The Pleasure of Thought during the Session

The pleasure of thought during the session is an intellectual feeling, that can take several forms at different moments during the analyst's thought process. The following should be distinguished: the disruption introduced by interpretative interference, which by underlining an unconscious element, upsets the conscious logical flow of the analysand's speech; finding the key-word or the overdetermined image which springs to the mind in the same way as a poet finds a rhyme; the resurgence of a memory, once evoked and subsequently forgotten again by the analysand, which imposes itself with quasi hallucinatory sharpness in the analyst's representative space; the experience of co-thought, either on one particular occasion related to a specific representation, or as a complement, accompanying the analysand's associative process.     

Learning to search for visual targets defined by edges or by shading: Evidence for non-equivalence of line drawings and surface representations

A visual search task was used to test the idea that shaded images and their line-drawn analogues are treated identically from an early stage onwards in human vision. Reaction times and error rates were measured to locate the presence or absence of a target in an array of a variable number of distractors. The target was a cube in one orientation and the distractors cubes in a different orientation. The stimuli were defined by lines alone, shading alone, or lines plus shading. Both the slopes and the intercepts of the search functions (graphs of search time against number of displayed items) were higher for the line drawings than for the stimuli defined by shading. Over six experimental sessions, both the slopes and the intercepts fell for all stimuli, but the relative differences between them were maintained. The data suggest that, at an equivalent stage of practice, line-drawn stimuli are processed more slowly than shaded stimuli in early vision.     

Executive Function and Processing Resources as Predictors of Adult Age Differences in the Implementation of Encoding Strategies

This research examined adult age differences in recall of word lists under different encoding conditions: association (story generation), rehearsal, and a control condition. Executive function and cognitive processing resources (speed and working memory) were investigated as mediators of these age differences. Younger (aged 17-48 years) and older (aged 65-88 years) adults completed a battery of tests of executive function, speed of information processing, working memory, and recall. Age differences in recall were evident for those who used the complex association encoding strategy only. For those using the association strategy, an examination of encoding strategy protocols revealed age differences in the integration of words, which were also related to subsequent recall performance. The association between integration and recall was accounted for by executive function and working memory, but not by speed of processing. Speed accounted for age differences in recall but its contribution to recall was largely independent from that of the impact of integration during encoding.     

Uncovering hockey fans' motivations behind their derogatory behaviors and how these motives predict psychological well-being and quality of social identity

ObjectiveThis article tested whether hockey fans' selfdetermined and non self-determined motivation for engaging in derogatory behaviors against an outgroup team predicted the frequency of these behaviors, fans' psychological well-being, and the quality of their social identity as a fan of their team. The two psychological theories we employ in the current research (i.e., self-determination theory and social identity theory) have different assumptions concerning the motivation behind derogatory fan behavior.DesignThree correlational studies were conducted among hockey fans.MethodsFans of rival hockey fans (Study 1; N = 45), fans of the Montreal Canadiens (Study 2; N = 181), and fans of NHL teams (Study 3; N = 105) completed measures of selfdetermination to engage in derogatory behaviors, frequency of these behaviors, psychological well-being, and quality of social identity. Multiple regression analyses were conducted to test if the frequency, well-being, and quality of social identity variables were predicted by the self-determined and non self-determined motivations to engage in derogatory behaviors.ResultsAs expected based on self-determination theory (SDT), the more hockey fans engage in derogatory behaviors for non self-determined reasons, the lower their well-being and the less frequently they report engaging in the derogatory behaviors. Moreover, as expected based on social identity theory (SIT), the more hockey fans engage in the derogatory behaviors for self-determined reasons, the higher their well-being, the frequency of these behaviors, and the more positive their social identity.ConclusionsTheses results are interpreted in light of SDT and SIT's theoretical propositions. Comparisons are made with prior studies conducted on this topic.     

Neural correlates of the effects of morphological family frequency and family size: an MEG study

Schreuder and Baayen (Schreuder. R., & Baayen, R. H. (1997). How complex simplex words can be. Journal of Memory and Language 37, 118-139) report that lexical decision times to nouns are not sensitive to the cumulative frequency of the noun's morphological derivatives in its "morphological family", even though such a cumulative frequency effect is obtained in the domain of inflection. Under a decomposition view of derivational morphology, this constitutes a puzzling exception to the robust finding that lexical frequency is one of the major determinants of behavioral response latencies. If morphologically complex words are decomposed, each occurrence of a member of a noun's morphological family should add to its root-frequency. We investigated the effects of morphological family frequency on the magnetoencephalographic response component M350, which shows sensitivity to factors affecting early stages of lexical processing, including lexical frequency. We hypothesized that high morphological family frequency should have a facilitory effect on the M350, even though no such effect can be seen in response time, presumably due to competition among possible root-affix combinations. Contrary to this hypothesis, we found that high family frequency elicits an M350 inhibition, suggesting that competition among morphological family members occurs at the M350. The result is significant, since there is evidence that competition among phonologically similar words occurs after, not at, the M350. Thus, our results suggest that competition within a morphological family precedes competition within a phonological similarity neighborhood.     

