偏侧化颜色范畴知觉不依赖于语言?

本研究探讨了偏左脑颜色范畴知觉依赖于语言还是范畴。三组被试分别完成无干扰、语言加工干扰和范畴加工干扰视觉搜索任务。结果发现：无干扰组、语言加工干扰组和范畴加工干扰组的视觉搜索任务中分别出现了偏左脑颜色范畴知觉、左脑劣势颜色范畴知觉和无偏侧化颜色范畴知觉。此结果表明,偏左脑颜色范畴知觉可能主要是语言范畴作为一种范畴对颜色知觉的影响效应,但语言范畴的语言属性也会对颜色知觉产生影响。     

特征信息和呈现时间对异族面孔知觉的影响

为了探讨面孔认知中内部特征和加工时间对种族判断的影响,采用面孔种族评价任务,选用被试内设计,通过操纵内部特征替换部位,刺激呈现时间,以及种族三个自变量进行研究.结果发现:对中国被试来说,面孔种族信息的获取是一个随时间不断累积信息的过程.在此过程中鼻和口特征并不能提供有效的亚洲和高加索种族信息,眼部特征和构型信息在加工中...     

Structural constraints in the perception of English stop-sonorant clusters

Native-language phonemes combined in a non-native way can be misperceived so as to conform to native phonotactics, e.g. English listeners are biased to hear syllable-initial [tr] rather than the illegal [tl] (Perception and Psychophysics 34 (1983) 338; Perception and Psychophysics 60 (1998) 941). What sort of linguistic knowledge causes phonotactic perceptual bias? Two classes of models were compared: unit models, which attribute bias to the listener's differing experience of each cluster (such as their different frequencies), and structure models, which use abstract phonological generalizations (such as a ban on [coronal][coronal] sequences). Listeners (N=16 in each experiment) judged synthetic 6 x 6 arrays of stop-sonorant clusters in which both consonants were ambiguous. The effect of the stop judgment on the log odds ratio of the sonorant judgment was assessed separately for each stimulus token to provide a stimulus-independent measure of bias. Experiment 1 compared perceptual bias against the onsets [bw] and [dl], which violate different structural constraints but are both of zero frequency. Experiment 2 compared bias against [dl] in CCV and VCCV contexts, to investigate the interaction of syllabification with segmentism and to rule out a compensation-for-coarticulation account of Experiment 1. Results of both experiments favor the structure models (supported by NSF).     

Unusual Child–Mother Communication During Separation: A Psychoanalytic Study

This paper describes two vignettes from psychoanalytic work with a mother who experienced unusual communication with her baby when they were apart. These episodes suggest there are sensory cues or an extrasensory perceptual awareness between individuals separated by physical distance. This paper attempts to describe these thought transferences in order to better understand communication phenomena that have not been described in the scientific literature.     

Perception of genetic risk among genetic counselors

A mailed survey of female prenatal genetic counselors, obstetric nurses, and high school biology teachers was conducted to determine if these groups hold different attitudes toward genetic risk and to investigate the extent to which any differences result from the effect of different professional experiences. In this study, the participants were 166 genetic counselors, 116 obstetric nurses, and 78 biology teachers (n = 360). Survey participants completed a written questionnaire designed to assess their numeric estimate of the empiric risk for birth defects/genetic problems, their subjective perception of this risk, and their personal use of prenatal diagnosis. Genetic counselors were found to be less likely than the other groups to consider the frequency of birth defects/genetic problems as rare and were 10 times more likely than nurses and 8 times more likely than teachers to have had prenatal diagnosis. Furthermore, more than half of the prenatal diagnosis procedures had by genetic counselors were not medically indicated. These results suggest that genetic counselors have an increased perception of genetic risks relative to nurses or teachers. Possible explanations for this finding are discussed, and the potential role of discordant risk perception in creating biases in the genetic counseling process is explored.     

