Transitive responding in hooded crows requires linearly ordered stimuli

Eight crows were taught to discriminate overlapping pairs of visual stimuli (A+ B-, B+ C-, C+ D-, and D+ E-). For 4 birds, the stimuli were colored cards with a circle of the same color on the reverse side whose diameter decreased from A to E (ordered feedback group). These circles were made available for comparison to potentially help the crows order the stimuli along a physical dimension. For the other 4 birds, the circles corresponding to the colored cards had the same diameter (constant feedback group). In later testing, a novel choice pair (BD) was presented. Reinforcement history involving stimuli B and D was controlled so that the reinforcement/nonreinforcement ratios for the latter would be greater than for the former. If, during the BD test, the crows chose between stimuli according to these reinforcement/nonreinforcement ratios, then they should prefer D; if they chose according to the diameter of the feedback stimuli, then they should prefer B. In the ordered feedback group, the crows strongly preferred B over D; in the constant feedback group, the crows' choice did not differ significantly from chance. These results, plus simulations using associative models, suggest that the orderability of the postchoice feedback stimuli is important for crows' transitive responding.     

“Seeing Conversion Whole”: Testing a Model of Religious Conversion

Rambo (1993) theorized that religious conversion consists of a process involving seven dimensions, labeled context, crisis, quest, encounter, interaction, commitment, and consequences. To test the Rambo model, a new measure, the 97-item Adult Religious Conversion Experiences Questionnaire (ARCEQ), was developed, revised on the basis of feedback from a focus group, and administered by mail to 110 adult volunteers who self-identified as having experienced conversion. Reliability analysis of the subscales of the ARCEQ resulted in five (crisis, quest, encounter, commitment, and consequences) meeting the criterion ( > .80). A sixth (interaction) achieved a reliability of .76 and was retained, but the seventh (context) was dropped. Principal components factor analysis with Varimax rotation produced factors labeled Redemptive Love, Zealous Dedication, Dysphoric Need, Openness to Uncertainty, Extrinsic Crisis, and Experiential Learning, which could readily be interpreted in relation to Rambo's model. Subsidiary analyses showed a number of significant correlations between demographic characteristics of the sample and differences in religious conversion experience.     

Global and local covert visual attention: Evidence from a bayesian hidden markov model

Psychological, psychophysical and physiological research indicates that people switch between two covert attention states, local and global attention, while visually exploring complex scenes. The focus in the local attention state is on specific aspects and details of the scene, and on examining its content with greater visual detail. The focus in the global attention state is on exploring the informative and perceptually salient areas of the scene, and possibly on integrating the information contained therein. The existence of these two visual attention states, their relative prevalence and sequence in time has remained empirically untested to date. To fill this gap, we develop a psychometric model of visual covert attention that extends recent work on hidden Markov models, and we test it using eye-movement data. The model aims to describe the observed time series of saccades typically collected in eye-movement research by assuming a latent Markov process, indicative of the brain switching between global and local covert attention. We allow subjects to be in either state while exploring a stimulus visually, and to switch between them an arbitrary number of times. We relax the no-memory-property of the Markov chain. The model that we develop is estimated with MCMC methodology and calibrated on eye-movement data collected in a study of consumers' attention to print advertisements in magazines.We thank Dominique Claessens of Verify International for making the data available to us.     

中小学生对父母管教信息的认知、情绪与行为反应倾向

运用情境模拟的方法,对中小学生对父母管教信息的认知、情绪与行为反应倾向进行了研究。被试是616名中小学生。结果表明：(1)小学中年级以上学生对家长管教信息的情绪有较准确的认知;(2)不同管教信息的教育效能有优劣之分：诱导教诲最能引起被试的正面反应,其次是困扰担忧,伤心失望能引起部分学生的顺从反应,愤怒批评易引起子女的消极情绪和对抗行为。(3)父亲发出的管教信息比母亲更具权威性,更易引起子女积极的情绪体验与行为倾向。(4)学生对家长管教信息的反应具有明显的年龄和性别差异,小学生比中学生更易接受、顺从家长管教,女生比男生易产生更多的积极情绪与服从行为。(5)被试的认知评价与其情绪反应、行为倾向有较高的一致性。学生对父母管教信息的情绪体验和行为反应很大程度上取决于对管教信息的认知。如果学生的认知较为积极,更易引起积极的情绪体验和行为倾向。     

Cognitive processing in literate and illiterate subjects: a review of some recent behavioral and functional neuroimaging data

