On the parity of structural persistence in language production and comprehension

Structural priming creates structural persistence. That is, differences in experience with syntax can change subsequent language performance, and the changes can be observed in both language production and comprehension. However, the effects in comprehension and production appear to differ. In comprehension, persistence is typically found when the verbs are the same in primes and targets; in production, persistence occurs without verb overlap. The contrast suggests a theoretically important hypothesis: parsing in comprehension is lexically driven while formulation in production is structurally driven. A major weakness in this hypothesis about comprehension-production differences is that its empirical motivation rests on the outcomes of experiments in which the priming manipulations differ, the primed sentence structures differ, and the measures of priming differ. To sharpen the comparison, we examined structural persistence with and without verb overlap in both reading comprehension and spoken production, using the same prime presentation procedure, the same syntactic structures, the same sentences, and the same participants. These methods yielded abstract structural persistence in comprehension as well as production. A measure of the strength of persistence revealed significant effects of priming and verb overlap without significant comprehension—production differences. This argues for uniformity in the structural mechanisms of language processing.     

Diagnostic Stability of ADHD in a Community Sample of School-Aged Children Screened for Disruptive Behavior

A large school-based sample of children in Grades 1, 2, 3, and 4 were screened for disruptive behavior and subsequently assessed over a 5-year period for DSM-III-R symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and other externalizing and internalizing behavior disorders. Parents completed structured diagnostic interviews in Years 1, 4, and 5, and teachers completed Behavioral Assessment for Children—Teacher Rating Scales behavioral ratings annually. For parent-derived diagnostic data, both inattention and hyperactivity/impulsivity symptom groups declined from Year 1 to Year 4, with hyperactivity showing more significant decline. For teacher-rated behavioral dimensions, the Attention Problems scale declined from Year 1 to Year 3 and stabilized thereafter. The Hyperactivity scale showed stability during the first 3 years before declining in Year 4. Of those children diagnosed with ADHD in Year 1, 69% still met criteria for ADHD in either Year 4 or 5. Persisters were more likely to exhibit coexisting conduct disorder in Year 1 and oppositional defiant disorder in Years 1, 4, and 5. Parents of persisters reported more psychosocial adversity on measures of parenting and marital satisfaction.     

Koinonia as Ecumenical Opening for Baptists

This article discusses a new opening for Baptists’ role in multilateral ecumenical dialogue since the release of Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry. A shift of emphasis toward koinonia has embraced relationship as a model for ecumenical endeavours while maintaining a robust sense of the goal of visible unity. The article will discuss several ecumenical insights and further potential for Baptist ecumenical work as a result of the centrality of koinonia.     

Towards explaining the “how” of positive orientation: The beliefs‐affect‐engagement model

As a higher order latent construct, positive orientation captures the common core of an individual's beliefs concerning oneself, life, and the future. This article aims at explaining how positive orientation may relate to activity engagement and stimulate persistence in action. It presents the beliefs‐affect‐engagement model, postulating that positive orientation stimulates positive affect, which in turn fosters activity engagement. A distinction between the trait and state components of positive orientation also is made, and specific mechanisms explaining engagement and persistence concerning the trait and two state components of each construct (relatively stable and temporal‐specific aspects of a state) are discussed. The proposed model may contribute to further development of the positive orientation theory.     

