逆行性遗忘、额叶与远期记忆的组织

通过对一例严重记忆障碍合并额叶损伤病人的逆行性遗忘的分析,对远期记忆的组织特点进行了探讨。被试的额叶功能受损较为明显。除顺行性遗忘外,患者的逆行性遗忘也较为严重。对病人进行的逆行性遗忘检测包括：著名人物测验、著名事件、一般知识测验和自传性记忆测验等。被试对著名人物、著名事件的回忆和再认成绩、以及有关个人的情节和语义记忆成绩均较低,但没有典型的随时间下降的趋势,而是呈平直斜率;患者儿童期的自传性记忆和公众事件记忆也受损。这两个特点均与内侧颞叶一间脑系统损伤的特点不同,提示额叶参与了远期记忆的提取等过程。     

The Motivational Origins of Religious Practices

I hypothesize that people engage in religious practices, in part, because such practices activate the frontal lobes. Activation of the frontal lobes is both intrinsically rewarding and necessary for acquisition of many of the behaviors that religions seek to foster, including self-responsibility, impulse and emotion modulation, empathy, moral insight, hope, and optimism. Although direct tests of the hypothesis are as yet nonexistent, there is reasonably strong circumstantial evidence (reviewed herein) for it. Recent brain-imaging studies indicate greater anterior activation values and increased blood flow to frontal sites during prayer and meditation. Regular prayer is positively correlated with better overall mental health. Religiosity is correlated with higher levels of self-monitoring, empathy, and moral insight and other positive behaviors and negatively correlated with depression and impulsive and risky behaviors. Independent data show that self-monitoring, empathy, hope, and moral insight are all selectively associated with intact frontal function, whereas depression, impulsiveness, and drug and alcohol abuse are associated selectively with frontal dysfunction. If religious practices do indeed preferentially activate and stimulate development of the frontal lobes, (a) religious practices should be considered as possible adjuncts for some patients in treatment for mental health disorders, and (b) the frontal lobes (rather than the temporal lobes) should be considered the major brain site that supports the core components of religious experience.     

Oppositional Children Differ from Healthy Children in Frontal Brain Activation

An atypical EEG pattern of frontal brain activation, which has been found in children and adults with emotional disorders, also is hypothesized to be present in disruptive behavior disorders. One hundred nineteen children (4 $\frac{1}{2}$ and 8 years of age) were examined with regard to the following questions: (1) Do children who are diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) exhibit an atypical pattern of frontal brain activation? (2) Can this pattern be demonstrated in preschool children (4 $\frac{1}{2}$ years of age) as well as in school children (8 years)? (3) Are there gender differences in these patterns similar to those that have been demonstrated in adults? Spontaneous EEG activity was subjected to power spectral analysis. In oppositional preschool and elementary school girls, the well-known pattern of lower left frontal than right frontal activation emerged that has been found previously in emotionally disordered children. Healthy girls showed no frontal brain asymmetry at 4 $\frac{1}{2}$ years of age, and left frontal activation at 8 years. In contrast, healthy boys demonstrated a greater right than left frontal activation, whereas ODD boys did not display any frontal brain asymmetry. Thus, the pattern of frontal brain activation seems to be gender-specific. The atypical activation pattern in oppositional children is hypothesized to be a biological substrate of negative affective style.     

Extinction-like effects in normals: independence of localization and response selection

An extinction-like effect in normal subjects was previously elicited when a low-salience target in the left was simultaneously presented with a highly salient distractor in the right visual hemifield, but not vice versa (Pollmann, 1996). We investigated in four experiments whether this extinction-like effect depends on (a) explicit localization and (b) response competition. It was found that the extinction-like effect could be replicated in the absence of both. In contradistinction to our previous results, low-salience distractors had no effect on pop-out target search. This showed that explicit spatial localization demands lead to low-salience distractor interference on pop-out search.     

Executive Control Functions in Degenerative Dementias: A Comparative Review

This paper reviews the literature concerning executive control impairments in degenerative dementias. The construct of executive control functioning is examined, as is the neuroanatomy of frontal–subcortical networks, believed to underlie executive function (EF) impairments. The pattern of EF impairments in Alzheimer's disease (AD) which affects temporal and parietal brain regions most severely is contrasted with observed executive dysfunctions in patients with dementias involving degeneration of primarily frontal and frontal–subcortical brain areas. EF impairments are present in each of these types of dementing illnesses. Although EF impairments are present in AD, they are less prominent than the memory disorder in the neuropsychological profile of the disease and tend to become more pronounced later in the course of the illness. In contrast, patients with frontal or frontal–subcortical dementia may demonstrate executive dysfunction, which occurs earlier in the disease progression and may be initially more severe.     

