Division I men and women athletes do not differ on perceptions of worth

Historically, especially prior to the increased interest in women's athletics with the passage of Title IX in 1972, there have been negative perceptions of women as athletes. If these social perceptions still hold in part today, as is indirectly suggested by unequal press coverage and less basic support for women athletes, one might predict that collegiate female athletes would rate themselves lower on self-esteem and worth than collegiate male athletes. 176 Division I male (n = 90) and female (n = 86) athletes rated their perceptions of self on the Worth Index which measures basic human worth, personal security, performance, and physical self; these are divided into intrinsic (unconditional worth) measures and behavior or performance (conditional worth) measures. There were no significant sex differences in the ratings of any aspect of perceived worth, in contrast to prior results among non-athletes. In spite of less support given to women athletes, perhaps the long-term high-intensity competition that is required to reach Division I status tends to eliminate sex differences in self-worth.     

Elementary visual hallucinations and their relationships to neural pattern-forming mechanisms

An extraordinary variety of experimental (e.g., flicker, magnetic fields) and clinical (epilepsy, migraine) conditions give rise to a surprisingly common set of elementary hallucinations, including spots, geometric patterns, and jagged lines, some of which also have color, depth, motion, and texture. Many of these simple hallucinations fall into a small number of perceptual geometries-the Klüver forms-that (via a nonlinear mapping from retina to cortex) correspond to even simpler sets of oriented stripes of cortical activity (and their superpositions). Other simple hallucinations (phosphenes and fortification auras) are linked to the Klüver forms and to pattern-forming cortical mechanisms by their spatial and temporal scales. The Klüver cortical activity patterns are examples of self-organized pattern formation that arise from nonlinear dynamic interactions between excitatory and inhibitory cortical neurons; with reasonable modifications, this model accounts for a wide range of hallucinated patterns. The Klüver cortical activity patterns are a subset of autonomous spatiotemporal cortical patterns, some of which have been studied with functional imaging techniques. Understanding the interaction of these intrinsic patterns with stimulus-driven cortical activity is an important problem in neuroscience. In line with this, hallucinatory pattern formation interacts with physical stimuli, and many conditions that induce hallucinations show interesting interactions with one another. Both types of interactions are predictable from neural and psychophysical principles such as localized processing, excitatory-inhibitory neural circuits, lateral inhibition, simultaneous and sequential contrast, saccadic suppression, and perceptual opponency. Elementary hallucinations arise from familiar mechanisms stimulated in unusual ways.     

Nocturnal polysomnographic correlates of daytime sleepiness

The relations of nighttime polysomnographic sleep variables with daytime sleepiness scores on the Epworth Sleepiness Scale were assessed in a retrospective chart review of 38 patients referred to a sleep clinic. Of the variables assessed, only slow wave sleep was statistically significantly correlated with daytime sleepiness, regardless of whether the analysis was based on absolute minutes of slow wave sleep or percentage of total sleep time spent in slow wave sleep. Stepwise linear regression suggested that other polysomnographic variables did not provide additional predictive value beyond the two indices of slow wave sleep. Apparently, reduced quantity of slow wave sleep was weakly but significantly related to increased daytime sleepiness among these sleep-clinic patients.     

Not all ambiguous words are created equal: An EEG investigation of homonymy and polysemy

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to investigate the time-course of meaning activation of different types of ambiguous words. Unbalanced homonymous ("pen"), balanced homonymous ("panel"), metaphorically polysemous ("lip"), and metonymically polysemous words ("rabbit") were used in a visual single-word priming delayed lexical decision task. The theoretical distinction between homonymy and polysemy was reflected in the N400 component. Homonymous words (balanced and unbalanced) showed effects of dominance/frequency with reduced N400 effects predominantly observed for dominant meanings. Polysemous words (metaphors and metonymies) showed effects of core meaning representation with both dominant and subordinate meanings showing reduced N400 effects. Furthermore, the division within polysemy, into metaphor and metonymy, was supported. Differences emerged in meaning activation patterns with the subordinate meanings of metaphor inducing differentially reduced N400 effects moving from left hemisphere electrode sites to right hemisphere electrode sites, potentially suggesting increased involvement of the right hemisphere in the processing of figurative meaning.     