Antipredator behavior of Swiss-Webster mice in a visible burrow system

Swiss-Webster mice living in a visible burrow system (VBS) reacted to presentation of a live cat in the surface area of the VBS by retreat to the burrows and reductions in nondefensive behaviors such as eating and drinking. Live eat-exposed subjects remained in the burrows 14 hr or more, while subjects exposed to a toy (plush) cat prior to live cat exposure reemerged almost immediately and made many contacts with the toy cat. However, subjects exposed first to the cat and later to a toy cat showed intermediate surface reemergence times and cat contacts during toy cat tests, indicating strong sensitization effects of prior live cat exposure. Previous studies indicated that rats in this situation show retreat to the burrows, surface avoidance, and reduction in nondefensive behaviors. The mouse pattern was similar, with the notable exception that in the first 5min block after cat presentation, mice rapidly alternated retreat to the burrow chambers with reappearance in the tunnel segment near the surface, to scan the surface visually and sniff. Movement during this time block involved a stretch attend posture characteristic also of risk assessment activities in rats. Such visual and olfactory inspection of the cat is not seen in rats in the VBS. This difference may be related to the finding that rats, but not mice, emit ultrasonic “alarm cries” during and after cat exposure. © 1995 Wiley-Liss, Inc.     

Construal‐level Mindsets Enhance Behavioral Persistence in Response to Incentive Valence

In this research, we find that incentive valence and construal‐level mindsets can interact to influence behavioral persistence on challenging tasks. An abstract mindset improves persistence in response to positively framed incentives whereas a concrete mindset improves persistence in response to negatively framed incentives. This interaction effect can be observed even when the cues inducing construal‐level mindsets are not related to the incentives or the incentivized tasks. Participants in our studies were either positively or negatively incentivized to solve a set of difficult anagrams, and were primed with an abstract or a concrete mindset using spatial (Study 1) and social (Study 2) cues. The participants persisted longer in response to the positively framed incentive when primed with spatially or socially remote cues. In contrast, for the negatively framed incentive, participants persisted longer when primed with spatially or socially proximal cues. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Persistence and accommodation in short‐term priming and other perceptual paradigms: temporal segregation through synaptic depression

Perceptual input changes constantly in an unpredictable fashion, often changing before our somewhat sluggish perceptual systems have adequately processed this input. This can give rise to source confusion—how do we know whether a given perceptual activation is due to the current input, or a previous input that had yet to be completely processed? We propose that activity‐dependent neural accommodation naturally limits this source confusion by suppressing items once they have been identified. We review behavioral paradigms from different literatures that measure the correlates of persistence and accommodation. Of the various accommodative mechanisms, we focus on synaptic depression, deriving a rate‐coded expression that can be used to produce accommodating dynamics in any neural network with real valued activation. We implement this expression in a hierarchical model of perception termed, “a neural mechanism for responding optimally with unknown sources of evidence” (nROUSE). This model can be viewed as a more detailed version of the more abstract ROUSE model of Huber, Shiffrin, Lyle, and Ruys (2001), which produces accommodated levels of feature evidence through an optimal calculation. We apply nROUSE to three short‐term priming experiments that manipulated prime duration.     

Face‐space‐R: Towards a unified account of face recognition

Versions of the “face space” are considered and built upon to develop an explicitly defined model of face recognition based on stimulus generalization that is similar to models of animal learning. This face‐space‐R model is implemented using realistic numbers of known faces. The model is able to account for distinctiveness, caricature, and race effects. It also predicts which faces will be falsely recognized and accounts for mirror effects. The application of the model to face learning and development is considered, as well as the effects of brief presentation. By varying parameters of the model, it is possible to match its performance to that of humans, leading to an estimate of the dimensionality of face space (of between 15 and 22 dimensions for same‐race faces).     

Rapid enumeration within a fraction of a single glance: The role of visible persistence in object individuation capacity

The number of items that can be individuated at a single glance is limited. Here, we investigate object individuation at a higher temporal resolution, in fractions of a single glance. In two experiments involving object individuation we manipulated the duration of visual persistence of the target items with a forward masking procedure. The number of items as well as their stimulus–onset asynchrony (SOA) to the mask was varied independently. The results showed main effects of numerosity and SOA, as well as an interaction. These effects were not caused by a generic reduction of item visibility by the mask. Instead, the SOA manipulation appeared to fractionate the time to access the sensory image. These findings suggest that the capacity limit of 3–4 items found in object individuation is, at least partially, the consequence of the temporal window of access to sensory information.