Where and when to look: Sequential effects at the millisecond level

Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics - Learning and imitating a complex motor action requires to visually follow complex movements, but conscious perception seems too slow for such tasks....     

Challenges of home visitor interventions with adolescent mothers and their infants

Issues in designing a home visitor intervention and research program for 130 adolescent mothers, 17 and under, and their infants from birth to 30 months are discussed. The overall project is described, and various aspects of creating and maintaining a home visitor intervention program are discussed, including: (1) Issues and problems that arise with the integration of a home visitor intervention component into an ongoing health department program; (2) the recruitment and training of lay home visitors in the context of arduous, often disheartening work; (3) issues of supervision and quality control faced by the mental health consultants; (4) coping with potential stresses and dangers faced by the home visitors; (5) assisting and maintaining maximum communication for the research components of the study to be successful.     

Anger regulation in disadvantaged preschool boys: strategies, antecedents, and the development of self-control

Emotion regulation strategies observed during an age 3 1/2 frustration task were examined in relation to (a) angry affect during the frustration task, (b) child and maternal characteristics at age 1 1/2, and (c) indices of self-control at age 6 in a sample of low-income boys (Ns varied between 189 and 310, depending on the assessment). Shifting attention away from sources of frustration and seeking information about situational constraints were associated with decreased anger. Secure attachment and positive maternal control correlated positively with effective regulatory strategy use. Individual differences in strategy use predicted self-control at school entry, but in specific rather than general ways: Reliance on attention-shifting strategies corresponded with low externalizing problems and high cooperation; reliance on information gathering corresponded with high assertiveness.     

Learning subjective health complaints

Symptom episodes often show a spatio-temporal structure, that is, they occur in a specific context for a certain duration. Repeated experiences may therefore be construed as associative learning trials, in which context elements are turned into predictive cues, triggering anticipatory processes conducive to subjective health complaints. A series of experiments, using inhalations of air enriched with CO2 and external (odors) or internal (mental images) stimuli as cues, is discussed to show that subjective health complaints may occur upon presenting the cue alone. Learned symptoms may be unrelated to bodily responses and easily generalize to new related cues. Better learning occurs to cues with a negative affective valence and in participants scoring high for negative affectivity. Our findings are relevant to the understanding of medically unexplained ("functional") syndromes and the poor relationship between objective and subjective health indicators in general.     

Personally familiar proper names are relatively successfully processed in the human right hemisphere; or, the missing link

Responding to our abstract in Brain and Language (Ohnesorge & Van Lancker, 1999), which proposed that famous proper nouns are successfully processed in both cerebral hemispheres, Schweinberger, Landgrebe, Mohr, and Kaufmann (2001) claimed that the "link" between personal names and the right hemisphere is "illusory." Ohnesorge and Van Lancker (2001) further described six experimental studies in which LVF/RH recognition of famous proper nouns was influenced by task conditions and stimulus familiarity. Here presenting two more experiments performed to explore the refutation presented by Schweinberger et al., this article confirms an ability of the right hemisphere to recognize famous proper nouns and explains why appropriate stimulus development and task conditions are essential in furthering our understanding of the role of the right hemisphere in processing personal relevance.     

Effect of speech task on intelligibility in dysarthria: a case study of Parkinson's disease

This study assessed intelligibility in a dysarthric patient with Parkinson's disease (PD) across five speech production tasks: spontaneous speech, repetition, reading, repeated singing, and spontaneous singing, using the same phrases for all but spontaneous singing. The results show that this speaker was significantly less intelligible when speaking spontaneously than in the other tasks. Acoustic analysis suggested that relative intensity and word duration were not independently linked to intelligibility, but dysfluencies (from perceptual analysis) and articulatory/resonance patterns (from acoustic records) were related to intelligibility in predictable ways. These data indicate that speech production task may be an important variable to consider during the evaluation of dysarthria. As speech production efficiency was found to vary with task in a patient with Parkinson's disease, these results can be related to recent models of basal ganglia function in motor performance.     

Variability in aphasic patients' response times

Response time studies of acquired language disorders are plagued by tremendous variability in patients' response times. In this brief report we demonstrate how variability itself may provide informative data. Lexical decision response times, generated by nine patients, illustrate how within-patient variability may estimate stability in cognitive dynamics.     

The influence of word frequency on recency effects in directed free recall

Leading theoretical explanations of recency effects are designed to explain the reported absence of a word frequency effect on recall of words from recency serial positions. The present study used a directed free-recall procedure (J. J. Dalezman, 1976) and manipulated the frequency composition of the word lists (pure and mixed). Overall, with pure lists, a greater proportion of high-frequency (HF) words were recalled than low-frequency (LF) words, and with mixed lists, a greater proportion of LF words were recalled than HF words. Of importance, this recall advantage for one frequency over the other as a function of list composition was evident across the last three serial positions, indicating an influence of word frequency on recency effects that is dependent on the frequency composition of the lists. These results challenge one of the major assumptions on which several theories of recency effects have been based.     

Effects of task performance and contextual performance on systemic rewards

Evidence from 2 samples of Air Force mechanics supported the hypothesis that contextual performance affects employees' career advancement and rewards over time. Results of hierarchical regressions controlling for experience showed task performance and contextual performance each predicted systemic rewards. Each facet explained separate variance in promotability ratings over 2 years. In both samples, contextual performance explained separate variance in informal rewards but task performance did not. Task performance explained incremental variance in career advancement 1 year later but contextual performance did not. Analyses using correlations corrected for unreliability suggest these results cannot be attributed to measurement error. Contextual performance still explained separate variance in informal rewards, and task performance explained distinct variance in career advancement a year later.