Visual search along the colour dimension

Subjects searched for a chromatic target among coloured background items. With low target-background chromatic similarity, response latencies remained uniformly short whether the target was present or not and whether the items were chromatically homogeneous or not. Latencies increased with increases in target-background similarity and were longest with heterogeneous backgrounds, with which the effects of trial type also became manifest. We employed Treisman's model of visual search to account for these findings. In particular, we suggest that similarity increases forced a shift from a preattentive to an attentive search, the latter being importantly shaped by the background's level of chromatic variance.     

Binocular unmasking with vertical disparity

We recently found (Schneider, Moraglia, & Jepson, 1989) that the contrast threshold for the detection of a visual signal in a noisy background can be considerably lower when binocular cues are available then when monocular cues only are present. Here, we investigated the occurrence of binocular unmasking with vertical interocular disparities. Subjects reported about the presence of Gabor signals in fields of two-dimensional broadband Gaussian noise surrounded by a frame of uniform noise. They saw these stimuli through a stereoscope; in all cases, the right-eye noise field was vertically displaced relative to the left one in either an upward or a downward direction, by up to 67.6'. In one condition, the right-eye signal was displaced by an amount equal to that of the noise, so that no opportunities for binocular unmasking existed; in the other, it appeared in exactly corresponding locations in the two fields--here, binocular disparities could be used to unmask the signal. Enhanced signal detectability, by up to 12.7 dB, was observed in the latter case for both directions of displacement, but only for displacements of 13.52' and only when the signal's orientation was horizontal. We argue that these effects result from the summation of monocular inputs carried out by linear binocular mechanisms.     

Borderline Personality Disorder in Adolescence Through the Lens of the Interview of Personality Organization Processes in Adolescence (IPOP-A): Clinical Use and Implications

Borderline personality disorder can be assessed in adolescence mainly through a dimensional approach that takes into account strengths and weaknesses of emerging personality patterns. Clinical interviews could help clinicians to gather information about adolescent’s functioning, fostering therapeutic alliance and promoting a mentalizing stance during the assessment of borderline adolescents. In this article, the Interview of Personality Organization Processes in Adolescence (IPOP-A) is presented through clinical case material to show its usefulness in clinical and research settings. The IPOP-A assesses an adolescent’s emerging personality along three dimensions: identity, quality of object relations and affect regulation. These dimensions are the core of borderline personality in adolescence.     

Psychiatric Disorders and Childhood Parental Loss in Obesity: Relationship with the Mode of Weight Gain

We assessed the association between psychiatric disorders, childhood parental loss, and weight gain mode in 150 obese patients seeking bariatric surgery and with a history of sudden or gradual weight gain mode. Subjects with sudden weight gain mode (47%) showed significantly higher bipolar II disorder (p < .001), childhood parental death (p < .01), and separation (p < .01), but lower pure hypomania (p < .001) prevalence than subjects with gradual weight gain mode. We found preliminary evidence that lifetime bipolar spectrum disorders and childhood parental loss may influence weight gain mode in obese subjects. These findings may contribute to predict patients’ weight trajectories and implement preventive interventions.     

Dynamic sensory–motor oscillation and cerebral development

Drawing from Freud’s Project, the author proposes a model of cerebral development whose sensory–motor structure is defined by a frontal–occipital oscillatory dynamic with a twofold function: the oscillation explains the formation and maintenance of mother–infant attunement in cerebral growth, while, at the same time, also explaining the functioning of the projective–introjective dynamic at the basis of psychoanalytic theory. The oscillatory dynamic, according to this perspective, operates as a “bridge” between two seminal theoretical models of developments—the psychoanalytic and the infant research model—which, in turn, leads to the formulation of some neurological hypotheses on how oscillation regulates the elaboration of maternal interaction in the infant’s brain, and how the mother may act to modify it. The paper discusses how the oscillatory dynamic offers an innovative framework for the reconceptualization of the development of mentalization, the function of mirror neurons, and, most interestingly, of the development of language, explaining the non-verbal properties of ordinary linguistic communication and the function of oscillation in the regulation of information exchange processing.     

