Perceiving vocal age and gender: An adaptation approach

Aftereffects of adaptation have revealed both independent and interactive coding of facial signals including identity and expression or gender and age. By contrast, interactive processing of non-linguistic features in voices has rarely been investigated. Here we studied bidirectional cross-categorical aftereffects of adaptation to vocal age and gender. Prolonged exposure to young (~ 20 yrs) or old (~ 70 yrs) male or female voices biased perception of subsequent test voices away from the adapting age (Exp. 1) and the adapting gender (Exp. 2). Relative to gender-congruent adaptor-test pairings, vocal age aftereffects (VAAEs) were reduced but remained significant when voice gender changed between adaptation and test. This suggests that the VAAE relies on both gender-specific and gender-independent age representations for male and female voices. By contrast, voice gender aftereffects (VGAEs) were not modulated by age-congruency of adaptor and test voices (Exp. 2). Instead, young voice adaptors generally induced larger VGAEs than old voice adaptors. This suggests that young voices are particularly efficient gender adaptors, likely reflecting more pronounced sexual dimorphism in these voices. In sum, our findings demonstrate how high-level processing of vocal age and gender is partially intertwined.     

Ecclesiology and the doctrine of creation: a Scandinavian theological perspective

With a view to the present challenges facing the traditional folk churches in Scandinavia, this article aims to present the interconnectedness of creation theology and ecclesiology, as this has been understood in Scandinavian ‘folk church Lutheranism’. While theologies of the Church often seem unrelated to a theology of creation, Bonhoeffer and de Lubac represent two different ways of connecting the two. This article shows how the theological tradition to which Grundtvig and Wingren belong, corresponds to and differs from these continental theologians. The specific character of the Scandinavian tradition is interpreted as stemming from an amalgam of Luther and Irenaeus. In conclusion, the article offers some critical comments on this tradition, and some reflections on how to negotiate between the all-inclusive nature of the Church, her catholicity, and the limited character of any actual local church. It is suggested that a reconsideration of the ecclesiological implications of the first article of faith (the doctrine of creation) is required for coming to terms with this challenge.     

The CS-US interval function in rabbit nictitating membrane response conditioning: Single vs multiple trials per conditioning session

The effect of varying trials per day conditions on the CS-US interval or interstimulus interval (ISI) function in rabbit nictitating membrane response conditioning was studied in two experiments. Experiment 1 showed that a 1250-msec ISI was more effective than a 250-msec ISI when there was 1 trial/day. Experiment 2 showed that as the number of trials per day decreased from 20 to 1, the superiority of the 250-msec ISI group over the 1250-msec ISI group declined, with a reversal at 1 trial/day. Results are interpreted in terms of the role of a hypothesized CS-elicited short-duration orienting response in CR performance.     

The intermediate-hue transposition of children after same-different and seriation pretraining

The intermediate-hue transposition of first- and second-grade children was investigated in two experiments. In Expt. 1, it was found that seriation pretraining increased the amount of far transposition regardless of whether or not the same hues were used in pretraining and subsequent tasks. In Expt. 2, seriation pretraining produced more far transposition than did same-different pretaining and a no-pretraining control. The latter two conditions were not significantly different. Three assumptions about the effects of perceptual pretraining on subsequent transposition were described and related to the data.     

A developmental study of recognition of pictures and nouns

Children at four age levels (4, 6, 8, and 10 years) were given continuous recognition tasks using concrete noun, abstract noun, and pictorial stimuli in a 4 × 3 factorial design. Pictures were recognized significantly better than concrete and abstract nouns at the 4- and 6-year age levels and significantly better than abstract nouns at the 8- and 10-year age levels. This supported Paivio's contention that pictures are easier to remember than words because of a greater possibility of dual encoding, while Rohwer's contention that there is a shift in recognition memory development received no support. There were no significant differences between recognition of concrete and abstract nouns at any age level, which opposed the findings from adult studies and suggested that Paivio's theoretical orientation would have to be extended in order to account for developmental data. Recognition for both concrete and abstract nouns was found to be linear and increasing significantly with age, but no age trends for picture recognition were found.