HIV-related neurocognitive impairment--a review

Neurocognitive impairments following central nervous system opportunistic infections and HIV-associated dementia (HAD) were common clinical features of HIV infection prior to anti-retroviral therapy. As HIV infection has evolved from an invariably fatal disease with a poor prognosis to a condition requiring long-term management, HIV-related neurocognitive disorders have been the subject of increasing research. This review will examine the recent changes in the understanding of the HIV-associated neurocognitive disorders (HAND) including the changing epidemiology, risk factors associated with its development, methods for screening for the disorders and evolving treatment options.     

Violation of the scalar property for time perception between 1 and 2 seconds: evidence from interval discrimination, reproduction, and categorization

According to the hypothesis of a scalar property for time, the variability to time ratio should be constant. Three experiments tested the validity of this hypothesis in a restricted range of durations (standard values = 1, 1.3, 1.6, and 1.9 s). In each experiment, time intervals to be discriminated, reproduced, or categorized were presented with 2, 4, or 6 brief successive auditory signals marking 1, 3, or 5 intervals, respectively. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to indicate whether the interval(s) within a second series of sounds were shorter or longer than those of the first. In Experiment 2, the standard interval had to be reproduced. In Experiment 3, after 10 presentations of the standard, participants had to categorize each comparison interval as shorter or longer than the standard. In addition to showing that performance was generally poorer when only 1 interval was presented and remained about the same regardless of whether 3 or 5 intervals were presented (Experiments 1 and 3), the results demonstrated that the variability to time ratio is not constant across the standard interval conditions. Overall, the ratio is higher at 1.9 than at 1 s. This violation of scalar timing occurs whatever the method used and does not interact with the number-of-interval variable.     

Our flaws are more human than yours: ingroup bias in humanizing negative characteristics

Four studies investigated whether people tend to see ingroup flaws as part of human nature (HN) to a greater degree than outgroup flaws. In Study 1, people preferentially ascribed high HN flaws to their ingroup relative to two outgroups. Study 2 demonstrated that flaws were rated higher on HN when attributed to the ingroup than when attributed to an outgroup, and no such difference occurred for positive traits. Study 3 replicated this humanizing ingroup flaws (HIF) effect and showed that it was (a) independent of desirability and (b) specific to the HN sense of humanness. Study 4 replicated the results of Study 3 and demonstrated that the HIF effect is amplified under ingroup identity threat. Together, these findings show that people humanize ingroup flaws and preferentially ascribe high HN flaws to the ingroup. These ingroup humanizing biases may serve a group-protective function by mitigating ingroup flaws as "only human."     

Are imaging and lesioning convergent methods for assessing functional specialisation?: investigations using an artificial neural network

This article presents an investigation of the relationship between lesioning and neuroimaging methods of assessing functional specialisation, using synthetic brain imaging (SBI) and lesioning of a connectionist network of past-tense formation. The model comprised two processing ‘routes’: one was a direct route between layers of input and output units, while the other, indirect, route featured an intermediate layer of processing units. Emergent specialisation within the network was assessed (1) by lesioning either the direct or indirect route and measuring past-tense performance for regular and irregular verbs, and (2) by measuring functional activation in each route when processing each verb type (SBI). SBI and lesioning approaches failed to converge when network activation was summed over each route in our SBI approach. Examination of individual network solutions suggested that the verb types might be using the indirect route differently in terms of the pattern of activation across the route, rather than in terms of gross activation. A subsequent SBI analysis compared patterns of activation in the indirect route and confirmed that these patterns were more similar between regular-type verbs than between regular and irregular verbs. As the spatial and temporal resolution of neuroimaging techniques improves, the results of this investigation suggest that the key to finding functional specialisation will be to distinguish local coding differences across behaviours that are the results of developmental processes. Other analyses suggest that lesioning data may be limited because, with increasing damage, they reveal the resting activations of a computational system rather than a computational specialisation per se.     

Counseling in Brazil: Past,Present, and Future

This article describes counseling in Brazil, which is rooted in career and vocational guidance. Although considered a distinct discipline, counseling falls under the umbrella of psychology. The multicultural movement is gaining momentum in Brazil, and counselors are pioneers working with socioracial minority college students. This is an emerging dimension to the professional identity. Some Brazilian universities are interested in international partnerships that could lead to the establishment of counseling as an independent profession.     

