Action–effect anticipation in infant action control

There is increasing evidence that action effects play a crucial role in action understanding and action control not only in adults but also in infants. Most of the research in infants focused on the learning of action-effect contingencies or how action effects help infants to infer goals in other persons' actions. In contrast, the present research aimed at demonstrating that infants control their own actions by action-effect anticipation once they know about specific action-effect relations. About 7 and 9-month olds observed an experimenter demonstrating two actions that differed regarding the action-effect assignment. Either a red-button press or a blue-button press or no button press elicited interesting acoustical and visual effects. The 9-month olds produced the effect action at first, with shorter latency and longer duration sustaining a direct impact of action-effect anticipation on action control. In 7-month olds the differences due to action-effect manipulation were less profound indicating developmental changes at this age.     

Sex differences in mental rotation with polygons of different complexity: Do men utilize holistic processes whereas women prefer piecemeal ones?

Sex differences in mental rotation were investigated as a function of stimulus complexity with a sample size of N = 72. Replicating earlier findings with polygons, mental rotation was faster for males than for females, and reaction time increased with more complex polygons. Additionally, sex differences increased for complex polygons. Most importantly, however, mental rotation speed decreased with increasing complexity for women but did not change for men. Thus, the sex effects reflect a difference in strategy, with women mentally rotating the polygons in an analytic, piecemeal fashion and men using a holistic mode of mental rotation.     

Correlates of general quality of life are different in patients with primary insomnia as compared to patients with insomnia and psychiatric comorbidity

Chronic insomnia is known to have a negative influence on quality of life (QOL). To date, most studies on chronic insomnia have focused on health-related aspects of QOL. General QOL, which is a different construct, has not been studied in detail. Moreover, it is not known which factors are associated with general QOL in insomnia, and whether the presence of mental disorders, a condition known as comorbid insomnia, affects these variables. The present study focused on identifying sleep and psychosocial variables that might be associated with general QOL in primary and comorbid insomnia. Personality traits, coping variables, anxiety and depressive symptoms, fatigue and subjective sleep variables were assessed in 218 consecutive well-characterized patients with primary and comorbid insomnia, referred to a third line centre for sleep medicine. In primary insomnia, higher extraversion and lower discrepancies in social support were associated with higher QOL. Surprisingly, insomnia severity was not significantly associated with QOL in this group. However, lower fatigue, which can be seen as an important daytime consequence of insomnia was correlated with higher QOL in patients with primary insomnia. In both insomnia groups, low anxiety and depressive symptoms and low fatigue were associated with higher general QOL. In contrast with the primary insomnia group, lower insomnia severity was correlated with higher QOL in patients with comorbid insomnia. These results stress the importance of assessing and treating daytime fatigue in insomnia. In primary insomnia, improving social support might be an important treatment goal. Furthermore, this study supports the concept that treatment of insomnia should not be neglected in patients with comorbid insomnia. Indeed, both insomnia and indices of psychiatric disease are strongly associated with general QOL in this condition.     

The use of snowball sampling for multi source organizational research: Some cause for concern

In snowball sampling for multisource studies, researchers ask target participants to recruit informants. Despite its widespread use, especially for recruiting informants for multisource research, virtually no published research has addressed possible biases snowball sampling may cause in findings of this type of research. Such potential biases were tested empirically in a multisource study with a sample of 1,058 employed students asked to collect online ratings from their supervisors and coworkers. Informant ratings were obtained for 358 target participants. Objective indicators were employed to identify informant ratings suspicious of being fabricated. Results indicated that target participants who report (a) better relationship quality with informants, (b) fewer organizational constraints, and (c) more favorable self‐evaluations on behaviors to be rated by informants were more likely to be included in multisource data unsuspicious of being fabricated. Inclusion of informant ratings suspicious of being fabricated led to inflated estimates of self‐other consensus and of variance accounted for in criterion measures, to deflated informant rating means, but also to a target sample less restricted in terms of relevant organizational variables. In sum, the present findings suggest that potential biases should be identified in future uses of snowball sampling. Some practical recommendations toward that end are derived.     

Values and learning approaches of students at an international university

This study indicates that values are statistically significant precursors to approaches to learning in a cohort of predominantly Bulgarian, German and Romanian students studying at a German university where the language of instruction in all subject areas is English. Values have been measured with the Portrait Values Questionnaire (Schwartz et al. 2001), and approaches to learning have been assessed by the Study Process Questionnaire (Biggs, 1987). The relationships between values and approaches to learning have been estimated by canonical correlation analysis. Results of the analysis suggest that values can be linked to learning approaches in a situation where students have left their home countries to undertake tertiary studies in a new social, cultural and educational environment. Four distinct pairings between values and learning approaches emerge whereby: (a) self-aggrandisement is linked to the achievement learning variable, (b) conservatism relates to the surface learning variable, (c) self-directedness is linked to the deep learning variable and (d) benevolent change is related to the learning strategies variable. The analyses for this research were conducted while the second author was a visiting scholar at the Flinders University Institute of International Education in Adelaide, South Australia. The assistance of Professor John Keeves in the implementation and interpretation of additional statistical analyses is gratefully acknowledged.     

