Behavioral and Emotional Functioning of Children and Adolescents at the End of Treatment for Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia Compared to Healthy Peers

Journal of Clinical Psychology in Medical Settings - This study describes the behavioral and emotional adjustment of 77 children and adolescents 3 months post-treatment for acute lymphoblastic...     

An expert–novice comparison of feature choice

Perceptual experts have learned to rapidly and accurately perceive the structural regularities that define categories and identities within a domain. They extract important features and their relations more efficiently than novices. We used fingerprint examination to investigate expert–novice differences in feature choice. On each fingerprint within our set, experts and novices selected one feature they thought was most useful for distinguishing a particular print and one feature they thought was least useful. We found that experts and novices often differed in the features they chose, and experts tended to agree more with each other. However, any such expert–novice difference appeared to depend on the image at hand typically emerging when salient or more conspicuous features of a fingerprint were unclear. We suggest that perceptual training ought to direct attention to useful features with the understanding that what is useful may change depending on the clarity of the stimuli.     

Past,present, and prospects: Reflections 40 years on from the selective impairment of semantic memory (Warrington, 1975)

We summarize the main findings and conclusions of Warrington's (1975) paper, The Selective Impairment of Semantic memory, a neuropsychological paper that described three cases with degenerative neurological conditions [Warrington, E. K. (1975). The selective impairment of semantic memory. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 27, 635–657]. We consider the developments that have followed from its publication and give a selective overview of the field in 2014. The initial impact of the paper was on neuropsychological investigations of semantic loss followed some 14 years later by the identification of Semantic Dementia (the condition shown by the original cases) as a distinctive form of degenerative disease with unique clinical and pathological characteristics. We discuss the distinction between disorders of semantic storage and refractory semantic access, the evidence for category- and modality-specific impairments of semantics, and the light that has been shed on the structure and organization of semantic memory. Finally we consider the relationship between semantic memory and the skills of reading and writing, phonological processing, and autobiographical memory.     

Local form–motion interactions influence global form perception

Object motion perception depends on the integration of form and motion information into a unified neural representation. Historically, form and motion perception are thought to be independent processes; however, research has demonstrated that these processes interact in numerous and complex ways. For example, an object??s orientation relative to its direction of motion will influence its perceived speed (Georges, Seriès, Frégnac, & Lorenceau, Vision Research 42:2757?C2772, 2002). Here, we investigated whether this local form?Cmotion interaction influences global form processing. In Experiment 1, we replicated the effect of orientation-dependent modulation of speed. In Experiment 2, we investigated whether the perceived speed of local elements could influence the perceived shape of a global object constructed from grouping of those elements. The results indicated that the orientation of local elements indeed influenced the perceived shape of a global object. We propose that inputs from local form?Cmotion processes are one of perhaps many neural mechanisms underlying global form integration.