The scanning of compound figures by young infants

We studied infants' scanning of two compound stimuli, in each case by presenting features inside a frame, the frame alone, and the features alone. One stimulus was composed of squares and was like that studied by P. Salapatek (in L. Cohen & P. Salapatek (Eds.), New York: Academic Press, 1975); the other was a schematic face. Newborns and 1-month-olds looked at the small square when it was presented alone, but rarely looked at it when it was framed by the larger square. In contrast, 2-month-olds looked at the small square for long periods whether or not it was framed. However, when newborns and 1-month-olds were shown a schematic face, they looked at its internal features at least half the time. Thus, young infants show no external bias when scanning a schematic face.     

Return of fear: The role of inhibition

In a previous study investigating the relationship between subjective, physiological and behavioural changes during treatment of specific phobias, a marked between-session increase was found in subjective fear after high, but not after low intensity phobic stimulation although the groups showed similar fear ratings and heart rates immediately after treatment (Grey et al, 1979). It was hypothesized that the high intensity stimulation led to ‘treatment fatigue’; a state of deactivation, the recovery from which led to a return of fear.In this study high intensity in vivo stimulation was used for the treatment of phobic subjects under conditions of distributed and massed practice. No differences emerged between treatment conditions. A small group of Ss with a conspicuously high heart rate (mean level 120 bpm) when rating zero fear, showed a significant increase in fear after one week's interval, although they had shown similar improvement to the Ss during treatment. Subjects in both treatment conditions showed lower heart rate at all post-treatment assessments than pre-treatment. The high initial heart rate Ss continued to have higher heart rate than other Ss throughout the experiment, although they showed a decrease after treatment. It was only these Ss with desynchronously high heart rate, i.e. high heart rate with zero fear ratings, who suffered a return of fear, whereas high heart rate during high fear did not predict either response to treatment or return of fear. A further finding was a lack of correlation between the behavioural and physiological indices of fear, namely, between distance and heart rate at high levels of fear.     

Language in a congenitally acallosal brain

A case of complete callosal agenesis shows two limitations of cognitive development. The first, a discrete loss of syntactic-pragmatic function within the language domain, may or may not be associated with anomalous cerebral lateralization of speech and language; its neural basis is unknown. The second deficit, an inability to identify free-field or dichotic speech sounds with overlapping temporal-acoustic properties, appears due to a nonlinguistic limitation of the acallosal brain, the inability to suppress ipsilateral information.     

Perception of facial expressions

Three studies examined the nature of the contributions of each hemisphere to the processing of facial expressions and facial identity. A pair of faces, the members of which differed in either expression or identity, were presented to the right or left field. Subjects were required to compare the members of the pair to each other (experiments 1 and 2) or to a previously presented sample (experiment 3). The results revealed that both face and expression perception show an LVF superiority although the two tasks could be differentiated in terms of overall processing time and the interaction of laterality differences with sex. No clear-cut differences in laterality emerged for processing of positive and negative expressions.     

An organizational analysis of the form class effect

The paper reports eight experiments concerning the form class effect. If verb connectives enhance organization between pairs of nouns more than do conjunction connectives, then (a) the form class effect should obtain in cued but not free recall, (b) interactive imagery instructions should raise performance with conjunctions, removing the effect, (c) separation imagery instructions should reduce performance with verbs, removing the effect, and (d) prepositions implying spatial contact should be superior as mediators for cued recall compared with less suggestive prepositions. The results of the experiments confirm the predictions, except that grade 3 children do not perform as expected with the instructional variables.     

Newborns' central vision: Whole or hole?

We studied visual detection in 150 infants, 1- to 7-days old, by presenting single lines varying in width and location. We found that newborns detected a line only 8′ wide in the central visual field. Peripherally, they appeared to detect lines of 33′, 33′, and 1°6′ at 10°, 20°, and 30°, respectively. Thus, both the central retina and the peripheral retina appear to function at birth.     

Sequences of phonemic approximations in aphasia

The trends of sequences of phonemic approximations to a single target were studied in three types of aphasia (Broca's, conduction, and Wernicke's), as gathered in five tasks (spontaneous speech, repetition of meaningful words, repetition of nonsense words, reading aloud, and automatized sequences). A phonemic error ratio was defined in order to quantify the distance between each approximation of a given sequence and its target. The results of a computer analysis based on this ratio were analyzed according to three parameters. A study of three types of patients revealed that conduction aphasics exhibited the most regular trend toward the target in sequences of phonemic approximations; the analysis of the various tasks indicated that sequences produced in repetition by conduction aphasics form an exception to the regularity of this trend, and an examination of the various lengths of sequences indicated that longer sequences showed a less decisive trend toward the target than shorter sequences. The discussion bears on some theoretical aspects of the phonological production mechanism and its control: the initial strength and permanence of the internal representation of the target emerge as important factors required for the good functioning of this mechanism.     

Some aspects of phonological impairment in aphasia

The relationships between expressive and receptive phonemic disorders and between disturbances of phoneme processing and general disorders of auditory comprehension were studied in 69 aphasic patients, by means of a phoneme discrimination test and of a standard aphasia battery. A significant but incomplete correlation between disorders of phonemic output and of phoneme analysis was found. The view is put forth that in some patients only phoneme encoding or decoding is disturbed, whereas in others a central level of phoneme processing is impaired. A significant but partial correlation was also found between disorders of phonological analysis and general disorders of auditory comprehension. This supports the view that, besides sequential phonological analysis, other processes operate in auditory comprehension.     

An Elementary Presentation of the Equivalence Between MV-algebras and l-groups With Strong Unit

Aim of this paper is to provide a self-contained presentation of the natural equivalence 8708q8h578/xxlarge915.gif" alt="Gamma" align="BASELINE" BORDER="0"> between MV-algebras and lattice-ordered abelian groups with strong unit.