Inner speech slips exhibit lexical bias, but not the phonemic similarity effect

Inner speech, that little voice that people often hear inside their heads while thinking, is a form of mental imagery. The properties of inner speech errors can be used to investigate the nature of inner speech, just as overt slips are informative about overt speech production. Overt slips tend to create words (lexical bias) and involve similar exchanging phonemes (phonemic similarity effect). We examined these effects in inner and overt speech via a tongue-twister recitation task. While lexical bias was present in both inner and overt speech errors, the phonemic similarity effect was evident only for overt errors, producing a significant overtness by similarity interaction. We propose that inner speech is impoverished at lower (featural) levels, but robust at higher (phonemic) levels.     

Implicit and explicit memory for affective passages in temporal lobectomy patients

Eighteen temporal lobectomy patients (9 left, LTL; 9 right, RTL) were administered four verbal tasks, an Affective Implicit Task, a Neutral Implicit Task, an Affective Explicit Task, and a Neutral Explicit Task. For the Affective and Neutral Implicit Tasks, participants were timed while reading aloud passages with affective or neutral content, respectively, as quickly as possible, but not so quickly that they did not understand. A target verbal passage was repeated three times; this target passage was alternated with other previously unread passages, and all passages had the same number of words. The Explicit Affective and Neutral Tasks were administered at the end of testing, and consisted of multiple choice questions regarding passage content. Verbal priming effects in terms of improved reading speed with repetition for the target but not non-target passages were found for patients with both left and right temporal lobectomies. As in the Burton, Rabin et al. [Burton, L., Rabin, L., Vardy, S.B., Frohlich, J., Wyatt, G., Dimitri, D., Constante, S., Guterman, E. (2004). Gender differences in implicit and explicit memory for affective passages. Brain and Cognition, 54(3), 218-224] normative study, there were no interactions between this priming effect and affective/neutral content. For the explicit tasks, items from the repeated passages were remembered better than the unrepeated passages, and there was a trend for information from the affective passages to be remembered better than the neutral passages, similar to the normative pattern. The RTL group did not show the normative pattern of slower reading speed for affective compared to neutral passages that the LTL group showed. Thus, the present findings support the idea that intact right medial temporal structures are important for affective content to influence some aspects of verbal processing.     

Stimulus timing by people with Parkinson's disease

Previous literature suggests that Parkinson’s disease is marked by deficits in timed behaviour. However, the majority of studies of central timing mechanisms in patients with Parkinson’s disease have used timing tasks with a motor component. Since the motor abnormalities are a defining feature of the condition, the status of timing in Parkinson’s disease remains uncertain. Data are reported from patients with mild to moderate Parkinson’s disease (both on and off medication) and age- and IQ-matched controls on a range of stimulus timing tasks without counting. Tasks used were temporal generalization, bisection, threshold determination, verbal estimation, and a memory for duration task. Performance of patients was generally “normal” on all tasks, but significant differences from performance of controls were found on the memory for duration task. Among the “normal” effects noted were arithmetic mean bisection, asymmetric temporal generalization gradients, and subjective shortening on the memory for duration task. The results suggest (a) that some previous reports of timing “deficits” in Parkinson’s patients were possibly due to the use of tasks requiring a timed manual response and (b) small differences between patients and controls may be found on tasks where two stimuli are presented on each trial, whether patients are on medication or off it.     

Orientation perception in rhesus monkeys (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Macaca mulatta</Emphasis>)

It was previously demonstrated that monkeys divide the orientation continuum into cardinal and oblique categories. However, it is still unclear how monkeys perceive within-category orientations. To better understand monkeys' perception of orientation, two experiments were conducted using five monkeys. In experiment 1, they were trained to identify either one cardinal or one oblique target orientation out of six orientations. The results showed that they readily identified the cardinal target whether it was oriented horizontally or vertically. However, a longer training period was needed to identify the oblique target orientation regardless of its degree and direction of tilt. In experiment 2, the same monkeys were trained to identify two-oblique target orientations out of six orientations. These orientations were paired, either sharing the degree of tilt, direction of tilt, or neither property. The results showed that the monkeys readily identified oblique orientations when they had either the same degree or direction of tilt. However, when the target orientations had neither the same degree nor direction of tilt, the animals had difficulty in identifying them. In summary, horizontal and vertical orientations are individually processed, indicating that monkeys do not have a category for cardinal orientation, but they may recognize cardinal orientations as non-obliques. In addition, monkeys efficiently abstract either the degree or the direction of tilt from oblique orientations, but they have difficulty combining these features to identify an oblique orientation. Thus, not all orientations within the oblique category are equally perceived.     

