A case of subcortical dementia due to sarcoidosis of the hypothalamus and fornices

A patient with sarcoidosis involving predominantly the hypothalamus and fornices was evaluated for dementia. He showed a relative sparing of fund of knowledge and orientation. Memory skills, particularly short-term memory, were severely impaired. Behavioral changes included apathy and a lack of spontaneity. Insight was relatively preserved. The pattern of his deficits showed some similarities to the pattern reported in patients with Huntington's disease and was different from that described in Alzheimer's disease. The dementia caused by subcortical pathology may differ in important respects from that caused by diffuse cortical dysfunction.     

Hemispheric differences in the voluntary inhibition of movement

Twenty normal, twenty left-, and fifteen right-brain injured subjects, all right-handed, were assigned a sequence of voluntary inhibition of 23 movements. The inhibition lapse was recorded. Statistical analyses indicated a high performance in the normal and a deficient performance in left-brain injured subjects, no influence of the neurological symptoms on groups' achievement, a handicap in the subjects affected by a frontal lesion in the right brain, a hierarchical clustering of items varying according to the groups, and an organ-group interaction.     

Ear asymmetry in recognition of unfamiliar voices

Female right-handed subjects were presented with a memory set consisting of five unfamiliar female voices. They were then tested with a recognition procedure in which samples of voice, memory set or novel, 2 or 4 sec in duration, were heard in one ear and a competing noise stimulus was heard in the other ear. There was an overall left-ear advantage in accuracy of recognition. This advantage held particularly for identifications of memory-set voices in the second half of trials. Internal analyses indicated that the left-ear advantage could not be attributed to greater retroactive interference during right-ear presentation. Congruent with studies of recognition of unfamiliar faces, the findings suggested right-hemisphere superiority in the recognition of unfamiliar voices.     

Sequential development of helping behavior: A cognitive-learning approach

It is suggested that cognitive, social-perspective, and moral skills, on the one hand, and a self-regulatory skill on the other, determine the extent, quantity, and quality of helping acts. A framework for the analysis of helping behavior development by integrating cognitive-development- and social-learning approaches is suggested. The framework proposes that altruistic behavior is a specific, highest-level kind of helping behavior. Helping behavior develops sequentially as its quality changes. The quality of the helping behavior is reflected in individuals' motivation to act. Empirical evidence supporting the suggested framework is presented, and the contribution of this framework for the study of prosocial behavior is discussed.     

Processing the intensity of dichotic syllables

Subjects were required to match the intensity levels of the left- and right-ear members of dichotically presented nonsense syllables. When subjects matched the overall average intensities of a sequence of differing dichotic pairs no ear differences were observed. When repetitions of single dichotic pairs were matched right-ear syllables were judged louder than left-ear syllables. The results support a model predicting left-hemisphere superiority in a task permitting higher-level encoding of speech input.     

The effects of distance between interactants and subject anxiety on conjugate lateral eye movements

Ehrlichman and Weinberger (1978, Psychological Bulletin 85, 1080-1101) have suggested that the distance between participants during face-to-face interviewing may be a significant determinant of directional patterns of conjugate lateral eye movements (CLEMS). As predicted, at the longer, social distance CLEMS were dependent on the verbal or spatial nature of questions; when interactants were at a closer, personal distance CLEMS became more consistent in direction, regardless of problem type. Distance manipulation also differentially altered CLEM patterns for the two sexes.     

Computing with connections in visual recognition of origami objects

This paper summarizes our initial foray in tackling Artificial Intelligence problems using a connectionist approach. The particular task chosen was the visual recognition of objects in the Origami world as defined by. The two major questions answered were how to construct a connectionist network to represent and recognize projected line drawings of Origami objects and what advantages such an approach would have. The structure of the resulting connectionist network can be described as a hierarchy of parameter or feature spaces with each node in each of the feature spaces representing a hypothesis about the possible existence of a specific geometric feature of an Origami object. The dynamic behavior of the network is a form of iterative refinement or relaxation whose major characteristic is to prefer more globally interesting interpretations of the input over locally pleasing ones. Examples from the implementation illustrate the system's ability to deal with forms of noise, occlusion and missing information. Other benefits are an inherently parallel approach to vision, limitation of explicit ordering of the search involved in matching model to instance and the elimination of backtracking due to the sharing of partial results as the search progresses. Extensions and problems are also discussed.