Age-Related Changes in Visual Temporal Order Judgment Performance: Relation to Sensory and Cognitive Capacities

PubMed Central

Busey, Thomas; Craig, James; Clark, Chris; Humes, Larry

2010-01-01

Five measures of temporal order judgments were obtained from 261 participants, including 146 elder, 44 middle aged, and 71 young participants. Strong age group differences were observed in all five measures, although the group differences were reduced when letter discriminability was matched for all participants. Significant relations were found between these measures of temporal processing and several cognitive and sensory assays, and structural equation modeling revealed the degree to which temporal order processing can be viewed as a latent factor that depends in part on contributions from sensory and cognitive capacities. The best-fitting model involved two different latent factors representing temporal order processing at same and different locations, and the sensory and cognitive factors were more successful predicting performance in the different location factor than the same-location factor. Processing speed, even measured using high-contrast symbols on a paper-and-pencil test, was a surprisingly strong predictor of variability in both latent factors. However, low-level sensory measures also made significant contributions to the latent factors. The results demonstrate the degree to which temporal order processing relates to other perceptual and cognitive capacities, and address the question of whether age-related declines in these capacities share a common cause. PMID:20580644

Age-related changes in visual temporal order judgment performance: Relation to sensory and cognitive capacities.

PubMed

Busey, Thomas; Craig, James; Clark, Chris; Humes, Larry

2010-08-06

Five measures of temporal order judgments were obtained from 261 participants, including 146 elder, 44 middle aged, and 71 young participants. Strong age group differences were observed in all five measures, although the group differences were reduced when letter discriminability was matched for all participants. Significant relations were found between these measures of temporal processing and several cognitive and sensory assays, and structural equation modeling revealed the degree to which temporal order processing can be viewed as a latent factor that depends in part on contributions from sensory and cognitive capacities. The best-fitting model involved two different latent factors representing temporal order processing at same and different locations, and the sensory and cognitive factors were more successful predicting performance in the different location factor than the same-location factor. Processing speed, even measured using high-contrast symbols on a paper-and-pencil test, was a surprisingly strong predictor of variability in both latent factors. However, low-level sensory measures also made significant contributions to the latent factors. The results demonstrate the degree to which temporal order processing relates to other perceptual and cognitive capacities, and address the question of whether age-related declines in these capacities share a common cause. Copyright 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Interhemispheric coupling between the posterior sylvian regions impacts successful auditory temporal order judgment.

PubMed

Bernasconi, Fosco; Grivel, Jeremy; Murray, Micah M; Spierer, Lucas

2010-07-01

Accurate perception of the temporal order of sensory events is a prerequisite in numerous functions ranging from language comprehension to motor coordination. We investigated the spatio-temporal brain dynamics of auditory temporal order judgment (aTOJ) using electrical neuroimaging analyses of auditory evoked potentials (AEPs) recorded while participants completed a near-threshold task requiring spatial discrimination of left-right and right-left sound sequences. AEPs to sound pairs modulated topographically as a function of aTOJ accuracy over the 39-77ms post-stimulus period, indicating the engagement of distinct configurations of brain networks during early auditory processing stages. Source estimations revealed that accurate and inaccurate performance were linked to bilateral posterior sylvian regions activity (PSR). However, activity within left, but not right, PSR predicted behavioral performance suggesting that left PSR activity during early encoding phases of pairs of auditory spatial stimuli appears critical for the perception of their order of occurrence. Correlation analyses of source estimations further revealed that activity between left and right PSR was significantly correlated in the inaccurate but not accurate condition, indicating that aTOJ accuracy depends on the functional decoupling between homotopic PSR areas. These results support a model of temporal order processing wherein behaviorally relevant temporal information--i.e. a temporal 'stamp'--is extracted within the early stages of cortical processes within left PSR but critically modulated by inputs from right PSR. We discuss our results with regard to current models of temporal of temporal order processing, namely gating and latency mechanisms. Copyright (c) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Duration, distance, and speed judgments of two moving objects by 4- to 11-year olds.

PubMed

Matsuda, F

1996-11-01

Four- to 11-year-old children (N = 133) made duration, distance, and speed judgments on a Piagetian task where two cars ran on two parallel tracks. Special effort was made to make duration judgment tasks and distance judgment tasks comparable. Among younger children, difficulties of duration judgments and distance judgments were approximately the same. Additionally, temporal attributes had nearly the same effects on duration judgments as spatial attributes had on distance judgments, and spatial attributes had nearly the same effects on duration judgments as temporal attributes had on distance judgments. Among older children, distance judgments were easier than duration judgments, and the above-mentioned symmetry in effects of temporal and spatial attributes decreased somewhat. Temporal and spatial attributes affected speed judgments equally, across age groups.

The good, the bad, and the timely: how temporal order and moral judgment influence causal selection

PubMed Central

Reuter, Kevin; Kirfel, Lara; van Riel, Raphael; Barlassina, Luca

2014-01-01

Causal selection is the cognitive process through which one or more elements in a complex causal structure are singled out as actual causes of a certain effect. In this paper, we report on an experiment in which we investigated the role of moral and temporal factors in causal selection. Our results are as follows. First, when presented with a temporal chain in which two human agents perform the same action one after the other, subjects tend to judge the later agent to be the actual cause. Second, the impact of temporal location on causal selection is almost canceled out if the later agent did not violate a norm while the former did. We argue that this is due to the impact that judgments of norm violation have on causal selection—even if the violated norm has nothing to do with the obtaining effect. Third, moral judgments about the effect influence causal selection even in the case in which agents could not have foreseen the effect and did not intend to bring it about. We discuss our findings in connection to recent theories of the role of moral judgment in causal reasoning, on the one hand, and to probabilistic models of temporal location, on the other. PMID:25477851

Response Errors Explain the Failure of Independent-Channels Models of Perception of Temporal Order

PubMed Central

García-Pérez, Miguel A.; Alcalá-Quintana, Rocío

2012-01-01

Independent-channels models of perception of temporal order (also referred to as threshold models or perceptual latency models) have been ruled out because two formal properties of these models (monotonicity and parallelism) are not borne out by data from ternary tasks in which observers must judge whether stimulus A was presented before, after, or simultaneously with stimulus B. These models generally assume that observed responses are authentic indicators of unobservable judgments, but blinks, lapses of attention, or errors in pressing the response keys (maybe, but not only, motivated by time pressure when reaction times are being recorded) may make observers misreport their judgments or simply guess a response. We present an extension of independent-channels models that considers response errors and we show that the model produces psychometric functions that do not satisfy monotonicity and parallelism. The model is illustrated by fitting it to data from a published study in which the ternary task was used. The fitted functions describe very accurately the absence of monotonicity and parallelism shown by the data. These characteristics of empirical data are thus consistent with independent-channels models when response errors are taken into consideration. The implications of these results for the analysis and interpretation of temporal order judgment data are discussed. PMID:22493586

High-level, but not low-level, motion perception is impaired in patients with schizophrenia.

PubMed

Kandil, Farid I; Pedersen, Anya; Wehnes, Jana; Ohrmann, Patricia

2013-01-01

Smooth pursuit eye movements are compromised in patients with schizophrenia and their first-degree relatives. Although research has demonstrated that the motor components of smooth pursuit eye movements are intact, motion perception has been shown to be impaired. In particular, studies have consistently revealed deficits in performance on tasks specific to the high-order motion area V5 (middle temporal area, MT) in patients with schizophrenia. In contrast, data from low-level motion detectors in the primary visual cortex (V1) have been inconsistent. To differentiate between low-level and high-level visual motion processing, we applied a temporal-order judgment task for motion events and a motion-defined figure-ground segregation task using patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls. Successful judgments in both tasks rely on the same low-level motion detectors in the V1; however, the first task is further processed in the higher-order motion area MT in the magnocellular (dorsal) pathway, whereas the second task requires subsequent computations in the parvocellular (ventral) pathway in visual area V4 and the inferotemporal cortex (IT). These latter structures are supposed to be intact in schizophrenia. Patients with schizophrenia revealed a significantly impaired temporal resolution on the motion-based temporal-order judgment task but only mild impairment in the motion-based segregation task. These results imply that low-level motion detection in V1 is not, or is only slightly, compromised; furthermore, our data restrain the locus of the well-known deficit in motion detection to areas beyond the primary visual cortex.

