Healthy brooders employ more attentional resources when disengaging from the negative: an event-related fMRI study

Depressive brooding is considered a maladaptive ruminative-thinking style that has been shown to be highly correlated with major depression. The present study in healthy participants employed event-related fMRI to uncover the neural underpinnings of emotional disengagement as it relates to depressive brooding. Thirty-four healthy, never depressed individuals performed an emotional go/no-go task with a rapid presentation of emotional faces. We focused on the contrast of inhibiting sad (happy/no-go) versus inhibiting happy (sad/no-go) information. This contrast allowed us to assess possible difficulties in disengaging from emotionally negative, as compared with emotionally positive, faces. At the behavioral level, only in high brooders were higher self-reported brooding scores correlated with more errors when sad information was inhibited, relative to happy information. At the neural level, across all participants, brooding scores were positively correlated with activity in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC; BA 46), implying that high brooders show higher DLPFC involvement when successfully disengaging from a series of negative stimuli. These results may suggest that healthy individuals who report a high brooding thinking style need to recruit more attentional control in order to disengage successfully from negative information, in a way that may be related to emotion regulation strategies. These mechanisms might protect them from developing depressive symptoms.     

Visual perception in fencing: Do the eye movements of fencers represent their information pickup?

The present study examined whether results of athletes' eye movements while they observe fencing attacks reflect their actual information pickup by comparing these results with others gained with temporal and spatial occlusion and cuing techniques. Fifteen top-ranking expert fencers, 15 advanced fencers, and 32 sport students predicted the target region of 405 fencing attacks on a computer monitor. Results of eye movement recordings showed a stronger foveal fixation on the opponent's trunk and weapon in the two fencer groups. Top-ranking expert fencers fixated particularly on the upper trunk. This matched their performance decrements in the spatial occlusion condition. However, when the upper trunk was occluded, participants also shifted eye movements to neighboring body regions. Adding cues to the video material had no positive effects on prediction performance. We conclude that gaze behavior does not necessarily represent information pickup, but that studies applying the spatial occlusion paradigm should also register eye movements to avoid underestimating the information contributed by occluded regions.     

Mature adults' attitudes to mental health service utilisation

This qualitative study examined mature adults' attitudes to mental health services, in order to improve service utilisation among members of this group. Twenty individual and 12 focus group interviews were conducted with 111 West Australians aged ≥40 years living in urban and regional areas. The findings indicate that mature individuals may be receptive to information that assists them in differentiating the symptoms of ageing and mental illness and empowers them to make appropriate help‐seeking decisions. Perceived stigma and an aversion to medication were identified as barriers preventing individuals from acknowledging and addressing mental illness. A model of mature adults' intentions to utilise mental health services is proposed.     

Unattended exposure to components of speech sounds yields same benefits as explicit auditory training

Learning a second language as an adult is particularly effortful when new phonetic representations must be formed. Therefore the processes that allow learning of speech sounds are of great theoretical and practical interest. Here we examined whether perception of single formant transitions, that is, sound components critical in speech perception, can be enhanced through an implicit task-irrelevant learning procedure that has been shown to produce visual perceptual learning. The single-formant sounds were paired at subthreshold levels with the attended targets in an auditory identification task. Results showed that task-irrelevant learning occurred for the unattended stimuli. Surprisingly, the magnitude of this learning effect was similar to that following explicit training on auditory formant transition detection using discriminable stimuli in an adaptive procedure, whereas explicit training on the subthreshold stimuli produced no learning. These results suggest that in adults learning of speech parts can occur at least partially through implicit mechanisms.     

Sinistrals’ upper hand: Evidence for handedness differences in the representation of body space

A difference in the perception of extrapersonal space has been shown to exist between dextrals and sinistrals. On the classical line bisection task, this difference is evident in a greater left bias for dextrals compared to sinistrals. Different modalities and regions of space can be affected. However, it has not yet been investigated whether a systematic bias also exists for the perception of personal or body space. We investigated this by using three tasks which assess different aspects of personal space in an implicit and explicit way. These tasks were performed by strongly right-handed (dextrals), strongly left-handed (sinistrals) and mixed-handed participants. First, a task of pointing to three areas of one’s own body without the use of visual information showed dextrals to have an asymmetric estimation of their body. In right hemispace, dextrals’ pointing was at a greater distance from the midsagittal plane compared to pointing in left hemispace. No such asymmetry was present for sinistrals, while mixed-handers’ performance was intermediate to that of strong right- and strong left-handers. Second, a task of recovering circular patches from their body surface whilst blindfolded also showed superior performance of sinistrals compared to dextrals. On these two tasks, there was also a moderate relationship between handedness scores and performance measures. Third, a computer-based task of adjusting scaled body-outline-halves showed no handedness differences. Overall, these findings suggest handedness differences in the implicit but not explicit representation of one’s own body space. Possible mechanisms underlying the handedness differences shown for the implicit tasks are a stronger lateralization or a greater activation imbalance for dextrals and/or greater access to right hemispheric functions, such as an “up-to-date body” representation, by sinistrals. In contrast, explicit measures of how body space is represented may not be affected due to their relying on a different processing pathway.     

