Repetition blindness: an emergent property of inter-item competition

Repeating an item in a brief or rapid display usually produces faster or more accurate identification of the item (repetition priming), but sometimes produces the opposite effect (repetition blindness). We present a theory of short-term repetition effects, the competition hypothesis, which explains these paradoxical outcomes. The central tenet of the theory is that repetition produces a representation with a higher signal-to-noise ratio but also produces a disadvantage in the representation’s ability to compete with other items for access to awareness. A computational implementation of the competition hypothesis was developed to simulate standard findings in the RB literature and to generate novel predictions which were then tested in three experiments. Results from these experiments suggest that repetition effects emerge from competitive interactions between items and that these influences extend to adjacent, nonrepeated items in the display. The results also present challenges to existing theories of short-term repetition effects.     

THE EFFECTS OF RESPONSE CARDS ON STUDENT AND TEACHER BEHAVIOR DURING VOCABULARY INSTRUCTION

The use of response cards during whole‐class English vocabulary instruction was evaluated. Five low‐participating students were observed during hand‐raising conditions and response‐card conditions to observe the effects of response cards on student responding and test scores and teacher questions and feedback. Responding and test scores were higher for all targeted students in the response‐card condition. The teacher asked a similar number of questions in both conditions; however, she provided more feedback in the response‐card condition.     

Adrenocortical Functioning in Boys with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: Examining Subtypes of ADHD and Associated Comorbid Conditions

Disruptions to hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis function have been associated with varying forms of psychopathology in children. Studies suggesting children with ADHD have blunted HPA function have been complicated by the prevalence of comorbid diagnoses and heterogeneity of ADHD. The goals of this research were to assess the relations between waking and stress–response salivary cortisol levels and comorbid disruptive behavior (DBD) and anxiety (AnxD) disorders and problems in boys with ADHD, and to examine whether cortisol levels varied across ADHD subtypes. One hundred seventy elementary school-age boys with ADHD provided salivary cortisol at waking and in reaction to venipuncture. Parent reports were used to assess boys’ psychiatric diagnoses and severity of behavioral problems. Boys’ comorbid AnxD and anxiety problems were associated with greater cortisol reactivity, whereas boys’ comorbid DBD and oppositional problems predicted diminished adrenocortical activity. Reactive cortisol increases were greatest in boys with ADHD and comorbid AnxD, but without DBD. ADHD subtypes were not differentially associated with waking, pre-stress baseline, or reactive cortisol levels. However, comorbid DBD predicted decreased cortisol reactivity in boys with inattentive and hyperactive subtypes of ADHD, but not in boys with combined subtype of ADHD. The results clarify previous patterns of distinct and divergent dysregulations of HPA function associated with boys’ varying kinds of psychopathology.

Sex Differences in the Effects of Neighborhood Socioeconomic Disadvantage and Social Organization on Rural Adolescents’ Aggression Trajectories

We determined whether effects of neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage on trajectories of aggression were moderated or mediated by neighborhood social organization and examined sex differences in neighborhood effects for rural adolescents. We used five waves of survey data collected over 2.5 years linked with neighborhood data from interviews with parents and the US Census. The sample (N = 5,118) was 50.1% female, 52.0% white and 38.3% African–American; average age at baseline was 13.1 years. Multilevel growth curve models for both girls and boys showed no significant interactions between neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage and indicators of social organization. Neither sample showed evidence of mediated effects. In main effects models, neighborhood disadvantage was associated with the average aggression trajectory for girls. For boys, the effects of neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage and social disorganization appeared to be confounded with each other. Neighborhood disadvantage is detrimental for rural girls regardless of the level of social organization.     

Voters, Emotions, and Memory

In this paper we argue that emotional response to information encountered in campaigns has implications for the likelihood of remembering that information at the time of the vote. Most voting models are built on what voters remember—whether it is the placement of candidates on issues, or opened ended responses to prompts. That recall of memory is biased is well-known, but the extent to which those biases are driven by affective response to candidate information has not been studied. Using dynamic process tracing, we examine voters' emotional responses, information search, and candidate evaluations during a simulated presidential primary campaign. By manipulating anxiety and the amount of incongruent information that voters encounter, we can detect the direct influence of affect in information processing. We find evidence that voters are more likely to remember information that generates any affective reaction as opposed to information for which the subjects report no emotional response. However, we find little evidence that anxiety has a special role, compared to enthusiasm or anger, in increasing the likelihood that an individual item is remembered. This challenges a primary contention of the theory of Affective Intelligence that anxiety leads to more memories for campaign information.     

