Resolving Power of the Perceptual-and Sensorimotor Systems in 6- to 10-Year-Old Children

Children aged 6 to 10 were tested on their ability to move accurately and to perceptually evaluate their motor response. Subjects performed a directional and an amplitude visuo-manual aiming task without vision of their moving limb. They were asked to correct their error, after completion of their movements, only if they felt they were not accurate. Terminal aiming errors and correction responses (adjustments) were analyzed, and threshold detection was determined relative to terminal aiming error. Action accuracy and evaluation of action accuracy are two abilities that do not develop synchronously. Moreover, the relationship between these abilities depends on whether accuracy and direction or amplitude are required. Amplitude undergoes more corrections than direction, suggesting that the spatial system of reference involved depends more upon the coding of the final position than on direction. Two spatial comparators, operating on the basis of two types of evaluation, seem to have a variably distinct contribution to movement and perception accuracy, according to age.     

New approaches to understanding unconscious processes: Implicit and explicit memory systems

Abstract

Freud viewed the unconscious as being roughly equivalent to dynamically repressed wishes, needs, and motivations. Findings from developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience over the past 40 years have dramatically changed our views of unconscious processes and the human mind. It is now clear that Freud's dynamic unconscious is only a minor segment of information that is processed at subsymbolic, implicit, and automatic levels. Only a fraction of this information is further processed at explicit conscious levels. Moreover, the vast majority of the information that remains nonconscious is adaptive and has major consequences for development. We examine some clinical implications of these views.     

The Questions We Left Behind: Reflections from a Teaching Theologian

Abstract : While the ordination of women made great strides in ending gender injustice for women in church‐related vocations, women also have raised other questions, specifically: the appropriate role of experience in theological discourse and moral deliberation; the displacement of advocacy by representation; and the tension between the personal and the political. Fore‐mothers leave behind these issues for their after‐daughters, as they meet challenges their fore‐mothers in the faith could hardly imagine.     

Anomalous global effects induced by ‘blind’ distractors in visual hemifield defects

Previous research has revealed that a stimulus presented in the blind visual field of participants with visual hemifield defects can evoke oculomotor competition, in the absence of awareness. Here we studied three cases to determine whether a distractor in a blind hemifield would be capable of inducing a global effect, a shift of saccade endpoint when target and distractor are close to each other, in participants with lesions of the optic radiations or striate cortex. We found that blind field distractors significantly shifted saccadic endpoints in two of three participants with lesions of either the striate cortex or distal optic radiations. The direction of the effect was paradoxical, however, in that saccadic endpoints shifted away from blind field distractors, whereas endpoints shifted towards distractors in the visible hemifields, which is the normal global effect. These results provide further evidence that elements presented in the blind visual field can generate modulatory interactions in the oculomotor system, which may differ from interactions in normal vision.     

Refining the visual-cortical hypothesis in category learning

Participants produce steep typicality gradients and large prototype-enhancement effects in dot-distortion category tasks, showing that in these tasks to-be-categorized items are compared to a prototypical representation that is the central tendency of the participant’s exemplar experience. These prototype-abstraction processes have been ascribed to low-level mechanisms in primary visual cortex. Here we asked whether higher-level mechanisms in visual cortex can also sometimes support prototype abstraction. To do so, we compared dot-distortion performance when the stimuli were size constant (allowing some low-level repetition-familiarity to develop for similar shapes) or size variable (defeating repetition-familiarity effects). If prototype formation is only mediated by low-level mechanisms, stimulus-size variability should lessen prototype effects and flatten typicality gradients. Yet prototype effects and typicality gradients were the same under both conditions, whether participants learned the categories explicitly or implicitly and whether they received trial-by-trial reinforcement during transfer tests. These results broaden out the visual-cortical hypothesis because low-level visual areas, featuring retinotopic perceptual representations, would not support robust category learning or prototype-enhancement effects in an environment of pronounced variability in stimulus size. Therefore, higher-level cortical mechanisms evidently can also support prototype formation during categorization.     

Two causal theories of counterfactual conditionals

Bayes nets are formal representations of causal systems that many psychologists have claimed as plausible mental representations. One purported advantage of Bayes nets is that they may provide a theory of counterfactual conditionals, such as If Calvin had been at the party, Miriam would have left early. This article compares two proposed Bayes net theories as models of people's understanding of counterfactuals. Experiments 1-3 show that neither theory makes correct predictions about backtracking counterfactuals (in which the event of the if-clause occurs after the event of the then-clause), and Experiment 4 shows the same is true of forward counterfactuals. An amended version of one of the approaches, however, can provide a more accurate account of these data.     

幼儿非形式推理能力的发生与发展

针对在儿童非形式推理能力发生研究中评价标准不一和研究结果中发生年龄不同的问题,在论证并提出幼儿非形式推理发生评价标准的基础上,采用提示访谈法对333名3-6岁幼儿的非形式推理做了考察。结果显示:幼儿的我方推理普遍在3岁3个月～3岁9个月发生;他方推理普遍在4岁～4岁6个月发生;反驳推理普遍在4岁9个月～6岁发生。幼儿在推理过程中提出的理由数量随年龄的增长而增多,年龄差异显著,但无显著性别差异。研究中建立的评价指标体系可以有效测量幼儿非形式推理的发生和发展。     

从医学整合的角度谈现代肺癌的防治

肺癌是严重影响群众健康的常见恶性肿瘤,当前肺癌防治工作中面临一系列由于分科过细、欠缺协作等导致的问题。加强肺癌防治领域中学科、技术、资源的整合,才能够有效应对越来越严峻的肺癌防治形势。建立以疾病为中心的肺癌整体防治模式,对于其他单一重大疾病的防治也有重要参考意义。     

精准医疗的理念及其技术体系

精准医疗模式本着患者的最大获益和社会医疗投入的高效配置为宗旨,结合现代流行病学和预防医学、临床诊断学和治疗学、分子医学、医学信息学技术以及卫生经济学和医学社会学,使传统的医疗模式走向整合化,为每一个人提供量体裁衣般的疾病预防、筛查、诊断、治疗和康复计划,以最小资源投入获取最大健康保障,从而提高整体人群的健康水平。