Disturbed behavioural adaptability as related to reproductive hormones and emotional states during the menstrual cycle

The relationship between the incapacity to adapt behaviour to external requirements and biological irregularities of the menstrual cycle was investigated in 30 healthy females divided according to a questionnaire on behavioural adaptability into good (GAs) and bad (BAs) adaptors. Emotional states and blood samples for determination of hormones were obtained on ten defined days of the menstrual cycle, which were individually synchronized to six phases according to biological indicators. Comparison of GAs and BAs revealed that the incapacity of behavioural adaptation is associated with higher neuroticism related traits and states and that BAs exhibited higher cortisol and testosterone levels, lower luteal and follicular levels of estrogen, and lower luteal levels of progesterone. Furthermore, significantly more BA subjects suffered from corpus luteum deficiency. Results are discussed with respect to chronobiological biobehavioural mechanisms. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Telemedizin als effizientes Werkzeug in der Konsultation von Menschen mit Alkoholabhängigkeit

psychopraxis. neuropraxis - Zur Sicherstellung der Kontinuität der Versorgung suchtkranker Patienten zwischen dem ambulanten und stationären Sektor wurde ein Pilotprojekt der Telemedizin...     

Gricean Expectations in Online Sentence Comprehension: An ERP Study on the Processing of Scalar Inferences

There is substantial support for the general idea that a formalization of comprehenders' expectations about the likely next word in a sentence helps explaining data related to online sentence processing. While much research has focused on syntactic, semantic, and discourse expectations, the present event‐related potentials (ERPs) study investigates neurolinguistic correlates of pragmatic expectations, which arise when comprehenders expect a sentence to conform to Gricean Maxims of Conversation. For predicting brain responses associated with pragmatic processing, we introduce a formal model of such Gricean pragmatic expectations, using an idealized incremental interpreter. We examine whether pragmatic expectancies derived from this model modulate the amplitude of the N400, a component that has been associated with predictive processing. As part of its parameterization, the model distinguishes genuine pragmatic interpreters, who expect maximally informative true utterances, from literal interpreters, who only expect truthfulness. We explore the model's non‐trivial predictions for an experimental setup which uses picture‐sentence verification with ERPs recorded at several critical positions in sentences containing the scalar implicature trigger some. We find that Gricean expectations indeed affect the N400, largely in line with the predictions of our model, but also discuss discrepancies between model predictions and observations critically.     

Validity of retrospective time‐use reports in old age

In a sample of N=83 participants aged between 72 and 97, we assessed the accuracy of time budgets originating from the Yesterday Interview (YI; Moss and Lawton, 1982) by means of comparison with in‐situ assessments based on the Experience‐Sampling Method (ESM; e.g. Csikszentmihalyi and Larson, 1987). We examined convergent and discriminant correlation patterns from indices of activity participation, location, company, and mood collected via both methods. The correspondence between the two methods appeared acceptable. Furthermore, we explored whether (a) length of the retention interval, (b) congruence with pre‐existing knowledge, and (c) congruence of the locations of encoding and retrieval accounted for (in)accuracy of recall. We also analysed the degree to which age and cognitive functioning explained performance differences. While we found discrepancies between YI and ESM to be hardly attributable to context effects or differences in cognitive functioning, there was an age effect. Finally, the sensitivity of the two methods to detect differences between groups was found to be largely equivalent but hardly sufficiently convergent. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Context and Complexity in Incremental Sentence Interpretation: An ERP Study on Temporal Quantification

The present event-related potential (ERP) study used picture–sentence verification to investigate the neurolinguistic correlates of the online processing of compositional-semantic information. To this end, we examined context effects on sentences involving temporal adverbial quantification likeJana war jeden Morgen schwimmen an den Arbeitstagen (“Jana went for a swim every morning during the working week”). We tested whether the conceptual complexity associated with quantifying over time intervals leads to delayed predictions regarding the upcoming words in a sentence. The present study replicated previous results relating to quantification over individuals, which are conceptually less complex than time intervals. Analogous to previous studies, false vs. true sentences elicited an N400 whenever contextual cues did not permit a potential revision of a locally assigned truth value. The present results are compatible with an approach under which contextual cues are immediately considered for predicting how a sentence continues. The fact that the contextual complexity did not lead to processing delays indicates that the processing system quickly abstracts away from the conceptual complexity associated with the linguistic input if such an abstraction is possible.