Display organization and the detection of horizontal line segments

Observers searched for a horizontal line segment through displays containing varying numbers of elements differing from the target and from each other in terms of orientation. These elements were always positioned on imaginary concentric circles centered in the middle of the display. They were allocated to these positions either randomly or in such a way that their orientation was equal to that of the tangent to the circle at that position. The search for the target line appeared to proceed spatially in parallel with the latter class of displays, and serially with the former. These findings are explained and discussed within the context of the attentive-preattentive dichotomy that characterizes spatial vision.     

Visual search: spatial frequency and orientation

Observers searched for a Gaussian-windowed patch of sinewave grating (Gabor pattern) through displays containing varying numbers of other such patterns (distractors). When the spatial frequencies of target and distractors differed by +/- 2 octaves and their orientations by +/- 60 degrees, the search proceeded spatially in parallel irrespective of whether the target could be discriminated in terms of spatial frequency differences alone, orientation differences alone, or their combination. However, when target and distractors differed by only +/- .5 octave in spatial frequency and by +/- 15 degrees in orientation, the search was serial and self-terminating, again irrespective of the nature of the target-distractor differences. These findings show that, contrary to some suggestions, the preattentive detection of targets defined by conjunctions of spatial frequency and orientation may occur, but only when the spectral distance between target and distractors allows their encoding by independent mechanisms.     

Cerebellar ataxia: quantitative assessment and cybernetic interpretation

To assess neuromotor disorders clinicians often rely on rating scales. Unfortunately, these scales lack the sensitivity and accuracy needed to detect the small changes in motor coordination that reflect the clinical progression of the disease on the basis of which treatment programmes can be adjusted. As a contribution to this topic, the present paper proposes a straightforward kinematic and kinetic analysis of reaching movements of patients with cerebellar ataxia in conjunction with a cybernetic interpretation of the data. The aim of the approach is to capture key deficits in the underlying motor control processes. We suggest that cerebellar ataxia may be characterized by defective feedforward control.     

Binocular detection of masked patterns in young and old observers

A visual pattern embedded in noise is detected appreciably better when the stimulus complex contains interocular cues (dichoptic condition) than when such cues are absent (binoptic condition). In a recent study (F. Speranza, G. Moraglia, & B. A. Schneider, 1995) the authors showed that the relative difference between binoptic and dichoptic thresholds does not change with age. However, older adults showed higher binoptic and dichoptic thresholds, thus suggesting an age-related difficulty with degraded stimulation. In this article the authors first replicated these findings and proceeded next to investigating whether age-related changes in processing efficiency, additive internal noise, and the spatial frequency bandwidth of the detecting filters could account, separately or concurrently, for the elevated thresholds in noise exhibited by the older adults. Results indicate that this increase is not attributable to age-related changes in filter bandwidth or internal noise. Rather, the findings can be explained in terms of a decrease in processing efficiency with age.     

Metacognitive Interpersonal Therapy for Treating Auditory Verbal Hallucinations in First-onset Schizophrenia

Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) are perceptive-like experiences happening without appropriate stimuli, occurring in two thirds of schizophrenia patients, where they often cause emotional suffering and dangerous behaviors, and interfere with social relationships. Patients with schizophrenia involving AVHs can also be drug-resistant or they may discontinue medications. The most well-known psychotherapeutic intervention for voice-hearing is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which focuses on reducing distress by modifying hearers’ beliefs about their voices. We hypothesize that it is possible to reinforce the clinical approach to AVHs by taking into consideration (a) that patients generally hear voices in particular interpersonal contexts where they experience negative emotions; (b) the relationship between AVHs and metacognition, namely the ability to make sense of mental states. On this basis, AVHs can be seen not just as a cause of emotional distress as CBT postulates, but the outcome of difficulties in meta-cognitively making sense of interpersonal exchanges. In this paper, we describe the treatment of a young man at the onset of schizophrenia with pervasive negative AVHs. The patient was treated with metacognitive interpersonal therapy (MIT), aimed to promote the patient’s metacognition. With this aim, in the first part of the treatment, each time AVHs emerged, the patient’s level of arousal was high and his metacognitive ability very low, the therapist treated AVHs helping the patient to understand and cope with the emotional suffering connected with AVHs. At a more advanced stage of therapy, the therapist helped the patient reach the point of understanding the social triggers which, together with the patient’s self-schemas, ignited his auditory hallucinations; this created the conditions for a significant reduction of the pervasiveness of AVHs.