Relative Recency Judgments in Learning Disabled Children: A Semi-Automatic Process.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Stein, Debra K.; And Others

The ability of 20 learning disabled (LD) and 20 non-LD students (mean age of 9 years) to process temporal order information was assessed by employing a relative recency judgment task. Ss were administered lists composed of pictures of everyday objects and were then asked to indicate which item appeared latest on the list (that is, most recently).…

Sequential Responding in Accordance with Temporal Relational Cues: A Comparison of before and after

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hyland, John M.; O'Hora, Denis P.; Leslie, Julian C.; Smyth, Sinead

2012-01-01

The current study investigated the relative effects of Before and After relational cues on temporal order judgments. In Experiment 1, participants (N = 20) were exposed to a 5-phase temporal relational responding task. Participants observed a sequence of 2 familiar shapes and then completed either a Before or an After statement to describe the…

Contribution of Temporal Processing Skills to Reading Comprehension in 8-Year-Olds: Evidence for a Mediation Effect of Phonological Awareness

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Malenfant, Nathalie; Grondin, Simon; Boivin, Michel; Forget-Dubois, Nadine; Robaey, Philippe; Dionne, Ginette

2012-01-01

This study tested whether the association between temporal processing (TP) and reading is mediated by phonological awareness (PA) in a normative sample of 615 eight-year-olds. TP was measured with auditory and bimodal (visual-auditory) temporal order judgment tasks and PA with a phoneme deletion task. PA partially mediated the association between…

Peripheral Visual Cues: Their Fate in Processing and Effects on Attention and Temporal-Order Perception.

PubMed

Tünnermann, Jan; Scharlau, Ingrid

2016-01-01

Peripheral visual cues lead to large shifts in psychometric distributions of temporal-order judgments. In one view, such shifts are attributed to attention speeding up processing of the cued stimulus, so-called prior entry. However, sometimes these shifts are so large that it is unlikely that they are caused by attention alone. Here we tested the prevalent alternative explanation that the cue is sometimes confused with the target on a perceptual level, bolstering the shift of the psychometric function. We applied a novel model of cued temporal-order judgments, derived from Bundesen's Theory of Visual Attention. We found that cue-target confusions indeed contribute to shifting psychometric functions. However, cue-induced changes in the processing rates of the target stimuli play an important role, too. At smaller cueing intervals, the cue increased the processing speed of the target. At larger intervals, inhibition of return was predominant. Earlier studies of cued TOJs were insensitive to these effects because in psychometric distributions they are concealed by the conjoint effects of cue-target confusions and processing rate changes.

Auditory and Speech Processing and Reading Development in Chinese School Children: Behavioural and ERP Evidence

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Meng, Xiangzhi; Sai, Xiaoguang; Wang, Cixin; Wang, Jue; Sha, Shuying; Zhou, Xiaolin

2005-01-01

By measuring behavioural performance and event-related potentials (ERPs) this study investigated the extent to which Chinese school children's reading development is influenced by their skills in auditory, speech, and temporal processing. In Experiment 1, 102 normal school children's performance in pure tone temporal order judgment, tone frequency…

The influence of causal connections between symptoms on the diagnosis of mental disorders: evidence from online and offline measures.

PubMed

Flores, Amanda; Cobos, Pedro L; López, Francisco J; Godoy, Antonio; González-Martín, Estrella

2014-09-01

An experiment conducted with students and experienced clinicians demonstrated very fast and online causal reasoning in the diagnosis of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV) mental disorders. The experiment also demonstrated that clinicians' causal reasoning is triggered by information that is directly related to the causal structure that explains the symptoms, such as their temporal sequence. The use of causal theories was measured through explicit, verbal diagnostic judgments and through the online registration of participants' reading times of clinical reports. To detect both online and offline causal reasoning, the consistency of clinical reports was manipulated. This manipulation was made by varying the temporal order in which different symptoms developed in hypothetical clients, and by providing explicit information about causal connections between symptoms. The temporal order of symptoms affected the clinicians' but not the students' reading times. However, offline diagnostic judgments in both groups were influenced by the consistency manipulation. Overall, our results suggest that clinicians engage in fast and online causal reasoning processes when dealing with diagnostic information concerning mental disorders, and that both clinicians and students engage in causal reasoning in diagnostic judgment tasks. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved.

The Role of the Right Posterior Parietal Cortex in Temporal Order Judgment

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Woo, Sung-Ho; Kim, Ki-Hyun; Lee, Kyoung-Min

2009-01-01

Perceived order of two consecutive stimuli may not correspond to the order of their physical onsets. Such a disagreement presumably results from a difference in the speed of stimulus processing toward central decision mechanisms. Since previous evidence suggests that the right posterior parietal cortex (PPC) plays a role in modulating the…

Young Children's Memory for the Times of Personal Past Events

PubMed Central

Pathman, Thanujeni; Larkina, Marina; Burch, Melissa; Bauer, Patricia J.

2012-01-01

Remembering the temporal information associated with personal past events is critical for autobiographical memory, yet we know relatively little about the development of this capacity. In the present research, we investigated temporal memory for naturally occurring personal events in 4-, 6-, and 8-year-old children. Parents recorded unique events in which their children participated during a 4-month period. At test, children made relative recency judgments and estimated the time of each event using conventional time-scales (time of day, day of week, month of year, and season). Children also were asked to provide justifications for their time-scale judgments. Six- and 8-year-olds, but not 4-year-olds, accurately judged the order of two distinct events. There were age-related improvements in children's estimation of the time of events using conventional time-scales. Older children provided more justifications for their time-scale judgments compared to younger children. Relations between correct responding on the time-scale judgments and provision of meaningful justifications suggest that children may use that information to reconstruct the times associated with past events. The findings can be used to chart a developmental trajectory of performance in temporal memory for personal past events, and have implications for our understanding of autobiographical memory development. PMID:23687467

Audiovisual Temporal Perception in Aging: The Role of Multisensory Integration and Age-Related Sensory Loss

PubMed Central

Brooks, Cassandra J.; Chan, Yu Man; Anderson, Andrew J.; McKendrick, Allison M.

2018-01-01

Within each sensory modality, age-related deficits in temporal perception contribute to the difficulties older adults experience when performing everyday tasks. Since perceptual experience is inherently multisensory, older adults also face the added challenge of appropriately integrating or segregating the auditory and visual cues present in our dynamic environment into coherent representations of distinct objects. As such, many studies have investigated how older adults perform when integrating temporal information across audition and vision. This review covers both direct judgments about temporal information (the sound-induced flash illusion, temporal order, perceived synchrony, and temporal rate discrimination) and judgments regarding stimuli containing temporal information (the audiovisual bounce effect and speech perception). Although an age-related increase in integration has been demonstrated on a variety of tasks, research specifically investigating the ability of older adults to integrate temporal auditory and visual cues has produced disparate results. In this short review, we explore what factors could underlie these divergent findings. We conclude that both task-specific differences and age-related sensory loss play a role in the reported disparity in age-related effects on the integration of auditory and visual temporal information. PMID:29867415

Audiovisual Temporal Perception in Aging: The Role of Multisensory Integration and Age-Related Sensory Loss.

PubMed

Brooks, Cassandra J; Chan, Yu Man; Anderson, Andrew J; McKendrick, Allison M

2018-01-01

Within each sensory modality, age-related deficits in temporal perception contribute to the difficulties older adults experience when performing everyday tasks. Since perceptual experience is inherently multisensory, older adults also face the added challenge of appropriately integrating or segregating the auditory and visual cues present in our dynamic environment into coherent representations of distinct objects. As such, many studies have investigated how older adults perform when integrating temporal information across audition and vision. This review covers both direct judgments about temporal information (the sound-induced flash illusion, temporal order, perceived synchrony, and temporal rate discrimination) and judgments regarding stimuli containing temporal information (the audiovisual bounce effect and speech perception). Although an age-related increase in integration has been demonstrated on a variety of tasks, research specifically investigating the ability of older adults to integrate temporal auditory and visual cues has produced disparate results. In this short review, we explore what factors could underlie these divergent findings. We conclude that both task-specific differences and age-related sensory loss play a role in the reported disparity in age-related effects on the integration of auditory and visual temporal information.