Overcoming focusing failures in competitive environments

This paper attacks one of the chief limitations of the field of behavioral decision research—the past inability to use this literature to improve decision making. Building on the work of Thompson, Gentner, Loewenstein and colleagues (Loewenstein, Thompson, & Gentner, 1999; Thompson, Gentner, & Loewenstein, 2000; Gentner & Markman, 1997), the current paper finds that it is possible to reduce bias in one of the most robust problems in the decision literature, the Acquiring a Company Problem (Samuelson & Bazerman, 1985). Past research has shown that individuals make suboptimal offers as a result of the failure to think about the decisions of others and to incorporate a clear understanding of the rules of the game. In the current study, we find that by allowing study participants to see and understand differences in seemingly unrelated decision problems—versions of the Monty Hall Game (Nalebuff, 1987; Friedman, 1998) and Multiparty Ultimatum Game (Messick, Moore, & Bazerman, 1997; Tor & Bazerman, 2003)—study participants can learn to focus more accurately on the decisions of other parties and the rules of the game, the keys to solving the Acquiring a Company Problem. This research offers a new piece of evidence that comparative and analogical processes may be a successful direction for improving decision making. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Influence of Ease of Retrieval on Judgment as a Function of Attention to Subjective Experience

The ease with which information comes to mind can impact judgment. We examine whether the influence of ease of retrieval is moderated by situational factors that call it to attention before judgment and by individual differences in experiential processing style, as measured by the rational experiential inventory scale (Pacini & Epstein, 1999). An ease of retrieval effect, indicated by less favorable evaluations of a proposal following the retrieval of many reasons advocating the proposal than following the retrieval of only a few, was found for high‐experiential style processors regardless of situational factors that made ease of retrieval salient. However, the effect was found among low‐experiential style processors only when ease of retrieval was explicitly called to their attention prior to judgment.     

Head-mounted displays for clinical virtual reality applications: pitfalls in understanding user behavior while using technology.

The use of virtual environments with head-mounted displays (HMDs) offers unique assets to the evaluation and therapy of clinical populations. However, research examining the effects of this technology on clinical populations is sparse. Understanding how wearers interact with the HMD is vital. Discomfort leads to altered use of the HMD that could confound performance measures; the very measures which might be used as tools for clinical decision making. The current study is a post-hoc analysis of the relationship between HMD use and HMD comfort. The analysis was conducted to examine contributing factors for a high incidence of simulator sickness observed in an HMD-based driving simulator. Pearson correlation analysis was used to evaluate objective and subjective measures of HMD performance and self-reported user comfort ratings. The results indicated weak correlations between these variables, indicating the complexity of quantifying user discomfort and HMD performance. Comparison of two case studies detailing user behavior in the virtual environment demonstrates that selected variables may not capture how individuals use the HMD. The validity and usefulness of the HMD-based virtual environments must be understood to fully reap the benefits of virtual reality (VR) in rehabilitation medicine.     

Primacy, recency, and suffix effects in auditory short-term memory for pure tones: evidence from a probe recognition paradigm.

The present study was designed to explore serial position and suffix effects in the short-term retention of nonverbal sounds. In contrast with previous studies of these effects, a probe recognition paradigm was used to minimize the possibility that participants would use a verbal labelling strategy. On each trial, participants heard a memory set consisting of three pure tones, followed five seconds later by a probe tone. Participants were required to indicate whether or not the probe tone had been a member of the memory set. On most trials, a suffix sound was presented 1 second following the third sound in the memory set. Results revealed that tones presented in the first and last positions of the memory set were recognized more accurately than were tones presented in the middle position. Furthermore, recognition of sounds presented in the last position was compromised when the memory set was followed by a postlist suffix of similar pitch, spectral composition, and spatial location.