Effects of social support and battle intensity on loneliness and breakdown during combat

A sample of 382 Israeli soldiers who developed combat stress reactions (CSR) during the 1982 Israel-Lebanon War were compared with groups of carefully matched controls who did not develop CSR. Lack of social support from officers was found to be related to greater feelings of loneliness and greater likelihood of CSR in soldiers. Lack of social support from buddies was found to be related to greater loneliness. Intensity of battle was also found to be related to greater feelings of loneliness and increased likelihood of CSR. A path model was tested and supported. The model suggests that battle intensity and officer support lead to CSR directly and indirectly by causing increased feelings of loneliness. Possible cognitive and psychodynamic explanations for the findings are offered. The limitations of making causal statements from retrospective perceptions is discussed.     

Spatial conceptions in Chinese and Canadian children

Four-, five-, and six-year-old Chinese and Canadian boys and girls were presented a series of 11 graphic models and were asked to draw them. Supporting Piaget's theory, the data indicated that drawing performance on the topological dimension was better than the performance on the Euclidean dimension, and that there were neither gender nor cultural differences in performance. The research offers strong support for a main effect of biological or maturational factors as the foundation for the developmental influences in the acquisition of spatial conceptions.     

The influence of facial characteristics on children's age perceptions

To examine the impact of age-related variations in facial characteristics on children's age judgments, two experiments were conducted in which craniofacial shape and facial wrinkling were independently manipulated in stimulus faces as sources of age information. Using a paired-comparisons task, children between the ages of 2 1/2 and 6 were asked to make age category as well as relative age judgments of stimulus faces. Preschool-aged children were able to use variations in craniofacial profile shape, frontal face feature vertical placement, or facial wrinkling to identify the age category of a stimulus person. Children were also able to identify the older, but not the younger, of two faces on the basis of facial wrinkling, a finding consistent with previously demonstrated limitations in young children's use of relative age terms. The results were discussed in the context of research which reveals parallel effects of craniofacial shape and wrinkling on the age judgments of adults.     

The role of location indexes in spatial perception: a sketch of the FINST spatial-index model

This paper hypothesizes a resource-limited mechanism, called a FINST, for individuating or indexing visual features, as distinct from encoding their type or location. FINSTs have the property that they index features in a way that is transparent to their retinal location, and hence under certain conditions succeed in "pointing to" scene locations. The basic assumption is that no operation upon sets of features can occur unless all the features to which the operation applies are first FINSTed. A number of applications of this hypothesis are explored in this paper, including applications to phenomena such as the spatial stability of visual percepts, the ability to track several independently moving targets in parallel, the ability to detect a class of spatial relations requiring the use of "visual routines", various mental imagery phenomena, and the ability to encode complex shapes for recognition. In addition, the possibility is examined that such indexes might be used to bind perceived locations to arguments in motor commands, thereby allowing some forms of perceptual-motor coordination. Several additional assumptions are introduced for this purpose, including the postulation of other indexes (called ANCHORS) for non-visually sensed locations. It is assumed that ANCHORS can be bound to FINSTs, thus allowing cross-referencing of visually detected locations to locations given within a proprioceptive or motor-command frame of reference.     

Local contour characteristics as determinants of pattern discrimination

Subjects were required to discriminate complex random polygons which had the same global shapes but differed in local contour characteristics. Discrimination was most often successful when local contour features comprised a few long line segments or when they were relatively complex. Local contour features of intermediate sized elements and intermediate complexity played a smaller role in discrimination. Presentation time and interstimulus interval effects, and their interaction were observed. A two-factor explanation was offered for the effect of the contour variable.     

Mutism associated with buccofacial apraxia and bihemispheric lesions

Mutism following brain trauma is quite common, is usually transient, and recovery of speech is essentially the rule. Lasting total absence of speech without aphasia is highly unusual. Three such patients, two of traumatic and one due to vascular origin showing buccofacial apraxia (BFA) and computerized tomography (CT) evidence of bilateral frontal lesions are reported. It is suggested that complete lasting mutism associated with BFA is a result of bihemispheric lesions affecting mainly the opercular part of the inferior frontal gyrus and immediate adjacent regions.