MEASUREMENT OF THE INTENSITY OF AN UNDERLYING FIGURAL PROCESS: A methodological study

K ünnapas , T. M. Measurement of the intensity of an underlying figural process. A methodological study. Scand. J. Psychol ., 1961, 2 , 174–184.—A method is proposed for studying the intensity of the figural process underlying the well-known phenomenon of figural fluctuations. A metric model is presented according to which a measure of the intensity of the underlying process is obtained in units of dispersion. The model is illustrated by an experimental example. An equation is given which is analogous to that of the damped harmonic vibration. Four parameters are involved in this equation. A technique for determining the parameters is developed. Very good agreement between theoretical and empirical scale values demonstrates the applicability of the proposed method.     

Emergency psychiatry and crisis intervention in a primary clinic

The terms Notfall and Krise, and the semantic problems arising, are elucidated; and an analysis of one years work in provision for emergency psychiatry and stress intervention is presented. Psychoreactive syndromes were found to be most common, followed in second place by psychotic conditions. In third place come disorders in connection with alcohol, which display a rising tendency. 40% of the clinic's beds are occupied by acute emergency cases, chiefly of short duration. Emergency provision is thus shown to be a major feature in the work of psychiatric clinics.     

Bandpass characteristics of high-frequency sensitivity and visual experience in blindsight

Patient RP suffers a unilateral right homonymous quadrant anopia but demonstrates better than chance discrimination for stimuli presented in the blind field at temporal frequencies between 33 and 47 Hz (all significant at p < .05, binomial). Examination of her reports of visual experience during blind-field discrimination suggests a more complex picture in which experiences particular to correct discrimination are not found at low-mid-gamma frequencies, but are significantly more likely than average (76%, p < .001) at a lower frequency (22 Hz) at which blindsight is not observed. We believe that visual experience may serve to support blindsight if discrimination tasks are generally impaired at frequencies outside of the low-mid-gamma band. If this is so, although generally experienced as non-specific and unstructured light, the visual experience that accompanies discrimination performance must be based upon a neural representation which includes information on the visual features present in the stimulus.     

Neurobiological degeneracy: Supporting stability,flexibility and pluripotentiality in complex motor skill

This paper investigated neurobiological degeneracy of the motor system that emerged as a function of levels of environmental constraint. Fourteen participants performed a breaststroke-swimming task that required them to develop a specific biomechanically expert pattern and in turn provide the basis for a suitable task vehicle to study the functional role of movement variability. Inter-limb coordination was defined based on the computation of continuous relative phase between elbow and knee oscillators. Unsupervised cluster analysis on arm–leg coordination revealed the existence of different patterns of coordination when participants achieved the same task goal under different levels of environmental constraints (i.e. different amounts of forward resistances). In addition, clusters differed in terms of higher order derivatives (e.g., joint angular velocity, joint amplitude), suggesting an effective role for degeneracy in learning by allowing the exploration of the key relationships between motor organization and interacting constraints. There is evidence to suggest that neurobiological degeneracy supports the potential for motor re-organization to enhance motor learning.     

Familiarity supports associative recognition memory for face stimuli that can be unitised: Evidence from receiver operating characteristics

According to dual-process models, associative recognition memory mainly relies on recollection without benefiting from familiarity. This study investigates the circumstances under which familiarity may support associative recognition judgements by comparing recognition memory for arbitrarily paired items (i.e., pairs of face stimuli depicting two different persons; interitem associations) with recognition memory for pairs of items that are highly overlapping and can be unitised into a coherent whole (i.e., pairs of physically different but very similar face stimuli depicting the same person; intraitem associations). Estimates of familiarity and recollection were derived from receiver operating characteristics. Consistent with the hypothesis that familiarity is able to support associative recognition memory, but only when the to-be-associated stimuli can be unitised, results from two experiments revealed higher familiarity estimates for intra- compared to interitem associations. By contrast, recollection for recombined pairs was higher for inter- compared to intraitem associations. We propose a hypothetical model on how intraitem associations may benefit from familiarity.     

Real-World Knowledge Facilitates Interpretation of Paintings by Naive Art Observers

It is often assumed that women kill themselves because of love and men because of achievement problems. The authors evaluated the suicide notes of 56 U.S. adult women and men with regard to love and achievement motives. Love themes were significantly more common than achievement themes, independent of sex and age. This suggests that, at least for U.S. adults who leave suicide notes, relationship concerns may be a dominant component of the motivation for suicide.     

Der Einfluß von Zeitdruck auf die Leistung und das Denkverhalten bei Volksschülern

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Adult age differences in event-based prospective memory: a meta-analysis on the role of focal versus nonfocal cues

Studies of age differences in event-based prospective memory indicate wide variation in the magnitude of age effects. One explanation derived from the multiprocess framework proposes that age differences depend on whether the cue to carry out a prospective intention is focal to ongoing task processing. A meta-analysis of 117 effect sizes from 4,709 participants provided evidence for this view, as age effects were greater when the prospective cue to the ongoing task was nonfocal compared with when it was focal. However, the results only support a weaker but not a stronger prediction of the multiprocess framework, as age impairments were reliably above zero for both types of retrieval cues.