing system of normal subjects, probably interfering with the cortical to subcortical loops, and link normality to pathology.     

Modality-specific effects in inhibitory mechanisms: the interaction of peripheral and central components in working memory

Working memory is a complex system assumed to encompass both storage and processing components. At the same time, several authors have suggested the existence of separate peripheral modality-specific subsystems, in particular a verbal and a visuo-spatial mechanism. In the present research, we explored the hypothesis that modality-specific mechanisms may also operate in the central processing component. Inhibitory control has traditionally been considered as a typical function of the central executive, devoted to selecting, processing, and eliminating irrelevant information. We designed verbal and visuo-spatial tasks involving similar procedures and comparable levels of inhibitory control. Results indicate that accuracy profiles are similar in the two conditions; however, the patterns of data measuring inhibitory control, i.e., percentage of intrusion errors, are opposite in the case of verbal (intrusions decreased in more complex trials) and visuo-spatial (intrusions increased in more complex trials) material. These data are consistent with theoretical models of working memory suggesting that modality-specific effects emerge even in central processes and that both material-dependent and process-dependent features must be considered in working memory tasks.     

Antigravity hills are visual illusions

Antigravity hills, also known as spook hills or magnetic hills, are natural places where cars put into neutral are seen to move uphill on a slightly sloping road, apparently defying the law of gravity. We show that these effects, popularly attributed to gravitational anomalies, are in fact visual illusions. We re-created all the known types of antigravity spots in our laboratory using tabletop models; the number of visible stretches of road, their slant, and the height of the visible horizon were systematically varied in four experiments. We conclude that antigravity-hill effects follow from a misperception of the eye level relative to gravity, caused by the presence of either contextual inclines or a false horizon line.