Speech comprehension after unilateral injection of sodium amytal

A unilateral cerebral dominance model predicts that speech comprehension will be disrupted after injection of sodium amytal into one hemisphere but not after the other. This model was supported when an auditory receptive task involving relatively nonredundant stimuli similar to that contained in the Token Test (E. DeRenzi & L. Vignolo, 1962, Brain, 85, 665–687) was administered to 17 epileptic patients undergoing bilateral amytal injections.     

Adaptive reasoning: Componential and eye movement analysis of geometric analogy performance

The present study explored individual differences in performance of a geometric analogies task. Whereas past studies employed true/false or two-alternative items, the present research included four-alternative items and studied eye movements and confidence judgements for each item performance as well as latency and error. Item difficulty proved to be a function of an interaction between the number of response alternatives and the number of elements in items, especially for subjects lower in fluid-analytic reasoning ability. Results were interpreted using two hypothesized performance strategies: constructive matching and response elimination. The less efficient of these, response elimination, seemed to be used more by lower ability subjects on more difficult items. While two previous theories resemble one or the other of these strategies, neither alone seems to capture the complexity of adaptive problem solving. It appears that a comprehensive theory should incorporate strategy shifting as a function of item difficulty and subject ability.Componential models, based in part on past research, revealed that a justification component was activated and deactivated depending upon the nature of the analogy being solved. In addition, two new components, spatial inference and spatial application, were identified as important on some items, suggesting that different geometric analogy items invoke different cognitive processing components. Thus, a comprehensive theory should also describe component activation and deactivation.     

On the measurement of storage and retrieval contributions to memory development

We report two free recall experiments and a cued recall experiment in which a new two-stage model was used to obtain numerical measurements of age changes in various aspects of storage and retrieval. The subjects in all three experiments were 7-year-olds (second graders) and 11-year-olds (sixth graders). The major findings in the free recall experiment were that getting a trace into storage posed less of a problem for elementary schoolers than learning how to get it out on test trials, that retrieval development is more rapid during the elementary school years than storage development, and that the superiority of older children's storage and retrieval abilities tends to become more pronounced as learning progresses. A similar pattern of results was obtained under different conditions in the cued recall experiment.     

Trading relations in the perception of speech by 5-year-old children

Five-year-old children were tested for perceptual trading relations between a temporal cue (silence duration) and a spectral cue (F₁ onset frequency) for the “say-stay” distinction. Identification functions were obtained for two synthetic “say-stay” continua, each containing systematic variations in the amount of silence following the /s/ noise. In one continuum, the vocalic portion had a lower F₁ onset than in the other continuum. Children showed a smaller trading relation than has been found with adults. They did not differ from adults, however, in their perception of an “ay-day” continuum formed by varying F₁ onset frequency only. The results of a discrimination task in which the two acoustic cues were made to “cooperate” or “conflict” phonetically supported the notion of perceptual equivalence of the temporal and spectral cues along a single phonetic dimension. The results indicate that young children, like adults, perceptually integrate multiple cues to a speech contrast in a phonetically relevant manner, but that they may not give the same perceptual weights to the various cues as do adults.     

The effect of television-mediated aggression and real-life aggression on the behavior of Lebanese children

This study investigated the effect of television-mediated aggression and real-life aggression on the behavior of Lebanese children. The sample consisted of 48 boys and 48 girls of Lebanese origin who were students in an elementary school in Beirut, Lebanon. After controlling for pre-experimental aggression, the subjects were randomly assigned to one of the following treatment conditions: human-film aggression, cartoon-film aggression, neutral film, or real-life (act of war) aggression. The results indicated that boys as a group were more aggressive than girls and exhibited more imitative aggression after viewing both violent film and real-life violence. Girls were not more violent after viewing filmed aggression but were affected by the real-life violence. Comparisons of Bandura's work within the Lebanese culture are made.     

Behavioral consequences of song learning: Discrimination of song types by male white-crowned sparrows

The functional significance of learned population differences in male song in the white-crowned sparrow was explored in natural populations using playback tests. Laboratory results have shown that learning of the population-specific song seems to take place in early life and is strongly dependent upon the nature of the auditory experience at that time. However, the varied results of recent studies make it difficult to reach a confident conclusion about the ecological functions of song learning. The present research took advantage of naturally occurring variation in the differences between songs of adjacent populations to determine a function relating degree of difference in song to intensity of territorial singing elicited. Applying a typological evaluation of syllable structure to the four segments of the song allowed a crude quantitative ranking of the differences between local songs and playback stimuli. These results, together with those of other studies, suggest a unimodal aggressive response function of males to songs of other males. A maximum response to songs slightly different from the local song environment suggests that male exclusion based upon acquired song components may contribute to the maintenance of discrete and stable song dialects.     

Social Activism's Possibility through Perspectives of Gloria Anzaldúa,Walter Benjamin and C. G. Jung1

This paper explores the vertices of Jung's, Anzaldúa's and Benjamin's distinct ontologies and the way in which they connect in the shared recognition that what has been estranged in human history is enigmatically lodged in the world's fabric today. Cultural distress, in other words, is the outcome of what has become repudiated in the self and the collective across time. From this perspective, the paper argues that we have a collective responsibility to listen to the claims of the dead laid bare in moments of contemporary real-world danger and it elaborates the psychical dimensions of being that are cultivated in times of danger. The author contends that these psychical presences are the dead of human history including our ancestral heritage that linger and possibly may penetrate our awareness. They haunt and hold a potential to animate our movement towards a sublimatory process that can be seen as a precursor to social responsiveness and action. The author explores this through her own experience with an example of the spawning of spiritual activism within the socio-political maelstrom of AIDS.