Time constraints and resource sharing in adults' working memory spans

This article presents a new model that accounts for working memory spans in adults, the time-based resource-sharing model. The model assumes that both components (i.e., processing and maintenance) of the main working memory tasks require attention and that memory traces decay as soon as attention is switched away. Because memory retrievals are constrained by a central bottleneck and thus totally capture attention, it was predicted that the maintenance of the items to be recalled depends on both the number of memory retrievals required by the intervening treatment and the time allowed to perform them. This number of retrievals:time ratio determines the cognitive load of the processing component. The authors show in 7 experiments that working memory spans vary as a function of this cognitive load.     

Direct social contacts override auditory information in the song-learning process in starlings (Sturnus vulgaris)

Social influence on song acquisition was studied in 3 groups of young European starlings raised under different social conditions but with the same auditory experience of adult song. Attentional focusing on preferred partners appears the most likely explanation for differences found in song acquisition in relation to experience, sex, and song categories. Thus, pair-isolated birds learned from each other and not from broadcast live songs, females did not learn from the adult male tutors, and sharing occurred more between socially associated peers. On the contrary, single-isolated birds clearly copied the adult songs that may have been the only source of attention stimulation. Therefore, social preference appears as both a motor for song learning and a potential obstacle for acquisition from nonpreferred partners, including adults.     

Temporal references in dreams and autobiographical memory

In an attempt to determine whether temporal references identified in dreams follow the same temporal distributions as those documented for autobiographical memories, 28 younger women (18-35 years of age) and 30 older women (60-77 years of age) kept a home dream diary for 1 week and then slept 1 night in the laboratory for rapid eye movement sleep dream collection. The following morning, they identified temporal references in their dreams and produced a sample of autobiographical memories using the semantic cuing method. For both groups, there was a linear decrease in temporal references identified in dreams and autobiographical memories with increased remoteness for the last 30 years. As predicted, for the older group, there were similar cubic trends reflecting a disproportionately higher number of both temporal references identified in dreams and autobiographical memories from adolescence/early adulthood compared with adulthood and childhood. The results support the notion of continuity between waking and dreaming memory processes.     

Influence of education on the pattern of cognitive deterioration in AD patients: the cognitive reserve hypothesis

The cognitive reserve hypothesis proposes that a high educational level could delay the clinical expression of Alzheimer's disease (AD) although neuropathologic changes develop in the brain. Therefore, some studies have reported that when the clinical signs of the disease emerge, high-educated patients may decline more rapidly than low-educated patients because the neuropathology is more advanced. However, these studies have only investigated the decline of global cognition or an isolated cognitive process. To study the differential deterioration pattern of several cognitive processes according to education, the performance of 20 AD patients with a high educational level and a low educational level were compared with the performance of 20 control subjects on a neuropsychological battery. The results showed that cognitive deterioration of AD patients is different according to education, although the global performance was similar in AD patients. The high-educated patients exhibited greater impairment of abstract thinking whereas the low-educated patients showed greater impairment of memory and attentional function. This confirms that some cognitive processes, such as abstract thinking, decline more rapidly in high-educated patients whereas others seem to evolve more slowly if compared to low-educated patients. In this latter case, high-educated patients may still benefit from cognitive reserve after the diagnosis of the dementia.     

Behavioral activity associated with onset in chronic tic and habit disorder

Seventy-six people (aged 18-62 years) diagnosed with either a chronic tic disorder or a habit disorder, entering a treatment study, kept a baseline daily diary for at least ten days, noting tic frequency and activity at time of onset. Together with an evaluator, participants completed a form ranking three high-risk activities where the tic or habit was likely to appear, and three low-risk activities where the tic was absent or barely present. Subjective appraisals distinguishing the two types of activities were also elicited and their relevance to the tic was measured on a seven-point scale using an adaptation of Kelly's repertory grid technique. Overall, the most frequent high-risk and low-risk activities were, respectively, passive attendance and physical activity. There were, however, significant differences in types of high-risk activities amongst the tic and habit disorders. Conversely, appraisals of the high-risk activities seemed to center on negative evaluations of tenseness, boredom, dissatisfaction, and disinterest.