The Development of a Simple Ballistic Skill with and Without Visual Control

80 randomly selected male Ss discriminated the “effort” required to perform a simple 1-handed ballistic aiming task: aligning a Fletcher’s Trolley with a pointer placed at varying distances adjacent to an inclined wooden track. Groups were aged 5-6, 10-11, 15-16, and 18 or more yr., with 10 Ss able to see both hands and target while the other 10 could see neither. A split-plot factorial design was used. On excluding the 5-6 yr.-old “Nonvision” children, the remaining 7 sub-groups were shown to be homogeneous. Mean absolute error scores increased with Distance, and also with a decrease in Age. In the “Non-vision” condition accuracy was reduced still further for all Ss. Age, Vision, and Distance and the interaction of Age with Vision were all significant, p<.01.     

Age-Associated Differences in Positional Variability Are Greater With the Lower Limb

The authors’ purpose was to determine the interaction of age and limb used on positional variability at different loads. Eleven young adults and 10 older adults were asked to accurately match and maintain a horizontal target line with 5° abduction of their index finger and 5° dorsiflexion of their ankle for 20 s at loads ranging from 2 to 50% of the maximal load that could be lifted with each limb. The visual gain was kept constant at 1° (visual angle). Positional variability was greater in older adults for both limbs, nonetheless age-associated differences were greater for the ankle dorsiflexion task compared with the abduction of the index finger task. In addition, we found that, independent of age, motor output variability was greater with the lower limb. These results provide novel evidence that older adults may exhibit greater impairments in motor control with the foot compared with the finger. Furthermore, these findings support the idea, using a different task than previous literature, that the lower limb has greater motor output variability than the upper limb.     

Rostro‐caudal and dorso‐ventral gradients in medial and lateral prefrontal cortex during cognitive control of affective and cognitive interference

Characterizing the anatomical substrates of major brain functions such as cognition and emotion is of utmost importance to the ongoing efforts of understanding the nature of psychiatric ailments and their potential treatment. The aim of our study was to investigate how the brain handles affective and cognitive interferences on cognitive processes. Functional magnetic resonance imaging investigation was performed on healthy individuals, comparing the brain oxygenation level dependent activation patterns during affective and cognitive counting Stroop tasks. The affective Stroop task activated rostral parts of medial prefrontal cortex (PFC) and rostral and ventral parts of lateral PFC, while cognitive Stroop activated caudal parts of medial PFC and caudal and dorsal parts of lateral PFC. Our findings suggest that the brain may handle affective and cognitive interference on cognitive processes differentially, with affective interference preferentially activating rostral and ventral PFC networks and cognitive interference activating caudal and dorsal PFC networks.     

Pointing and the interference effect in obsessive‐compulsive disorder (OCD)

The interference effect in obsessive‐compulsive disorder (OCD) was investigated in order to analyze cognitive aspects of motor stereotypy in OCD‐related compulsions. So far, the domain of cognitive control in compulsive behavior has been under‐investigated. Twelve participants (OCD patients and healthy controls) completed a newly created computer‐based pointing task as well as standard clinical and psychological background measures. Findings showed that the patients displayed a larger visual interference effect compared to the controls and pointing paths were longer in time as well as distance when a distractor stimulus was present. It is concluded that, for compensation, patients would need to generate excessive amounts of attentional resources not available to overcome motor rigidity on the one side and visual distraction on the other side.     

The Duration and Intensity of the Exposure Light as Factors in Determining the Course of the Subsequent Dark-Adaptation: I. the Matching Method

The authors investigated the phenomenon that performance in an ongoing task declines when individuals must carry out a prospective memory (PM) task. This effect is referred to as the PM interference effect. The authors examined whether the PM interference effect differs between event-based and time-based PM tasks and whether it is increased among the elderly. The authors also investigated adult age differences in PM performance and the potential underlying mechanisms of the age deficits in PM. They found that the PM interference effect was greater in event-based than in time-based tasks. However, aging was not associated with an increase in PM interference effects. Age differences in PM performance were more exaggerated in time-based than event-based PM, but they were not mediated by age differences in traditional cognitive ability measures. In time-based PM, age showed a unique adverse effect even after controlling for the ability to externally monitor the time, leading to the possibility that aging disrupts time-based PM because of deficits in internally processing the time.     

