Normal time course of auditory recognition in schizophrenia, despite impaired precision of the auditory sensory ("echoic") memory code

Prior studies have demonstrated impaired precision of processing within the auditory sensory memory (ASM) system in schizophrenia. This study used auditory backward masking to evaluate the degree to which such deficits resulted from impaired overall precision versus premature decay of information within the short-term auditory store. ASM performance was evaluated in 14 schizophrenic participants and 16 controls. Schizophrenic participants were severely impaired in their ability to match tones following delay. However, when no-mask performance was equated across participants, schizophrenic participants were no more susceptible to the effects of backward maskers than were controls. Thus, despite impaired precision of ASM performance, schizophrenic participants showed no deficits in the time course over which short-term representations could be used within the ASM system.     

Gender Role Orientation and Performance on Stereotypically Feminine and Masculine Cognitive Tasks

Nash (1979) argued that people tend to perform better on cognitive tasks when their gender-related self-concept is consistent with the stereotyping of the tasks. In order to evaluate Nash's hypothesis, participants were administered the S&M Mental Rotation Task, the Controlled Word Association Test, and the Bem (1974) Sex Role Inventory (BSRI). In men gender role orientation was significantly related to performance on the verbal task, with the critical factor being androgyny. When femininity and masculinity were assessed individually, femininity was found to be significantly related to the verbal task in men only. In women there was no significant variability across the gender role types in relation to performance on either task. These findings suggest that the importance of gender is dependent on the task and participants' sex. Nash's hypothesis was not supported for the mental rotation task.     

Patočka’s Care of the Soul Reconsidered: Performing the Soul Through Movement

Care of the soul is arguably the core concept in Pato?ka’s phenomenology. However, what is the soul? In this paper I seek to determine its ontological meaning, connecting the concept of caring for the soul with that of the movement of existence. Starting from Pato?ka’s affirmative presentation of Aristotle’s criticism of Plato, I interrogate the “orthodox” Platonic concept of caring for the soul and develop an alternative notion, putting emphasis on action in the world. I demonstrate the impossibility of identifying the third movement with true existence, or with the care for the soul, whether conceived as the performance of philosophy or as political action. Finally, I outline a reinterpreted concept of care for the soul in which the (active) self-moving of the soul is not ontologically prior to (passive) responding. The soul is inherent in action; and it is free only as responding to the world and responsible only in being free.     

The impact of previous leaders on the evaluation of new leaders: an alternative to prototype matching

In 2 studies, this research demonstrated the existence of leader transference, a cognitive process whereby mental representations of previous leaders are activated and used for evaluation when new, similar leaders are encountered. The 1st study demonstrated that exposure to a new leader who was similar to a past leader led to erroneous generalization of leader characteristics and associated underlying attributions. The 2nd study showed that expectations of just treatment and abuse were also subject to transfer from old to new, similar leaders, although positive and negative affective responses were not. Results suggested that individuals exposed to a leader who was not reminiscent of an old leader were more likely to use a general leader prototype to form leader expectations, whereas individuals exposed to a leader who was similar to an old leader activated a significant other mental representation for use in making judgments. These results have implications for individual- and relational-level processes as characterized by implicit leadership theory and leader-member exchange theory as well as macro theories of leader succession and organizational culture change.     

Creativity: Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Selection of Creative Ideas

Creative idea selection—the selection of the most creative idea(s) from available ideas—is an important yet understudied topic. Creative idea selection can be performed by the idea generator (i.e., intrapersonal selection) or by another person (i.e., interpersonal selection). In the current research, we examined whether these two types of selection lead to different levels of performance. Participants generated six creative ideas to solve a societal problem. Thereafter, two selection tasks—intrapersonal selection and interpersonal selection—were performed. During intrapersonal selection, the idea generator selected the most creative idea from his/her own ideas; during interpersonal selection, another person made the selection from the same ideas. We found no effect of intrapersonal and interpersonal selection on creative idea selection performance: People selected ideas of identical creativity, irrespective of whether that idea was from themselves or from others. Moreover, we replicated the earlier finding that people perform suboptimally at creative idea selection, failing to select ideas that were more creative than an average idea, for both intrapersonal and interpersonal selection.     

RUI: Recording user input from interfaces under Windows and Mac OS X

Event and timing logs are useful in studying human—computer interaction, evaluating applications, and comparing input devices. Recording User Input (RUI) is a tool that records user—computer interface behavior. It is created in the .Net framework with C# for Windows and in the Carbon framework for Mac OS X. RUI runs in the background and works with software that runs under Windows or Mac OS X (10.3 Panther and later versions). We illustrate its use with a human—robot interaction interface and present two simple tests that RUI passes and that other timing software should pass: avoiding 0-msec timings and time distributions that follow a gamma (or gamma-like) distribution.     

Brain activity for visual judgment of lifted weight

It is well established that humans can recognize high-level aspects from point-light biological motion, such as gender and mood. If the task is to judge the manipulated weight we expected that sensorimotor regions should be recruited in the brain. Moreover, we have recently shown that chronic pain in a limb that is involved in the presented movement disturbs the weight judgment. We therefore hypothesized that some cortical regions usually activated during the processing of pain will also be activated while viewing point-light biological motion with the instruction to judge the manipulated weights. We investigated point-light biological motion of two types of movements performed with different weights in a blocked fMRI experiment in healthy subjects. In line with our a priori hypothesis, we found strong activity in the regions known as the neuromatrix of pain, such as the anterior cingulate (ACC), insula, as well as primary and secondary somatosensory regions. We also found activation in the occipital and temporal regions that are typical for biological motion, as well as regions in the cerebellum and prefrontal cortex. The activation of the somatosensory regions probably serves the judgment of the biological motion stimuli. Activation of the anterior cingulate and the insula might be explained by their role in the integration of behaviorally relevant information. Alternatively, these structures are known to be involved in the processing of nociceptive information and pain. So it seems possible that the interference between judgment of weights and perception of pain in chronic pain patients occurs in the somatosensory areas, anterior cingulate and/or insula. This finding provides important information as to the underlying mechanisms used for the weight judgment task, but also why chronic pain interferes with this task.     

Learning from examples does not prevent order effects in belief revision

A common finding is that information order influences belief revision (e.g., Hogarth & Einhorn, 1992 Hogarth, R. M. and Einhorn, H. J. 1992. Order effects in belief updating: The belief-adjustment model. Cognitive Psychology, 24: 1–55. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). We tested personal experience as a possible mitigator. In three experiments participants experienced the probabilistic relationship between pieces of information and object category through a series of trials where they assigned objects (planes) into one of two possible categories (hostile or commercial), given two sequentially presented pieces of probabilistic information (route and ID), and then they had to indicate their belief about the object category before feedback. The results generally confirm the predictions from the Hogarth and Einhorn model. Participants showed a recency effect in their belief revision. Extending previous model evaluations the results indicate that the model predictions also hold for classification decisions, and for pieces of information that vary in their diagnostic values. Personal experience does not appear to prevent order effects in classification decisions based on sequentially presented pieces of information and in belief revision.