Are all data created equal?--Exploring some boundary conditions for a lazy intuitive statistician.

PubMed

Lindskog, Marcus; Winman, Anders

2014-01-01

The study investigated potential effects of the presentation order of numeric information on retrospective subjective judgments of descriptive statistics of this information. The studies were theoretically motivated by the assumption in the naïve sampling model of independence between temporal encoding order of data in long-term memory and retrieval probability (i.e. as implied by a "random sampling" from memory metaphor). In Experiment 1, participants experienced Arabic numbers that varied in distribution shape/variability between the first and the second half of the information sequence. Results showed no effects of order on judgments of mean, variability or distribution shape. To strengthen the interpretation of these results, Experiment 2 used a repeated judgment procedure, with an initial judgment occurring prior to the change in distribution shape of the information half-way through data presentation. The results of Experiment 2 were in line with those from Experiment 1, and in addition showed that the act of making explicit judgments did not impair accuracy of later judgments, as would be suggested by an anchoring and insufficient adjustment strategy. Overall, the results indicated that participants were very responsive to the properties of the data while at the same time being more or less immune to order effects. The results were interpreted as being in line with the naïve sampling models in which values are stored as exemplars and sampled randomly from long-term memory.

Plastic brain mechanisms for attaining auditory temporal order judgment proficiency.

PubMed

Bernasconi, Fosco; Grivel, Jeremy; Murray, Micah M; Spierer, Lucas

2010-04-15

Accurate perception of the order of occurrence of sensory information is critical for the building up of coherent representations of the external world from ongoing flows of sensory inputs. While some psychophysical evidence reports that performance on temporal perception can improve, the underlying neural mechanisms remain unresolved. Using electrical neuroimaging analyses of auditory evoked potentials (AEPs), we identified the brain dynamics and mechanism supporting improvements in auditory temporal order judgment (TOJ) during the course of the first vs. latter half of the experiment. Training-induced changes in brain activity were first evident 43-76 ms post stimulus onset and followed from topographic, rather than pure strength, AEP modulations. Improvements in auditory TOJ accuracy thus followed from changes in the configuration of the underlying brain networks during the initial stages of sensory processing. Source estimations revealed an increase in the lateralization of initially bilateral posterior sylvian region (PSR) responses at the beginning of the experiment to left-hemisphere dominance at its end. Further supporting the critical role of left and right PSR in auditory TOJ proficiency, as the experiment progressed, responses in the left and right PSR went from being correlated to un-correlated. These collective findings provide insights on the neurophysiologic mechanism and plasticity of temporal processing of sounds and are consistent with models based on spike timing dependent plasticity. Copyright 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Audiovisual Temporal Processing and Synchrony Perception in the Rat.

PubMed

Schormans, Ashley L; Scott, Kaela E; Vo, Albert M Q; Tyker, Anna; Typlt, Marei; Stolzberg, Daniel; Allman, Brian L

2016-01-01

Extensive research on humans has improved our understanding of how the brain integrates information from our different senses, and has begun to uncover the brain regions and large-scale neural activity that contributes to an observer's ability to perceive the relative timing of auditory and visual stimuli. In the present study, we developed the first behavioral tasks to assess the perception of audiovisual temporal synchrony in rats. Modeled after the parameters used in human studies, separate groups of rats were trained to perform: (1) a simultaneity judgment task in which they reported whether audiovisual stimuli at various stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) were presented simultaneously or not; and (2) a temporal order judgment task in which they reported whether they perceived the auditory or visual stimulus to have been presented first. Furthermore, using in vivo electrophysiological recordings in the lateral extrastriate visual (V2L) cortex of anesthetized rats, we performed the first investigation of how neurons in the rat multisensory cortex integrate audiovisual stimuli presented at different SOAs. As predicted, rats ( n = 7) trained to perform the simultaneity judgment task could accurately (~80%) identify synchronous vs. asynchronous (200 ms SOA) trials. Moreover, the rats judged trials at 10 ms SOA to be synchronous, whereas the majority (~70%) of trials at 100 ms SOA were perceived to be asynchronous. During the temporal order judgment task, rats ( n = 7) perceived the synchronous audiovisual stimuli to be "visual first" for ~52% of the trials, and calculation of the smallest timing interval between the auditory and visual stimuli that could be detected in each rat (i.e., the just noticeable difference (JND)) ranged from 77 ms to 122 ms. Neurons in the rat V2L cortex were sensitive to the timing of audiovisual stimuli, such that spiking activity was greatest during trials when the visual stimulus preceded the auditory by 20-40 ms. Ultimately, given that our behavioral and electrophysiological results were consistent with studies conducted on human participants and previous recordings made in multisensory brain regions of different species, we suggest that the rat represents an effective model for studying audiovisual temporal synchrony at both the neuronal and perceptual level.

Audiovisual Temporal Processing and Synchrony Perception in the Rat

PubMed Central

Schormans, Ashley L.; Scott, Kaela E.; Vo, Albert M. Q.; Tyker, Anna; Typlt, Marei; Stolzberg, Daniel; Allman, Brian L.

2017-01-01

Extensive research on humans has improved our understanding of how the brain integrates information from our different senses, and has begun to uncover the brain regions and large-scale neural activity that contributes to an observer’s ability to perceive the relative timing of auditory and visual stimuli. In the present study, we developed the first behavioral tasks to assess the perception of audiovisual temporal synchrony in rats. Modeled after the parameters used in human studies, separate groups of rats were trained to perform: (1) a simultaneity judgment task in which they reported whether audiovisual stimuli at various stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) were presented simultaneously or not; and (2) a temporal order judgment task in which they reported whether they perceived the auditory or visual stimulus to have been presented first. Furthermore, using in vivo electrophysiological recordings in the lateral extrastriate visual (V2L) cortex of anesthetized rats, we performed the first investigation of how neurons in the rat multisensory cortex integrate audiovisual stimuli presented at different SOAs. As predicted, rats (n = 7) trained to perform the simultaneity judgment task could accurately (~80%) identify synchronous vs. asynchronous (200 ms SOA) trials. Moreover, the rats judged trials at 10 ms SOA to be synchronous, whereas the majority (~70%) of trials at 100 ms SOA were perceived to be asynchronous. During the temporal order judgment task, rats (n = 7) perceived the synchronous audiovisual stimuli to be “visual first” for ~52% of the trials, and calculation of the smallest timing interval between the auditory and visual stimuli that could be detected in each rat (i.e., the just noticeable difference (JND)) ranged from 77 ms to 122 ms. Neurons in the rat V2L cortex were sensitive to the timing of audiovisual stimuli, such that spiking activity was greatest during trials when the visual stimulus preceded the auditory by 20–40 ms. Ultimately, given that our behavioral and electrophysiological results were consistent with studies conducted on human participants and previous recordings made in multisensory brain regions of different species, we suggest that the rat represents an effective model for studying audiovisual temporal synchrony at both the neuronal and perceptual level. PMID:28119580

It's about time: Presentation in honor of Ira Hirsh

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Grant, Ken

2002-05-01

Over his long and illustrious career, Ira Hirsh has returned time and time again to his interest in the temporal aspects of pattern perception. Although Hirsh has studied and published articles and books pertaining to many aspects of the auditory system, such as sound conduction in the ear, cochlear mechanics, masking, auditory localization, psychoacoustic behavior in animals, speech perception, medical and audiological applications, coupling between psychophysics and physiology, and ecological acoustics, it is his work on auditory timing of simple and complex rhythmic patterns, the backbone of speech and music, that are at the heart of his more recent work. Here, we will focus on several aspects of temporal processing of simple and complex signals, both within and across sensory systems. Data will be reviewed on temporal order judgments of simple tones, and simultaneity judgments and intelligibility of unimodal and bimodal complex stimuli where stimulus components are presented either synchronously or asynchronously. Differences in the symmetry and shape of ``temporal windows'' derived from these data sets will be highlighted.

Gender-specific effects of emotional modulation on visual temporal order thresholds.

