Mental rotation and temporal contingencies.

A task that requires subjects to determine whether two forms of the same shape, but in different orientations, are mirror images or identical except for orientation is called a handedness recognition task. Subjects' reaction times (RT) on this task are consistently related to the angular disparity (termed alpha) between the two presented forms. This pattern of data has been interpreted to indicate that subjects solve the task by imagining that one of the forms rotates into the orientation of the other (termed mental rotation). The speed with which one imagines one of the forms rotating has been widely considered a fixed capability of the individual, and thus immune to the effect of contingencies. We present an experiment that assesses the effects of temporal contingencies in a handedness recognition task on the slope of the function RT = f(alpha). The data indicate that the slope of this function can come under the control of temporal contingencies.     

Sprachspiel vs. vollständige Sprache

The article formulates a criticism of Wittgenstein's later philosophy which, in its substance, I would like to think, is fairly the same as the (hermeneutic) criticism issued by Apel and Habermas in the sixties. Contrary to these philosophers, however, I try to make the point by focusing on the distinction between language game and language, respectively between intralanguage relations of family resemblance (between language games) and interlanguage translation relations. The notion of a complete language is introduced — completeness of a language being, roughly, its possibility in principle of being translated into any (other) language — and the criticism of Wittgenstein is formulated as the allegation that he does not, or will not, acknowledge such a concept of completeness.So far the contents of the first part of the article. The rest of it assembles some hints, remarks and reminders which bear upon the question of the completeness of a language. These considerations include comments on the conditions of translatability, on the performative (agent's) knowledge or intention-in-action of the acting person, on Habermas' concept of communicative competence and on the notion of a responsible subject of action. It is alleged that to speak of translation and reporting an event as language games is misleading.     

Adult Attachment and Motivated Attention to Social Images: Attachment-Based Differences in Event-Related Brain Potentials to Emotional Images

Differences in adult attachment may concord with differences in social perception. The present study aimed to measure neural activity associated with the presentation of visual social stimuli. In an affective oddball paradigm, event-related brain potentials were recorded while participants viewed negative, positive, and neutral images of people and categorized them according to valence. Brain response amplitudes were examined across valence categories and across attachment groups. Results revealed differences between anxious and avoidant groups in “emotion bias”. The avoidant group displayed a bias towards more neural activation in response to negative compared to positive images. The anxious group trended in the opposite direction. Results are discussed in terms of possible attachment-based differences in motivated attention to social stimuli.     

Effects of exercise intervention on event-related potential and task performance indices of attention networks in children with developmental coordination disorder

The study investigated whether 10-week soccer training can benefit the inhibitory control and neuroelectric indices in children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD). Fifty-one children were divided into groups of typically developing (TD, n=21), DCD-training (n=16), and DCD non-training (n=14) individuals using the for Children test, and, before and after training, were assessed with the visuospatial attention orienting task with their lower extremities, while brain event-related potentials (ERPs) were concurrently recorded. The results indicated that, when compared to TD children, children with DCD responded significantly more slowly across conditions of the visuospatial attention orienting task and showed a deficit of inhibitory control capacity in their lower extremities, whereas no group differences were observed for the accuracy rate. Neuroelectric data indicated that, before training, P3 amplitude was smaller and P3 latency was slower for both DCD groups compared to TD children across conditions of the visuospatial attention orienting task; after training, the beneficial effects were seen in the strength of inhibitory control and P3 latency in the DCD-training group. The data suggest that soccer training resulted in significant improvements in ERP and task performance indices for the children with DCD.     

Neuroscientific Measures of Covert Behavior

In radical behaviorism, the difference between overt and covert responses does not depend on properties of the behavior but on the sensitivity of the measurement tools employed by the experimenter. Current neuroscientific research utilizes technologies that allow measurement of variables that are undetected by the tools typically used by behavior analysts. Data from a specific neuroscientific technique, event-related potential (ERP), suggest that emission of otherwise covert responses can be indexed and that such covert responses are sensitive to stimulus control and selection by consequences. The P3 ERP effect is proposed as indicative of emission. Moreover, ERP results in semantic priming experiments suggest that operants are sensitive to changes in stimulus control even when they are not emitted (latent responses). Changes in response strength of latent responses as a function of stimulus control can in fact be measured by reaction time data and an ERP dependent variable called the N400 effect. If the interpretations provided in this paper are accurate, an index of covertly emitted operants (P3 effect) constitutes experimental evidence suggesting the validity of a Skinnerian radical behaviorist perspective on behavior. Moreover, in a Skinnerian paradigm, measured fluctuations in the response strength of latent operants as a function of environmental changes (N400 effect) would validate Palmer's (2009) concept of the repertoire.     