Inhibitory response capacities of bilateral lower and upper extremities in children with developmental coordination disorder in endogenous and exogenous orienting modes

This study was designed to investigate separately the inhibitory response capacity and the lateralization effect in children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) in the endogenous and exogenous modes of orienting attention. Children with DCD on the lower extremities (DCD-LEs), along with age-matched controls, completed four tasks that involved various applications of asynchronous stimuli to the feet or hands at various intervals. The results demonstrated that children with DCD-LEs had a significantly longer reaction time than the controls for all tasks, and were not alert to the appearance of the target. However, they displayed a deficit in volitional shifts of attention (endogenous mode), but not in automatic dislocation of attention (exogenous mode), whenever they performed the tasks with either their lower or their upper-limbs-even 6 months after the initial study. These findings confirm the deficit in the inhibitory response capacity in terms of volitional movement of attention by children with DCD. Additionally, the negative effect of lateralization on the bilateral extremities was not present in children with DCD-LEs. Significantly differences in response ability were detected only between the dominant and non-dominant sides of upper-limbs, but not between the lower-limbs, suggesting a future avenue for further experimentation on bilateral extremities.     

Global Model Analysis of Cognitive Variability

Residual fluctuations produced in typical experimental methodologies are examined as correlated noises. The effective range of the correlations was assessed by determining whether the decay over look-back time is better described as a power law or exponential. Both of these decay laws contain free parameters and it is argued that it is not possible to distinguish their models on the basis of simple measures of goodness-of-fit. Global analyses that evaluate models on the basis of how well they generalize are conducted. The models are examined in terms of three constructs that all bear on generalization: cross-validity, flexibility, and representativeness. Quantitative assessment of a large ensemble of data suggests that the correlations decay over time as a power law. The conclusion is that human residual fluctuation is a correlated fractal.     

Behavioral and neuronal attributes of short- and long-term habituation in the crab Chasmagnathus

Investigations using invertebrate species have led to a considerable progress in our understanding of the mechanisms underlying learning and memory. In this review we describe the main behavioral and neuronal findings obtained by studying the habituation of the escape response to a visual danger stimulus in the crab Chasmagnathus granulatus. Massed training with brief intertrial intervals lead to a rapid reduction of the escape response that recovers after a short term. Conversely, few trials of spaced training renders a slower escape reduction that endures for many days. As predicted by Wagner’s associative theory of habituation, long-term habituation in the crab proved to be determined by an association between the contextual environment of the training and the unconditioned stimulus. By performing intracellular recordings in the brain of the intact animal at the same time it was learning, we identified a group of neurons that remarkably reflects the short- and long-term behavioral changes. Thus, the visual memory abilities of crabs, their relatively simple and accessible nervous system, and the recording stability that can be achieved with their neurons provide an opportunity for uncovering neurophysiological and molecular events that occur in identifiable neurons during learning.     

Neuroscience today,Florence 25–27 March 2007: foreword

Currently in humor research, there exists a dearth of computational models for humor perception. The existing theories are not quantifiable and efforts need to be made to quantify the models and incorporate neuropsychological findings in humor research. We propose a new computational model (GraPHIA) for perceiving phonological jokes or puns. GraPHIA consists of a semantic network and a phonological network where words are represented by nodes in both the networks. Novel features based on graph theoretical concepts are proposed and computed for the identification of homophonic jokes. The data set for evaluating the model consisted of homophonic puns, normal sentences, and ambiguous nonsense sentences. The classification results show that the feature values result in successful identification of phonological jokes and ambiguous nonsense sentences suggesting that the proposed model is a plausible model for humor perception. Further work is needed to extend the model for identification of other types of phonological jokes.