Representational neglect for words as revealed by bisection tasks

In the present study, we showed that a representational disorder for words can dissociate from both representational neglect for objects and neglect dyslexia. This study involved 14 brain-damaged patients with left unilateral spatial neglect and a group of normal subjects. Patients were divided into four groups based on presence of left neglect dyslexia and representational neglect for non-verbal material, as evaluated by the Clock Drawing test. The patients were presented with bisection tasks for words and lines. The word bisection tasks (with words of five and seven letters) comprised the following: (1) representational bisection: the experimenter pronounced a word and then asked the patient to name the letter in the middle position; (2) visual bisection: same as (1) with stimuli presented visually; and (3) motor bisection: the patient was asked to cross out the letter in the middle position. The standard line bisection task was presented using lines of different length. Consistent with the literature, long lines were bisected to the right and short lines, rendered comparable in length to the words of the word bisection test, deviated to the left (crossover effect). Both patients and controls showed the same leftward bias on words in the visual and motor bisection conditions. A significant difference emerged between the groups only in the case of the representational bisection task, whereas the group exhibiting neglect dyslexia associated with representational neglect for objects showed a significant rightward bias, while the other three patient groups and the controls showed a leftward bisection bias. Neither the presence of neglect alone nor the presence of visual neglect dyslexia was sufficient to produce a specific disorder in mental imagery. These results demonstrate a specific representational neglect for words independent of both representational neglect and neglect dyslexia.     

Activity and Convention

This paper develops Lewis’ notion of convention within a framework that mixes cognitive science with some more social theories of activity like distributed cognition and activity theory. The close examination of everyday situations of convention-based activity will produce some interesting issues for a cognitive theory of behavior. Uncertainty, dynamics, and the complexities of the performance of convention-based activities that are distributed over time and/or place, are driving factors in the analysis that is presented. How the actors reason and manage their collaboration is characterized as pragmatic action. During the course of recurrent activities, the participants adapt previously learned convention-based activities to new circumstances. The coordinating representations that are a part of the design of the context mediate parts of the activity. As they act, the participants learn.     

Spatial-attention and emotional evocation: line bisection performance and visual art emotional evocation

Lesion studies demonstrate that the right temporal-parietal region (RTP) is important for mediating spatial attention. The RTP is also involved in emotional experiences that can be evoked by art. Normal people vary in their ability to allocate spatial attention, thus, people who can better allocate attention might also be more influenced by the emotional messages of the paintings (evocative impact). Seventeen healthy participants bisected an unlabeled 100mm line and their performance on this task was used to create two groups, individuals who were more (mALB) and less accurate (lALB). These participants also judged 10 paintings on five qualities, Evocative Impact, Aesthetics, Novelty, Technique, and Closure by marking a 100mm line from 1 (low degree) to 10 (high degree). An ANOVA indicated differences in accuracy on the line bisection (LB) between the two groups. Additional ANOVAs, using the quality ratings as the dependent measure, revealed that the mALB group scored the Evocative Impact greater than the lALB group. These results suggest that the differences in attentional bias between the two groups, as indicated by their LB performance, might influence their evocative impact or reactions and also be a 'barometer' of other RTP functions, including emotional processing.     

Description and First Steps Toward the Empirical Validation of the Plan Formulation Method for Couples

The aim of this paper is to empirically assess the reliability of the plan formulation method for couples, a procedure for formulating the case, planning, and monitoring the couple therapies according to control-mastery theory. We hypothesized that when couples are looking for couple therapy, they have an unconscious couple’s plan for the therapy, which includes the couple’s goals; the pathogenic beliefs that the partners want to disprove; the traumas from which these beliefs originated and that the partners want to master; the vicious relational circles that make the couple suffer and that the couple wants to break; the virtuous relational circles that are expressions of the couple’s resources and that the couple wants to fuel; and the relational insights that may help the couple get better. Our study involved 15 couples treated by four experienced therapists. Four raters independently formulated each couple’s plan based on the first three sessions following a standard procedure, and we calculated the intraclass correlation for pooled judges’ ratings. For a subsample of three couples—who before and after treatment had completed the dyadic adjustment scale (DAS) and the outcome questionnaire-45.2 (OQ-45.2)—the compatibility of the therapists’ interventions with the couples’ and partners’ plans was assessed. The relationship between the ratings of compatibility, DAS and OQ-45.2, was assessed. The results showed excellent interjudge reliability for each couple’s plan formulation (average ICC?=?0.82), attesting to the validity of the procedure; and preliminary data on the therapeutic process suggested that therapists’ interventions compatible with couple’s plans could help partners achieve good outcomes.

