7-11-year-old children show an advantage for matching and recognizing the internal features of familiar faces: Evidence against a developmental shift

Adults are better at recognizing familiar faces from the internal facial features (eyes, nose, mouth) than from the external facial features (hair, face outline). However, previous research suggests that this “internal advantage” does not appear until relatively late in childhood, and some studies suggest that children rely on external features to recognize all faces, whether familiar or not. We use a matching task to examine face processing in 7-8- and 10-11-year-old children. We use a design in which all face stimuli can be used as familiar items (for participants who are classmates) and unfamiliar items (for participants from a different school). Using this design, we find an internal feature advantage for matching familiar faces, for both groups of children. The same children were then shown the external and internal features of their classmates and were asked to name or otherwise identify them. Again, both age groups identified more of their classmates correctly from the internal than the external features. This is the first time an internal advantage has been reported in this age group. Results suggest that children as young as 7 process faces in the same way as do adults, and that once procedural difficulties are overcome, the standard effects of familiarity are observed.     

Toward a predictive model of suicidal ideation and behavior: some preliminary data in college students

Within a multivariate statistical design, the relationship of various interpersonal, emotional, and cognitive variables to suicidal ideation and behavior in college students was examined. A total of 158 subjects (58 males, 100 females) completed self-report measures of life stress, faulty cognitions, loneliness, depression, hopelessness, family cohesiveness, adaptive reasons for living, and suicidal ideation and behavior. The results of a multiple-regression analysis, forward-inclusion algorithm, indicated that a predictive equation consisting of loneliness, irrational beliefs, and low adaptive reasons for living best accounted for suicidal behavior scores. To determine the basic structures and power of the predictor variables under study, a factor analysis and composite regression were employed, resulting in a predictive equation consisting of three factors: Social/Emotional Alienation, Cognitive Distortions, and Deficient Adaptive Resources. Results are discussed in terms of an interactional model of suicidal behavior.     

Inhibition of the LH Surge by Restraint Stress in Cyclic Rats: Studies on the Role of GABAA and GABAB Receptors

There is evidence that stress can alter the activity in the brain of gamma-aminobutyricacid (GABA), a neurotransmitter that has been implicated in the regulation of LH secretion. In the present study the role of GABA in the restraint stress-induced inhibition of the LH surge was investigated in the intact cyclic rat. Intracerebroventricular (icv) administration of the GABAA receptor agonist muscimol (0.1, 0.5 or 1 μg) 5 min before the presumed onset of the pro-oestrous LH surge (at 0900 h) caused a dose dependent suppression of the surge. A single dose of the GABAB receptor agonist baclofen (1 μg; icv) injected at 0855 h postponed the onset of the LH surge, and repeated injections at 0855 and 1130 h suppressed the surge. These data indicate that GABA-ergic activity in the brain can inhibit the LH surge in the cyclic rat via GABAA and GABAB receptors. Pro-oestrous rats were subjected to 5 hrs of restraint starting at 0855 h. Pretreatment with the GABAA receptor antagonist bicuculine (1 μg; icv) at 0840, 0940 and 1040 h or pretreatment with the GABAB receptor antagonist phaclofen (10 μg; icv) at 0840 h were ineffective in preventing the restraint-induced inhibition of the LH surge. The results suggest that GABAA and GABAB receptors are not involved in the inhibitory effect of restraint stress on the LH surge.     

Effects of Acute Stress or Centrally Injected Interleukin-1beta on Neuropeptide Expression in the Immune System