On being sad and evasive: Affective influences on verbal communication strategies in conflict situations

Does mood influence people’s tendency to engage in evasive, equivocal communication when facing conflict situations? Based on recent affect-cognition theories and research on verbal communication, this experiment predicted that negative mood should increase, and positive mood decrease the level of verbal evasiveness in conflict situations, and that high situational conflict should magnify these mood effects. Participants underwent a happy or sad audiovisual mood induction, and then produced verbal responses to low- and high-conflict situations using structured as well as open-ended responses. Results indicated that affect and conflict severity had an interactive influence on evasiveness and equivocation: negative affect produced significantly more evasiveness than positive affect, and these effects were greater in high than in low-conflict situations. These results are discussed in terms of the cognitive strategies that mediate mood effects on verbal communication. The implications of the findings for everyday communication situations, and for current affect-cognition theorizing are considered.     

Manipulating cues in mind wandering: Verbal cues affect the frequency and the temporal focus of mind wandering

Our understanding of mind wandering (MW) has dramatically increased over the past decade. A key challenge still facing research is the identification of the processes and events that directly cause and control its occurrence. In the present study we sought to shed light on this question, by investigating the effects of verbal cues on the frequency and temporal focus of MW. To this aim, we experimentally manipulated the presence of irrelevant verbal cues during a vigilance task, in two independent groups (Verbal-cues group vs. No-cues group).We found that compared to the No-cues group, the Verbal-cues group reported a higher amount of MW, mostly triggered by the irrelevant cue-words, and a higher proportion of past-oriented MW compared to the other temporal orientations. These results demonstrate that task-irrelevant verbal stimulation increases the frequency of MW and steers its temporal orientation toward the past. Implications for the research on MW are discussed.     

Recognition of all basic emotions varies in accuracy and reaction time: A new verbal method of measurement

To study different aspects of facial emotion recognition, valid methods are needed. The more widespread methods have some limitations. We propose a more ecological method that consists of presenting dynamic faces and measuring verbal reaction times. We presented 120 video clips depicting a gradual change from a neutral expression to a basic emotion (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise), and recorded hit rates and reaction times of verbal labelling of emotions. Our results showed that verbal responses to six basic emotions differed in hit rates and reaction times: happiness > surprise > disgust > anger > sadness > fear (this means these emotional responses were more accurate and faster). Generally, our data are in accordance with previous findings, but our differentiation of responses is better than the data from previous experiments on six basic emotions.     

Instructions as discriminative stimuli (2): A within‐subject examination of the effect of differential reinforcement on establishing novel instructional control1

Abstract: Six undergraduates were exposed to a fixed‐ratio schedule with an instruction to respond slowly and to a differential‐reinforcement‐of‐low‐rate schedule with an instruction to respond rapidly when a white circle was presented on a display monitor. When a yellow circle was presented, however, the subjects were exposed to the fixed‐ratio schedule with the instruction to respond rapidly and to the differential‐reinforcement‐of‐low‐rate schedule with the instruction to respond slowly. Following this, a fixed‐interval schedule was in effect during those stimuli and instructions. Under the white circle, response rates were higher with the instruction to respond slowly than with the instruction to respond rapidly during the fixed‐interval schedule. Such control by instructions was not observed under the yellow circle. A previous study examined establishment of novel instructional control by between‐subject comparisons and found that for three of four subjects ( Okouchi, 1999 ). In contrast, the present results demonstrate the instructional control through within‐subject comparisons for all six subjects.     

Aggression and Sociometric Status among Peers: Do Gender and Type of Aggression Matter?

The connections between the use of different types of aggression (direct physical, direct verbal, and indirect) and sociometric status among same-sex and opposite-sex peers were studied. The subjects were 209 ninth-grade adolescents. Although an adolescent's aggression in general was related to being rejected by peers, a different picture emerged when the shared variance between types of aggression was controlled: The partial correlations showed that when the level of direct (physical and verbal) aggression was kept constant, increases in indirect aggression did not explain variance in peer rejection scores. On the contrary, the use of indirect aggression contributed (especially among boys) to social acceptance by peers. The direct (physical and verbal) forms of aggression were unrelated to adolescents' social acceptance scores. No clear differences were detected between girls' and boys' acceptance or rejection of their aggressive peers, despite the finding that boys seemed to tolerate indirect aggression better than girls did.     

Pervasive influence of semantics in letter and category fluency: a multidimensional approach

We used multidimensional statistical procedures to study semantic and lexical processes underlying word retrieval in verbal-fluency performance. Forty healthy participants were given a two-choice letter task (i.e., generate items beginning with the letter 'A' or 'F', in any order) and a two-choice category task (i.e., generate animal or fruit names, in any order). Using correspondence analysis (CoA) and hierarchical clustering (HC), we found evidence of prominent semantic organization in both letter and category fluency. For example, a striking categorical segregation between animate and inanimate entities emerged during the letter task. Analysis of inter-item times revealed strong sequential priming effects in both tasks. Taken together, these results indicate that semantic facilitation is pervasive in word retrieval processes, even in the letter-fluency task, and therefore suggest that the traditional view of letter fluency as a purely phonemically based task should be revised. Finally, our findings may help explain patterns of verbal-fluency measures obtained in focal brain lesion patients.