Imagination equally influences false memories of high and low plausibility events

To examine the effects of event plausibility on people's false beliefs and memories for imagined childhood events, subjects took part in a three‐stage procedure. First, subjects rated how confident they were that they had experienced certain childhood events. They also rated their memories of the events. Second, 1 week later, subjects imagined one high, one moderate and one low plausibility event. Third, 1 week later (and 2 weeks after their initial ratings), subjects rated their confidence and memory a second time. Imagining the events made subjects more confident that they were genuine experiences and gave subjects clearer and more complete memories. Plausibility did not affect subjects' confidence but it did affect their memories. Subjects developed clearer and more complete memories for high, followed by moderate, followed by low plausibility events regardless of whether those events were imagined. We use a nested model of plausibility, belief and memory to discuss our findings. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Effects of a 6-week circuit training intervention on body esteem and body mass index in British primary school children

Research examining the impact of physical activity on children's body image has been limited and equivocal. The current researchers examined the effect of 6-week circuit-based training on body esteem and body mass index (BMI) in 68 British children (34 boys and 34 girls, aged 10–11 years, 16% overweight, 7% obese). The Body Esteem Scale for Children (BES-C) was administered to both the intervention group and control group, pre, post and 6 weeks post the intervention. BMI was directly assessed from height and body mass pre- and post-intervention. The results of this study revealed that, as compared to the control group, participation in 6-week circuit training significantly improved body esteem scores post-intervention. However, these scores were not sustained 6 weeks post-intervention. The improvement in body esteem scores from pre- to post-intervention was greater for girls as compared to boys. Additionally, BMI decreased significantly in the intervention group compared to the control group.     

Near space functioning of the human angular and supramarginal gyri

The posterior parietal cortex (PPC) has been associated with the encoding of events in peripersonal space, but little is known about the precise segregation of parietal areas involved specifically in ‘near‐space’ visuospatial processing. This study applied transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to two parietal areas: the right angular gyrus (ANG) and the right supramarginal gyrus (SMG) in addition to a control site, cortical visual area V5, while subjects performed symmetry judgements on lines presented simultaneously in the left and right visual fields. Eight subjects performed the task with the stimuli presented either in peripersonal or extra personal space. As expected, TMS over the right ANG caused subjects to report lines as being longer ipsilateral to the stimulation site, but only in near space. TMS of the right SMG, however, induced a bias shift in both near and far space, but the change only reached significance in near space. Our findings suggest that, consistent with its role in somatosensory functions, the SMG, like the ANG, is specialised for near space.     

Hiding and finding: The relationship between visual concealment and visual search

As an initial step toward developing a theory of visual concealment, we assessed whether people would use factors known to influence visual search difficulty when the degree of concealment of objects among distractors was varied. In Experiment 1, participants arranged search objects (shapes, emotional faces, and graphemes) to create displays in which the targets were in plain sight but were either easy or hard to find. Analyses of easy and hard displays created during Experiment 1 revealed that the participants reliably used factors known to influence search difficulty (e.g., eccentricity, target—distractor similarity, presence/absence of a feature) to vary the difficulty of search across displays. In Experiment 2, a new participant group searched for the targets in the displays created by the participants in Experiment 1. Results indicated that search was more difficult in the hard than in the easy condition. In Experiments 3 and 4, participants used presence versus absence of a feature to vary search difficulty with several novel stimulus sets. Taken together, the results reveal a close link between the factors that govern concealment and the factors known to influence search difficulty, suggesting that a visual search theory can be extended to form the basis of a theory of visual concealment.     

The role of spatial integration in the perception of surface orientation with active touch

Vision research has shown that perception of line orientation, in the fovea area, improves with line length (Westheimer & Ley, 1997). This suggests that the visual system may use spatial integration to improve perception of orientation. In the present experiments, we investigated the role of spatial integration in the perception of surface orientation using kinesthetic and proprioceptive information from shoulder and elbow. With their left index fingers, participants actively explored virtual slanted surfaces of different lengths and orientations, and were asked to reproduce an orientation or discriminate between two orientations. Results showed that reproduction errors and discrimination thresholds improve with surface length. This suggests that the proprioceptive shoulder-elbow system may integrate redundant spatial information resulting from extended arm movements to improve orientation judgments.