The effects of ageing and visual noise on conceptual integration during sentence reading

The effortfulness hypothesis implies that difficulty in decoding the surface form, as in the case of age-related sensory limitations or background noise, consumes the attentional resources that are then unavailable for semantic integration in language comprehension. Because ageing is associated with sensory declines, degrading of the surface form by a noisy background can pose an extra challenge for older adults. In two experiments, this hypothesis was tested in a self-paced moving window paradigm in which younger and older readers’ online allocation of attentional resources to surface decoding and semantic integration was measured as they read sentences embedded in varying levels of visual noise. When visual noise was moderate (Experiment 1), resource allocation among young adults was unaffected but older adults allocated more resources to decode the surface form at the cost of resources that would otherwise be available for semantic processing; when visual noise was relatively intense (Experiment 2), both younger and older participants allocated more attention to the surface form and less attention to semantic processing. The decrease in attentional allocation to semantic integration resulted in reduced recall of core ideas in both experiments, suggesting that a less organized semantic representation was constructed in noise. The greater vulnerability of older adults at relatively low levels of noise is consistent with the effortfulness hypothesis.     

Geometric determinants of human spatial memory

Geometric alterations to the boundaries of a virtual environment were used to investigate the representations underlying human spatial memory. Subjects encountered a cue object in a simple rectangular enclosure, with distant landmarks for orientation. After a brief delay, during which they were removed from the arena, subjects were returned to it at a new location and orientation and asked to mark the place where the cue had been. On some trials the geometry (size, aspect ratio) of the arena was varied between presentation and testing. Responses tended to lie somewhere between a location that maintained fixed distances from nearby walls and a location that maintained fixed ratios of the distances between opposing walls. The former were more common after expansions and for cued locations nearer to the edge while the latter were more common after contractions and for locations nearer to the center. The spatial distributions of responses predicted by various simple geometric models were compared to the data. The best fitting model was one derived from the response properties of 'place cells' in the rat hippocampus, which matches the 'proximities' 1/(d+c) of the cue to the four walls of the arena, where d is the distance to a wall and c is a global constant. Subjects also tended to adopt the same orientation at presentation and testing, although this was not due to using a view matching strategy, which could be ruled out in 50% of responses. Disoriented responses were most often seen where the cued location was near the center of the arena or where the long axis of a rectangular arena was changed between presentation and testing, suggesting that the geometry of the arena acts as a weak cue to orientation. Overall, the results suggest a process of visual landmark matching to determine orientation, combined with an abstract representation of the proximity of the cued location to the walls of the arena consistent with the neural representation of location in the hippocampus.     

Integrating Cognitive and Existential Treatment Strategies in Psychotherapy With Dependent Patients

A dependent personality orientation is associated with increased risk for a broad array of Axis I and Axis II disorders. Although traditional treatment interventions have modest ameliorative effects on problematic dependency, the multifaceted nature of dependency suggests that integrated treatment strategies may hold more promise than traditional treatment approaches. This article outlines one potentially useful integrated treatment strategy, combining elements of cognitive and existential therapy to alter dependency-related thought, behavior, and emotional responding. Procedures for implementing an integrated cognitive-existential treatment model are outlined, and challenges in use of the model are discussed.     

Enactment enhances integration between verb and noun, but not relational processing, in episodic memory

Improved recall has consistently been demonstrated following motor activation at encoding (SPT), compared to traditional verbal learning (VT). Enhancements of item-specific processing and relational processing have been proposed as possible mechanisms to account for this SPT effect. There is ample evidence supporting the notion of enhanced item-specific processing, however it is still unclear whether enhancement of relational processing contributes to improved recall. In the present study, 2 experiments were designed to address this issue. In Experiment 1, memory under 2 encoding conditions (VT vs. SPT) and 3 recall conditions (free recall vs. category-cued recall vs. verb-cued recall) were studied in 3 large samples (N= 500-600). Experiment 2 replicated the findings of Experiment 1, and controlled for the use of actual objects, short-term memory effects, and carryover effects, in Experiment 1. The results in both experiments showed an interaction between type of encoding and type of recall. Verb-cued recall was affected differently by SPT encoding, as compared to category-cued recall and free recall. The results indicate that enhanced integration between verb and noun is an effect of SPT encoding, whereas enhanced relational processing is not.     

