Who's Up First? Testing for Order Effects in Structured Interviews Using a Counterbalanced Experimental Design

A growing body of research suggests that, apart from the wording of specific questions, various aspects of the interview process itself may affect the reliability of information provided by research participants. To examine whether the order of presentation of specific diagnostic modules affects the likelihood of subjects' yes/no responses within the Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children (DISC), the authors used a counterbalanced design, presenting two DISC diagnostic modules to children and their parents in standard or reversed order. Results indicate that the order of module administration exerts effects on the total numbers of symptoms endorsed, level of impairment, and the likelihood of meeting diagnostic criteria, regardless of whether the information is provided by parent or child respondents. Future child and adult assessment measures should take these difficulties fully into account through novel approaches to instrument design and interview procedures.     

Effect of unpleasant loud noise on hippocampal activities during picture encoding: an fMRI study

The functional link between the amygdala and hippocampus in humans has not been well documented. We examined the effect of unpleasant loud noise on hippocampal and amygdaloid activities during picture encoding by means of fMRI, and on the correct response in humans. The noise reduced activity in the hippocampus during picture encoding, decreased the correct response and increased the activity of the amygdala. A path diagram using structural equation modeling suggested that hippocampus activity might be depressed by high amygdala activity. Therefore, noise should diminish memory by reducing hippocampal activity, which might be depressed by high amygdala activity.     

Geographical profiling incorporating neighbourhood-level factors using spatial interaction modelling

The aim of this study was to examine the applicability of methods that use spatial interaction modelling to predict the most probable area for an offender's residence. Tokyo, which is the capital of Japan and is divided into 1507 square-kilometre zones, was selected as the study area. We analysed 4316 criminal trips to commit residential burglaries by 1089 offenders who lived in Tokyo. The following neighbourhood-level factors, and a distance-decay effect between zones, were incorporated into the proposed model: the size of the residential population aged 15–59 years in origin zones, the numbers of households living in detached houses, newcomers, the number of police facilities in destination zones, and the spatial structures of the criminal trips. Search areas calculated by the proposed model were smaller than previous models, suggesting that neighbourhood-level factors are important for predicting the location of an offender's residence.     

Pigeons' discrimination of paintings by Monet and Picasso

Pigeons successfully learned to discriminate color slides of paintings by Monet and Picasso. Following this training, they discriminated novel paintings by Monet and Picasso that had never been presented during the discrimination training. Furthermore, they showed generalization from Monet's to Cezanne's and Renoir's paintings or from Picasso's to Braque's and Matisse's paintings. These results suggest that pigeons' behavior can be controlled by complex visual stimuli in ways that suggest categorization. Upside-down images of Monet's paintings disrupted the discrimination, whereas inverted images of Picasso's did not. This result may indicate that the pigeons' behavior was controlled by objects depicted in impressionists' paintings but was not controlled by objects in cubists' paintings.     

Developmental changes in the embodied self of spatial perspective taking

Spatial perspective taking consists of mental self‐rotation and other cognitive information processing. Mental self‐rotation is a process of rotating an embodied representational self through mental simulation of the sensorimotor mechanisms underlying actual self‐movement. It was predicted that physical development would affect the operation of the representational self. One hundred and twenty‐five individuals aged 5–80 years (57 children, 35 students, and 33 elderly people) executed a video game task of spatial perspective taking in three conditions of sensorimotor activation: A restrained, stable, and unstable condition. In the linear function formulas considering the degree of rotation and response times, the gradient represented the theoretical speed of mental self‐rotation and the intercept represented other cognitive processing. A significant interaction was found between age group and condition on the gradients, indicating that the response times in the unstable condition were faster than in the other conditions for the children, the restrained condition was slower than the other conditions for the students, while no difference was found for the elderly adults. The results suggest that the influence of sensorimotor activation on the embodied representational self depends on developmental changes in physical control.     

Attention demands influence 10- and 12-month-old infants' perseverative behavior

The present study examined the role of attentional demand on infants' perseverative behavior in a noncommunicative looking version of an A-not-B task. The research aimed at clarifying age-related improvements in the attention process that presumably underlies the development of cognitive control. In a between-subjects design, forty 10-month-olds and forty 12-month-olds were assigned to either a distractor or a no-distractor condition as a means of testing the role of attentional load. The authors used an eye tracker to record infants' looking behavior while they anticipated the reappearance of the target of interest as well as continuously throughout the task. The data demonstrated that 10-month-olds show more perseverative looking than do 12-month-olds and that increased attentional demand leads to more perseverative looking. Correct anticipation, however, was not affected by age or distraction. The results also failed to show that 12-month-olds are better than 10-month-olds at handling the increased attentional demand introduced in the distractor condition, in that the effect of the distractor was not larger for the younger infants. Our results are in line with the theoretical view of cognitive control as dependent on a limited attentional resource, which can explain perseverative behaviors in different tasks and at different ages.     

