Reprint of: stuttering treatment control using P300 event-related potentials

Positron emission tomography studies during speech have indicated a failure to show the normal activation of auditory cortical areas in stuttering individuals. In the present study, P300 event-related potentials were used to investigate possible effects of behavioral treatment on the pattern of signal amplitude and latency between waves. In order to compare variations in P300 measurements, a control group paired by age and gender to the group of stutterers, was included in the study. Findings suggest that the group of stutterers presented a significant decrease in stuttering severity after the fluency treatment program. Regarding P300 measurements, stutterers and their controls presented results within normal limits in all testing situations and no significant statistical variations between pre and post treatment testing. When comparing individual results between the testing situations, stutterers presented a higher average decrease in wave latency for the right ear following treatment. The results are discussed in light of previous P300 event-related potentials and functional imaging studies with stuttering adults.Educational objectives: The reader will learn about and be able to describe the: (1) use of P300 event-related potentials in the study of stuttering; (2) differences between stuttering and non-stuttering adults; and (3) effects of behavioral fluency treatment on cerebral activity in stuttering speakers.     

Distorted temporal consciousness and preserved knowing consciousness in confabulation: a case study

In this study we describe a patient, TA, who developed a chronic amnesic-confabulatory syndrome, following rupture of a right internal carotid siphon aneurysm. Our aim was to elucidate as fully as possible the nature of TA's impairment and to test the hypothesis of confabulation as reflecting a dysfunction of Temporal Consciousness, i.e., to become aware of something as part of a personal past, present or future. TA's confabulations were present in answers to questions tapping Temporal Consciousness, i.e., autobiographical episodic memory, orientation in time and place, and foresight of personal future. In contrast, confabulations were not observed in answers to questions tapping Knowing Consciousness, i.e., to become aware of something as a meaning or as an element of impersonal knowledge. In fact, he had normal access to semantic knowledge, including foresight of impersonal future. TA's brain MRI showed lesions involving the right hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus, fornix, mammillary bodies, and thalamus. Moreover TA showed sub-cortical lesions involving the caudate and putamen nuclei bilaterally, a lesion site not commonly described in amnesic-confabulatory syndrome. We suggest that this pattern of results is better accounted for within the framework of the Memory, Consciousness and Temporality Theory and reflects a specific distortion of Temporal Consciousness.     

Defining Compulsive Behavior

Neuropsychology Review - Compulsive tendencies are a central feature of problematic human behavior and thereby are of great interest to the scientific and clinical community. However, no consensus...     

Infants' discrimination of happy and sad music

Infants can detect information specifying affect in infant- and adult-directed speech, familiar and unfamiliar facial expressions, and in point-light displays of facial expressions. We examined 3-, 5-, 7-, and 9-month-olds' discrimination of musical excerpts judged by adults and preschoolers as happy and sad. In Experiment 1, using an infant-controlled habituation procedure, 3-, 5-, 7-, and 9-month-olds heard three musical excerpts that were rated as either happy or sad. Following habituation, infants were presented with two new musical excerpts from the other affect group. Nine-month-olds discriminated the musical excerpts rated as affectively different. Five- and seven-month-olds discriminated the happy and sad excerpts when they were habituated to sad excerpts but not when they were habituated to happy excerpts. Three-month-olds showed no evidence of discriminating the sad and happy excerpts. In Experiment 2, 5-, 7-, and 9-month-olds were presented with two new musical excerpts from the same affective group as the habituation excerpts. At no age did infants discriminate these novel, yet affectively similar, musical excerpts. In Experiment 3, we examined 5-, 7-, and 9-month-olds' discrimination of individual excerpts rated as affectively similar. Only the 9-month-olds discriminated the affectively similar individual excerpts. Results are discussed in terms of infants' ability to discriminate affect across a variety of events and its relevance for later social-communicative development.     

Retention by “fast” and “slow” learners

Four experiments were conducted to replicate and extend the findings by Shuell and Keppel (1970) as well as others, that when properly equated for original learning, “fast” and “slow” learners have parallel forgetting curves. In Experiments I and II, the Shuell-Keppel findings, originally demonstrated on American students learning lists of words, were replicated on samples of Nigerian students. In Experiments III and IV, Nigerian and American students, respectively, learned poems to a criterion of 75–90% correct and were tested for retention. In all studies, “fast” and “slow” learners were brought to a similar learning criterion, with the result that their forgetting curves were parallel.     

