The lexical bias effect in bilingual speech production: Evidence for feedback between lexical and sublexical levels across languages

The lexical bias effect (LBE) is the tendency for phonological substitution errors to result in existing words (rather than nonwords) at a rate higher than would be predicted by chance. This effect is often interpreted as revealing feedback between the phonological and lexical levels of representation during speech production. We report two experiments in which we tested for the LBE (1) in second-language production (Experiment 1) and (2) across the two languages of a bilingual (Experiment 2). There was an LBE in both situations. Thus, to the extent that the LBE reveals the presence of interactivity between the phonological and the lexical levels of representation, these effects suggest that there is feedback in second-language production and that it extends across the two languages of a bilingual.     

Spoonish spanerisms: A lexical bias effect in Spanish

Lexical bias is the tendency for phonological errors to form existing words at a rate above chance. This effect has been observed in experiments and corpus analyses in Germanic languages, but S. del Viso, J. M. Igoa, and J. E. García-Albea (1991) found no effect in a Spanish corpus study. Because lexical bias plays an important role in the debate on interactivity in language production, the authors reconsidered its absence in Spanish. A corpus analysis, which considered relatively many errors and which used a method of estimating chance rate that is relatively independent of total error number, and a speech-error elicitation experiment provided converging evidence for lexical bias in Spanish. The authors conclude that the processing mechanisms underlying this effect hold cross-linguistically.     

Changes in search rate but not in the dynamics of exogenous attention in action videogame players

Many previous studies have shown that the speed of processing in attentionally demanding tasks seems enhanced following habitual action videogame play. However, using one of the diagnostic tasks for efficiency of attentional processing, a visual search task, Castel and collaborators (Castel, Pratt, & Drummond, Acta Psychologica 119:217-230, 2005) reported no difference in visual search rates, instead proposing that action gaming may change response execution time rather than the efficiency of visual selective attention per se. Here we used two hard visual search tasks, one measuring reaction time and the other accuracy, to test whether visual search rate may be changed by action videogame play. We found greater search rates in the gamer group than in the nongamer controls, consistent with increased efficiency in visual selective attention. We then asked how general the change in attentional throughput noted so far in gamers might be by testing whether exogenous attentional cues would lead to a disproportional enhancement in throughput in gamers as compared to nongamers. Interestingly, exogenous cues were found to enhance throughput equivalently between gamers and nongamers, suggesting that not all mechanisms known to enhance throughput are similarly enhanced in action videogamers.     

The big carrot: High‐stakes incentives revisited

Using an international dataset of about 35 000 subjects, this paper provides an empirical example of high‐stakes incentives in relation to religious practice. First, we show that incentives (based on absolute belief) play a salient role in religious performance. Second, we find that when both positive (heaven) and negative (hell) incentives are available the former are more effective than the latter. Specifically, it is shown that beliefs in heaven are much more relevant than beliefs in hell when estimating the production of religious commodities (church‐attendance and praying equations). Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Is "Change Blindness" Attenuated by Domain-specific Expertise? An Expert-Novices Comparison of Change Detection in Football Images

When an aspect of a visual image is altered, observers often fail to notice the change. Recent studies suggest that successful change detection requires the observer to attend to and effortfully encode the changing aspect between the images. In this study we addressed the question of whether individual characteristics of the observer, namely expertise in a domain, selectively influence the ability to detect changes in images from that domain. A total of 48 individuals, half of whom were experts in the sport of American football and half of whom were American football novices, were presented alternating sequences of football-related and unrelated images. Our results indicate that expertise in a specific domain increases observers' sensitivity to semantic changes of domain-related images. Implications for the development of diagnostic tools are briefly addressed.     

Transferences in parent–infant psychoanalytic treatments

In parent–infant treatments, babies sometimes exhibit symptoms such as screaming, clinging, and fearful gaze avoidance of the analyst. The paper investigates if such phenomena may be regarded as transference manifestations, and if so, if they appear both in younger and older infants. Based on three case presentations, it is concluded that some babies are capable of forming both brief and enduring transferences. The term “indirect infant transference” refers to when a baby reacts emotionally to the analyst as long as the parent's transference remains unresolved. “Direct transference” refers to when a baby reacts in a non‐mediated way to the analyst. The necessary tool of investigation for discovering these phenomena is a psychoanalytic method with an explicit, though not exclusive, focus on the baby. Discerning them in the clinical encounter may help us understand the baby's predicament and when and how to address the baby or the parent. These treatments constitute an empirical field awaiting more extensive clinical and theoretical investigation. Already now, they suggest that transference may be rooted in, and may appear during, very early developmental stages. The paper's positions are compared with those put forward by other parent‐infant clinicians.     

An empirical test of two opposing theoretical models of prefrontal function.

The purpose of this study was to compare the validity of two models which contrast with each other in the manner in which they integrate neuropsychological tests into distinct prefrontal constructs. The first prefrontal model consists of five distinct functional constructs drawn from human clinical neuropsychology. The second model, elaborated by Goldman-Rakic, is based primarily on monkey research and postulates a basic prefrontal function, "on-line representational memory," which guides behavior in the absence of, or despite discriminative environmental stimuli. In the latter model, distinct prefrontal functional constructs are primarily defined in terms of various types of representational memory involved in specific tasks. Eleven "prefrontal" measures were obtained from 259 normal adults, stratified for age, education, and sex. Confirmatory factor analyses revealed that the Goldman-Rakic model "fit" the data better than the model derived from human clinical neuropsychology, while several constructs commonly used in human neuropsychology were refuted. It was concluded that new research on brain-damaged humans with a view to understanding prefrontal function might benefit from using the Goldman-Rakic model as a starting point.