Sex differences in the relation between math performance, spatial skills, and attitudes

Sex differences have been previously found in cognitive and affective predictors of math achievement, including spatial skills and math attitudes. It is important to determine whether there are sex differences not only in the predictors themselves, but also in the nature of their relation to math achievement. The present paper examined spatial skills and math attitudes as predictors of curriculum-based measures of math performance in middle-school students, specifically comparing the patterns of these predictive relations for boys and girls. The results of the current study showed that, despite similar levels of math performance for boys and girls, the significance of particular predictors varied as a function of sex. Specifically, spatial skills predicted math performance in boys, but not in girls. We suggest that sex differences in spatial reasoning in conjunction with the differential involvement of spatial reasoning in math problem solving may lead to later sex differences in math outcomes.     

How emotional pictures influence visuospatial binding in short-term memory in ageing and Alzheimer’s disease?

The present study examines the prediction that emotion can facilitate short-term memory. Nevertheless, emotion also recruits attention to process information, thereby disrupting short-term memory when tasks involve high attentional resources. In this way, we aimed to determine whether there is a differential influence of emotional information on short-term memory in ageing and Alzheimer's disease (AD). Fourteen patients with mild AD, 14 healthy older participants (NC), and 14 younger adults (YA) performed two tasks. In the first task, involving visual short-term memory, participants were asked to remember a picture among four different pictures (negative or neutral) following a brief delay. The second task, a binding memory task, required the recognition by participants of a picture according to its spatial location. The attentional cost involved was higher than for the first task. The pattern of results showed that visual memory performance was better for negative stimuli than for neutral ones, irrespective of the group. In contrast, binding memory performance was essentially poorer for the location of negative pictures in the NC group, and for the location of both negative and neutral stimuli in the AD group, in comparison to the YA group. Taken together, these results show that emotion has beneficial effects on visual short-term memory in ageing and AD. In contrast, emotion does not improve their performances in the binding condition.     

Assessment of cognitive function across pregnancy using CANTAB: A longitudinal study

Significant changes in endogenous plasma hormone levels are required to sustain pregnancy which provides a unique opportunity to study their effect on cognitive function.     

Perspective-taking in dialogue as self-organization under social constraints

We present a dynamical systems account of how simple social information influences perspective-taking. Our account is motivated by the notion that perspective-taking may obey common dynamic principles with perceptuomotor coupling. We turn to the prominent HKB dynamical model of motor coordination, drawing from basic principles of self-organization to describe how conversational perspective-taking unfolds in a low-dimensional attractor landscape. We begin by simulating experimental data taken from a simple instruction-following task, in which participants have different expectations about their interaction partner. By treating belief states as different values of a control parameter, we show that data generated by a basic dynamical process fits overall egocentric and other-centric response distributions, the time required for participants to enact a response on a trial-by-trial basis, and the action dynamics exhibited in individual trials. We end by discussing the theoretical significance of dynamics in dialog, arguing that high-level coordination such as perspective-taking may obey similar dynamics as perceptuomotor coordination, pointing to common principles of adaptivity and flexibility during dialog.     

What Does Children's Spatial Language Reveal About Spatial Concepts? Evidence From the Use of Containment Expressions

Children's overextensions of spatial language are often taken to reveal spatial biases. However, it is unclear whether extension patterns should be attributed to children's overly general spatial concepts or to a narrower notion of conceptual similarity allowing metaphor‐like extensions. We describe a previously unnoticed extension of spatial expressions and use a novel method to determine its origins. English‐ and Greek‐speaking 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds used containment expressions (e.g., English into, Greek mesa) for events where an object moved into another object but extended such expressions to events where the object moved behind or under another object. The pattern emerged in adult speakers of both languages and also in speakers of 10 additional languages. We conclude that learners do not have an overly general concept of Containment. Nevertheless, children (and adults) perceive similarities across Containment and other types of spatial scenes, even when these similarities are obscured by the conventional forms of the language.     