PubMed

Liang, Wei; Zhang, Jiyuan; Bao, Yan

2015-09-01

Emotions affect temporal information processing in the low-frequency time window of a few seconds, but little is known about their effect in the high-frequency domain of some tens of milliseconds. The present study aims to investigate whether negative and positive emotional states influence the ability to discriminate the temporal order of visual stimuli, and whether gender plays a role in temporal processing. Due to the hemispheric lateralization of emotion, a hemispheric asymmetry between the left and the right visual field might be expected. Using a block design, subjects were primed with neutral, negative and positive emotional pictures before performing temporal order judgment tasks. Results showed that male subjects exhibited similarly reduced order thresholds under negative and positive emotional states, while female subjects demonstrated increased threshold under positive emotional state and reduced threshold under negative emotional state. Besides, emotions influenced female subjects more intensely than male subjects, and no hemispheric lateralization was observed. These observations indicate an influence of emotional states on temporal order processing of visual stimuli, and they suggest a gender difference, which is possibly associated with a different emotional stability.

Using time to investigate space: a review of tactile temporal order judgments as a window onto spatial processing in touch

PubMed Central

Heed, Tobias; Azañón, Elena

2014-01-01

To respond to a touch, it is often necessary to localize it in space, and not just on the skin. The computation of this external spatial location involves the integration of somatosensation with visual and proprioceptive information about current body posture. In the past years, the study of touch localization has received substantial attention and has become a central topic in the research field of multisensory integration. In this review, we will explore important findings from this research, zooming in on one specific experimental paradigm, the temporal order judgment (TOJ) task, which has proven particularly fruitful for the investigation of tactile spatial processing. In a typical TOJ task participants perform non-speeded judgments about the order of two tactile stimuli presented in rapid succession to different skin sites. This task could be solved without relying on external spatial coordinates. However, postural manipulations affect TOJ performance, indicating that external coordinates are in fact computed automatically. We show that this makes the TOJ task a reliable indicator of spatial remapping, and provide an overview over the versatile analysis options for TOJ. We introduce current theories of TOJ and touch localization, and then relate TOJ to behavioral and electrophysiological evidence from other paradigms, probing the benefit of TOJ for the study of spatial processing as well as related topics such as multisensory plasticity, body processing, and pain. PMID:24596561

No Prior Entry for Threat-Related Faces: Evidence from Temporal Order Judgments

PubMed Central

Schettino, Antonio; Loeys, Tom; Pourtois, Gilles

2013-01-01

Previous research showed that threat-related faces, due to their intrinsic motivational relevance, capture attention more readily than neutral faces. Here we used a standard temporal order judgment (TOJ) task to assess whether negative (either angry or fearful) emotional faces, when competing with neutral faces for attention selection, may lead to a prior entry effect and hence be perceived as appearing first, especially when uncertainty is high regarding the order of the two onsets. We did not find evidence for this conjecture across five different experiments, despite the fact that participants were invariably influenced by asynchronies in the respective onsets of the two competing faces in the pair, and could reliably identify the emotion in the faces. Importantly, by systematically varying task demands across experiments, we could rule out confounds related to suboptimal stimulus presentation or inappropriate task demands. These findings challenge the notion of an early automatic capture of attention by (negative) emotion. Future studies are needed to investigate whether the lack of systematic bias of attention by emotion is imputed to the primacy of a non-emotional cue to resolve the TOJ task, which in turn prevents negative emotion to exert an early bottom-up influence on the guidance of spatial and temporal attention. PMID:23646126

Differential effects of visual-spatial attention on response latency and temporal-order judgment.

PubMed

Neumann, O; Esselmann, U; Klotz, W

1993-01-01

Theorists from both classical structuralism and modern attention research have claimed that attention to a sensory stimulus enhances processing speed. However, they have used different operations to measure this effect, viz., temporal-order judgment (TOJ) and reaction-time (RT) measurement. We report two experiments that compared the effect of a spatial cue on RT and TOJ. Experiment 1 demonstrated that a nonmasked, peripheral cue (the brief brightening of a box) affected both RT and TOJ. However, the former effect was significantly larger than the latter. A masked cue had a smaller, but reliable, effect on TOJ. In Experiment 2, the effects of a masked cue on RT and TOJ were compared under identical stimulus conditions. While the cue had a strong effect on RT, it left TOJ unaffected. These results suggest that a spatial cue may have dissociable effects on response processes and the processes that lead to a conscious percept. Implications for the concept of direct parameter specification and for theories of visual attention are discussed.

The one that does, leads: action relations influence the perceived temporal order of graspable objects.

PubMed

Roberts, Katherine L; Humphreys, Glyn W

2010-06-01

Perception and action are influenced by the "possibilities for action" in the environment. Neuropsychological studies (e.g., Riddoch, Humphreys, Edwards, Baker, & Willson, 2003) have demonstrated that objects that are perceived to be interacting (e.g., a corkscrew going toward the top of a wine bottle) are perceptually integrated into a functional unit, facilitating report of both objects. In addition, patients with parietal damage tend to report the "active" item of the pair (the corkscrew in the above example) when the objects are positioned for action, overriding their spatial bias toward the ipsilesional side. Using a temporal order judgment task we show for the first time that normal viewers judge that active objects appear earlier when they are positioned correctly for action. This effect is not dependent on a learned relationship between objects, or on the active object being integrated at a perceptual level with the object it is paired with. The data suggest that actions afforded by a correctly positioned active object permeate normal perceptual judgments.

Perceptual latency priming by masked and unmasked stimuli: evidence for an attentional interpretation.

PubMed

Scharlau, Ingrid; Neumann, Odmar

2003-08-01

Four experiments investigated the influence of a metacontrast-masked prime on temporal order judgments. The main results were (1) that a masked prime reduced the latency of the mask's conscious perception (perceptual latency priming), (2) that this effect was independent of whether the prime suffered strong or weak masking, (3) that it was unaffected by the degree of visual similarity between the prime and the mask, and that (4) there was no difference between congruent and incongruent primes. Finding (1) suggests that location cueing affects not only response times but also the latency of conscious perception. (2) The finding that priming was unaffected by the prime's detectability argues against a response bias interpretation of this effect. (3) Since visual similarity had no effect on the prime's efficiency, it is unlikely that sensory priming was involved. (4) The lack of a divergence between the effects of congruent and incongruent primes implies a functional difference between the judgments in the temporal order judgment task and speeded responses that have demonstrated differential effects of congruent and incongruent primes (e.g., Klotz & Neumann, 1999). These results can best be interpreted by assuming that the prime affects perceptual latency by initiating a shift of attention, as suggested by the Asynchronous Updating Model (AUM; Neumann 1978, 1982).

Auditory perception of temporal order in centenarians in comparison with young and elderly subjects.

PubMed

Kołodziejczyk, Iwona; Szelsg, Elzbieta

2008-01-01

Temporal information processing controls many aspects of human mental activity and may be assessed by examining perception of temporal order in the tens of milliseconds time range. Although existing studies suggest an age-related decline in mental abilities, the data on the deterioration of temporal order perception seems inconsistent. Moreover, any evidence on subjects aged over 70 years is lacking. The present experiment aimed to extend the existing data to extremely old people. Temporal order judgment (TOJ) for auditory stimuli was tested across the life span of approx. 80 years, i.e. in young (mean age 22 years) elderly (66 years) and very old (101 years) subjects. Age-related deterioration of performance was observed, with slight changes in elderly subjects and significant deterioration in centenarians which was more distinct in women than in men. The results confirm age-related decrease in temporal resolution which may be explained by slowing of information processing or of a hypothetical internal-timing mechanism. These effects may be influenced by different strategies used in particular age groups.

An fMRI Study of Episodic Memory: Retrieval of Object, Spatial, and Temporal Information

PubMed Central

Hayes, Scott M.; Ryan, Lee; Schnyer, David M.; Nadel, Lynn

2011-01-01

Sixteen participants viewed a videotaped tour of 4 houses, highlighting a series of objects and their spatial locations. Participants were tested for memory of object, spatial, and temporal order information while undergoing functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Preferential activation was observed in right parahippocampal gyrus during the retrieval of spatial location information. Retrieval of contextual information (spatial location and temporal order) was associated with activation in right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. In bilateral posterior parietal regions, greater activation was associated with processing of visual scenes, regardless of the memory judgment. These findings support current theories positing roles for frontal and medial temporal regions during episodic retrieval and suggest a specific role for the hippocampal complex in the retrieval of spatial location information PMID:15506871

[Temporal and spatial heterogeneity analysis of optimal value of sensitive parameters in ecological process model: The BIOME-BGC model as an example.

