Children's and parents' daily stressful events and psychological symptoms

Associations of children's daily stressful events and their parents' daily hassles and psychological symptoms with children's emotional/behavioral problems were examined in a sample of fourth- and fifth-grade children and their parents. Correlational analyses indicated that children's self-reports of depressive symptoms were associated with children's daily stressors and mothers' daily hassles, and children's self-reports of anxiety symptoms were associated with children's daily stressors and both mothers' and fathers' daily hassles. Mothers' and fathers' reports of their children's internalizing emotional/behavioral problems were correlated with mothers' and fathers' daily stressors and symptoms. Hierarchical multiple-regression analyses revealed that (a) children's self-reports of depressive symptoms were associated with children's daily stressors, (b) children's self-reports of anxiety symptoms were associated with their parents' daily hassles, (c) mothers' reports of their children's internalizing emotional/behavioral problems were marginally associated with parents' symptoms, and (d) fathers' reports of their children's internalizing emotional/behavioral problems were associated with parents' symptoms and children's self-reports of daily stressors.     

Pretrial EEG coherence as a predictor of semantic priming effects

Twenty subjects were presented 240 randomized trials of a lexical decision task (LDT) while connected to a 16-electrode EEG montage. EEG data were acquired for 2 sec prior to the onset of each LDT trial. Alpha (9-13 Hz) coherence, alpha power, and 3- to 30-Hz power from five different combinations of EEG electrodes were used to predict semantic effects in the LDT trials. High pretrial coherence in the Right Hemisphere and Left Posterior-Parietal regions was associated with greater semantic facilitation (faster reaction times) in related-prime trials and greater semantic inhibition (slower reaction times) in unrelated-prime trials, relative to neutral-prime trials. No power variables were associated with semantic effects. Results support an information flow model of the functional significance of EEG coherence to cognitive processing.     

Naming multisyllabic words

The process of reading multisyllabic words aloud from print was examined in 4 experiments. Experiment 1 used multisyllabic words that vary in terms of the consistency of component spelling-sound correspondences. The stimuli were regular, regular inconsistent, and exception words analogous to the monosyllabic items used in previous studies. Both regular inconsistent and exception words produced longer naming latencies than regular words. In Experiment 2 these differences between word types were found to be limited to lower frequency items. Experiment 3 showed that effects of number of syllables on naming latency are also limited to lower frequency words when the stimulus display forced subjects to use syllabic units. Thus, frequency modulates the effects of two aspects of lexical structure-consistency of spelling-sound correspondences and number of syllables. The results suggest that the naming of multisyllabic words draws on some of the same knowledge representations and processes as monosyllabic words; however, naming does not require syllabic decomposition. The results are discussed in the context of current models of naming.     

Image statistics and the perception of apparent motion

The short- and long-range apparent motion processes are discussed in terms of the statistical properties of images. It is argued that the short-range process, exemplified by the random-dot kinematogram, is primarily sensitive to the dipole statistics, whereas the long-range process, exemplified by illusory occlusion, is treated by the visual system primarily in terms of the tripole and higher statistical correlation functions. The studies incorporate the balanced dot, which is a unique stimulus element that permits high pass filtering while preserving detailed positional information. Low spatial frequencies are shown to be critical for texture segregation in random-dot kinematograms, independent of the grain size or number density of texture elements. Illusory path perception in the long-range process is shown not to require low spatial frequencies, but is sensitive rather to global temporal phase coherency. These results are interpreted in terms of the respective roles of the power and phase spectra in perceptual organization. The construction of balanced dots is discussed in detail.     

Moon illusion in pictures: a multimechanism approach

The existence of the moon illusion in pictorial representations was demonstrated in 6 experiments. Ss either judged the size of the moon in pictures, depicted as on the horizon or high in the sky, or drew horizon and elevated moons. The horizon moon was consistently judged to be larger than the elevated moon, independent of the angle at which the pictures are viewed. The distance paradox usually observed with the moon illusion (horizon moon apparently closer than the elevated moon) also exists in pictures. The magnitude of both size and distance effects depends on the salience of depicted depth cues. The pattern of results suggests that the moon illusion is caused by several interacting mechanisms and that use of pictorial stimuli may allow the separation of various cognitive from physiological contributions to the illusion.     