Using eye movement measures to investigate effects of age on memory for objects in a scene

We examined whether there were age-related differences in eye movements during intentional encoding of a photographed scene that might account for age-related differences in memory of objects in the scene. Younger and older adults exhibited similar scan path patterns, and visited each region of interest in the scene with similar frequency and duration. Despite the similarity in viewing, there were fundamental differences in the viewing-memory relationship. Although overall recognition was poorer in the older than younger adults, there was no age effect on recognition probability for objects visited only once. More importantly, re-visits to objects brought gain in recognition probability for the younger adults, but not for the older adults. These results suggest that the age-related differences in object recognition performance are in part due to inefficient integration of information from working memory to longer-term memory.     

Offline consolidation of memory varies with time in slow wave sleep and can be accelerated by cuing memory reactivations

Memory representations are reactivated during slow-wave sleep (SWS) after learning, and these reactivations cause a beneficial effect of sleep for memory consolidation. Memory reactivations can also be externally triggered during sleep by associated cues which enhance the sleep-dependent memory consolidation process. Here, we compared in humans the influence of sleep periods (i) of 40min and (ii) of 90min without externally triggered reactivations and (iii) of externally triggered reactivations by an associated odor cue during a 40-min sleep period on the consolidation of previously learned hippocampus-dependent visuo-spatial memories. We show that external reactivation by an odor cue during the 40-min sleep period enhanced memory stability to the same extent as 90min of sleep without odor reactivation. In contrast, 40min of sleep without external reactivations were not sufficient to benefit memory. In the 90-min sleep condition, memory enhancements were associated with time spent in SWS and were independent of the presence or absence of REM sleep. These results suggest that the efficacy of hippocampus-dependent memory consolidation depends on the duration of sleep and particularly SWS. External reactivation cues can accelerate the consolidation process even during shorter sleep episodes.     

The relationship between external job mobility and salary attainment across career stages

The current study examines the relationship between external job mobility and salary for employees in different career stages. Based on career stage and career timetable theories, we predict that external job mobility would generate the greatest salary benefits for early-career employees whereas external job mobility would generate fewer salary benefits for employees in mid- and late career stages. Data collected from multiple industries in Hong Kong and the United States consistently show that, as expected, highly mobile early-career employees earn significantly greater salaries than their less mobile peers do. The positive effects of external job mobility on salary were stronger for early-career workers than for mid-and late-career workers.     

Assessing the use of multiple sources in student essays

The present study explored different approaches for automatically scoring student essays that were written on the basis of multiple texts. Specifically, these approaches were developed to classify whether or not important elements of the texts were present in the essays. The first was a simple pattern-matching approach called "multi-word" that allowed for flexible matching of words and phrases in the sentences. The second technique was latent semantic analysis (LSA), which was used to compare student sentences to original source sentences using its high-dimensional vector-based representation. Finally, the third was a machine-learning technique, support vector machines, which learned a classification scheme from the corpus. The results of the study suggested that the LSA-based system was superior for detecting the presence of explicit content from the texts, but the multi-word pattern-matching approach was better for detecting inferences outside or across texts. These results suggest that the best approach for analyzing essays of this nature should draw upon multiple natural language processing approaches.     

Dietary restraint in college women: Fear of an imperfect fat self is stronger than hope of a perfect thin self

We predicted that the perceived likelihood of acquiring a hoped-for thin self would mediate perfectionistic strivings on dietary restraint, and that the perceived likelihood of acquiring a feared fat self would mediate perfectionistic concerns on dietary restraint. We also predicted that the mediation pathway from perfectionistic concerns to dietary restraint would have a greater impact than that from perfectionistic strivings. Participants were 222 female college students who reported their height and weight and completed measures of perfectionism, the likelihood of acquiring the feared fat and hoped-for thin selves, and dietary restraint. Statistical analyses revealed that the perceived likelihood of acquiring the feared fat self mediated both perfectionistic concerns and perfectionistic strivings on dietary restraint, and that the mediating pathway from perfectionistic concerns to dietary restraint was greater than that from perfectionistic strivings. Implications for future research and eating pathology interventions are discussed.