PubMed

Li, Yi Zhe; Zhang, Ting Long; Liu, Qiu Yu; Li, Ying

2018-01-01

The ecological process models are powerful tools for studying terrestrial ecosystem water and carbon cycle at present. However, there are many parameters for these models, and weather the reasonable values of these parameters were taken, have important impact on the models simulation results. In the past, the sensitivity and the optimization of model parameters were analyzed and discussed in many researches. But the temporal and spatial heterogeneity of the optimal parameters is less concerned. In this paper, the BIOME-BGC model was used as an example. In the evergreen broad-leaved forest, deciduous broad-leaved forest and C3 grassland, the sensitive parameters of the model were selected by constructing the sensitivity judgment index with two experimental sites selected under each vegetation type. The objective function was constructed by using the simulated annealing algorithm combined with the flux data to obtain the monthly optimal values of the sensitive parameters at each site. Then we constructed the temporal heterogeneity judgment index, the spatial heterogeneity judgment index and the temporal and spatial heterogeneity judgment index to quantitatively analyze the temporal and spatial heterogeneity of the optimal values of the model sensitive parameters. The results showed that the sensitivity of BIOME-BGC model parameters was different under different vegetation types, but the selected sensitive parameters were mostly consistent. The optimal values of the sensitive parameters of BIOME-BGC model mostly presented time-space heterogeneity to different degrees which varied with vegetation types. The sensitive parameters related to vegetation physiology and ecology had relatively little temporal and spatial heterogeneity while those related to environment and phenology had generally larger temporal and spatial heterogeneity. In addition, the temporal heterogeneity of the optimal values of the model sensitive parameters showed a significant linear correlation with the spatial heterogeneity under the three vegetation types. According to the temporal and spatial heterogeneity of the optimal values, the parameters of the BIOME-BGC model could be classified in order to adopt different parameter strategies in practical application. The conclusion could help to deeply understand the parameters and the optimal values of the ecological process models, and provide a way or reference for obtaining the reasonable values of parameters in models application.

Motivationally Significant Stimuli Show Visual Prior Entry: Evidence for Attentional Capture

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

West, Greg L.; Anderson, Adam A. K.; Pratt, Jay

2009-01-01

Previous studies that have found attentional capture effects for stimuli of motivational significance do not directly measure initial attentional deployment, leaving it unclear to what extent these items produce attentional capture. Visual prior entry, as measured by temporal order judgments (TOJs), rests on the premise that allocated attention…

A theory of international bioethics: multiculturalism, postmodernism, and the bankruptcy of fundamentalism.

PubMed

Baker, Robert

1998-09-01

The first of two articles analyzing the justifiability of international bioethical codes and of cross-cultural moral judgments reviews "moral fundamentalism," the theory that cross-cultural moral judgments and international bioethical codes are justified by certain "basic" or "fundamental" moral priniciples that are universally accepted in all cultures and eras. Initially propounded by the judges at the 1947 Nuremberg Tribunal, moral fundamentalism has become the received justification of international bioethics, and of cross-temporal and cross-cultural moral judgments. Yet today we are said to live in a multicultural and postmodern world. This article assesses the challenges that multiculturalism and postmodernism pose to fundamentalism and concludes that these challenges render the position philosophically untenable, thereby undermining the received conception of the foundations of international bioethics. The second article, which follows, offers an alternative model -- a model of negotiated moral order -- as a viable justification for international bioethics and for transcultural and transtemporal moral judgments.

Cross-cultural differences in mental representations of time: evidence from an implicit nonlinguistic task.

PubMed

Fuhrman, Orly; Boroditsky, Lera

2010-11-01

Across cultures people construct spatial representations of time. However, the particular spatial layouts created to represent time may differ across cultures. This paper examines whether people automatically access and use culturally specific spatial representations when reasoning about time. In Experiment 1, we asked Hebrew and English speakers to arrange pictures depicting temporal sequences of natural events, and to point to the hypothesized location of events relative to a reference point. In both tasks, English speakers (who read left to right) arranged temporal sequences to progress from left to right, whereas Hebrew speakers (who read right to left) arranged them from right to left, replicating previous work. In Experiments 2 and 3, we asked the participants to make rapid temporal order judgments about pairs of pictures presented one after the other (i.e., to decide whether the second picture showed a conceptually earlier or later time-point of an event than the first picture). Participants made responses using two adjacent keyboard keys. English speakers were faster to make "earlier" judgments when the "earlier" response needed to be made with the left response key than with the right response key. Hebrew speakers showed exactly the reverse pattern. Asking participants to use a space-time mapping inconsistent with the one suggested by writing direction in their language created interference, suggesting that participants were automatically creating writing-direction consistent spatial representations in the course of their normal temporal reasoning. It appears that people automatically access culturally specific spatial representations when making temporal judgments even in nonlinguistic tasks. Copyright © 2010 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

Realigning thunder and lightning: temporal adaptation to spatiotemporally distant events.

PubMed

Navarra, Jordi; Fernández-Prieto, Irune; Garcia-Morera, Joel

2013-01-01

The brain is able to realign asynchronous signals that approximately coincide in both space and time. Given that many experience-based links between visual and auditory stimuli are established in the absence of spatiotemporal proximity, we investigated whether or not temporal realignment arises in these conditions. Participants received a 3-min exposure to visual and auditory stimuli that were separated by 706 ms and appeared either from the same (Experiment 1) or from different spatial positions (Experiment 2). A simultaneity judgment task (SJ) was administered right afterwards. Temporal realignment between vision and audition was observed, in both Experiment 1 and 2, when comparing the participants' SJs after this exposure phase with those obtained after a baseline exposure to audiovisual synchrony. However, this effect was present only when the visual stimuli preceded the auditory stimuli during the exposure to asynchrony. A similar pattern of results (temporal realignment after exposure to visual-leading asynchrony but not after exposure to auditory-leading asynchrony) was obtained using temporal order judgments (TOJs) instead of SJs (Experiment 3). Taken together, these results suggest that temporal recalibration still occurs for visual and auditory stimuli that fall clearly outside the so-called temporal window for multisensory integration and appear from different spatial positions. This temporal realignment may be modulated by long-term experience with the kind of asynchrony (vision-leading) that we most frequently encounter in the outside world (e.g., while perceiving distant events).

A dissociation between selective attention and conscious awareness in the representation of temporal order information.

PubMed

Eimer, Martin; Grubert, Anna

2015-09-01

Previous electrophysiological studies have shown that attentional selection processes are highly sensitive to the temporal order of task-relevant visual events. When two successively presented colour-defined target stimuli are separated by a stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of only 10 ms, the onset latencies of N2pc components to these stimuli (which reflect their attentional selection) precisely match their objective temporal separation. We tested whether such small onset differences are accessible to conscious awareness by instructing participants to report the category (letter or digit) of the first of two target-colour items that were separated by an SOA of 10, 20, or 30 ms. Performance was at chance level for the 10 ms SOA, demonstrating that temporal order information which is available to attentional control processes cannot be utilized for conscious temporal order judgments. These results provide new evidence that selective attention and conscious awareness are functionally separable, and support the hypothesis that attention and awareness operate at different stages of cognitive processing. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Audiovisual Simultaneity Judgment and Rapid Recalibration throughout the Lifespan.

PubMed

Noel, Jean-Paul; De Niear, Matthew; Van der Burg, Erik; Wallace, Mark T

2016-01-01

Multisensory interactions are well established to convey an array of perceptual and behavioral benefits. One of the key features of multisensory interactions is the temporal structure of the stimuli combined. In an effort to better characterize how temporal factors influence multisensory interactions across the lifespan, we examined audiovisual simultaneity judgment and the degree of rapid recalibration to paired audiovisual stimuli (Flash-Beep and Speech) in a sample of 220 participants ranging from 7 to 86 years of age. Results demonstrate a surprisingly protracted developmental time-course for both audiovisual simultaneity judgment and rapid recalibration, with neither reaching maturity until well into adolescence. Interestingly, correlational analyses revealed that audiovisual simultaneity judgments (i.e., the size of the audiovisual temporal window of simultaneity) and rapid recalibration significantly co-varied as a function of age. Together, our results represent the most complete description of age-related changes in audiovisual simultaneity judgments to date, as well as being the first to describe changes in the degree of rapid recalibration as a function of age. We propose that the developmental time-course of rapid recalibration scaffolds the maturation of more durable audiovisual temporal representations.