Acute stress stimulates the expression and release of corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH) and arginine vasopressin (AVP) from the hypothalamus, and the pro-opiomelanocortin products beta-endorphin and ACTH from the anterior pituitary. These neuropeptides are also expressed in immune tissues, and it has been proposed that they may modulate immune responses to stress through paracrine mechanisms. We subjected rats to restraint stress or central injection of interleukin (IL)-1beta to determine whether these acute stimuli can alter the expression of neuropeptides in the spleen and thymus. Restraint stress significantly increased the contents of all these neuropeptides in thymic, but not splenic, extracts. A single icv injection of IL-1beta increased contents of CRH, AVP, ACTH and beta-endorphin in the spleens of both sham-operated and adrenalectomised (ADX) rats. IL-1beta increased thymic contents of CRH and ACTH in sham-operated rats but these increases were not observed in ADX rats. These results suggest that the effects of IL-1beta on neuropeptide expression in the spleen are independent of glucocorticoids, whereas IL-1beta stimulation of neuropeptide expression in the thymus is dependent on circulating glucocorticoids. There were significant correlations between increases in CRH, ACTH and beta-endorphin in the spleen, and between CRH and ACTH in the thymus, consistent with the suggestion that IL-1beta-induced increases in ACTH and beta-endorphin may be mediated through CRH. These results provide evidence that stressors can directly influence neuropeptide expression in immune tissues. Thus stress may influence immune functions through paracrine mechanisms involving locally synthesised neuropeptides as well as through activation of the hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal axis.     

Familiarity influences judgments of sex: the case of voice recognition

Two experiments are reported in which subjects made judgments about the sex or the familiarity of a voice. In experiment 1, subjects were fans of the BBC-radio soap opera, The Archers, and familiar voice clips were taken from this programme. Subjects showed a large reduction in response times when making sex judgments to familiar voices, despite the fact that sex judgments are generally much faster than familiarity judgments. In experiment 2, the same familiar clips were played to subjects unfamiliar with the soap opera, and no difference was observed in times to make sex judgments to Archers or non-Archers voices. We conclude that, unlike the case of face recognition, sex and identity processing of voices are not independent. The findings constrain models of person recognition across multiple modalities.     

Finding MAPs using strongly equivalent high order recurrent symmetric connectionist networks

Belief revision is the problem of finding the most plausible explanation for an observed set of evidences. It has many applications in various scientific domains like natural language understanding, medical diagnosis and computational biology. Bayesian Networks (BN) is an important probabilistic graphical formalism widely used for belief revision tasks. In BN, belief revision can be achieved by finding the maximum a posteriori (MAP) assignment. Finding MAP is an NP-Hard problem. In previous work, we showed how to find the MAP assignment in BN using High Order Recurrent Neural Networks (HORN) through an intermediate representation of Cost-Based Abduction. This method eliminates the need to explicitly construct the energy function in two steps, objective and constraints. This paper builds on that previous work by providing the theoretical foundation and proving that the resultant HORN used to find MAP is strongly equivalent to the original BN it tries to solve.     

In conflict with ourselves? An investigation of heuristic and analytic processes in decision making

Many theorists propose two types of processing: heuristic and analytic. In conflict tasks, in which these processing types lead to opposing responses, giving the analytic response may require bothdetection andresolution of the conflict. The ratio bias task, in which people tend to treat larger numbered ratios (e.g., 20/100) as indicating a higher likelihood of winning than do equivalent smaller numbered ratios (e.g., 2/10), is considered to induce such a conflict. Experiment 1 showed response time differences associated with conflict detection, resolution, and the amount of conflict induced. The conflict detection and resolution effects were replicated in Experiment 2 and were not affected by decreasing the influence of the heuristic response or decreasing the capacity to make the analytic response. The results are consistent with dual-process accounts, but a single-process account in which quantitative, rather than qualitative, differences in processing are assumed fares equally well in explaining the data.     

Separating the confident from the correct: Leveraging member knowledge in groups to improve decision making and performance

Groups often struggle to distinguish expert members from others who stand out for various reasons but may not be particularly knowledgeable (Littlepage & Mueller, 1997). We examined an intervention designed to improve group decision making and performance through instructing group members to search for information they already possessed that was relevant to a problem. Participants estimated values and expressed their confidence in their estimates individually and then a second time either individually or in a group. This was done with or without the intervention. Results indicated that: (1) groups were more confident than, and out-performed, individuals, (2) group decision making was best captured by models predicting more influence for more accurate members when the intervention was used and more influence for more confident members in its absence, and (3) groups that received the intervention out-performed groups that did not.