Acute effects of triazolam on false recognition

Neuropsychological, neuroimaging, and electrophysiological techniques have been applied to the study of false recognition; however, psychopharmacological techniques have not been applied. Benzodiazepine sedative/anxiolytic drugs produce memory deficits similar to those observed in organic amnesia and may be useful tools for studying normal and abnormal memory mechanisms. The present double-blind, placebo-controlled repeated measures study examined the acute effects of orally administered triazolam (Halcion; 0.125 and 0.25 mg/70 kg), a benzodiazepine hypnotic, on performance in the Deese (1959)/Roediger-McDermott (1995) false recognition paradigm in 24 healthy volunteers. Paralleling previous demonstrations in amnesic patients, triazolam produced significant dose-related reductions in false recognition rates to nonstudied words associatively related to studied words, suggesting that false recognition relies on normal memory mechanisms impaired in benzodiazepine-induced amnesia. The results also suggested that relative to placebo, triazolam reduced participants' reliance on memory for item-specific versus list-common semantic information and reduced participants' use of remember versus know responses.     

The persistence of structural priming: transient activation or implicit learning?

Structural priming in language production is a tendency to recreate a recently uttered syntactic structure in different words. This tendency can be seen independent of specific lexical items, thematic roles, or word sequences. Two alternative proposals about the mechanism behind structural priming include (a) short-term activation from a memory representation of a priming structure and (b) longer term adaptation within the cognitive mechanisms for creating sentences, as a form of procedural learning. Two experiments evaluated these hypotheses, focusing on the persistence of structural priming. Both experiments yielded priming that endured beyond adjacent sentences, persisting over 2 intervening sentences in Experiment 1 and over 10 in Experiment 2. Although memory may have short-term consequences for some components of this kind of priming, the persisting effects are more compatible with a learning account than a transient memory account.     

Spatial attention: different mechanisms for central and peripheral temporal precues?

The external noise paradigm (Z.-L. Lu & B. A. Dosher, 1998) was applied to investigate mechanisms of spatial attention in location precuing. Observers were precued or simultaneously cued to identify 1 of 4 pseudocharacters embedded in various amounts of external noise. The cues were either central or peripheral. Both central and peripheral precuing significantly reduced threshold in the presence of high external noise (16% and 17.5%). Only peripheral precuing significantly reduced threshold in the presence of low, or no, external noise (11%). A perceptual template model identified different mechanisms of attention for central and peripheral precuing, external noise exclusion for central precuing, and a combination of external noise exclusion and stimulus enhancement (or equivalently, internal additive noise reduction) for peripheral cuing.     

Use of number by crows: investigation by matching and oddity learning

Hooded crows were trained in two-alternative simultaneous matching and oddity tasks with stimulus sets of three different categories: color (black and white), shape (Arabic Numerals 1 and 2, which were used as visual shapes only), and number of elements (arrays of one and two items). These three sets were used for training successively and repeatedly; the stimulus set was changed to the next one after the criterion (80% correct or better over 30 consecutive trials) was reached with the previous one. Training was continued until the criterion could be reached within the first 30 to 50 trials for each of the three training sets. During partial transfer tests, familiar stimuli (numerals and arrays in the range from 1 to 2) were paired with novel ones (numerals and arrays in the range from 3 to 4). At the final stage of testing only novel stimuli were presented (numerals and arrays in the range from 5 to 8). Four of 6 birds were able to transfer in these tests, and their performance was significantly above chance. Moreover, performance of the birds on the array stimuli did not differ from their performance on the color or shape stimuli. They were capable of recognizing the number of elements in arrays and comparing the stimuli by this attribute. It was concluded that crows were able to apply the matching (or oddity) concept to stimuli of numerical category.     

Effects of escape to alone versus escape to enriched environments on adaptive and aberrant behavior

Escape-maintained aberrant behavior may be influenced by two outcomes: (a) a break from the activity and (b) subsequent access to preferred activities. To assess this hypothesis, a treatment was developed that analyzed response allocation across two break options: break alone and break with access to preferred social activities. The break with preferred activities decreased aberrant behavior and increased appropriate behavior.     

Career proactivity: A bibliometric literature review and a future research agenda

Individuals often need to be proactive in order to successfully navigate their career development journeys. To what extent one is vocationally proactive has critical implications for his or her attitudes, behaviors, and other outcomes in career and work-related settings. However, research in career proactivity has been accumulating from divergent perspectives, resulting in a substantially fragmented literature that has not been comprehensively, objectively synthesized to guide the field to move forward. To advance the domain of career proactivity, this paper synthesizes theoretical and empirical literatures using two major bibliometric analyses. We first analyze the intellectual basis of the career proactivity literature by performing document citation analysis. We then review the developmental trends of main conceptual themes in career proactivity literature using a temporal co-word analysis. Informed by these bibliometric findings, we propose a roadmap for future research highlighting the need to clear up concepts, account for context, develop new meso-level theories, and bridge the domains of organizational behavior and vocational development.     

Moderators of sex- and race-based subgroup differences in assessment center ratings: A meta-analysis

This meta-analysis tested a series of moderators of sex- and race-based subgroup differences using assessment center (AC) field data. We found that sex-based subgroup differences favoring female assessees were smaller among studies that reported: combining AC scores with other tests to compute overall assessment ratings, lower mean correlations between rating dimensions, using more than one assessor to rate assessees in exercises, and providing assessor training. In contrast, we found larger sex-based subgroup differences favoring female assessees among studies that reported: lower proportions of females in assessee pools, conducting a job analysis to design the AC, and using multiple observations of AC dimensions across exercises. We also observed a polynomial effect showing that subgroup differences most strongly favored female assessees in jobs with the highest and lowest rates of female incumbents. We found race-based subgroup differences favoring White assessees were smaller on less cognitively loaded rating dimensions and for jobs with lower rates of Black incumbents. Studies reporting greater overall methodological rigor also showed smaller subgroup differences favoring White assessees. Regarding specific rigor features, studies reporting use of highly qualified assessors and integrating dimension ratings from separate exercises into overall dimension scores showed significantly lower differences favoring White assessees.     

Forgiveness,its factors,and unforgivable acts in romantic relationships: A mixed-methods study

Using a mixed-methods approach, this study investigates forgiveness, the factors of forgiveness, and unforgivable acts, and analyzes relational and gender differences in participants' qualitative answers. Open-ended questions were answered by 649 participants from Slovakia (532 dating, 117 married; 517 women, 132 men). Responses were analyzed qualitatively using the Consensual Qualitative Research-Modified method, then transformed into quantitative data in order to statistically compare the groups. The results showed that dating individuals tended to see forgiveness as working on the relationship, whereas married individuals viewed forgiveness as an emotional process. Married individuals were more likely to report that shared commitments helped them to forgive. Dating partners tended to look at the situational context. Men were more likely to report that forgiveness was key to the relationship. When forgiving their partner, men focused on internal factors, whereas women needed an apology and acts of love. Infidelity was the most common unforgivable transgression. Therapists may benefit from a more nuanced understanding of forgiveness in dating and married individuals.