The Effect of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and Methylphenidate Treatment on the Adult Auditory Temporal Order Judgment Threshold

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fostick, Leah

2017-01-01

Purpose: "The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition" notes that attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnosed in childhood will persist into adulthood among at least some individuals. There is a paucity of evidence, however, regarding whether other difficulties that often accompany childhood…

Movement. Proceedings of Seventh Symposium in Psychomotor Learning and Sport Psychology.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Association of Physical Activity Professionals of Quebec, Montreal.

The symposium on the physical and psychomotor aspects of sports covered a variety of topics. Among those contained in this report are: discussions on the taxonomies of sports; the time dimension of physical activity including response variables, judgment of temporal order, and duration discrimination; memory; information and its use in physical…

Speech Perception Deficits in Poor Readers: Auditory Processing or Phonological Coding?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mody, Maria; And Others

1997-01-01

Forty second-graders, 20 good and 20 poor readers, completed a /ba/-/da/ temporal order judgment (TOJ) task. The groups did not differ in TOJ when /ba/ and /da/ were paired with more easily discriminated syllables. Poor readers' difficulties with /ba/-/da/ reflected perceptual confusion between phonetically similar syllables rather than difficulty…

Realigning Thunder and Lightning: Temporal Adaptation to Spatiotemporally Distant Events

PubMed Central

Navarra, Jordi; Fernández-Prieto, Irune; Garcia-Morera, Joel

2013-01-01

The brain is able to realign asynchronous signals that approximately coincide in both space and time. Given that many experience-based links between visual and auditory stimuli are established in the absence of spatiotemporal proximity, we investigated whether or not temporal realignment arises in these conditions. Participants received a 3-min exposure to visual and auditory stimuli that were separated by 706 ms and appeared either from the same (Experiment 1) or from different spatial positions (Experiment 2). A simultaneity judgment task (SJ) was administered right afterwards. Temporal realignment between vision and audition was observed, in both Experiment 1 and 2, when comparing the participants’ SJs after this exposure phase with those obtained after a baseline exposure to audiovisual synchrony. However, this effect was present only when the visual stimuli preceded the auditory stimuli during the exposure to asynchrony. A similar pattern of results (temporal realignment after exposure to visual-leading asynchrony but not after exposure to auditory-leading asynchrony) was obtained using temporal order judgments (TOJs) instead of SJs (Experiment 3). Taken together, these results suggest that temporal recalibration still occurs for visual and auditory stimuli that fall clearly outside the so-called temporal window for multisensory integration and appear from different spatial positions. This temporal realignment may be modulated by long-term experience with the kind of asynchrony (vision-leading) that we most frequently encounter in the outside world (e.g., while perceiving distant events). PMID:24391928

Question/statement judgments: an fMRI study of intonation processing.

PubMed

Doherty, Colin P; West, W Caroline; Dilley, Laura C; Shattuck-Hufnagel, Stefanie; Caplan, David

2004-10-01

We examined changes in fMRI BOLD signal associated with question/statement judgments in an event-related paradigm to investigate the neural basis of processing one aspect of intonation. Subjects made judgments about digitized recordings of three types of utterances: questions with rising intonation (RQ; e.g., "She was talking to her father?"), statements with a falling intonation (FS; e.g., "She was talking to her father."), and questions with a falling intonation and a word order change (FQ; e.g., "Was she talking to her father?"). Functional echo planar imaging (EPI) scans were collected from 11 normal subjects. There was increased BOLD activity in bilateral inferior frontal and temporal regions for RQ over either FQ or FS stimuli. The study provides data relevant to the location of regions responsive to intonationally marked illocutionary differences between questions and statements.

Orienting attention in visual space by nociceptive stimuli: investigation with a temporal order judgment task based on the adaptive PSI method.

PubMed

Filbrich, Lieve; Alamia, Andrea; Burns, Soline; Legrain, Valéry

2017-07-01

Despite their high relevance for defending the integrity of the body, crossmodal links between nociception, the neural system specifically coding potentially painful information, and vision are still poorly studied, especially the effects of nociception on visual perception. This study investigated if, and in which time window, a nociceptive stimulus can attract attention to its location on the body, independently of voluntary control, to facilitate the processing of visual stimuli occurring in the same side of space as the limb on which the visual stimulus was applied. In a temporal order judgment task based on an adaptive procedure, participants judged which of two visual stimuli, one presented next to either hand in either side of space, had been perceived first. Each pair of visual stimuli was preceded (by 200, 400, or 600 ms) by a nociceptive stimulus applied either unilaterally on one single hand, or bilaterally, on both hands simultaneously. Results show that, as compared to the bilateral condition, participants' judgments were biased to the advantage of the visual stimuli that occurred in the same side of space as the hand on which a unilateral, nociceptive stimulus was applied. This effect was present in a time window ranging from 200 to 600 ms, but importantly, biases increased with decreasing time interval. These results suggest that nociceptive stimuli can affect the perceptual processing of spatially congruent visual inputs.

Duration judgments in children with ADHD suggest deficient utilization of temporal information rather than general impairment in timing.

PubMed

Radonovich, Krestin J; Mostofsky, Stewart H

2004-09-01

Clinicians, parents, and teachers alike have noted that individuals with ADHD often have difficulties with "time management," which has led some to suggest a primary deficit in time perception in ADHD. Previous studies have implicated the basal ganglia, cerebellum, and frontal lobes in time estimation and production, with each region purported to make different contributions to the processing and utilization of temporal information. Given the observed involvement of the frontal-subcortical networks in ADHD, we examined judgment of durations in children with ADHD (N = 27) and age- and gender-matched control subjects (N = 15). Two judgment tasks were administered: short duration (550 ms) and long duration (4 s). The two groups did not differ significantly in their judgments of short interval durations; however, subjects with ADHD performed more poorly when making judgments involving long intervals. The groups also did not differ on a judgment-of-pitch task, ruling out a generalized deficit in auditory discrimination. Selective impairment in making judgments involving long intervals is consistent with performance by patients with frontal lobe lesions and suggests that there is a deficiency in the utilization of temporal information in ADHD (possibly secondary to deficits in working memory and/or strategy utilization), rather than a problem involving a central timing mechanism.

Cognitive abilities required in time judgment depending on the temporal tasks used: A comparison of children and adults.

PubMed

Droit-Volet, S; Wearden, J H; Zélanti, P S

2015-01-01

The aim of this study was to examine age-related differences in time judgments during childhood as a function of the temporal task used. Children aged 5 and 8 years, as well as adults, were submitted to 3 temporal tasks (bisection, generalization and reproduction) with short (0.4/0.8 s) and long durations (8/16 s). Furthermore, their cognitive capacities in terms of working memory, attentional control, and processing speed were assessed by a wide battery of neuropsychological tests. The results showed that the age-related differences in time judgment were greater in the reproduction task than in the temporal discrimination tasks. This task was indeed more demanding in terms of working memory and information processing speed. In addition, the bisection task appeared to be easier for children than the generalization task, whereas these 2 tasks were similar for the adults, although the generalization task required more attention to be paid to the processing of durations. Our study thus demonstrates that it is important to understand the different cognitive processes involved in time judgment as a function of the temporal tasks used before venturing to draw conclusions about the development of time perception capabilities.

Adaptation to delayed auditory feedback induces the temporal recalibration effect in both speech perception and production.

PubMed

Yamamoto, Kosuke; Kawabata, Hideaki

2014-12-01

We ordinarily speak fluently, even though our perceptions of our own voices are disrupted by various environmental acoustic properties. The underlying mechanism of speech is supposed to monitor the temporal relationship between speech production and the perception of auditory feedback, as suggested by a reduction in speech fluency when the speaker is exposed to delayed auditory feedback (DAF). While many studies have reported that DAF influences speech motor processing, its relationship to the temporal tuning effect on multimodal integration, or temporal recalibration, remains unclear. We investigated whether the temporal aspects of both speech perception and production change due to adaptation to the delay between the motor sensation and the auditory feedback. This is a well-used method of inducing temporal recalibration. Participants continually read texts with specific DAF times in order to adapt to the delay. Then, they judged the simultaneity between the motor sensation and the vocal feedback. We measured the rates of speech with which participants read the texts in both the exposure and re-exposure phases. We found that exposure to DAF changed both the rate of speech and the simultaneity judgment, that is, participants' speech gained fluency. Although we also found that a delay of 200 ms appeared to be most effective in decreasing the rates of speech and shifting the distribution on the simultaneity judgment, there was no correlation between these measurements. These findings suggest that both speech motor production and multimodal perception are adaptive to temporal lag but are processed in distinct ways.