IGFBP-2及IGFBP-6在结直肠癌中的表达及意义

研究胰岛素样生长因子结合蛋白2（IGFBP-2）及胰岛素样生长因子结合蛋白6（IGFBP-6）在结直肠癌中的表达及临床意义。采用免疫组织化学法及RT-PCR方法检测结直肠癌、结直肠腺瘤及癌旁正常黏膜组织中IGFBP-2及IGFBP-6的蛋白及mRNA的表达情况,结合临床病理资料进行统计学分析。IGFBP-2及IGFBP-6蛋白的阳性表达及mRNA的表达量在三组组织中均存在异常表达情况,且差异有明显的统计学意义（P〈0.05）,在结直肠癌组IGFBP-2、IGFBP-6的阳性表达在肿瘤浸润深度、有无淋巴结转移及Duke＇s分期存在差异,有明显的统计学差异（P〈0.05）。临床可以把二者作为结直肠癌诊断及预后的早期预测指标。     

Mr. Richie and the tourists

This paper tracks the affective intensity and emergent potential that is part of making contact with Richie, a local Creole villager from Walliceville, Belize. Tourists and expats are drawn to Richie and seduced by him, his colorful language and personality. My attention in this paper is directed to the spatialized force fields of contact between tourists, expats and local creole villagers, like Richie, by attending to the way these contact fields conjure forces of wild vitality that both agitate and fascinate social life in Belize. I focus on how Richie acts as a powerful representation of tropical “no worries” Creole life. But more than that, he carries a sensory charge, seducing tourists and expats into crazy moments of abandon, a “sensing beyond security” (Manning, 2007: 134–161), that exceeds the work of Caribbean tourist representations to become moments when forces are activated as impacts that provoke things, for better or for worse. I argue that such moments spawn worlds that build forms of attachment and become the vital fields of sensations that incite life as emergent forces coming into play in this postcolonial state of emergency taking shape as neo-liberal exception, on the edge of global empire, in Belize.     

Long-term response-stimulus associations can influence distractor-response bindings

Strong associations between target stimuli and responses usually facilitate fast and effortless reactions. The present study investigated whether long-term associations between distractor stimuli and responses modulate behavior. In particular, distractor stimuli can affect behavior due to distractor-based stimulus-response retrieval, a phenomenon called distractor-response binding: An ignored stimulus becomes temporarily associated with a response and retrieves it at stimulus repetition. In a flanker task, participants ignored left and right pointing arrows and responded to a target letter either with left and right (strongly associated) responses or with upper and lower (weakly associated) responses. Binding effects were modulated in dependence of the long-term association strength between distractors and responses. If the association was strong (arrows pointing left and right with left and right responses), binding effects emerged but only in case of compatible responses. If the long-term association between distractors and responses was weak (arrows pointing left and right with upper and lower responses), binding was weaker and not modulated by compatibility. In contrast, sequential compatibility effects were not modulated by association strength between distractor and response. The results indicate that existing long-term associations between stimuli responses may modulate the impact of an ignored stimulus on action control.     

Effects of irrelevant object structure on early attention deployment

Event-related potential (ERP) studies have suggested that Gestalt principles or grouping factors in a visual scene modulate attention deployment in early visual processing. The present study examined the effects of an extrinsic grouping factor, region commonality, on early ERP spatial attention. Effects of sex were also explored, since the processing of task-irrelvant objects may differ between the sexes. Twenty-four participants were required to discriminate one side of rapidly-presented bilateral letters, and attention effects were indexed by hemispheric lateralization accroding to attended visual fields. In results, an early P1 attention effect (70–110 ms) increased when the letters were surrounded by an object, compared to the control stimulus without a complete object, and this result was more prominent in women than in men. The present study demonstrates that visual object and sex differences play a novel role at very early cortical stages of processing in attention deployment to a task-irrelevant visual structure.