Comparative Evaluations

My response to Engelmann (2008) will be based on several questions that will allow both its author and the general reader to determine whether the assumptions I make as an interpreter of this complex paper are congruent or incongruent with their own interpretations of the text. The interpretations by the writer, by any commentator, and the diverse interpretations of a general audience together with my own interpretations will, I hope, facilitate some fruitful ‘comparative evaluations.’ I articulate my inferences of the most dense part of the paper, namely the ‘concrete immediate Consciousness and the developing absent outside.’ My hope is to address Engelmann’s question: “Am I in a better disposition to judge modern theories of consciousness?” The last section of my response spells out more personal comments to my all too brief and single encounter with Arno Engelmann. It is there that Arno Engelmann’s fascinating statement “I am a citizen of the world” is addressed through its counterparts in my life.     

An alternative hierarchical organization of the mental disorders of the DSM-IV

With the approaching publication of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), alternative organizations of the DSM (4th ed.; DSM-IV; American Psychiatric Association, 1994) categories have been proposed. This article compares several published alternative organizations to clinicians' organization of the DSM-IV categories. As demonstrations of their organization of DSM-IV categories, psychologists and psychiatrists sorted 66 DSM-IV diagnostic categories into groups of similar diagnoses and then made progressively larger and smaller groups of diagnoses or placed similar groups next to each other on a table. Hierarchical agglomerative data analysis of clinicians' individual sortings showed that clinicians retained many lower level DSM-IV categories (e.g., anxiety disorders, mood disorders), but not the higher level DSM-IV categories (e.g., Axis I vs. Axis II). Instead, at the highest hierarchical level, clinicians' categories resembled the structure of the first edition of the DSM (American Psychiatric Association, 1952), which followed clinicians' diagnostic decision-making scheme, dividing mental disorders into organic versus nonorganic and then psychotic versus neurotic disorders. At minimum, these data suggest a DSM organization that makes sense to clinicians.     

Expectation-based syntactic comprehension

This paper investigates the role of resource allocation as a source of processing difficulty in human sentence comprehension. The paper proposes a simple information-theoretic characterization of processing difficulty as the work incurred by resource reallocation during parallel, incremental, probabilistic disambiguation in sentence comprehension, and demonstrates its equivalence to the theory of Hale [Hale, J. (2001). A probabilistic Earley parser as a psycholinguistic model. In Proceedings of NAACL (Vol. 2, pp. 159-166)], in which the difficulty of a word is proportional to its surprisal (its negative log-probability) in the context within which it appears. This proposal subsumes and clarifies findings that high-constraint contexts can facilitate lexical processing, and connects these findings to well-known models of parallel constraint-based comprehension. In addition, the theory leads to a number of specific predictions about the role of expectation in syntactic comprehension, including the reversal of locality-based difficulty patterns in syntactically constrained contexts, and conditions under which increased ambiguity facilitates processing. The paper examines a range of established results bearing on these predictions, and shows that they are largely consistent with the surprisal theory.     

Bilateral associations of low-level unilateral performance: an unremarked aspect of limb control

The experimenters examine upper limb movement discrimination performance in an arm-raising task for bilateral associations of low-level unilateral performance. On a cue from the experimenter, young adults (n = 23) with no history of shoulder injury raised either their left arm, right arm, or both together in a forward flexion movement until their hand or hands contacted an unseen, adjustable, overhead stop. The participant then judged which of the 5 possible stop positions, in the 12-20 degrees range forward of true vertical, the participant had contacted on the particular trial. Results showed that for the 16 participants whose best performance was in 1 of the unimanual conditions discrimination scores in the bilateral condition were equivalent to those of their worse-performing limb. For the 7 participants whose best discrimination performance was obtained on bimanual arm-raising, scores for the 2 unimanual conditions were equivalently low. Therefore, when a single limb that can perform well operates in conjunction with a limb performing at a lower level, the consequence is lowering the bimanual movement discrimination performance.     

The relationship of impairment to personality disorder severity among individuals with specific axis I disorders: results from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions

The present study examined one dimensional approach to personality disorders (PDs) in a large (n = 43,093), nationally representative sample of the U.S. population. Respondents were classified in four personality severity categories (no PD, subthreshold PD, simple PD, complex PD). Linear regression analyses were conducted to examine mental disability by PD severity for major DSM-IV substance use, mood and anxiety disorders. Significant increases in disability were observed between no PD and simple PD and between simple PD and complex PD for each Axis I disorder except drug dependence, but few differences in disability were found between no PD and subthreshold PD. This study found support for the clinical utility of the dimensional classification of PD severity with regard to the distinction between simple and complex PD and for a combined no PD-subthreshold PD level of severity. Future planned analyses will address the clinical utility of the classification prospectively, with a full battery of all Axis II PDs.     