     

Representation, interaction, and intersubjectivity

What the participants share, their common "sense" of the world, creates a foundation, a framing, an orientation that enables human actors to see and act in coordination with one another. For recurrent activities, the methods the participants use to understand each other as they act change, making the intersubjective space in which actors operate richer and easier to produce. This article works through some of the issues that emerge from a close examination of intersubjectivity as it is managed through representation and interaction. The data that are presented document, in detail, a sequence of related interactions, within and across episodes of cooperation, where continuity and change can be observed. The emergence of conversational structure and coordinating representations are significant milestones in the long-term development of a representational practice that support the runtime co-construction of intersubjective space. Conversational structures emerge interactively to mediate recurrent points of coordination in the domain activity, and only secondarily the conversation itself. Coordinating representations change the representational practice of the participants by making it easier to manage their "shared view" of the collective work, enabling the participants to make progress, expand the field of the common activity, while exhibiting more control of if and when explicit grounding occurs.     

Reconsolidation of declarative memory in humans

The reconsolidation hypothesis states that a consolidated memory could again become unstable and susceptible to facilitation or impairment for a discrete period of time after a reminder presentation. The phenomenon has been demonstrated in very diverse species and types of memory, including the human procedural memory of a motor skill task but not the human declarative one. Here we provide evidence for both consolidation and reconsolidation in a paired-associate learning (i.e., learning an association between a cue syllable and the respective response syllable). Subjects were given two training sessions with a 24-h interval on distinct verbal material, and afterward, they received at testing two successive retrievals corresponding to the first and second learning, respectively. Two main results are noted. First, the first acquired memory was impaired when a reminder was presented 5 min before the second training (reconsolidation), and also when the second training was given 5 min instead of 24 h after the first one (consolidation). Second, the first retrieval proved to influence negatively on the later one (the retrieval-induced forgetting [RIF] effect), and we used the absence of this RIF effect as a very indicator of the target memory impairment. We consider the demonstration of reconsolidation in human declarative memory as backing the universality of this phenomenon and having potential clinical relevance. On the other hand, we discuss the possibility of using the human declarative memory as a model to address several key topics of the reconsolidation hypothesis.     

Convention in joint activity

Conventional behaviors develop from practice for regularly occurring problems of coordination within a community of actors. Reusing and extending conventional methods for coordinating behavior is the task of everyday reasoning .
The computational model presented in the paper details the emergence of convention in circumstances where there is no ruling body of knowledge developed by prior generations of actors within the community to guide behavior. The framework we assume combines social theories of cognition with human information processing models that have been developed within Cognitive Science. The model presented reflects both elements of the framework. Conventional behaviors are partially coded in the predisposition of participants in a joint activity to expect certain points of coordination to develop during the course of the activity. The expected points of coordination that are commonly assumed form a design for an activity . Because of uncertainty, interruptions, and numerous other opportunities to get off-track and out-of-synch, the participants must work jointly and continuously to achieve conventional coordination.
One feature of the model is that the community improves its performance despite the fact that individual actors reason independently about their experiences. Another important feature of the model is that the mechanisms for improving behavior are tied to the memory function of individual actors. A third important feature is that the social interaction among the participants simplifies and drives the everyday reasoning processes. An analysis of a large set of computational experiments supports the theoretical position that is developed regarding everyday reasoning and convention.     

Infant psychopathology during the first year of life and its return during adolescence and adulthood

This is a presentation of different clinical cases having in common severe infantile traumatic events during the first year of life. From the disappearance of mother and father during Latin-American dictatorships, to another patient who hallucinates that bats fly out of his cheeks, this paper tries to bring light into the difficult times of these patients and how the analysts worked with infantile parts of the self which were inside the adult patients.     

Audiotactile interactions in temporal perception

In the present review, we focus on how commonalities in the ontogenetic development of the auditory and tactile sensory systems may inform the interplay between these signals in the temporal domain. In particular, we describe the results of behavioral studies that have investigated temporal resolution (in temporal order, synchrony/asynchrony, and simultaneity judgment tasks), as well as temporal numerosity perception, and similarities in the perception of frequency across touch and hearing. The evidence reviewed here highlights features of audiotactile temporal perception that are distinctive from those seen for other pairings of sensory modalities. For instance, audiotactile interactions are characterized in certain tasks (e.g., temporal numerosity judgments) by a more balanced reciprocal influence than are other modality pairings. Moreover, relative spatial position plays a different role in the temporal order and temporal recalibration processes for audiotactile stimulus pairings than for other modality pairings. The effect exerted by both the spatial arrangement of stimuli and attention on temporal order judgments is described. Moreover, a number of audiotactile interactions occurring during sensory-motor synchronization are highlighted. We also look at the audiotactile perception of rhythm and how it may be affected by musical training. The differences emerging from this body of research highlight the need for more extensive investigation into audiotactile temporal interactions. We conclude with a brief overview of some of the key issues deserving of further research in this area.