Do learned irrelevance and perseveration play a role during discrimination learning?

In both healthy participants and various patient populations, performance on attentional set-shifting tasks has been found to be affected by learned irrelevance and/or perseveration. The present study examined whether or not these processes also play a role during the initial discrimination learning phase of those tasks. To this end, participants first solved a multidimensional discrimination learning task. Thereafter, they underwent three types of shift of relevant and/or irrelevant stimulus attributes, which enabled the assessment of the separate contribution of perseveration and learned irrelevance to post-shift task performance. Subsequent correlational analyses revealed that the number of errors during initial discrimination learning was significantly correlated with the number of errors in the learned irrelevance-shift but not the perseveration-shift. This suggests that processes underlying learned irrelevance in post-shift task performance also play a significant role during initial discrimination learning. The implications of these results for interpreting deficits in shifting are discussed.     

Quality of Relationship with Parents and Emotional Autonomy as Predictors of Self Concept and Loneliness in Adolescents with Learning Disabilities: The Moderating Role of the Relationship with Teachers

The present study aims to investigate the impact of family-level variables (emotional autonomy and the quality of the parents-adolescent relationship) on socio-emotional adjustment (loneliness and self-esteem) in adolescents with learning disabilities (LDs) and the role of the quality of the teacher-adolescent relationship in moderating the effects of these impacts. The participants are 293 typically developing adolescents (TD group) and 50 adolescents with learning disabilities (LD group), aged between 13 and 20. The following measures were administered: the Emotional Autonomy Scale (EAS), the Loneliness and Aloneness Scale for Children and Adolescents (LACA), the Assessment of Interpersonal Relations (AIR), and the Multidimensional Self Concept Scale (MSCS). The data showed that adolescents with LDs display significantly higher levels of peer-related loneliness, and lower levels of self-concept and perceived quality of relationships with parents and teachers. No significant differences emerged between the groups in emotional autonomy and in parent-related loneliness. Path analysis indicated that, in adolescents with LDs, emotional autonomy was more closely related to self-concept than in typically developing adolescents. A positive teacher-adolescent relationship could have a moderating effect on the relationships between the dimension considered only in the LD group. The findings have important implications for the implementation of intervention programs focused on social and emotional competences in young people with LDs.     

The association of antidepressant and statin use with death and incident cardiovascular disease varies by depression severity

Depression has been reported to be associated with a greater risk of death and cardiovascular disease (CVD); however, the impact of antidepressants (ADM) on CVD risk remains controversial. Statin use is known to decrease CVD risk. Whether the use of these medications together affects CVD risk has not been studied. Patients (N = 26,828) completing the patient health questionnaire (PHQ-9), ≥40 years of age, without prior CVD, and no prior ADM use were studied. Depressive severity was categorized as none-mild (PHQ-9 score ≤14, n = 21,517) and moderate-severe (PHQ-9 score ≥15, n = 5311). Cox hazard regression was used to evaluate the association of no ADM/no statin use (n = 23,104 [86.1%]), ADM/no statin use (n = 877 [3.3%]), no ADM/statin use (n = 2627 [9.8%]), and ADM/statin use (n = 220 [.8%]) with major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE: death, CAD, stroke). Patients averaged 56 ± 12 years; 61% female. There were 1182 (4.4%) 3 year MACE events. The association of ADM and statin use with MACE varied by depressive symptom severity, with statin therapy associated with a decreased risk in the none-mild group (HR = .78, p = .007) and ADM in the moderate-high group (HR = 0.58, p = 0.02). Concomitant use of ADMs and statins did not appear to provide additive benefit.     

More learned irrelevance than perseveration errors in rule shifting in healthy subjects

The present experiments examined the extent to which two possible sources of error affect healthy subjects' performance in a rule-shift task. All 115 participants first received a discrimination learning task, in which a pair of different visual stimuli was presented on each trial, one of which had to be identified as 'correct.' Each stimulus varied in two dimensions: a task-relevant and a task-irrelevant dimension. Feedback on correctness was given after each choice. After eight successive correct choices, the nature of the task-relevant dimension changed: the post-shift learning phase. Two types of error can occur in this phase: continued responding to the former relevant, but now irrelevant, dimension, a perseverative error, and non-responding to the former irrelevant, but now relevant, dimension, an error due to learned irrelevance. Different groups received a post-shift task in which none, one, or both of these two types of error could affect performance. The number of incorrect choices in the post-shift phase was significantly affected by learned-irrelevance errors but not by perseverative errors. An associative-learning model incorporating feedback-induced changes in both associative strength and saliency of the elements comprising the stimuli can explain these results.     