Task‐Related Factors that Influence the Spontaneous Use of Diagrams in Math Word Problems

Diagrams are effective tools for problem solving. However, previous findings indicate that students generally do not use diagrams spontaneously. This study examined task‐related factors that may influence the spontaneity of diagram use. Experiment 1 compared two possible explanations: the first, that the length‐relatedness of the story context of the problem (i.e. whether it involves the measurement of length) determines the likelihood of diagram use; and the second, that the cognitive cost of transforming the situation described in the word problem to an abstract diagrammatic representation is the more important factor. Four math word problems, differing in their story context and structure, were administered to eighth‐grade Japanese students (n = 125) to solve. The results provide support for the cognitive transformation cost explanation. The results of experiment 2, in which the problems were administered to students in both Japan (n = 291) and New Zealand (n = 323), confirm this finding. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

What constitutes traffic event severity in terms of human danger perception?

This study focuses on the severity gradation of non-collision events. Earlier theoretical work has suggested that a proper severity measure for an event should reflect the risk of personal injury, which is often split into two components, including the risk of a collision and the potential consequences had the collision taken place. While a great number of severity measures have been suggested, most of them fail to address both components, thus resulting in counter-intuitive event gradations and inconclusive outcomes in validation studies. Conversely, it has been shown that human observers often show very good agreement when given a task to rank traffic situations by their severity or level of danger. The aim of this study is to investigate in depth how human judgements of the severity of traffic situations can be expressed by means of objective safety indicators. In this study, a set of video-recorded traffic situations, in which a cyclist passes straight through an intersection while a left or right-turning motor vehicle crosses the cyclist’s path, were analysed. Binary logistic regression was used to develop models assessing the most important traffic severity indicators associated with human feelings of danger. The results showed that the initial conditions of a traffic event, defined as a start of an evasive action, contain the most important information for explaining its severity. Moreover, variables related to both proximity and collision consequences are important and should be integrated into severity measures.     

Atypical central auditory speech-sound discrimination in children who stutter as indexed by the mismatch negativity

PurposeRecent theoretical conceptualizations suggest that disfluencies in stuttering may arise from several factors, one of them being atypical auditory processing. The main purpose of the present study was to investigate whether speech sound encoding and central auditory discrimination, are affected in children who stutter (CWS).MethodsParticipants were 10 CWS, and 12 typically developing children with fluent speech (TDC). Event-related potentials (ERPs) for syllables and syllable changes [consonant, vowel, vowel-duration, frequency (F0), and intensity changes], critical in speech perception and language development of CWS were compared to those of TDC.ResultsThere were no significant group differences in the amplitudes or latencies of the P1 or N2 responses elicited by the standard stimuli. However, the Mismatch Negativity (MMN) amplitude was significantly smaller in CWS than in TDC. For TDC all deviants of the linguistic multifeature paradigm elicited significant MMN amplitudes, comparable with the results found earlier with the same paradigm in 6-year-old children. In contrast, only the duration change elicited a significant MMN in CWS.ConclusionsThe results showed that central auditory speech-sound processing was typical at the level of sound encoding in CWS. In contrast, central speech-sound discrimination, as indexed by the MMN for multiple sound features (both phonetic and prosodic), was atypical in the group of CWS. Findings were linked to existing conceptualizations on stuttering etiology.Educational objectives: The reader will be able (a) to describe recent findings on central auditory speech-sound processing in individuals who stutter, (b) to describe the measurement of auditory reception and central auditory speech-sound discrimination, (c) to describe the findings of central auditory speech-sound discrimination, as indexed by the mismatch negativity (MMN), in children who stutter.     

Logical Metonymy Resolution in a Words‐as‐Cues Framework: Evidence From Self‐Paced Reading and Probe Recognition

Logical metonymy resolution (begin a book → begin writing a book) has traditionally been explained either through complex lexical entries (qualia structures) or through the integration of the implicit event via post‐lexical access to world knowledge. We propose that recent work within the words‐as‐cues paradigm can provide a more dynamic model of logical metonymy, accounting for early and dynamic integration of complex event information depending on previous contextual cues (agent and patient). We first present a self‐paced reading experiment on German subordinate sentences, where metonymic sentences and their paraphrased version differ only in the presence or absence of the clause‐final target verb (Der Konditor begann die Glasur → Der Konditor begann, die Glasur spreading the icing). Longer reading times at the target verb position in a high‐typicality condition (baker + icing → spread ) suggest that we make use of knowledge activated by lexical cues to build expectations about events. The early and dynamic integration of event knowledge in metonymy interpretation is bolstered by further evidence from a second experiment using the probe recognition paradigm. Presenting covert events as probes following a high‐typicality or a low‐typicality metonymic sentence (Der Konditor begann die Glasur → SPREAD ), we obtain an analogous effect of typicality at 100 ms interstimulus interval.