High-dimensional maximum marginal likelihood item factor analysis by adaptive quadrature

Although the Bock–Aitkin likelihood-based estimation method for factor analysis of dichotomous item response data has important advantages over classical analysis of item tetrachoric correlations, a serious limitation of the method is its reliance on fixed-point Gauss-Hermite (G-H) quadrature in the solution of the likelihood equations and likelihood-ratio tests. When the number of latent dimensions is large, computational considerations require that the number of quadrature points per dimension be few. But with large numbers of items, the dispersion of the likelihood, given the response pattern, becomes so small that the likelihood cannot be accurately evaluated with the sparse fixed points in the latent space. In this paper, we demonstrate that substantial improvement in accuracy can be obtained by adapting the quadrature points to the location and dispersion of the likelihood surfaces corresponding to each distinct pattern in the data. In particular, we show that adaptive G-H quadrature, combined with mean and covariance adjustments at each iteration of an EM algorithm, produces an accurate fast-converging solution with as few as two points per dimension. Evaluations of this method with simulated data are shown to yield accurate recovery of the generating factor loadings for models of upto eight dimensions. Unlike an earlier application of adaptive Gibbs sampling to this problem by Meng and Schilling, the simulations also confirm the validity of the present method in calculating likelihood-ratio chi-square statistics for determining the number of factors required in the model. Finally, we apply the method to a sample of real data from a test of teacher qualifications.     

Motion and edge sensitivity in perception of object unity

Although much evidence indicates that young infants perceive unitary objects by analyzing patterns of motion, infants' abilities to perceive object unity by analyzing Gestalt properties and by integrating distinct views of an object over time are in dispute. To address these controversies, four experiments investigated adults' and infants' perception of the unity of a center-occluded, moving rod with misaligned visible edges. Both alignment information and depth information affected adults' and infants' perception of object unity in similar ways, and infants perceived object unity by integrating information about object features over time. However, infants perceived a moving, misaligned, three-dimensional object as indeterminate in its connectedness, whereas adults perceived it as connected behind the occluder. These findings indicate that the effectiveness of common motion in specifying unified surfaces across an occluder is reduced by misalignment of edges. Alignment information enhances perception of object unity either by serving directly as information for unity or by optimizing the detectability of motion-carried information for unity. In addition, young infants are able to retain information about edge orientation over short intervals in determining connectedness via a process of spatiotemporal integration.     

攻击行为儿童大脑半球某些认知特点的研究

为了解攻击行为儿童大脑两半球的认知活动特点,采用侧视野速示呈现技术,对径“同伴提名量表”筛选的１７名攻南 儿童和１６名正常儿童进行了比较研究。     

The multiple self: working with dissociation and trauma

This paper describes a patient who appears to have a chronic dissociative personality disorder. Renewed clinical interest in dissociative disorders had arisen in North America in the 1980s, in part due to the influence of the Women's Movement which had highlighted the incidence of child sexual abuse. The early psychological observations of Janet, Freud and Jung on hysterical patients who displayed dissociative phenomena were similar to those displayed by the patient. consideration is given to theoretical understanding of the condition, taking into account the views of the earlier theorists and object-relations theory. The possibility of trauma, in particular childhood sexual abuse, as a causative factor in dissociative disorders is discussed.     

医学分子生物学的发展历程和展望

回顾了医学分子生物学的发展历程,展望了新世纪的医学分子生物学,分子生物学的理论和技术进步改变了医学研究的格局和观念,使人们对疾病的认识深入到分子水平,分子病,基因病,构象病和信息病等概念继续被提出。医学分子生物学的未来发展必将更紧密地与其它学科如细胞生物学,发育生物学,神经生物学,理论医学等相结合,实现分子水平,细胞水平和整体水平的整合,创造更加辉煌的成就。     

My Perspective on Psychotherapy Integration: An Outsider Who's Out of It

My rejoinder is a response to two commentaries on my SEPI keynote in 1997: commentaries written by Goldfried and Cullari. Instead of grappling with the ideas I presented, both respondents were distracted by my satirical beginning. In my talk I proposed a method for studying psychotherapy integration. I am not pessimistic about the potential for integration, nor am I pessimistic about psychotherapy. But I am a skeptic, and science is driven—and indeed advance—by skepticism. In fact, psychotherapy integration requires that its advocates be skeptics. I still do not know what psychotherapy integration is, and remain confused. I can only conclude that I am not only an outsider, but out of it.