The neural basis of temporal order processing in past and future thought.

PubMed

D'Argembeau, Arnaud; Jeunehomme, Olivier; Majerus, Steve; Bastin, Christine; Salmon, Eric

2015-01-01

Although growing evidence has shown that remembering the past and imagining the future recruit a common core network of frontal-parietal-temporal regions, the extent to which these regions contribute to the temporal dimension of autobiographical thought remains unclear. In this fMRI study, we focused on the event-sequencing aspect of time and examined whether ordering past and future events involve common neural substrates. Participants had to determine which of two past (or future) events occurred (or would occur) before the other, and these order judgments were compared with a task requiring to think about the content of the same past or future events. For both past and future events, we found that the left posterior hippocampus was more activated when establishing the order of events, whereas the anterior hippocampus was more activated when representing their content. Aside from the hippocampus, most of the brain regions that were activated when thinking about temporal order (notably the intraparietal sulcus, dorsolateral pFC, dorsal anterior cingulate, and visual cortex) lied outside the core network and may reflect the involvement of controlled processes and visuospatial imagery to locate events in time. Collectively, these findings suggest (a) that the same processing operations are engaged for ordering past events and planned future events in time, (b) that anterior and posterior portions of the hippocampus are involved in processing different aspects of autobiographical thought, and (c) that temporal order is not necessarily an intrinsic property of memory or future thought but instead requires additional, controlled processes.

Neural Substrates for Judgment of Self-Agency in Ambiguous Situations

PubMed Central

Fukushima, Hirokata; Goto, Yurie; Maeda, Takaki; Kato, Motoichiro; Umeda, Satoshi

2013-01-01

The sense of agency is the attribution of oneself as the cause of one’s own actions and their effects. Accurate agency judgments are essential for adaptive behaviors in dynamic environments, especially in conditions of uncertainty. However, it is unclear how agency judgments are made in ambiguous situations where self-agency and non-self-agency are both possible. Agency attribution is thus thought to require higher-order neurocognitive processes that integrate several possibilities. Furthermore, neural activity specific to self-attribution, as compared with non-self-attribution, may reflect higher-order critical operations that contribute to constructions of self-consciousness. Based on these assumptions, the present study focused on agency judgments under ambiguous conditions and examined the neural correlates of this operation with functional magnetic resonance imaging. Participants performed a simple but demanding agency-judgment task, which required them to report on whether they attributed their own action as the cause of a visual stimulus change. The temporal discrepancy between the participant’s action and the visual events was adaptively set to be maximally ambiguous for each individual on a trial-by-trial basis. Comparison with results for a control condition revealed that the judgment of agency was associated with activity in lateral temporo-parietal areas, medial frontal areas, the dorsolateral prefrontal area, and frontal operculum/insula regions. However, most of these areas did not differentiate between self- and non-self-attribution. Instead, self-attribution was associated with activity in posterior midline areas, including the precuneus and posterior cingulate cortex. These results suggest that deliberate self-attribution of an external event is principally associated with activity in posterior midline structures, which is imperative for self-consciousness. PMID:23977268

Roman Catholic beliefs produce characteristic neural responses to moral dilemmas

PubMed Central

Flexas, Albert; de Miguel, Pedro; Cela-Conde, Camilo J.; Munar, Enric

2014-01-01

This study provides exploratory evidence about how behavioral and neural responses to standard moral dilemmas are influenced by religious belief. Eleven Catholics and 13 Atheists (all female) judged 48 moral dilemmas. Differential neural activity between the two groups was found in precuneus and in prefrontal, frontal and temporal regions. Furthermore, a double dissociation showed that Catholics recruited different areas for deontological (precuneus; temporoparietal junction) and utilitarian moral judgments [dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC); temporal poles], whereas Atheists did not (superior parietal gyrus for both types of judgment). Finally, we tested how both groups responded to personal and impersonal moral dilemmas: Catholics showed enhanced activity in DLPFC and posterior cingulate cortex during utilitarian moral judgments to impersonal moral dilemmas and enhanced responses in anterior cingulate cortex and superior temporal sulcus during deontological moral judgments to personal moral dilemmas. Our results indicate that moral judgment can be influenced by an acquired set of norms and conventions transmitted through religious indoctrination and practice. Catholic individuals may hold enhanced awareness of the incommensurability between two unequivocal doctrines of the Catholic belief set, triggered explicitly in a moral dilemma: help and care in all circumstances—but thou shalt not kill. PMID:23160812

Roman Catholic beliefs produce characteristic neural responses to moral dilemmas.

PubMed

Christensen, Julia F; Flexas, Albert; de Miguel, Pedro; Cela-Conde, Camilo J; Munar, Enric

2014-02-01

This study provides exploratory evidence about how behavioral and neural responses to standard moral dilemmas are influenced by religious belief. Eleven Catholics and 13 Atheists (all female) judged 48 moral dilemmas. Differential neural activity between the two groups was found in precuneus and in prefrontal, frontal and temporal regions. Furthermore, a double dissociation showed that Catholics recruited different areas for deontological (precuneus; temporoparietal junction) and utilitarian moral judgments [dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC); temporal poles], whereas Atheists did not (superior parietal gyrus for both types of judgment). Finally, we tested how both groups responded to personal and impersonal moral dilemmas: Catholics showed enhanced activity in DLPFC and posterior cingulate cortex during utilitarian moral judgments to impersonal moral dilemmas and enhanced responses in anterior cingulate cortex and superior temporal sulcus during deontological moral judgments to personal moral dilemmas. Our results indicate that moral judgment can be influenced by an acquired set of norms and conventions transmitted through religious indoctrination and practice. Catholic individuals may hold enhanced awareness of the incommensurability between two unequivocal doctrines of the Catholic belief set, triggered explicitly in a moral dilemma: help and care in all circumstances-but thou shalt not kill.

Temporal order judgments are disrupted more by reflexive than by voluntary saccades.

PubMed

Yabe, Yoshiko; Goodale, Melvyn A; Shigemasu, Hiroaki

2014-05-01

We do not always perceive the sequence of events as they actually unfold. For example, when two events occur before a rapid eye movement (saccade), the interval between them is often perceived as shorter than it really is and the order of those events can be sometimes reversed (Morrone MC, Ross J, Burr DC. Nat Neurosci 8: 950-954, 2005). In the present article we show that these misperceptions of the temporal order of events critically depend on whether the saccade is reflexive or voluntary. In the first experiment, participants judged the temporal order of two visual stimuli that were presented one after the other just before a reflexive or voluntary saccadic eye movement. In the reflexive saccade condition, participants moved their eyes to a target that suddenly appeared. In the voluntary saccade condition, participants moved their eyes to a target that was present already. Similarly to the above-cited study, we found that the temporal order of events was often misjudged just before a reflexive saccade to a suddenly appearing target. However, when people made a voluntary saccade to a target that was already present, there was a significant reduction in the probability of misjudging the temporal order of the same events. In the second experiment, the reduction was seen in a memory-delay task. It is likely that the nature of the motor command and its origin determine how time is perceived during the moments preceding the motor act. Copyright © 2014 the American Physiological Society.

Comparing temporal order judgments and choice reaction time tasks as indices of exogenous spatial cuing.

