冰毒使用者抑制控制的损伤、可逆性及干预策略

冰毒使用的危害日益凸显,受到社会的普遍关注。行为、认知和脑功能的研究结果一致表明:长期的冰毒使用会导致使用者的抑制控制受损,包含一般抑制控制损伤以及药物相关线索条件下的损伤。这些损伤与前额脑区的异常密切相关,对冰毒使用者的行为和认知能力产生不良影响。目前,这些损伤只能部分恢复,因此,改善冰毒使用者抑制控制的干预策略成为热点。未来研究可以从不同药物成瘾者的差异性、多药物使用模式以及有区别的运动干预等方面对冰毒使用者的抑制控制损伤进行深入研究。     

学前儿童抑制控制的发展趋势及其对言语理解和数学认知的预测作用

以长春市某幼儿园的122名3~6岁幼儿为被试,采用2(测试任务:无嵌套规则白天黑夜任务,有嵌套规则的白天黑夜任务)×2(测试时间:间隔9个月的第一次测试和第二次测试)×4(年龄分组:3.00~3.75岁组,3.76~4.50岁组,4.51~5.25岁组,5.26~6.00岁组)的三因素混合设计,来分析不同复杂程度的抑制控制在学前阶段的发展趋势,并在控制幼儿年龄和工作记忆水平后,分析不同复杂程度抑制控制对言语理解和数学认知的独立预测作用。结果发现:(1)对3~6岁儿童来说,有嵌套规则的白天黑夜任务的难度水平要显著高于无嵌套规则的白天黑夜任务;(2)较简单的抑制控制(无嵌套规则的白天黑夜任务)在学前阶段的发展速度先快后慢,但较复杂的抑制控制(有嵌套规则的白天黑夜任务)在3~6岁期间持续快速发展;(3)独立于年龄和工作记忆,较复杂的抑制控制能够显著预测幼儿的数学认知和言语理解,但较简单的抑制控制对言语理解和数学认知的预测作用不显著。根据上述结果,在描述学前儿童抑制控制发展趋势时要注意任务难度的设定,而且难度适当的抑制控制任务成绩更能预测幼儿的言语理解和数学认知。     

Intergroup relations in action: Questions asked about lesbian,gay and bisexual issues in diversity training

This paper focuses on the questions which heterosexual trainees ask about lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) experience within diversity training about LGB issues. Drawing on a data corpus of 162 questions asked by trainees in 13 tape‐recorded training sessions, questions were coded into six categories: (1) general ‘understanding’ questions; (2) questions about the trainer's life, experience and practices; (3) professional practice questions; (4) questions about lesbian and gay related legislation, policies and procedures; (5) questions about specific people and projects and (6) questions about the meanings, derivations and correct use of terms and symbols. ‘Real’ questions are compared with the decontexualized questions (and answers to them) that are provided in training manuals and it is demonstrated that these questions differ markedly from how questions actually get asked and how they actually get answered. Recommendations are provided for improving training and the argument made for turning towards analyses of the real world in action, especially when considering intergroup relations. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Absent minds and absent agents: Attention-lapse induced alienation of agency

We report a novel task designed to elicit transient attention-lapse induced alienation (ALIA) of agency experiences in normal participants. When attention-related action slips occur during the task, participants reported substantially decreased self control as well as a high degree of perceived agency attributed to the errant hand. In addition, participants reported being surprised by, and annoyed with, the actions of the errant hand. We argue that ALIA experiences occur because of constraints imposed by the close and precise temporal relations between intention formation and a contrary action employed in this paradigm. We note similarities between ALIA experiences and anarchic hand sign (AHS) and argue that, despite important differences, both ALIA experiences and AHS phenomenology reflect failures of executive control to intervene and cancel contrary affordance-driven habitual motor plans.     

A behavior-analytic account of cognitive bias in clinical populations

Cognitive bias refers to a well-established finding that individuals who suffer from certain clinical problems (e.g., depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder, substance abuse, etc.) selectively attend to, remember, and interpret events relevant to their condition. Although a body of literature exists that has tried to examine this phenomenon, most existing explanations are mentalistic and mediational. In this paper we offer a behavior-analytic account of cognitive bias, its development, and how it may contribute to maintenance of clinical problems. This account is based on establishing operations or motivating events, verbal processes, and relational responding. Clinical and future research implications are also discussed.     