Attention maintains mental extrapolation of target position: irrelevant distractors eliminate forward displacement after implied motion

Observers' judgments of the final position of a moving target are typically shifted in the direction of implied motion ("representational momentum"). The role of attention is unclear: visual attention may be necessary to maintain or halt target displacement. When attention was captured by irrelevant distractors presented during the retention interval, forward displacement after implied target motion disappeared, suggesting that attention may be necessary to maintain mental extrapolation of target motion. In a further corroborative experiment, the deployment of attention was measured after a sequence of implied motion, and faster responses were observed to stimuli appearing in the direction of motion. Thus, attention may guide the mental extrapolation of target motion. Additionally, eye movements were measured during stimulus presentation and retention interval. The results showed that forward displacement with implied motion does not depend on eye movements. Differences between implied and smooth motion are discussed with respect to recent neurophysiological findings.     

Asymmetries in the processing of emotionally valenced words

Earlier research has shown a valence dependent encoding asymmetry of emotional words (e.g., Pratto & John, 1991; White, 1996; Stenberg, Wiking & Dahl, 1998). To further study this asymmetry, two word detection experiments were performed based on the following hypothesis: when there is a more thoroughly processing of the valence, in this case a valence categorisation, there will be, in a subsequent task, prolonged latencies for negative words, compared to positive words. The result gave significantly prolonged response latencies for negative words compared to positive ones in the subsequent detection task when using an affective orienting task, something not found using a non-affective orienting task. The results support the Mobilization-Minimization hypothesis (Taylor, 1991), according to which negative events and stimuli occupy more cognitive resources, but with some limitation: the affective asymmetry, with prolonged latencies for negative words, occurs only when there is a deepened encoding of the affective component of the words.     

Factor copula models for mixed data

We develop factor copula models to analyse the dependence among mixed continuous and discrete responses. Factor copula models are canonical vine copulas that involve both observed and latent variables, hence they allow tail, asymmetric and nonlinear dependence. They can be explained as conditional independence models with latent variables that do not necessarily have an additive latent structure. We focus on important issues of interest to the social data analyst, such as model selection and goodness of fit. Our general methodology is demonstrated with an extensive simulation study and illustrated by reanalysing three mixed response data sets. Our studies suggest that there can be a substantial improvement over the standard factor model for mixed data and make the argument for moving to factor copula models.     

Prospective memory,working memory,planning, and attention in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder: A comparative study

There is a need to study prospective memory (PM) and its relationship with aspects of frontal lobe functioning in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The study aims to investigate event‐based (EB) and time‐based (TB) PM functioning in the two groups, and its association with working memory, planning, and attention. A word categorisation task was developed to assess PM functioning among 90 participants (schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and a control group). Frontal lobe functioning was assessed using Tower of London, N‐Back test, and triads test. Mean comparisons revealed significantly higher impairment in TB PM in comparison to EB PM in both the clinical groups. Significant relationship between PM and frontal lobe impairment was found. Relationship between PM and frontal lobe deficits in the clinical groups emphasises the need to include its assessment at an early stage and to develop PM rehabilitation strategies to improve the quality of living.     

Iki and Contingency: A Reconstruction of Shūzō Kuki’s Early Aesthetic theory

Iki is the key word of Shūzō Kuki’s The Structure of Iki, and it became one of the most widely recognized Japanese aesthetic categories mainly due to this work. However, in The Problems of Contingency, which is Kuki’s most important philosophical work, there is no discussion of iki again, and consequently, most commentators of Kuki fail to see the correlation between his theories of iki and contingency. This article, by contrast, intends to provide a new interpretation of iki in the light of Kuki’s theory of contingency. The specific thesis of this paper is that aesthetic phenomena categorized as subject to the principles of iki are positively evaluated in Japanese culture just because the consciousness of iki is just one form of the consciousness of contingency, in which the awareness of alternatives to the actual situation could produce considerable spiritual entertainment for aesthetic subjects.