Temporal factors in visual perception as related to aging

Older Ss, in the age range 30–55 years, were compared on certain temporal characteristics of visual perception. Experiment I confirmed a previous finding that older adults required an appreciably longer exposure duration to identify forms, even when equated with younger adults on standard measures of visual acuity. Experiment 2 found that older adults have a longer critical duration over which time-intensity reciprocity holds for form identification. The results were discussed in terms of such concepts of psychological time as the psychological moment.     

Die physikalische Sprache als Universalsprache der Wissenschaft

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Whisker: A client—server high-performance multimedia research control system

We describe an original client-server approach to behavioral research control and the Whisker system, a specific implementation of this design. The server process controls several types of hardware, including digital input/output devices, multiple graphical monitors and touchscreens, keyboards, mice, and sound cards. It provides a way to access this hardware for client programs, communicating with them via a simple text-based network protocol based on the standard Internet protocol. Clients to implement behavioral tasks may be written in any network-capable programming language. Applications to date have been in experimental psychology and behavioral and cognitive neuroscience, using rodents, humans, nonhuman primates, dogs, pigs, and birds. This system is flexible and reliable, although there are potential disadvantages in terms of complexity. Its design, features, and performance are described.     

Reactions to self-discrepant feedback: Feminist attitude and symbolic self-completion

Reactions to self-discrepant feedback were theoretically and experimentally investigated. The conceptual frame was provided by the theory of symbolic self-completion. Starting from the assumption that attitudes can function as central aspects of self-definition, 81 female subjects were either presented with feedback that their attitudes were unfeminist (treatment, i.e. incompleteness condition) or they received no feedback (control condition) Then they were given the opportunity for self-symbolizing by subscribing to a feminist journal. Subjects with strongly pro-feminist attitudes who were made incomplete with respect to their feminist self-definition subscribed more often and more intensively to the feminist journal than others. The results illustrate that attitudes can take on the character of self-definitions. Furthermore, reactions to self-discrepant feedback concerning a central attitude were as predicted by the theory of symbolic self-completion.