Interdependence of parenting of mothers and fathers of infants

This study examined the relations among parenting behaviors of 97 coresident mothers and fathers of infants during a dyadic free-play setting. The authors examined the extent to which observed sensitive and intrusive parenting behaviors in mother-child and father-child dyads were related and how perceived marital quality may be associated with the similarity between maternal and paternal parenting behaviors. The authors found support for interdependence of parenting by mothers and fathers. High perceived marital quality was associated with interdependence of sensitive parenting behaviors in mother-infant and father-infant interactions. Negative parenting behaviors by mothers and fathers were interrelated regardless of marital quality. The findings highlight the importance of studying parenting by mothers and fathers as embedded within particular family systems.     

Dissociations in visual attention deficits among persons with mild cognitive impairment

Impairments in visual attention and visual information processing have been identified as part of the neuropsychological features of Alzheimer's disease (AD), even in its earliest stages. There is increasing recognition that these deficits may be selective rather than global, with some attentional subtypes being more vulnerable than others. The few studies that have investigated attentional deficits in mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a putatively prodromal phase of AD, have not satisfactorily addressed the possible selectivity in attentional deficits in MCI. This study examined potential dissociations in visual attention deficits in MCI using a measure that assesses simple, divided, and selective attention. The results indicated a hierarchy of attentional impairments, with divided attention being the most affected and simple attention the least. Among participants with MCI, 53% showed evidence of impairment in divided attention compared to 19% of controls (OR = 4.81, p < .001). Poorer visual attention was also associated with poorer overall cognitive status. The implications of these findings for early identification of MCI, prevention of functional decline in MCI, and delay/reversal of cognitive degradation in MCI are discussed.     

Implicit orientation toward family and school among bilingual Latino college students

The authors examined the associations that underlie the orientations of bilingual Latino college students toward family and school. Participants completed, in English or Spanish, 3 implicit association tests assessing their attitude toward family vs. school, identifications with these concepts, and self-esteem. Results revealed a more positive attitude toward, and stronger identification with, family than school. Identification with family was stronger among participants who completed the study in English, suggesting self-definition in terms of distinctions from the context. Last, the more participants valued family over school and identified with family rather than school, the higher was their self-esteem. These findings shed light on the subtle, yet crucial, mechanisms by which cultural knowledge is incorporated in the self-concept of bilingual Latino college students.     

Promoting early adolescents' achievement and peer relationships: the effects of cooperative, competitive, and individualistic goal structures

Emphasizing the developmental need for positive peer relationships, in this study the authors tested a social-contextual view of the mechanisms and processes by which early adolescents' achievement and peer relationships may be promoted simultaneously. Meta-analysis was used to review 148 independent studies comparing the relative effectiveness of cooperative, competitive, and individualistic goal structures in promoting early adolescents' achievement and positive peer relationships. These studies represented over 8 decades of research on over 17,000 early adolescents from 11 countries and 4 multinational samples. As predicted by social interdependence theory, results indicate that higher achievement and more positive peer relationships were associated with cooperative rather than competitive or individualistic goal structures. Also as predicted, results show that cooperative goal structures were associated with a positive relation between achievement and positive peer relationships. Implications for theory and application are discussed.     

The overlap model: a model of letter position coding

Recent research has shown that letter identity and letter position are not integral perceptual dimensions (e.g., jugde primes judge in word-recognition experiments). Most comprehensive computational models of visual word recognition (e.g., the interactive activation model, J. L. McClelland & D. E. Rumelhart, 1981, and its successors) assume that the position of each letter within a word is perfectly encoded. Thus, these models are unable to explain the presence of effects of letter transposition (trial-trail), letter migration (beard-bread), repeated letters (moose-mouse), or subset/superset effects (faulty-faculty). The authors extend R. Ratcliff's (1981) theory of order relations for encoding of letter positions and show that the model can successfully deal with these effects. The basic assumption is that letters in the visual stimulus have distributions over positions so that the representation of one letter will extend into adjacent letter positions. To test the model, the authors conducted a series of forced-choice perceptual identification experiments. The overlap model produced very good fits to the empirical data, and even a simplified 2-parameter model was capable of producing fits for 104 observed data points with a correlation coefficient of .91.