Non‐specific encoding of threat in social phobia and panic disorder

This study employs a release of proactive interference technique to explore encoding‐related processes in social phobia. Twenty‐six individuals with social phobia and 24 individuals with panic disorder participated in the memory task. Significant release of proactive interference was found when neutral and threat dimensions were encoded, but not when social and physical threat dimensions, or when positive and threat dimensions were presented. Threat was therefore differently encoded depending on the active encoding context in which semantic processing occurred. Individuals with social phobia or panic disorder did not differ in the release of proactive interference. The present experiment consequently yields little support for the specificity hypothesis in memory of anxious individuals. Instead, the findings generally demonstrate that threat encoding is similar for people with social phobia and those with panic disorder.     

Prior task experience and comparable stimulus exposure nullify focal and nonfocal prospective memory retrieval differences

We explored the nature of focal versus nonfocal event-based prospective memory retrieval. In the context of a lexical decision task, people received an intention to respond to a single word (focal) in one condition and to a category label (nonfocal) for the other condition. Participants experienced both conditions, and their order was manipulated. The focal instruction condition was a single word presented multiple times. In Experiment 1, the stimuli in the nonfocal condition were different exemplars from a category, each presented once. In the nonfocal condition retrieval was poorer and reaction times were slower during the ongoing task as compared to the focal condition, replicating prior findings. In Experiment 2, the stimulus in the nonfocal condition was a single category exemplar repeated multiple times. When this single-exemplar nonfocal condition followed in time the single-item focal condition, focal versus nonfocal performance was virtually indistinguishable. These results demonstrate that people can modify their stimulus processing and expectations in event-based prospective memory tasks based on experience with the nature of prospective cues and with the ongoing task.     

The impact of experiential avoidance on the relations between illness representations,pain catastrophising and pain interference in chronic pain

Objective: The aim of this study was to examine the effects of experiential avoidance (EA) on the indirect relationship of chronic pain patients’ illness representations to pain interference, through pain catastrophising

Design and main outcome measure: The sample consisted of 162 patients diagnosed with an arthritis-related or a musculoskeletal disorder. The effects of EA on the pathway between illness representations, pain catastrophising and pain interference were examined with PROCESS, a computational tool for SPSS

Results: After controlling for patient and illness-related variables and pain severity, the ‘illness representations–pain catastrophising–pain interference’ pathway was interrupted at the higher levels of EA. The reason was that, at the high levels of EA, either the relation of illness representations to pain catastrophising or the relation of pain catastrophising to pain interference was not statistically significant.

Conclusion: The findings indicate that EA is not a generalised negative response to highly aversive conditions, at least as far as the factors examined in this study are concerned. EA may rather reflect a coping reaction, the impact of which depends on its specific interactions with the other aspects of the self-regulation mechanism. At least in chronic pain, EA should become the focus of potential intervention only when its interaction with the illness-related self-regulation mechanism results in negative outcomes.     

How does information from low and high spatial frequencies interact during scene categorization?

Current models of visual perception suggest that, during scene categorization, low spatial frequencies (LSF) are rapidly processed and activate plausible interpretations of visual input. This coarse analysis would be used to guide subsequent processing of high spatial frequencies (HSF). The present study aimed to further examine how information from LSF and HSF interact and influence each other during scene categorization. In a first experimental session, participants had to categorize LSF and HSF filtered scenes belonging to two different semantic categories (artificial vs. natural). In a second experimental session, we used hybrid scenes as stimuli made by combining LSF and HSF from two different scenes which were semantically similar or dissimilar. Half of the participants categorized LSF scenes in hybrids, and the other half categorized HSF scenes in hybrids. Stimuli were presented for 30 or 100?ms. Session 1 results showed better performance for LSF than HSF scene categorization. Session 2 scene categorization was faster when participants attended and categorized LSF than HSF scene in hybrids. The semantic interference of a semantically dissimilar HSF scene on LSF scene categorization was greater than the semantic interference of a semantically dissimilar LSF scene on HSF scene categorization, irrespective of exposure duration. These results suggest a LSF advantage for scene categorization, and highlight the prominent role of HSF information when there is uncertainty about the visual stimulus, in order to disentangle between alternative interpretations.