Phonological priming in adults who stutter

The purpose of this study was to compare the speed of phonological encoding between adults who stutter (AWS) and adults who do not stutter (ANS). Fifteen male AWS and 15 age- and gender-matched ANS participated in the study. Speech onset latency was obtained for both groups and stuttering frequency was calculated for AWS during three phonological priming tasks: (1) heterogeneous, during which the participants' single-word verbal responses differed phonemically; (2) C-homogeneous, during which the participants' response words shared the initial consonant; and (3) CV-homogeneous, during which the participants' response words shared the initial consonant and vowel. Response words containing the same C and CV patterns in the two homogeneous conditions served as phonological primes for one another, while the response words in the heterogeneous condition did not. During each task, the participants produced a verbal response after being visually presented with a semantically related cue word, with cue-response pairs being learned beforehand. The data showed that AWS had significantly longer speech onset latency when compared to ANS in all priming conditions, priming had a facilitating effect on word retrieval for both groups, and there was no significant change in stuttering frequency across the conditions for AWS. This suggests that phonological encoding may play no role, or only a minor role, in stuttering. EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES: The reader will be able to: (1) describe previous research paradigms that have been used to assess phonological encoding in adults and children who stutter; (2) explain performance similarities and differences between adults who do and do not stutter during various phonological priming conditions; (3) compare the present findings to past research that examined the relationship between phonological encoding and stuttering.     

Perception of temporal order is impaired during the time course of the attentional blink

Identification accuracy for the second of two target (T2) is impaired when presented shortly after the first (T1). Does this attentional blink (AB) also impair the perception of the order of presentation? In four experiments, three letter targets (T1, T2, T3) were inserted in a stream of digit distractors displayed in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), with T3 always presented directly after T2. The T1-T2 lag was varied to assess the perception of T2-T3 temporal order throughout the period of the AB. Factorial manipulation of the presence or absence of distractors before T1 and between T1 and T2 had similar effects on accuracy and on perception of temporal order. It is important to note that perception of temporal order suffered even when accuracy was unimpaired. This pattern of results is consistent with prior-entry theories of the perception of temporal order but not with episodic-integration theories. Simulations based on the Episodic Simultaneous Type, Serial Token (eSTST) model (Wyble, Bowman, & Nieuwenstein, 2009) provided excellent fits to the data except for the condition in which no distractors were presented in the RSVP stream.     

Educational Needs of Primary Care Physicians Regarding Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing

To assess the educational needs of North Carolina primary care physicians (PCPs) about direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing, surveys were mailed to 2,402 family and internal medicine providers in North Carolina. Out of 382 respondents, 323 (85%) felt unprepared to answer patient questions and 282 (74%) reported wanting to learn about DTC genetic testing. A total of 148 (39%) were aware of DTC genetic testing. Among these, 63 (43%) thought DTC genetic testing was clinically useful. PCPs who felt either unprepared to answer patient questions (OR = 0.354, p = 0.01) or that DTC genetic testing was clinically useful (OR = 5.783, p = 0.00) were more likely to want to learn about DTC genetic testing. PCPs are interested in learning about DTC genetic testing, but are mostly unaware of DTC testing and feel unprepared to help patients with DTC testing results. Familiar and trusted channels that provide the information and tools PCPs need to help answer patient’s questions and manage their care should be used when creating educational programs.     

A Tale of Two Perspectives: Regulation Versus Self-Regulation. A Financial Reporting Approach (from Sarbanes–Oxley) for Research Ethics

Reports of research fraud have raised concerns about research integrity similar to concerns raised about financial accounting fraud. We propose a departure from self-regulation in that researchers adopt the financial accounting approach in establishing trust through an external validation process, in addition to the reporting entities and the regulatory agencies. The general conceptual framework for reviewing financial reports, utilizes external auditors who are certified and objective in using established standards to provide an opinion on the financial reports. These standards have become both broader in scope and increasingly specific as to what information is reported and the methodologies to be employed. We believe that the financial reporting overhaul encompassed in the US Sarbanes?COxley Act of 2002, which aims at preventing accounting fraud, can be applied to scientific research in 4 ways. First, Sarbanes?COxley requires corporations to have a complete set of internal accounting controls. Research organizations should use appropriate sampling techniques and audit research projects for conformity with the initial research protocols. Second, corporations are required to have the chief financial officer certify the accuracy of their financial statements. In a similar way, each research organization should have their vice-president of research (or equivalent) certify the research integrity of their research activities. In contrast, the primary responsibility of the existing Research Integrity Officers is to handle allegations of research misconduct, an after-the-fact activity. Third, generally accepted auditing standards specify the appropriate procedures for external review of a corporation??s financial statements. For similar reasons, the research review process would also require corresponding external auditing standards. Finally, these new requirements would be implemented in stages, with the largest 14 research organizations that receive 25% of the total National Institutes of Health funding, adopting these research oversight enhancements first.     

The feature-binding problem is an ill-posed problem

The binding problem arises when visual features (colour, orientation), said to be coded in independent brain modules, are to be integrated into unitary percepts. I argue that binding is an ill-posed problem, because those modules are now known to code jointly for multiple features, rendering the feature-binding issue moot. A hierarchical reentrant system explains the emergence of coherent visual objects from primitive features. An initial feed-forward sweep activates many high-level perceptual hypotheses, which descend to lower levels, where they correlate themselves with the ongoing activity. Low correlations are discarded, whereas the hypothesis that yields the highest correlation is confirmed and leads to conscious awareness. In this system, there is no separate binding process that actively assigns features to objects.