No need to fake it: reproduction of the Asch experiment without confederates

In the present experiment, we replicated Asch's seminal study on social conformity without using confederates. We adapted a presentation trick in order to present two different stimuli secretly to groups of participants to create minorities and majorities without utilizing confederates. One hundred and four Japanese undergraduates (40 men and 64 women) carried out Asch-equivalent tasks in same-sex groups of four. In each group, we adapted the fMORI Technique to present the tasks such that one person (minority participant) observed different stimuli than the other three people (majority participants). The same nine stimulus sets that Asch had used were carefully reproduced as PowerPoint slides and projected onto a half-transparent screen. As for the critical tasks, the top part of the standard lines appeared in either green or magenta so that two groups of participants would see them differently when they wore two types of polarizing sunglasses that filtered either green or magenta to make the lines appear longer or shorter. A post-experimental questionnaire confirmed that no participant among either the minority or majority viewers noticed the presentation trick. The results showed that, in line with Asch's basic findings, the minority women participants conformed to the majority. However, our study produced two different results: While minority women conformed, minority men did not. Contrary to Asch's findings, the frequency of conformity of minority participants was almost the same regardless of whether the majority answered unanimously or not.     

The neural correlates of driving performance identified using positron emission tomography

Driving is a complex behavior involving multiple cognitive domains. To identify neural correlates of driving performance, [15O]H2O positron emission tomography was performed using a simulated driving task. Compared with the resting condition, simulated driving increased regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) in the cerebellum, occipital, and parietal cortices. Correlations between rCBF and measurements of driving performance were evaluated during simulated driving. Interestingly, rCBF in the thalamus, midbrain, and cerebellum were positively correlated with time required to complete the course and rCBF in the posterior cingulate gyrus was positively correlated with number of crashes during the task. These brain regions may thus play roles in the maintenance of driving performance.     

Conditioned taste aversion with sucrose and tactile stimuli in the pond snail Lymnaea stagnalis

A new form of taste aversion conditioning was established in the pond snail Lymnaea stagnalis. An associative memory, lasting 24h, was produced in the pond snail with 20 pairings of 100 mM sucrose as the conditioned stimulus (CS) and mechanical stimulation to the head as the unconditioned stimulus (UCS). Animals exposed to reverse pairings of the CS and UCS failed to learn the association. The learning was characterized by a shift in the response to the UCS from a whole-body withdrawal response to the cessation of feeding behavior.     

Anomalous production of vacancy clusters and the possibility of plastic deformation of crystalline metals without dislocations

High-speed heavy plastic deformation of thin foils of fcc metals, including aluminium, is found to produce a high density of small vacancy clusters, in the form of stacking-fault tetrahedra. The dependences of the density of the clusters on the deformation temperature and deformation rate indicate the production of vacancy clusters from deformation-induced dispersed vacancies. Neither dislocations nor any indication of the reaction of dislocations are present in the regions containing a high density of vacancy clusters. A possible model is proposed that describes, at extremely high strain rates where dislocation generation is difficult, how a high concentration of point defects is produced by a large number of parallel shifts of atomic planes without dislocations.     

Unforced Revision in Processing Relative Clause Association Ambiguity in Japanese: Evidence Against Revision as Last Resort

The current study tackles a long standing question of whether comprehenders perform structural revision when it is not forced by grammar or not. Using an eye-tracking reading paradigm, we addressed this issue by making use of global structural ambiguity in Japanese. Our results show that comprehenders initially associate a relative clause with the first potential head noun and that they revise this analysis when the second noun is lexico-semantically possible as the relative clause head, but do not when it is impossible. The results are incompatible with the Revision as Last Resort hypothesis. Instead, they support the parsing with unforced revision that is immediately sensitive to lexical properties. We argue that our results cannot be accounted for by serial modular processing models but that they can be explained by ranked-parallel interactive processing models. Furthermore, we propose that head-finality is a key factor involved in the availability of unforced revision.     

Discrete cortical regions associated with the musical beauty of major and minor chords

Previous research has demonstrated that the degree of aesthetic pleasure a person experiences correlates with the activation of reward functions in the brain. However, it is unclear whether different affective qualities and the perceptions of beauty that they evoke correspond to specific areas of brain activation. Major and minor musical keys induce two types of affective qualities--bright/happy and dark/sad--that both evoke aesthetic pleasure. In the present study, we used positron emission tomography to demonstrate that the two musical keys (major and minor) activate distinct brain areas. Minor consonant chords perceived as beautiful strongly activated the right striatum, which has been assumed to play an important role in reward and emotion processing, whereas major consonant chords perceived as beautiful induced significant activity in the left middle temporal gyrus, which is believed to be related to coherent and orderly information processing. These results suggest that major and minor keys, both of which are perceived as beautiful, are processed differently in the brain.     

A quantitative near-infrared spectroscopy study: a decrease in cerebral hemoglobin oxygenation in Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment

A newly developed quantitative near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) system was used to measure changes in cortical hemoglobin oxygenation during the Verbal Fluency Task in 32 healthy controls, 15 subjects with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and 15 patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). The amplitude of changes in the waveform, which was quantitatively calculated by a signal processing method, was significantly lower in the frontal, and the bilateral parietal areas in the AD group, whereas that in the MCI group was significantly lower only in the right parietal area. The NIRS system may be a potential tool for the primary screening of AD.     

Effects of prior knowledge and response bias upon recognition memory for a story: Implications for children's eyewitness testimony

Abstract: The present study was designed to evaluate the integration hypothesis and the response bias hypothesis for explaining the fragility of children's eyewitness memory, by varying the plausibility of postevent information and the strength of response bias in recognition tests. Preschool children were told a story in which a boy named Ken saw a housebreaker stealing various objects and the postevent information was also incorporated into the story. The first recognition test was administered immediately following the presentation of an interpolated story, and the second recognition test was administered 10 weeks later. The results indicated that high-plausibility objects tended to be recognized as the stolen objects in the second recognition test, and that recognition accuracy was higher for a new-distractor condition than for a misleading-distractor condition. These findings were interpreted as suggesting that the memory representation of the story might be changed through the integration processes and/or rendered inaccessible in terms of the response bias.