Discriminative properties of morphine that modulate associations between tastes and lithium chloride

Wistar rats learned to withhold consumption of a target solution when morphine preceded presentation of the target solution and lithium chloride (LiCl) and to consume the same target solution when saline preceded the presentation of the solution. After this serial feature discrimination training, morphine did not block the formation of a Pavlovian association between saccharin and LiCl but did suppress consumption of familiar tap water. After Pavlovian conditioning, morphine blocked the formation of an association between saccharin and LiCl but did not suppress consumption of a familiar tap water solution. The roles of morphine and saline can be interchanged. It appears that the morphine discriminative stimulus is calling up a representation of neither the conditioned stimulus nor the unconditional stimulus alone, but rather a modified representation of some aspect of their association.     

Range and regression, loudness scales, and loudness processing: toward a context-bound psychophysics

How does context affect basic processes of sensory integration and the implicit psychophysical scales that underlie those processes? Five experiments examined how stimulus range and response regression determine characteristics of (a) psychophysical scales for loudness and (b) 3 kinds of intensity summation: binaural loudness summation, summation of loudness between tones widely spaced in frequency, and temporal loudness summation. Context affected the overt loudness scales in that smaller power-function exponents characterized larger versus smaller range of stimulation and characterized magnitude estimation versus magnitude production. More important, however, context simultaneously affected the degree of loudness integration as measured in terms of matching stimulus levels. Thus, stimulus range and scaling procedure influence not only overt response scales, but measures of underlying intensity processing.     

Gender, level of spatial ability, and lateralization of mental rotation

The present study indicates that some of the inconsistencies in studies of the lateralization of mental rotation may be a consequence of uncontrolled individual differences in the general level of spatial ability. In order to investigate the relation between spatial ability and the lateralization of mental rotation, 48 subjects (24 males and 24 females) were divided into three groups based on their performance on a standardized test of spatial ability. They then performed a lateralized two-dimensional mental rotation task. The results showed the typical mental rotation function in that angle of rotation and reaction time were linearly related. A significant spatial ability by visual field interaction indicated that subjects with low spatial ability had a left field advantage, whereas subjects with medium spatial ability showed no field advantage and subjects with high spatial ability showed a right field advantage. Gender also interacted with visual field, with males showing a left visual superiority and females an insignificant right visual field advantage. A significant three-way interaction of gender, spatial ability, and angle of rotation reflected the fact that low spatial males were more profoundly affected by rotation than the other groups. The results suggest that at least some of the inconsistent findings in studies of lateralization of mental rotation may be accounted for by differences in the level of spatial ability.     

Detectability as a function of target location: effects of spatial configuration

Marked differences in detectability as a function of spatial location, a "detectability gradient," are observed when subjects are required to detect a briefly exposed target pattern of uncertain location in the presence of a number of nontarget patterns. Target detectability also is inversely related to the number of nontarget patterns which are present in this search paradigm. These previous findings provide strong evidence for a serial process in which increasing probability of error occurs during a scan of a rapidly degrading neural representation of the visual image following a brief exposure to the stimuli. It is not yet established whether this scan is attentional or perceptual in nature. The present experiments test the hypothesis of an attentional scan by presenting the target and nontarget patterns in spatially segregated groups. If the scan is attentional, then target detectability under these circumstances would be expected to exhibit the characteristic phenomenon of "group processing"--a close clustering of detection performance for targets located within a group and large differences in detectability across groups. As no evidence for group processing was observed, the results fail to support the view that the scan is attentional in nature but are fully consistent with a nonattentional scan.     

Laws,chances and properties

The paper develops a unified account of both deterministic and indeterministic laws of nature which inherits the merits but not the defects of the best existing accounts. As in Armstrong's account, laws are embodied in facts about universals; but not in higher‐order relations between them, and the necessity of laws is not primitive but results from their containing chances of 0 or 1. As in the Ramsey‐Lewis account, law statements would be the general axioms and theorems of the simplest deductive theory of everything; but because laws are not so defined, simplicity of statement is not a criterion of law‐hood.