Information processing biases concurrently and prospectively predict depressive symptoms in adolescents: Evidence from a self-referent encoding task

Negative information processing biases have been hypothesised to serve as precursors for the development of depression. The current study examined negative self-referent information processing and depressive symptoms in a community sample of adolescents (N = 291, M_age at baseline = 12.34 ± 0.61, 53% female, 47.4% African-American, 49.5% Caucasian and 3.1% Biracial). Participants completed a computerised self-referent encoding task (SRET) and a measure of depressive symptoms at baseline and completed an additional measure of depressive symptoms nine months later. Several negative information processing biases on the SRET were associated with concurrent depressive symptoms and predicted increases in depressive symptoms at follow-up. Findings partially support the hypothesis that negative information processing biases are associated with depressive symptoms in a nonclinical sample of adolescents, and provide preliminary evidence that these biases prospectively predict increases in depressive symptoms.     

Race-specific perceptual discrimination improvement following short individuation training with faces

This study explores the effect of individuation training on the acquisition of race-specific expertise. First, we investigated whether practice individuating other-race faces yields improvement in perceptual discrimination for novel faces of that race. Second, we asked whether there was similar improvement for novel faces of a different race for which participants received equal practice, but in an orthogonal task that did not require individuation. Caucasian participants were trained to individuate faces of one race (African American or Hispanic) and to make difficult eye-luminance judgments on faces of the other race. By equating these tasks we are able to rule out raw experience, visual attention, or performance/success-induced positivity as the critical factors that produce race-specific improvements. These results indicate that individuation practice is one mechanism through which cognitive, perceptual, and/or social processes promote growth of the own-race face recognition advantage.     

Perceptual simulation in developing language comprehension

We tested an embodied account of language proposing that comprehenders create perceptual simulations of the events they hear and read about. In Experiment 1, children (ages 7–13 years) performed a picture verification task. Each picture was preceded by a prerecorded spoken sentence describing an entity whose shape or orientation matched or mismatched the depicted object. Responses were faster for matching pictures, suggesting that participants had formed perceptual-like situation models of the sentences. The advantage for matching pictures did not increase with age. Experiment 2 extended these findings to the domain of written language. Participants (ages 7–10 years) of high and low word reading ability verified pictures after reading sentences aloud. The results suggest that even when reading is effortful, children construct a perceptual simulation of the described events. We propose that perceptual simulation plays a more central role in developing language comprehension than was previously thought.     

Perceptual biases in processing facial identity and emotion

Normal observers demonstrate a bias to process the left sides of faces during perceptual judgments about identity or emotion. This effect suggests a right cerebral hemisphere processing bias. To test the role of the right hemisphere and the involvement of configural processing underlying this effect, young and older control observers and patients with right hemisphere damage completed two chimeric faces tasks (emotion judgment and face identity matching) with both upright and inverted faces. For control observers, the emotion judgment task elicited a strong left-sided perceptual bias that was reduced in young controls and eliminated in older controls by face inversion. Right hemisphere damage reversed the bias, suggesting the right hemisphere was dominant for this task, but that the left hemisphere could be flexibly recruited when right hemisphere mechanisms are not available or dominant. In contrast, face identity judgments were associated most clearly with a vertical bias favouring the uppermost stimuli that was eliminated by face inversion and right hemisphere lesions. The results suggest these tasks involve different neurocognitive mechanisms. The role of the right hemisphere and ventral cortical stream involvement with configural processes in face processing is discussed.     

The egocentric reference for visual exploration and orientation

Clinical signs of damage to the egocentric reference system range from the inability to detect stimuli in the real environment to a defect in recovering items from an internal representation. Despite clinical dissociations, current interpretations consider all symptoms as due to a single perturbation, differentially expressed according to the medium explored (perceptual or representational). We propose an alternative account based on the functional distinction between two separate egocentric mechanisms: one allowing construction of the immediate point of view, the other extracting a required perspective within a mental representation. Support to this claim comes from recent results in the domain of navigation, showing that separate cognitive mechanisms maintain the egocentric reference when actively exploring the visual space as opposed to moving according to an internal map. These mechanisms likely follow separate developmental pathways, seemingly depend on distinct neural pathways and are used independently by healthy adults, reflecting task demands and individual cognitive style. Implications for spatial cognition and social skills are discussed.     

