Age-related changes in amplitude,latency and specialization of ERP responses to faces and watches

ABSTRACT

Healthy aging is associated with impairments in face recognition. While earlier research suggests that these impairments arise during memory retrieval, more recent findings suggest that earlier mechanisms, at the perceptual stage, may also be at play. However, results are often inconsistent and very few studies have included a non-face control stimulus to facilitate interpretation of results with respect to the implication of specialized face mechanisms vs. general cognitive factors. To address these issues, P100, N170 and P200 event-related potentials (ERPs) were measured during processing of faces and watches. For faces, age-related differences were found for P100, N170 and P200 ERPs. For watches, age-related differences were found for N170 and P200 ERPs. Older adults showed less selective and less lateralized N170 responses to faces, suggesting that ERPs can detect age-related de-differentiation of specialized face networks. We conclude that age-related impairments in face recognition arise in part from difficulties in the earliest perceptual stages of visual information processing. A working model is presented based on coarse-to-fine analysis of visually similar exemplars.     

Revising the Communication Mediation Model for a New Political Communication Ecology

A long tradition of research focuses on conversation as a key catalyst for community integration and a focal mediator of media influence on participation. Changes in media systems, political environments, and electoral campaigning demand that these influences, and the communication mediation model, be revised to account for the growing convergence of media and conversation, heightened partisan polarization, and deepening social contentiousness in media politics. We propose a revised communication mediation model that continues to emphasize the centrality of face‐to‐face and online talk in democratic life, while considering how mediational and self‐reflective processes that encourage civic engagement and campaign participation might also erode institutional legitimacy, foster distrust and partisan divergence, disrupting democratic functioning as a consequence of a new communication ecology.     

The Relationship between General Population Suicide Rates and the Internet: A Cross‐National Study

Internet Web sites and chat rooms have been reported both to promote suicides and have a positive beneficial effect on suicidal individuals. There is a paucity of studies examining the role of the Internet in general population suicide rates. The relationship between general population suicide rates and the prevalence of Internet users was examined in a cross‐national study using data from the World Health Organization and the United Nations Web sites. The prevalence of Internet users was significantly and positively correlated with general population suicide rates in both sexes. On multiple regression analysis the prevalence of Internet users was independently associated with general population suicide rates in males, and this independent relationship in females approached statistical significance. Caution should be exercised in the attribution of a causal relationship and the direction of this relationship because of the cross‐sectional and ecological study design whereby the findings are subject to ecological fallacy. However, the findings identify and support a need for further research.     

Secularism's threat to tradition: A reading of Europe,India and the Limits of Secularism

ABSTRACT

This article offers a reading of Jakob De Roover's important book, Europe, India and the Limits of Secularism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016). It invokes the way in which the English courts have re-described Sikh tradition as religion in order to illustrate the relevance of Jakob De Roover's hypothesis about secularism, explaining its dependence on Christian theology and its inbuilt normative dynamic, which reframes tradition and poses a lethal threat to it.