Paradoxical breathlessness in asthma

This study tested the hypothesis that breathlessness in asthma relates linearly to airway obstruction when situational, attentional and emotional influences are held constant via random presentation of different intensities of externally applied airflow obstruction. Adolescents with stable asthma and normal controls (n=25+25) with lung functions of approximately 3.5 l forced expiratory volume in 1 s (FEV₁) breathed through a device which obstructed airflow with five stimulus intensities, analogous to a mean reduction in FEV₁ of 8–66%. A session consisted of 10 blocks, each with presentation of five stimulus intensities plus the baseline resistance of the apparatus. Breathlessness was continuously reported by moving a lever along a 10-point scale. The mean breathlessness was computed per stimulus intensity. Lung function and anxiety were measured before and after the test.

Participants with asthma, not controls, manifested a paradoxical response: they reported significantly more breathlessness, but undifferentially. One patient against 12 controls reported consistently more breathlessness from baseline to severe obstruction. The hypothesis was only supported for controls. Breathlessness did not correlate with severity of asthma, lung function, duration of asthma, number of exacerbations over the last six months, age, sex or anxiety.

It was concluded that the meaning of airflow obstruction in patients with asthma has changed and underlies their paradoxical responses, even when situational, attentional and emotional factors are controlled.     

Perception of dynamic acoustic patterns by an individual with unilateral verbal auditory agnosia

Previous studies have found that subjects diagnosed with verbal auditory agnosia (VAA) from bilateral brain lesions may experience difficulties at the prephonemic level of acoustic processing. In this case study, we administered a series of speech and nonspeech discrimination tests to an individual with unilateral VAA as a result of left-temporal-lobe damage. The results indicated that the subject's ability to perceive steady-state acoustic stimuli was relatively intact but his ability to perceive dynamic stimuli was drastically reduced. We conclude that this particular aspect of acoustic processing may be a major contributing factor that disables speech perception in subjects with unilateral VAA.     

Ratings of emotion in laterally presented faces: sex and handedness effects

Sixteen right-handed participants (8 male and 8 female students) and 16 left-handed participants (8 male and 8 female students) were presented with cartoon faces expressing emotions ranging from extremely positive to extremely negative. A forced-choice paradigm was used in which the participants were asked to rate the faces as either positive or negative. Compared to men, women rated faces more positively, especially in response to right visual field presentations. Women rated neutral and mildly positive faces more positively in the right than in the left visual field, whereas men rated these faces consistently across visual fields. Handedness did not affect the ratings of emotion. The data suggest a positive emotional bias of the left hemisphere in women.     

Selection and inhibition in infancy: evidence from the spatial negative priming paradigm

We used a spatial negative priming (SNP) paradigm to examine visual selective attention in infants and adults using eye movements as the motor selection measure. In SNP, when a previously ignored location becomes the target to be selected, responses to it are impaired, providing a measure of inhibitory selection. Each trial consisted of a prime and a probe, separated by 67, 200, or 550 ms interstimulus intervals (ISIs). In the prime, a target was accompanied by a distractor. In the probe, the target appeared either in the location formerly occupied by the distractor (ignored repetition) or in another location (control). Adults exhibited the SNP effect in all three ISI conditions, producing slower saccade latencies on ignored repetition versus control trials. The SNP effect obtained for infants only under 550 and 200 ms ISI conditions. These results suggest that important developments in visual selection are rooted in emerging inhibitory mechanisms.     

Audio-visual speech perception is special

In face-to-face conversation speech is perceived by ear and eye. We studied the prerequisites of audio-visual speech perception by using perceptually ambiguous sine wave replicas of natural speech as auditory stimuli. When the subjects were not aware that the auditory stimuli were speech, they showed only negligible integration of auditory and visual stimuli. When the same subjects learned to perceive the same auditory stimuli as speech, they integrated the auditory and visual stimuli in a similar manner as natural speech. These results demonstrate the existence of a multisensory speech-specific mode of perception.