Cerebral hemispheric involvement in the acquisition of new phonetic categories

This study was concerned with the involvement of the cerebral hemispheres in the acquisition of perceptual skill with novel speech sounds. Two groups of eight subjects rated on three occasions the dissimilarity of pairs of Mandarin Chinese speech sounds varying on voicing and aspiration, presented to the left or right ear with contralateral noise. The experimental group received listening experience with long passages of Mandarin containing the target sounds. Multidimensional scaling analysis of dissimilarity ratings indicated that listening experience leads to increased perceptual differentiation of phonetic categories drawn from a language unfamiliar to the listener. This improvement occurred sooner with presentation of the target sounds to the right hemisphere than to the left if the phonological contrast was along the voicing dimension. Improvement in the perception of stimuli varying on aspiration occurred in right ear presentations only. This finding supports the position that speech perception mechanisms at the feature level may be distributed asymmetrically across the hemispheres.     

Error-related electrocortical responses in 10-year-old children and young adults

Recent anatomical and electrophysiological evidence suggests that the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is relatively late to mature. This brain region appears to be critical for monitoring, evaluating, and adjusting ongoing behaviors. This monitoring elicits characteristic ERP components including the error-related negativity (ERN), error positivity (Pe) and correct-related negativity (CRN), with the ERN clearly relating to activation of the ACC; however, little attention has been paid to the examination of these ERP components in children. The present study examined developmental differences in the ERN, Pe, and CRN in normal 10-year-old children and young adults in a standard visual flanker task. We found that children had smaller ERNs than adults, with no between-group differences on the Pe, and some ambiguity concerning the CRN. Results provide electrophysiological support either for late maturation of the ACC or late involvement of the ACC in response monitoring. Results also suggest that there is some functional independence of response-monitoring ERP components. Error-related ERPs may be a useful tool in studying the development of this brain region and its role in behavior in normal and atypical development.     

Documentary Bioethics: Visual Narratives for Generations X and Y

Narrative bioethics is primarily understood to involve storytelling through the use of literature. This article suggests that other forms of media are necessary to convey stories of an ethical nature to an audience broader than one being trained as medical professionals. "Documentary bioethics" is a manner to present and interpret stories of an ethical nature using forms of popular electronic media in a reality-based documentary style to society at large, specifically Generations X and Y.     

Linguistic attention control: attention shifting governed by grammaticized elements of language

In 2 experiments, the authors investigated attention control for tasks involving the processing of grammaticized linguistic stimuli (function words) contextualized in sentence fragments. Attention control was operationalized as shift costs obtained with adult speakers of English in an alternating-runs experimental design (R. D. Rogers & S. Monsell, 1995). Experiment 1 yielded significant attention shift costs between tasks involving judgments about the meanings of grammatical function words. The authors used a 3-stage experimental design (G. Wylie & A. Allport, 2000), and the emerging pattern of results implicated task set reconfiguration and not task set inertia in these shift costs. Experiment 2 further demonstrated that shift costs were lower when the tasks involved shared attentional resources (processing the same grammatical dimension) versus unshared resources (different grammatical dimensions). The authors discuss the results from a cognitive linguistic perspective and for their implications for the view that language itself can serve a special attention-directing function.     

Explaining neurocognitive aging: is one factor enough?

As an introduction to the special issue on neurocognitive factors underlying age effects, we discuss a number of recent developments in the literature on aging. The classic distinction between generalized and process-specific cognitive changes with old age has reappeared in the distinctions between the frontal lobe hypothesis and more differentiated views of neurocognitive aging. We argue that neurological decay in the frontal cortex has important implications for cognitive control, but that the frontal lobe hypothesis does not capture the plethora of changes that characterize aging and incorrectly suggests a unitary effect.     

A new look at time and eternity

In his Systematic Theology, Vol. III, Wolfhart Pannenberg argues that God as eternal comprehends the different moments of time simultaneously and orders them to constitute a whole or totality. The author contends that this approach to time and eternity might solve the logical tension between the classical notion of divine sovereignty and the common sense belief in creaturely spontaneity/human freedom. For, if the existence of the events constituting a temporal sequence is primarily due to the spontaneous decisions of creatures, and if their being ordered into a totality or meaningful whole is primarily due to the superordinate activity of God, then both God and creatures play indispensable but nevertheless distinct roles in the cosmic process.