Response bias induced in rats by response effects

Two experiments examined whether response choice in rats is affected by the presentation of response-produced stimuli. Rats were first trained to emit two different responses, with each response producing a unique auditory stimulus. Subsequently, the former response-produced stimuli were presented while the two response options were freely available. Presentation of a former response-produced stimulus caused the rats to choose more frequently the response option that had previously produced that specific stimulus over the other response option. However, although statistically significant, this response-biasing effect was numerically weak and was only apparent when the stimuli no longer had a general response-activating effect. Moreover, in the case of relatively short presentations of the stimuli, the response-biasing effect was only present if, during testing, the responses continued to produce the auditory stimuli according to the response-effect mapping used during training. These results were discussed in terms of possible underlying associations and were contrasted with previous results from analogous human studies on action control by response-produced stimuli.     

Contextual dependencies in predictive learning

Two experiments assessed contextual dependencies in a predictive-learning task. Subjects learned to associate each of four pictorial stimuli with the occurrence or non-occurrence of a specific outcome. Each of these stimuli, the intentional stimuli, was presented against one of two different visual (Experiment 1) or auditory (Experiment 2) context stimuli. These context stimuli were incidental: subjects were not explicitly instructed to pay any attention to them and each of them in isolation was not predictive of the outcome. During acquisition and testing, subjects expressed the expected relationship between intentional stimulus and outcome by an appropriate key press. At test, intentional stimuli were presented either with the same contextual stimulus as also present during acquisition (same trials), or with the other one (switched trials). The response latency was slower on switched trials than on same trials in each experiment, a result extending previous findings on the effect of environmental contextual stimuli on task performance. Results are discussed in the framework of contextual occasion setting and habituation to contextual stimuli.     

How Cognitive Load Influences Speakers' Choice of Referring Expressions

We report on two experiments investigating the effect of an increased cognitive load for speakers on the choice of referring expressions. Speakers produced story continuations to addressees, in which they referred to characters that were either salient or non‐salient in the discourse. In Experiment 1, referents that were salient for the speaker were non‐salient for the addressee, and vice versa. In Experiment 2, all discourse information was shared between speaker and addressee. Cognitive load was manipulated by the presence or absence of a secondary task for the speaker. The results show that speakers under load are more likely to produce pronouns, at least when referring to less salient referents. We take this finding as evidence that speakers under load have more difficulties taking discourse salience into account, resulting in the use of expressions that are more economical for themselves.     

Training Pediatric Psychologists for Perinatal Behavioral Health Services in a Pediatric Hospital

Although pediatric hospitals specialize in providing care to children and adolescents, at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), our team has been providing behavioral health services for two unique parent populations—parents with a child in the Newborn Infant Intensive Care Unit and pregnant women carrying fetuses with specific birth defects and receiving prenatal care in the Center for Fetal Diagnosis and Treatment. A new training program was developed to expand the scope of pediatric psychologists’ practice to include perinatal behavioral health services, specifically for these two unique parent populations served at CHOP. The program includes direct service provision for adult mental health concerns, as well as education and support to help families cope with the existing medical conditions. This article describes the training program and its implementation as a model of training for other pediatric hospitals. The roles of psychologists embedded in these units and hospital privileges are discussed.     

Competition between a Simultaneous and a Serial Feature in Appetitive Feature positive and Feature negative Discriminations

Two experiments with rats examined competition between simultaneous and serial features for behavioural control in an appetitive discrimination. In Experiment 1, an auditory target was reinforced when presented in isolation. For different groups, the target was non-reinforced when simultaneously accompanied by a visual feature (first group), when preceded by a serial visual feature (second group), or when both accompanied by a simultaneous feature and preceded by a serial feature (third group). Tests performed after discrimination learning revealed inhibitory control by the simultaneous feature in the first group and by the serial feature in the second group. In the third group, the simultaneous feature acquired inhibitory control over the target in isolation, whereas the serial feature did not. However, the serial feature further reduced responding to the target-simultaneous feature compound relative to responding shown to the compound in isolation. In Experiment 2, the same training procedure was used in three groups as in Experiment 1, except that the target was nonreinforced in isolation and reinforced in the presence of a simultaneous and/or serial feature. Tests revealed that the feature acquired excitatory control in the first and second groups. In the third group, both features acquired excitatory control, although the control exerted by the simultaneous feature was less strong than that observed in the group trained with only the simultaneous feature. The theoretical implications of these results regarding competition between occasion setters and Pavlovian excitors and inhibitors were discussed.