Associative responding versus analogical reasoning by children

Following upon work which showed that college and high school students' analogy solutions were predictable from ratings of the relatedness of the words comprising the analogy choices, this study extended those results to children's analogy solutions. Achenbach's Children's Associative Responding Test was used as the criterion to determine (1) whether analogy solutions by children were as related to word relatedness ratings as analogy solutions were in previous subject samples, (2) whether individual differences in using associative responding versus analogical reasoning processes could enhance the predictability estimates, and (3) whether associative priming can affect analogy solutions. Two correlational studies were done, one on an American and another on a Nigerian sample. A third study was an experimental manipulation of choices on analogy items on an American sample. The results suggest that the answer to questions (1) and (3) is yes, but the answer to question (2) is no.     

Enrichment versus exercise effects on motor impairments following cortical removals in rats

Groups of rats were exposed to an enriched environment, given access to an activity wheel, or individually housed in wire mesh cages, impoverished. Rats were exposed in groups of four to the enriched environment or placed individually in the activity wheel for 2 h per day for 25 days preoperatively. Within each exposure group, rats sustained bilateral removals of sensorimotor cortex, or were sham-operated controls. Animals were trained preoperatively to locomote across a narrow elevated runway. Postoperatively, locomotor testing was initiated 17 days after surgery throughout which time all animals were maintained under impoverished conditions. Locomotor deficits following cortical damage were a function of preoperative exposure: enriched rats were least impaired; impoverished rats were most impaired. Rats allowed running wheel activity initially showed the same marked deficits as impoverished animals but recovered more rapidly. The opportunity for physical exercise afforded wheel animals preoperatively may have enhanced motor capabilities that aided recovery. However, physical activity alone did not yield the same protective effects from initial impairment as enrichment. Greater elaboration of neural structures associated with perceptual-motor enrichment probably accounted for the initial sparing of the enriched group.     

Synaesthetic perception of colour and visual space in a blind subject: an fMRI case study

In spatial sequence synaesthesia (SSS) ordinal stimuli are perceived as arranged in peripersonal space. Using fMRI, we examined the neural bases of SSS and colour synaesthesia for spoken words in a late-blind synaesthete, JF. He reported days of the week and months of the year as both coloured and spatially ordered in peripersonal space; parts of the days and festivities of the year were spatially ordered but uncoloured. Words that denote time-units and triggered no concurrents were used in a control condition. Both conditions inducing SSS activated the occipito-parietal, infero-frontal and insular cortex. The colour area hOC4v was engaged when the synaesthetic experience included colour. These results confirm the continued recruitment of visual colour cortex in this late-blind synaesthetes. Synaesthesia also involved activation in inferior frontal cortex, which may be related to spatial memory and detection, and in the insula, which might contribute to audiovisual integration related to the processing of inducers and concurrents.     

Male and Female Pronoun Use in U.S. Books Reflects Women’s Status, 1900–2008

The status of women in the United States varied considerably during the 20th century, with increases 1900–1945, decreases 1946–1967, and considerable increases after 1968. We examined whether changes in written language, especially the ratio of male to female pronouns, reflected these trends in status in the full text of nearly 1.2?million U.S. books 1900–2008 from the Google Books database. Male pronouns included he, him, his, himself and female pronouns included she, her, hers, and herself. Between 1900 and 1945, 3.5 male pronouns appeared for every female pronoun, increasing to 4.5 male pronouns during the postwar era of the 1950s and early 1960s. After 1968, the ratio dropped precipitously, reaching 2 male pronouns per female pronoun by the 2000s. From 1968 to 2008, the use of male pronouns decreased as female pronouns increased. The gender pronoun ratio was significantly correlated with indicators of U.S. women’s status such as educational attainment, labor force participation, and age at first marriage as well as women’s assertiveness, a personality trait linked to status. Books used relatively more female pronouns when women’s status was high and fewer when it was low. The results suggest that cultural products such as books mirror U.S. women’s status and changing trends in gender equality over the generations.