The study of illiterate subjects, which for specific socio-cultural reasons did not have the opportunity to acquire basic reading and writing skills, represents one approach to study the interaction between neurobiological and cultural factors in cognitive development and the functional organization of the human brain. In addition the naturally occurring illiteracy may serve as a model for studying the influence of alphabetic orthography on auditory-verbal language. In this paper we have reviewed some recent behavioral and functional neuroimaging data indicating that learning an alphabetic written language modulates the auditory-verbal language system in a non-trivial way and provided support for the hypothesis that the functional architecture of the brain is modulated by literacy. We have also indicated that the effects of literacy and formal schooling is not limited to language related skills but appears to affect also other cognitive domains. In particular, we indicate that formal schooling influences 2D but not 3D visual naming skills. We have also pointed to the importance of using ecologically relevant tasks when comparing literate and illiterate subjects. We also demonstrate the applicability of a network approach in elucidating differences in the functional organization of the brain between groups. The strength of such an approach is the ability to study patterns of interactions between functionally specialized brain regions and the possibility to compare such patterns of brain interactions between groups or functional states. This complements the more commonly used activation approach to functional neuroimaging data, which characterize functionally specialized regions, and provides important data characterizing the functional interactions between these regions.     

A Note on (K)Nots: Response to Robert W. Kentridge''s Commentary

GY, an extensively studied human hemianope, is aware of salient visual events in his cortically blind field but does not call this "vision." To learn whether he has low-level conscious visual sensations or whether instead he has gained conscious knowledge about, or access to, visual information that does not produce a conscious phenomenal sensation, we attempted to image process a stimulus s presented to the impaired field so that when the transformed stimulus T(s) was presented to the normal hemifield it would cause a sensation similar to that caused by s in the impaired field. While degradation of contrast, spatio-temporal filtering, contrast reversal, and addition of smear and random blobs all failed to match the response to a flashed bar s(f), moving textures of low contrast were accepted to match the response to a moving contrast-defined bar, s(m). Orientation and motion direction discrimination of the perceptually matched stimuli [s(m) and T(s(m))] was closely similar. We suggest that the existence of a satisfactory match indicates that GY has phenomenal vision.     

Maturing Religious Experience and the Postmodern Self

Past attempts to define mature religion have been rooted in a modernist theological anthropology which assumes an atomistic, universal, rational, and stable human self. Yet postmodernists resist universal statements about humanity and understand the self as an ever-changing social construct. This paper suggests a theological anthropology more adequate to the postmodern world, examines maturing religious experience from this perspective, and considers ways pastoral care/counseling can nurture healthy, integrative, and maturing Christian faith in postmodern culture.     

Hemispheric asymmetry in lexical decisions: the effects of grammatical class and imageability

It has been suggested that neural systems for lexical processing of nouns and verbs are anatomically distinct. The aim of the present study was to investigate if brain asymmetry for the processing of these two grammatical classes is also different. Neurologically intact adults performed a lateralized lexical decision task with grammatically unambiguous words of high, medium, and low degrees of imagery. For error scores a right visual field (RVF) advantage and an overall effect of imageability were obtained. For latency scores grammatical class and imageability modified visual field differences: in the noun class a RVF advantage was obtained only for low imagery nouns, while for the verbs the RVF advantage was present for both medium and low imagery verbs. These results suggest that the participation of right hemisphere neural systems in the processing of verbs is more limited than in the processing of nouns.     

Steep Cliff Arguments

In recent philosophical debates a number of arguments have been used which have so much in common that it is useful to study them as having a similar structure. Many arguments – Searle's Chinese Room, for example – make use of thought experiments in which we are told a story or given a narrative context such that we feel we are in comfortable surroundings. A new notion is then introduced which clashes with our ordinary habits and associations. As a result, we do not bother to investigate seriously the new notion any further. I call such an arrangement, which is perhaps a variation of the fallacy of presumption, a Steep Cliff argument. One remedy for the misdirection of a Steep Cliff argument is to tell a counterstory from the point of view of the rejected notion.     

Discovering the Alphabetic Principle: A Lost Opportunity for Educational Reform

We review the recently published report by the Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children from a behavior analytic perspective. The authors prescribe what children should learn to be successful readers based on the correlates of reading and the developmental progression of reading errors. The report offers no discussion of theoretical models that can be used by teachers and parents to reform reading instruction or specific procedures that have been shown to be effective at promoting various reading skills. We discuss these omissions in terms of the level of research included in the review, the authors' structural approach to synthesizing this research, and the constructivist orientation common to many early childhood educators. The paper concludes by identifying models and strategies from the behavior analysis literature that can be used to guide instruction and offers a modest suggestion for future reviews of reading research.