Personality Disorders in Older Adult Inpatients with Chronic Mental Illness

It has been hypothesized that some types of personality disorders tend to remit with age whereas others may become more prominent. The present study determined the prevalence and nature of 13 personality disorders with a self-report inventory (Coolidge Axis II Inventory) in an older group of chronically mentally ill inpatients (N = 30, mean age = 63 years) and a younger group of similar patients (N = 30, mean age = 39 years). All patients met DSM-IV criteria for either Schizophrenia, Schizoaffective Disorder, Bipolar Disorder, or recurrent severe Major Depression with psychotic features. The prevalence rate of personality disorders was high for both groups: 58% for the older sample and 66% for the younger group. The younger group was more likely to be diagnosed Antisocial, Borderline, Passive-Aggressive, Sadistic, and Schizotypal, but the groups were not different in the rates of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. This study supports the hypothesis that some personality disorders remit with age. However, no evidence was found to suggest that other personality disorders become more prominent in older adult psychiatric populations. Suggestions for future research are offered.     

Renewal of Extinguished Lever-Press Responses upon Return to the Training Context

Two experiments with rats explored renewal effects in operant conditioning preparations. When pressing a lever was trained in one context and then extinguished in a second context, the responding was renewed by returning to the original context (ABA renewal) in Experiment 1. This finding was replicated in Experiment 2 with discriminative operant performance signaled by a localized light cue. In spite of the successful demonstration of ABA renewal effect in these experiments, AAB renewal was detected in neither experiment: When the responses had been extinguished in the context of acquisition, testing the rats in a second context did not renew the responses. The demonstration of ABA renewal but no AAB renewal suggests that extinction in another context and/or a return to the original context are critical for renewal of extinguished operant performance.     

Race-specific perceptual discrimination improvement following short individuation training with faces

This study explores the effect of individuation training on the acquisition of race-specific expertise. First, we investigated whether practice individuating other-race faces yields improvement in perceptual discrimination for novel faces of that race. Second, we asked whether there was similar improvement for novel faces of a different race for which participants received equal practice, but in an orthogonal task that did not require individuation. Caucasian participants were trained to individuate faces of one race (African American or Hispanic) and to make difficult eye-luminance judgments on faces of the other race. By equating these tasks we are able to rule out raw experience, visual attention, or performance/success-induced positivity as the critical factors that produce race-specific improvements. These results indicate that individuation practice is one mechanism through which cognitive, perceptual, and/or social processes promote growth of the own-race face recognition advantage.     

Exploring the perceptual spaces of faces, cars and birds in children and adults

While much developmental research has focused on the strategies that children employ to recognize faces, less is known about the principles governing the organization of face exemplars in perceptual memory. In this study, we tested a novel, child-friendly paradigm for investigating the organization of face, bird and car exemplars. Children ages 3-4, 5-6, 7-8, 9-10, 11-12 and adults were presented with 50/50 morphs of typical and atypical face, bird and car parent images. Participants were asked to judge whether the 50/50 morph more strongly resembled the typical or the atypical parent image. Young and older children and adults showed a systematic bias to the atypical faces and birds, but no bias toward the atypical cars. Collectively, these findings argue that by the age of 3, children encode and organize faces, birds and cars in a perceptual space that is strikingly similar to that of adults. Category organization for both children and adults follows Krumhansl's (1978) distance-density principle in which the similarity between two exemplars is jointly determined by their physical appearance and the density of neighboring exemplars in the perceptual space.     

The preferred level of face categorization depends on discriminability

People usually categorize objects more quickly at the basic level (e.g., “dog”) than at the subordinate (e.g., “collie”) or superordinate (e.g., “animal”) levels. Notable exceptions to this rule include objects of expertise, faces, or atypical objects (e.g., “penguin,” “poodle”), all of which show faster than normal subordinate-level categorization. We hypothesize that the subordinate-level reaction time advantage for faces is influenced by their discriminability relative to other faces in the stimulus set. First, we replicated the subordinate-level advantage for faces (Experiment 1) and then showed that a basic-level advantage for faces can be elicited by increasing the perceptual similarity of the face stimuli, making discrimination more difficult (Experiment 2). Finally, we repeated both effects within subjects, showing that individual faces were slower to be categorized in the context of similar faces and more quickly categorized among diverse faces (Experiment 3).     

