Influence of reference frames on asymmetries in Troxler's effect

In 1804, Troxier discovered that, when an observer fixates on a point in central vision and attends to a peripheral stationary stimulus, the peripheral stimulus eventually fades from awareness. This phenomenon is known as Troxler's effect and is allegedly influenced by spatial attention. Asymmetries in Troxler's effect along horizontal and vertical meridian were a recent discovery. However, viewer- and environment-centered reference frames were aligned in prior studies, making it impossible to assess whether asymmetries correspond to viewer- versus environment-centered coordinate systems. This study was undertaken to (a) replicate the asymmetries in the upright condition among 39 participants without health issues and (b) use the asymmetrics to test contrasting predictions made by viewer- and environment-centered coordinate systems when they are decoupled using an experimental head-tilt condition. The horizontal and vertical asymmetries were replicated and consistent with a viewer-centered rather than an environment-centered reference frame.     

Metaphor: Bridging embodiment to abstraction

Embodied cognition accounts posit that concepts are grounded in our sensory and motor systems. An important challenge for these accounts is explaining how abstract concepts, which do not directly call upon sensory or motor information, can be informed by experience. We propose that metaphor is one important vehicle guiding the development and use of abstract concepts. Metaphors allow us to draw on concrete, familiar domains to acquire and reason about abstract concepts. Additionally, repeated metaphoric use drawing on particular aspects of concrete experience can result in the development of new abstract representations. These abstractions, which are derived from embodied experience but lack much of the sensorimotor information associated with it, can then be flexibly applied to understand new situations.     

Is the Web as good as the lab? Comparable performance from Web and lab in cognitive/perceptual experiments

With the increasing sophistication and ubiquity of the Internet, behavioral research is on the cusp of a revolution that will do for population sampling what the computer did for stimulus control and measurement. It remains a common assumption, however, that data from self-selected Web samples must involve a trade-off between participant numbers and data quality. Concerns about data quality are heightened for performance-based cognitive and perceptual measures, particularly those that are timed or that involve complex stimuli. In experiments run with uncompensated, anonymous participants whose motivation for participation is unknown, reduced conscientiousness or lack of focus could produce results that would be difficult to interpret due to decreased overall performance, increased variability of performance, or increased measurement noise. Here, we addressed the question of data quality across a range of cognitive and perceptual tests. For three key performance metrics??mean performance, performance variance, and internal reliability??the results from self-selected Web samples did not differ systematically from those obtained from traditionally recruited and/or lab-tested samples. These findings demonstrate that collecting data from uncompensated, anonymous, unsupervised, self-selected participants need not reduce data quality, even for demanding cognitive and perceptual experiments.     

Parental Relationships,Autonomy, and Identity Processes of High School Students

To examine the interrelations among parental relationships, emotional autonomy, and identity statuses, the authors asked 234 (105 male, 129 female) high school students to complete the Parental Bonding Scale (G. Parker, H. Tupling, &; L. B. Brown, 1979), Emotional Autonomy Scale (L. D. Steinberg &; S. B. Silverberg, 1986), and Extended Objective Measure of Ego Identity Scale-II (L. D. Bennion &; G. R. Adams, 1986). There continues to be controversy about whether adolescents’ identity formation is related to their emotional separation from their parents. According to Eriksonian and neo-Eriksonian theory (J. E. Marcia, 1980 Marcia, J. E. 1980. “Identity in adolescence”. In Handbook of adolescent psychology, Edited by: Adelson, J. 159–187. New York: Wiley.  [Google Scholar], 1984), adolescents who are successful in resolving their identity issues are better able to emotionally individuate from their parents. That is, adolescents have fewer conflicts with parents as they become more independent of them. Results of the present study indicate that adolescent perceptions of mother's caring behavior, but not father's caring behavior, predicted higher foreclosure identity status scores among adolescents. In addition, 2 dimensions of emotional autonomy (i.e., perceiving parents as people and parental deidealization) best predicted the adolescent identity statuses of moratorium and foreclosure. Results also indicate that future research may need to establish a better theoretical conceptualization of the constructs of interest in this study and better measures of emotional autonomy among adolescents.     

Subcutaneous dye injection for marking and identification of individual adult zebrafish (Danio rerio) in behavioral studies

The zebrafish is increasingly utilized in behavioral brain research, as it offers a useful compromise between system complexity and practical simplicity. However, a potential drawback of this species in behavioral research is that individuals are difficult to distinguish. Here we describe a simple marking procedure, subcutaneous injection of color dyes, that may alleviate this problem. The procedure allowed us to successfully mark zebrafish and distinguish them for a period of more than 30 days, which is sufficiently long for most behavioral paradigms developed for this species. In addition, we also provide data suggesting that the injection-based marking does not significantly alter social interaction, as defined by the frequency of agonistic behaviors within shoals.     

Can Determinism Give a Causal Explanation of Intentional Behaviour? Revisiting the Concepts of Determinism,Fatalism and Rational Agency

Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research - In this short piece of work, an attempt has been made to revisit the skepticism about free will, which has historically been directed to it due...     

The Plausibility of a Feminist Philosopher’s Take on Freudian Analysis

The analytic tradition of thought in the West started in the late nineteenth century with what is known as ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy. But as a methodological movement, it impacted other areas of knowledge as well. Feminist scholars react to the analytic tradition of thought in many various ways. Many of them critique and challenge the tradition. The present paper aims at a review of a feminist take on Sigmund Freud who imported analytical tradition in psychology at the beginning of the twentieth century. Luce Irigaray questions the legitimacy of Freudian analysis and challenges the claim of neutrality of Freudian discourse by accusing that Freud works within a patriarchal-biased ideology. About the logical basis of Freudian discourse, Irigaray alleges that a logic of indifference is at work there. But how far has Irigaray, as a feminist, been successful in showing the biases and loopholes in Freudian discourse? This paper attempts to show that the Irigarayian line of argument and critique of Freud does not offer a stronger and plausible feminist stance.

     

Stimulus design is an obstacle course: 560 matched literal and metaphorical sentences for testing neural hypotheses about metaphor

Despite the ubiquity and importance of metaphor in thought and communication, its neural mediation remains elusive. We suggest that this uncertainty reflects, in part, stimuli that have not been designed with recent conceptual frameworks in mind or that have been hampered by inadvertent differences between metaphoric and literal conditions. In this article, we begin addressing these shortcomings by developing a large, flexible, extensively normed, and theoretically motivated set of metaphoric and literal sentences. On the basis of the results of three norming studies, we provide 280 pairs of closely matched metaphoric and literal sentences that are characterized along 10 dimensions: length, frequency, concreteness, familiarity, naturalness, imageability, figurativeness, interpretability, valence, and valence judgment reaction time. In addition to allowing for control of these potentially confounding lexical and sentential factors, these stimuli are designed to address questions about the role of novelty, metaphor type, and sensory-motor grounding in determining the neural basis of metaphor comprehension. Supplemental data for this article may be downloaded from http://brm.psychonomic-journals .org/content/supplemental.     

Comprehensive analysis of golf performance on the PGA Tour: 1990-2004

Researchers have investigated the relationship between different shot-making measures and performance on the PGA Tour. Prior studies have typically focused on a short period of time or used a restricted sample so long-term trends were not discernible. To remedy this situation, the present study looked at the longitudinal performance of professional golfers from 1990-2004. The findings indicated a remarkable stability in terms of the relative importance of Greens In Regulation and Putting Average in explaining the variability in Scoring Average. The findings also indicated a declining importance of driving in recent years due, in part, to a strengthening of the negative relationship between Driving Distance and Driving Accuracy.