Ubiquity of Whiteness in majority group national imagination: Australian = White,but New Zealander does not

This research examined cross‐national differences in the extent to which majority ethnic group members (White Europeans) in Australia and New Zealand automatically privileged members of their ingroup, relative to Indigenous targets, in cognitive representations of nationhood. As predicted, European Australian undergraduates implicitly associated their own ethnic group with the concept of “Australian”, relative to Aboriginal Australian targets (N = 50), but the implicit preferencing of Whiteness in representations of nationhood (relative to Maori targets) was absent in a comparable sample of New Zealand European undergraduates (N = 50). These results indicate that the extent to which representations of minority groups are interwoven with non‐conscious cognitive representations of nationhood and national identity are not immutably fixed. Instead, it is argued that this cross‐national difference is due to underlying systemic differences in the extent to which symbolic markers of Indigenous culture, identity, and values are consensually represented in majority group (White) national culture.     

Positive attributional style,life events and their effect on children's mood: Prospective study

The present study extended previous research into the role of cognitive style in predicting depressive symptoms in children by examining positive attributional style for positive events in a prospective manner, with a focus on the influence of prior life experience. A non‐clinical sample of 102 children (aged 10–12 years) was recruited. Participants completed self‐report measures of depression, attributional style, stressful life events, and positive life events on two occasions (approximately 6 months apart). Positive attributional style for positive events moderated the relationship between negative life events and follow‐up depressive symptoms. Number of positive events did not significantly moderate the negative life events–depression symptoms relationship although there was a trend in the expected direction. Positive attributional style for positive events appeared to act as both a mediator and moderator in the positive events–depression symptoms relationship. Theoretical and clinical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Contexts and control operations used in accessing list-specific, generalized, and semantic memories

The human ability to focus memory retrieval operations on a particular list, episode or memory structure has not been fully appreciated or documented. In Experiment 1-3, we make it increasingly difficult for participants to switch between a less recent list (multiple study opportunities), and a more recent list (single study opportunity). Task performance was good, although there was a cost associated with switching. In Experiment 4, list-specific learning experiences were used to create a generalized memory as a step towards semantic memory. List-specific memories intruded during attempts to retrieve the generalized memory and the generalized memory enhanced list-specific performance. The generalized memory also intruded in a free-association task. We propose that a hierarchy of contexts and control operations underlie the human ability to access different memory structures and that there is no sharp discontinuity in the control operations needed to access list-specific, generalized, and semantic memories.     

Bilingualism and conversational understanding in young children

The purpose of the two experiments reported here was to investigate whether bilingualism confers an advantage on children’s conversational understanding. A total of 163 children aged 3-6 years were given a Conversational Violations Test to determine their ability to identify responses to questions as violations of Gricean maxims of conversation (to be informative and avoid redundancy, speak the truth, and be relevant and polite). Though comparatively delayed in their L2 vocabulary, children who were bilingual in Italian and Slovenian (with Slovenian as the dominant language) generally outperformed those who were either monolingual in Italian or Slovenian. We suggest that bilingualism can be accompanied by an enhanced ability to appreciate effective communicative responses.     

Similarity and rules United: similarity- and rule-based processing in a single neural network

A central controversy in cognitive science concerns the roles of rules versus similarity. To gain some leverage on this problem, we propose that rule- versus similarity-based processes can be characterized as extremes in a multidimensional space that is composed of at least two dimensions: the number of features (Pothos, 2005) and the physical presence of features. The transition of similarity- to rule-based processing is conceptualized as a transition in this space. To illustrate this, we show how a neural network model uses input features (and in this sense produces similarity-based responses) when it has a low learning rate or in the early phases of training, but it switches to using self-generated, more abstract features (and in this sense produces rule-based responses) when it has a higher learning rate or is in the later phases of training. Relations with categorization and the psychology of learning are pointed out.