Do Positive Self-Perceptions Have a “Dark Side”? Examination of the Link between Perceptual Bias and Aggression

The hypothesis that positive self-perceptions may have a dark side was investigated in the present study by examining the relationship between positively biased self-perceptions and aggression. Ratings of actual and perceived social acceptance of third-grade (n = 278), fourth-grade (n = 260), and fifth-grade (n = 321) students were compared to form a measure of perceptual bias. Peers provided nominations for overt and relational aggression. Gender differences were found for aggression (males were more overtly and relationally aggressive than females) but not perceptual bias. African-American children held more positive perceptions of their social acceptance and were perceived by peers as more aggressive than Caucasian children. Even after controlling for the effects of gender and ethnicity, more positively biased perceptions were associated with more peer nominations for overt and relational aggression. Contrary to an optimal range of bias hypothesis, even moderately positive self-perceptions were associated with elevated levels of aggression.     

Individual differences in susceptibility to experimentally induced phantom sensations

We investigated individual differences in susceptibility to two vibration-induced phantom illusions, i.e. illusory arm extension and nose prolongation (“Pinocchio illusion”). Vibration was applied to the biceps brachii tendon of 32 healthy participants. Susceptibility to the illusions was quantified by vividness ratings and by ratings of the amount of illusory position changes of the arm and illusory shape changes of the nose. Participants also completed the Perceptual Aberration (PA) and the Need for Cognition (NFC) inventories. PA reflects the frequency of spontaneously experienced body schema alterations and NFC a person's tendency to cognitively structure experiences. PA was positively correlated with participants’ susceptibility to illusory arm extension and, exclusively for men, also to nose elongation. A high NFC was weakly associated with a high susceptibility for the Pinocchio illusion. By inference, these findings indicate a physiological basis of PA and a cognitive mediation of experimentally induced phantom sensations.     

A computational feature binding model of human texture perception

We present a computational model for human texture perception which assigns functional principles to the Gestalt laws of similarity and proximity. Motivated by early vision mechanisms, in the first stage, local texture features are extracted by utilizing multi-scale filtering and nonlinear spatial pooling. In the second stage, features are grouped according to the spatial feature binding model of the competitive layer model (CLM; Wersing et al. 2001). The CLM uses cooperative and competitive interactions in a recurrent network, where binding is expressed by the layer-wise coactivation of feature-representing neurons. The Gestalt law of similarity is expressed by a non-Euclidean distance measure in the abstract feature space with proximity being taken into account by a spatial component. To choose the stimulus dimensions which allow the most salient similarity-based texture segmentation, the feature similarity metrics is reduced to the directions of maximum variance. We show that our combined texture feature extraction and binding model performs segmentation in strong conformity with human perception. The examples range from classical microtextures and Brodatz textures to other classical Gestalt stimuli, which offer a new perspective on the role of texture for more abstract similarity grouping.     

Sex Biases in Subject Selection: A Survey of Articles Published in American Medical Journals

This study discusses the results of a survey of 1,800 articles published in American medical journals from 1985--1996. The study finds 9% of these articles reported research that uses only male subjects to examine medical conditions that affect both sexes; the ratio of research on female to male conditions among these articles was greater than 5:1; but 76.5% of the articles reported research that includes both male and female subjects. The study also discusses evidence that sex biases against women (and men) are decreasing. This study also offers some possible psychological, institutional, medical, and economic explanations of the sex biases in medical research published in American journals, and discusses some policy implications of sex biases in medical research. The study concludes by urging others to conduct more empirical research on sex biases in medical research.