Context-dependent olfactory learning monitored by activities of salivary neurons in cockroaches

Context-dependent discrimination learning, a sophisticated form of nonelemental associative learning, has been found in many animals, including insects. The major purpose of this research is to establish a method for monitoring this form of nonelemental learning in rigidly restrained insects for investigation of underlying neural mechanisms. We report context-dependent olfactory learning (occasion-setting problem solving) of salivation, which can be monitored as activity changes of salivary neurons in immobilized cockroaches, Periplaneta americana. A group of cockroaches was trained to associate peppermint odor (conditioned stimulus, CS) with sucrose solution reward (unconditioned stimulus, US) while vanilla odor was presented alone without pairing with the US under a flickering light condition (1.0 Hz) and also trained to associate vanilla odor with sucrose reward while peppermint odor was presented alone under a steady light condition. After training, the responses of salivary neurons to the rewarded peppermint odor were significantly greater than those to the unrewarded vanilla odor under steady illumination and those to the rewarded vanilla odor was significantly greater than those to the unrewarded peppermint odor in the presence of flickering light. Similar context-dependent responses were observed in another group of cockroaches trained with the opposite stimulus arrangement. This study demonstrates context-dependent olfactory learning of salivation for the first time in any vertebrate and invertebrate species, which can be monitored by activity changes of salivary neurons in restrained cockroaches.     

Sequential effects in face-attractiveness judgment

A number of studies have shown that current-trial responses are biased toward the response of the preceding trial in perceptual decisionmaking tasks (the sequential effect-Holland and Lockhead, 1968 Perception & Psychophysics 3 409-414). The sequential effect has been widely observed in evaluation of the physical properties of stimuli as well as more complex properties. However, it is unclear whether subjective decisions (e.g., attractiveness judgments) are also susceptible to the sequential effect. Here, we examined whether the sequential effect would occur in face-attractiveness judgments. Forty-eight pictures of male and female faces were presented successively. Participants rated the attractiveness of each face on a 7-point scale. The results showed that the attractiveness rating of a given face assimilated toward the rating of the preceding trial. In a separate experiment, we provided the average attractiveness rating by others for each trial as feedback. The feedback weakened the sequential effect. These findings suggest that attractiveness judgment is also biased toward the preceding judgment, and hence the sequential effect can be extended into the domain of subjective decisionmaking.     

Implicit transfer of spatial structure in visuomotor sequence learning

Implicit learning and transfer in sequence learning are essential in daily life. Here, we investigated the implicit transfer of visuomotor sequences following a spatial transformation. In the two experiments, participants used trial and error to learn a sequence consisting of several button presses, known as the m × n task (Hikosaka et al., 1995). After this learning session, participants learned another sequence in which the button configuration was spatially transformed in one of the following ways: mirrored, rotated, and random arrangement. Our results showed that even when participants were unaware of the transformation rules, accuracy of transfer session in the mirrored and rotated groups was higher than that in the random group (i.e., implicit transfer occurred). Both those who noticed the transformation rules and those who did not (i.e., explicit and implicit transfer instances, respectively) showed faster performance in the mirrored sequences than in the rotated sequences. Taken together, the present results suggest that people can use their implicit visuomotor knowledge to spatially transform sequences and that implicit transfers are modulated by a transformation cost, similar to that in explicit transfer.     

Western scrub-jays allocate longer observation time to more valuable information

When humans mentally reconstruct past events and imagine future scenarios, their subjective experience of mentally time travelling is accompanied by the awareness of doing so. Despite recent popularity of studying episodic memory in animals, such phenomenological consciousness has been extremely difficult to demonstrate without agreed behavioural markers of consciousness in non-linguistic subjects. We presented western scrub-jays (Aphelocoma californica) with a task requiring them to allocate observing time between two peepholes to see food being hidden in either of two compartments, one where observing the hiding location was necessary to later relocate the food, and another where food could easily be found without watching. Jays first separately experienced these consequences of possessing information in each compartment and subsequently, once given a choice, made more looks and spent more time looking into the compartment where information was necessary than into the compartment where it was unnecessary. Thus, the jays can collect information to solve a future problem. Moreover, they can differentiate sources of information according to their potential value and modify behaviour to efficiently collect important, usable information. This is the first evidence of metacognition in a species that passes the behavioural criteria for both retrospective and prospective mental time travel.