Response inhibition in adults and teenagers: spatiotemporal differences in the prefrontal cortex

Inhibition is a core executive function reliant on the frontal lobes that shows protracted maturation through to adulthood. We investigated the spatiotemporal characteristics of response inhibition during a visual go/no-go task in 14 teenagers and 14 adults using magnetoencephalography (MEG) and a contrast between two no-go experimental conditions designed to eliminate a common confound in earlier studies comparing go with no-go trials. Source analyses were performed using an event-related beamformer algorithm with co-registered individual structural MRIs. Performance was controlled to be similar across subjects. Analyses of MEG data revealed bilateral prefrontal activity in the inhibitory condition for both age groups, but with different spatiotemporal patterns: around 300ms after stimulus onset in middle frontal gyri in teenagers vs. around 260ms in inferior frontal gyri in adults. Moreover, the inhibition of a prepotent motor response showed a stronger recruitment of the left hemisphere in teenagers than in adults and of the right hemisphere in adults than in teenagers. These findings provide high-resolution temporal and spatial information regarding response inhibition in adolescents compared to adults, independent of motor components and performance differences.     

Investing in karma: when wanting promotes helping

People often face outcomes of important events that are beyond their personal control, such as when they wait for an acceptance letter, job offer, or medical test results. We suggest that when wanting and uncertainty are high and personal control is lacking, people may be more likely to help others, as if they can encourage fate's favor by doing good deeds proactively. Four experiments support this karmic-investment hypothesis. When people want an outcome over which they have little control, their donations of time and money increase (Experiments 1 and 2), but their participation in other rewarding activities does not (Experiment 1b). In addition, at a job fair, job seekers who feel the process is outside (vs. within) their control make more generous pledges to charities (Experiment 3). Finally, karmic investments increase optimism about a desired outcome (Experiment 4). We conclude by discussing the role of personal control and magical beliefs in this phenomenon.     

Targeting Co-Sleeping in Children With Anxiety Disorders Using a Modified Bedtime Pass Intervention: A Case Series Using a Changing Criterion Design

Children with anxiety disorders experience high rates of sleep-related problems, with co-sleeping and resistance to sleeping independently being among the more frequent problems reported. Although extinction-based behavioral sleep interventions have repeatedly been shown to be highly effective for treating bedtime resistance, the primary obstacle to their implementation is parent discomfort with these procedures. The bedtime pass intervention was developed to minimize extinction bursts when implementing extinction procedures for childhood sleep problems. Several studies have found this intervention to be effective for treating bedtime resistance behaviors, but not co-sleeping specifically, in nonclinical samples of children. The current paper describes the use of a modified bedtime pass procedure to target problematic co-sleeping and related bedtime resistance behaviors in two children with anxiety disorders who presented for treatment at an outpatient pediatric anxiety specialty clinic. A changing criterion, single subject methodology was used to evaluate the effectiveness of this procedure. Data indicate that both children were able to transition from co-sleeping with parents every night, to sleeping independently, with relatively limited need for contact with parents at night during the intervention. These findings extend the data for the bedtime pass procedure to both co-sleeping and children with anxiety disorders. Clinical implications of these findings are discussed given the limited guidance for treating comorbid sleep problems in anxious children. Strengths and limitations of the data being drawn from a clinical treatment setting are also discussed.     

Feminism and the Decade of Behavior

This Psychology of Women Quarterly special issue argues that the goals of the Decade of Behavior to foster a healthier, safer, better educated, more prosperous, and more democratic nation cannot be achieved without contributions from feminist psychology. Its individual articles reflect feminist perspectives and provide examples of how feminist perspectives can inform behavioral and social research within Decade domains. In this overview, we outline the challenges that gender poses to achieving Decade goals, and discuss four cross-cutting feminist principles for research to address those challenges: Inclusiveness and Diversity, Context, Power and Privilege, and Activism. We discuss specific limitations of traditional research, and emphasize the need for new models that view the world in more complex, context-based ways. We underscore the importance of generating new, diversity-mindful research questions and of developing and accepting new methods to answer them. We discuss policy implications, stressing the need for activism. We hope this work will encourage the expansion of feminist scholarship in the new millennium and be helpful to researchers, educators, and policymakers in working to achieve the goals of the Decade of Behavior.     

Representational momentum,spatial layout,and viewpoint dependency

Completing a representational momentum (RM) task, participants viewed one of three camera motions through a scene and indicated whether test probes were in the same position as they were in the final view of the animation. All camera motions led to RM anticipations in the direction of motion, with larger distortions resulting from rotations than a compound motion of a rotation and a translation. A surprise test of spatial layout, using an aerial map, revealed that the correct map was identified only following aerial views during the RM task. When the RM task displayed field views, including repeated views of multiple object groups, participants were unable to identify the overall spatial layout of the scene. These results suggest that the object–location binding thought to support certain change detection and visual search tasks might be viewpoint dependent.     

The closeness-communication bias: Increased egocentrism among friends versus strangers

People commonly believe that they communicate better with close friends than with strangers. We propose, however, that closeness can lead people to overestimate how well they communicate, a phenomenon we term the closeness-communication bias. In one experiment, participants who followed direction of a friend were more likely to make egocentric errors—look at and reach for an object only they could see—than were those who followed direction of a stranger. In two additional experiments, participants who attempted to convey particular meanings with ambiguous phrases overestimated their success more when communicating with a friend or spouse than with strangers. We argue that people engage in active monitoring of strangers’ divergent perspectives because they know they must, but that they “let down their guard” and rely more on their own perspective when they communicate with a friend.     

The Center for Brain,Consciousness, and Cognition at Maharishi University of Management

The work at the Center for Brain, Consciousness and Cognition is summarized.     

Experimental Studies in Ocular Behavior: I. The Dodge Mirror-Recorder for Photographing Eye-Movements

Two experiments are reported concerning the effects of semantic encoding operations on the subsequent usefulness of interitem semantic relations in recall. These experiments employ the Mathews paradigm in which Ss first make judgments about the semantic relatedness of words presented in triplets and subsequently have their memory for the words tested. These experiments examine the effects of variations in interitem associative strength (Experiment 1), and task instructions and triplet order (Experiment 2). The results are discussed in terms of the general effects of the semantic judgment task on the encoding of task-relevant and task-irrelevant semantic attributes of words.