Enhanced recognition of emotional stimuli in the chimpanzee (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Pan troglodytes</Emphasis>)

Humans often have a better memory of emotional events than neutral events. From the comparative-cognitive perspective, we explored the enhancement of recognition memory by emotion in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) using a serial probe recognition task. In this task, we sequentially presented a list of pictures to subjects and then tested their recognition of specific pictures from within the list. We selected pictures of aggressive chimpanzees as emotional stimuli and less tensed, relaxed chimpanzees as neutral stimuli. In Experiment 1, we gave four-item lists to two young chimpanzees; one showed significantly greater recognition of pictures depicting aggressive chimpanzees than neutral ones. In Experiment 2, this chimpanzee was further tested using a recognition task with eight-item lists. The subject again showed better recognition of emotional stimuli than neutral. Furthermore, the presence of an emotional stimulus in the list also facilitated recognition of the neutral item immediately following it. Overall, although only one of the two chimpanzees showed enhanced recognition memory by emotional stimuli, this is the first demonstration of such a response in the chimpanzee. The findings are discussed in comparison with those of human studies.     

Subjectively divided tone components in the gap transfer illusion

When a long glide with a short temporal gap in its middle crosses with a continuous short glide at the temporal midpoint of both glides, the gap is perceived in the short glide instead of in the long glide. In the present article, we tested possible explanations for this "gap transfer illusion" by obtaining points of subjective equality of the pitches and durations of the two short tones that are subjectively divided by the gap. The results of two experiments showed that neither an explanation in terms ofenvelope patterns nor explanations in terms of combinationtones or acoustic beats could account for the perception of the short tones in the gap transfer illusion. Rather, the results were compatible with the idea that the illusory tones were formed by the perceptual integration of onsets and offsets of acoustically different sounds. Implications for the perceptual construction of auditory events are discussed.     

Is the loss of diagnosticity of the eye region of the face a common aspect of acquired prosopagnosia?

A recent study published in this journal has shown an abnormal performance at discriminating differences with respect to the eyes of unfamiliar faces in two acquired prosopagnosic patients, but preserved processing of the mouth region. Here we extend these findings by showing a similar lack of sensitivity to the eyes in the very same face matching experiment for the prosopagnosic patient PS, who also showed normal performance for detecting differences in the mouth region. These results complement previously published evidence that the patient PS presents a lack of sensitivity to diagnostic information located on the eyes of familiar faces during individual face recognition tasks. More generally, they indicate that the impaired processing of the eyes of faces is a fundamental aspect of acquired prosopagnosia that can arise following damage to different brain localizations.     

Contact and other‐race effects in configural and component processing of faces

Other‐race faces are generally recognized more poorly than own‐race faces. There has been a long‐standing interest in the extent to which differences in contact contribute to this other‐race effect (ORE). Here, we examined the effect of contact on two distinct aspects of face memory, memory for configuration and for components, both of which are better for own‐race than other‐race faces. Configural and component memory were measured using recognition memory tests with intact study faces and blurred (isolates memory for configuration) and scrambled (isolates memory for components) test faces, respectively. Our participants were a large group of ethnically Chinese individuals who had resided in Australia for varying lengths of time, from a few weeks to 26 years. We found that time in a Western country significantly (negatively) predicted the size of the ORE for configural, but not component, memory. There was also a trend for earlier age of arrival to predict smaller OREs in configural, but not component, memory. These results suggest that memory for configural information in other‐race faces improves with experience with such faces. However, as found for recognition memory generally, the contact effects were small, indicating that other factors must play a substantial role in cross‐race differences in face memory.