客体工作记忆对注意的导向作用：抑制动机的影响

通过两个实验验证了客体工作记忆内容对注意的导向过程是灵活可控的; 与客体工作记忆内容匹配的刺激既可以捕获注意, 也可以被抑制。实验1通过操作匹配试验概率来诱发不同水平的抑制动机, 考察在客体工作记忆内容对注意的导向作用中抑制动机的影响。匹配试验中有分心物与客体工作记忆内容相同。控制试验中所有搜索项目均与客体工作记忆内容不同。实验2保持实际匹配试验概率恒定, 仅通过改变指导语来调节抑制动机水平, 以排除练习的干扰。两实验结果均表明, 当抑制动机水平较低时, 匹配分心物会捕获注意; 而当抑制动机水平足够高时, 匹配分心物会被抑制。并且, 抑制动机水平的高低还会影响认知控制的效应量和时程。     

Development of manipulatory skills and the deployment of attention

Two independent tasks, object manipulation and auditory-visual matching, were used to examine the relationship between developing manual action skills and attention to intermodal object properties in 3.5- and 5.5-month-olds. Although handling skills improved with age, with older infants demonstrating more varied manipulation, there were no age differences for the matching task. When grouped by handling skills, a significant interaction between skill and event type was found for the two age groups combined and for 5.5-month-olds alone. Auditory-visual matching of social events did not vary with handling skills, whereas auditory-visualmatching of object events did. Infants at higher skill levels responded similarly to social and object events, whereas less skilled infants' matching preferences were weaker for object events. These findings indicate that infants increase their attention to auditory and visual properties of objects as this information becomes useful for guiding new actions. This effect is independent of age due to considerable individual variability in the development of object handling skills.     

Cognitive influences on cross-language speech perception in infancy

Previous research has shown that young infants can discriminate both native and nonnative phonetic contrasts with ease. By 10 to 12 months of age, however, infants—like adults—typically have difficulty discriminating consonant contrasts that are not used to distinguish meaning in their native language. Although the timing of this change in speech perception has been firmly established, little is currently known about the processes or mechanisms involved in this selective and adaptive reorganization in nonnative phonetic discrimination. This study was designed to determine if there is a relation between age-related changes in speech perception performance and other developing cognitive abilities. A total of 40 8- to 10-month-old infants were tested on a nonnative consonant discrimination task and then on two additional tasks (a visual categorization task and an object search task) in an attempt to determine whether changes in nonnative consonant perception coincide with changes in these other areas of cognitive/perceptual functioning. The results indicate that changes in task performance occur in synchrony across all three tasks, and that this synchrony is not explained by simple age effects. These findings suggest that domain-general cognitive/perceptual competencies may influence developmental changes in speech perception by the end of the 1st year of life.     

Destructive and reparative transference in multiple levels of group psychotherapy

Group members are challenged to form psychologically meaningful relationships with therapists, other members, and the group as a whole. The way in which individuals perceive this challenge is based on their past experiences. Early relationships establish a perceptual frame in which fears of being hurt and concern about hurting others coexist. Balance between these two ways of generating meaning enables individuals to form relatively healthy relationships. Imbalance in this perceptual frame results in distorted perceptions and maladaptive patterns emerging as transference manifestations. Working through involves repeatedly addressing distortions as members relate to therapists, others and the group as a whole.     

Farting as a defence against unspeakable dread

This paper describes some features of the behaviour of a severely disturbed adopted latency boy. Peter was born premature, suffered several early hospitalizations and surgical operations, and at 2 months of age was removed from his mother's care by Social Services for neglect and abandonment.
Although his subsequent development has been clouded by a series of losses and sudden changes of caregivers, Peter has maintained an unexpected desire to relate, showing considerable innate resilience. When feeling endangered, Peter had developed a defensive olfactive container using his bodily smell and farts to envelop himself in a protective cloud of familiarity against the dread of falling apart, and to hold his personality together.
In the paper Fordham's views of development and Anzieu's concept of psychic envelopes constitute the theoretical underpinning. Bion's concepts of beta- and alpha-elements are discussed in relation to Jung's views on symbolic development and psychological containment.     

Relations between baseline contingencies and equivalence probe performances

Following the emergence of two three-member equivalence classes (A1B1C1 and A2B2C2), 5 college students were exposed to one or more changes in the reinforcement contingencies controlling baseline conditional discriminations. AC relations were either reversed (i.e., C2 was reinforced and C1 punished when A1 was the sample; C1 was reinforced and C2 punished when A2 was the sample) or arranged randomly (i.e., C2 and C1 were reinforced and punished equally often in the presence of A1 and A2). In a third condition, the original AB and AC relations were reversed. Results showed that although baseline conditional discrimination performances were under the control of reinforcement contingencies, and performances on symmetry trials varied with baseline responding for 3 of 4 subjects when contingencies were reversed, performances on transitivity probes remained consistent with the initial equivalence class. These inconsistencies between probe and baseline performances were striking because conditional discriminations are thought to be the determinants of equivalence class performance. Similarly, the contrast between performances on symmetry and transitivity probes was of theoretical interest because equivalence classes are defined by congruent patterns of responding on probe trials.     

Object knowledge and the emergence of language

Infants' spontaneous play with objects was examined for evidence of developments in object knowledge in relation to the emergence of words and the single-word period in language development. Subjects were 7 girls and 7 boys, from different ethnic and economic backgrounds, who were studied longitudinally from 9 months to 26 months of age. Two types of displacements of objects in relation to one another were identified in the children's play: separations and constructions. The development of constructions was associated with the emergence of words, and constructions increased with age while separations decreased. The development of specific constructions, which account for knowledge of the particular properties of objects, was more strongly associated with a vocabulary spurt at the end of the single-word period than with chronological age. Despite the wide variation in the infants' ages when developments in language and play were reached, relations between achievements in the two domains were consistent among them, as confirmed with the Friedman test, p<.001. The results are discussed in terms of the cognitive developments required for play with objects and saying words.     

Object decision test (BORB): normative data for the adult Quebec population and performance in Alzheimer’s disease and the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia

Object decision (OD) test is one subtest of the Birmingham Object Recognition Battery (BORB). It is useful for differential diagnosis among several neurodegenerative diseases. However, normative data provided with this battery count on very few subjects and do not control for the effect of age, which limits interpretability. The purpose of Study 1 was to provide normative data for the OD test of the BORB (version A—hard). The objectives of Study 2 were to establish the diagnostic validity of this task and predictive validity of the normative data in the case of the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia (svPPA) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD).Based on multiple linear regressions, equations to calculate Z-scores corrected for age were provided for 130 participants aged from 47 to 89 years. Performance of 20 healthy participants was compared to that of 14 individuals with svPPA and 18 with AD. After controlling for confounders, participants with svPPA had a lower total score than controls and AD participants. AD participants had a poorer performance than controls only when chimeric objects were considered. Among those with a deficit on the total score of the test, 94% (17/18, including 12 with svPPA) were correctly identified as having a pathological condition (svPPA or AD). This test could help refine differential diagnosis between svPPA and AD patients, especially before the deficits of episodic memory show up.