PubMed

Eskes, Gail A; Klein, Raymond M; Dove, Mary Beth; Coolican, Jamesie; Shore, David I

2007-11-30

Attentional disorders are common in individuals with neurological or psychiatric conditions and impact on recovery and outcome. Thus, it is critical to develop theory-based measures of attentional function to understand potential mechanisms underlying the disorder and to evaluate the effect of intervention. The present study compared two alternative methods to measure the effects of attentional cuing that could be used in populations of individuals who may not be able to make manual responses normally or may show overall slowing in responses. Spatial attention was measured with speeded and unspeeded methods using either manual or voice responses in two standard attention paradigms: the cued target discrimination reaction time (RT) paradigm and the unspeeded temporal order judgment (TOJ) task. The comparison of speeded and unspeeded tasks specifically addresses the concern about interpreting RT differences between cued and uncued trials (taken as a proxy for attention) in the context of drastically different baseline RTs. We found significant cuing effects for both tasks (speeded RT and untimed TOJ) and both response types (vocal and manual) giving clinicians and researchers alternative methods with which to measure the effects of attention in different populations who may not be able to perform the standard speeded RT task.

True and False Memories, Parietal Cortex, and Confidence Judgments

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Urgolites, Zhisen J.; Smith, Christine N.; Squire, Larry R.

2015-01-01

Recent studies have asked whether activity in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) and the neocortex can distinguish true memory from false memory. A frequent complication has been that the confidence associated with correct memory judgments (true memory) is typically higher than the confidence associated with incorrect memory judgments (false memory).…

Professionally Present--Highlighting the Temporal Aspect of Teachers' Professional Judgment

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Frelin, Anneli

2014-01-01

Novice teachers need to develop their professional judgment. Teaching is performed in the face of imperfect, complex but above all continuously emergent situations. These matters have not received adequate attention in theories relating to professional judgment and professionality in teaching or in the contemporary discourse of education policy.…

Judgments Relative to Patterns: How Temporal Sequence Patterns Affect Judgments and Memory

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kusev, Petko; Ayton, Peter; van Schaik, Paul; Tsaneva-Atanasova, Krasimira; Stewart, Neil; Chater, Nick

2011-01-01

RESix experiments studied relative frequency judgment and recall of sequentially presented items drawn from 2 distinct categories (i.e., city and animal). The experiments show that judged frequencies of categories of sequentially encountered stimuli are affected by certain properties of the sequence configuration. We found (a) a "first-run…

Temporal Dissociation of Neocortical and Hippocampal Contributions to Mental Time Travel Using Intracranial Recordings in Humans.

PubMed

Schurr, Roey; Nitzan, Mor; Eliahou, Ruth; Spinelli, Laurent; Seeck, Margitta; Blanke, Olaf; Arzy, Shahar

2018-01-01

In mental time travel (MTT) one is "traveling" back-and-forth in time, remembering, and imagining events. Despite intensive research regarding memory processes in the hippocampus, it was only recently shown that the hippocampus plays an essential role in encoding the temporal order of events remembered, and therefore plays an important role in MTT. Does it also encode the temporal relations of these events to the remembering self? We asked patients undergoing pre-surgical evaluation with depth electrodes penetrating the temporal lobes bilaterally toward the hippocampus to project themselves in time to a past, future, or present time-point, and then make judgments regarding various events. Classification analysis of intracranial evoked potentials revealed clear temporal dissociation in the left hemisphere between lateral-temporal electrodes, activated at ~100-300 ms, and hippocampal electrodes, activated at ~400-600 ms. This dissociation may suggest a division of labor in the temporal lobe during self-projection in time, hinting toward the different roles of the lateral-temporal cortex and the hippocampus in MTT and the temporal organization of the related events with respect to the experiencing self.

First- and Second-Order Metacognitive Judgments of Semantic Memory Reports: The Influence of Personality Traits and Cognitive Styles

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Buratti, Sandra; Allwood, Carl Martin; Kleitman, Sabina

2013-01-01

In learning contexts, people need to make realistic confidence judgments about their memory performance. The present study investigated whether second-order judgments of first-order confidence judgments could help people improve their confidence judgments of semantic memory information. Furthermore, we assessed whether different personality and…

Temporal Dynamics of Hypothesis Generation: The Influences of Data Serial Order, Data Consistency, and Elicitation Timing

PubMed Central

Lange, Nicholas D.; Thomas, Rick P.; Davelaar, Eddy J.

2012-01-01

The pre-decisional process of hypothesis generation is a ubiquitous cognitive faculty that we continually employ in an effort to understand our environment and thereby support appropriate judgments and decisions. Although we are beginning to understand the fundamental processes underlying hypothesis generation, little is known about how various temporal dynamics, inherent in real world generation tasks, influence the retrieval of hypotheses from long-term memory. This paper presents two experiments investigating three data acquisition dynamics in a simulated medical diagnosis task. The results indicate that the mere serial order of data, data consistency (with previously generated hypotheses), and mode of responding influence the hypothesis generation process. An extension of the HyGene computational model endowed with dynamic data acquisition processes is forwarded and explored to provide an account of the present data. PMID:22754547

Functional magnetic resonance imaging of neural activity related to orthographic, phonological, and lexico-semantic judgments of visually presented characters and words.

PubMed

Fujimaki, N; Miyauchi, S; Pütz, B; Sasaki, Y; Takino, R; Sakai, K; Tamada, T

1999-01-01

Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to investigate neural activity during the judgment of visual stimuli in two groups of experiments using seven and five normal subjects. The subjects were given tasks designed differentially to involve orthographic (more generally, visual form), phonological, and lexico-semantic processes. These tasks included the judgments of whether a line was horizontal, whether a pseudocharacter or pseudocharacter string included a horizontal line, whether a Japanese katakana (phonogram) character or character string included a certain vowel, or whether a character string was meaningful (noun or verb) or meaningless. Neural activity related to the visual form process was commonly observed during judgments of both single real-characters and single pseudocharacters in lateral extrastriate visual cortex, the posterior ventral or medial occipito-temporal area, and the posterior inferior temporal area of both hemispheres. In contrast, left-lateralized activation was observed in the latter two areas during judgments of real- and pseudo-character strings. These results show that there is no katakana "word form center" whose activity is specific to real words. Activation related to the phonological process was observed, in Broca's area, the insula, the supramarginal gyrus, and the posterior superior temporal area, with greater activation in the left hemisphere. These activation foci for visual form and phonological processes of katakana also were reported for the English alphabet in previous studies. The present activation showed no additional areas for contrasts of noun judgment with other conditions and was similar between noun and verb judgment tasks, suggesting two possibilities: no strong semantic activation was produced, or the semantic process shared activation foci with the phonological process.

Making judgments about ability: the role of implicit theories of ability in moderating inferences from temporal and social comparison information.

PubMed

Butler, R

2000-05-01

Two studies examined the novel proposal that implicit theories of intelligence (C. S. Dweck & E. L. Leggett, 1988) moderate both the effects of performance trends on ability inferences and the perceived diagnosticity of temporal versus normative feedback. Results from 613 adolescents and 42 teachers confirmed that entity theorists perceived initial outcome as more diagnostic and inferred higher ability in another (Study 1) and in the self (Study 2) in a declining outcome condition; incremental theorists perceived last outcome as more diagnostic and inferred higher ability in an ascending condition. Experimental induction of beliefs about ability had similar effects. As predicted, self-appraisal was affected more by temporal feedback among incremental theorists and by normative feedback among entity theorists. Results help resolve prior mixed findings regarding order effects and responses to temporal and normative evaluation.

How Does Sequence Structure Affect the Judgment of Time? Exploring a Weighted Sum of Segments Model

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Matthews, William J.

2013-01-01

This paper examines the judgment of segmented temporal intervals, using short tone sequences as a convenient test case. In four experiments, we investigate how the relative lengths, arrangement, and pitches of the tones in a sequence affect judgments of sequence duration, and ask whether the data can be described by a simple weighted sum of…

Using Relative Position and Temporal Judgments to Assess the Effects of Texture and Field of View on Spatial Awareness for Synthetic Vision Systems Displays

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Bolton, Matthew L.; Bass, Ellen J.; Comstock, James R., Jr.

2006-01-01

Synthetic Vision Systems (SVS) depict computer generated views of terrain surrounding an aircraft. In the assessment of textures and field of view (FOV) for SVS, no studies have directly measured the 3 levels of spatial awareness: identification of terrain, its relative spatial location, and its relative temporal location. This work introduced spatial awareness measures and used them to evaluate texture and FOV in SVS displays. Eighteen pilots made 4 judgments (relative angle, distance, height, and abeam time) regarding the location of terrain points displayed in 112 5-second, non-interactive simulations of a SVS heads down display. Texture produced significant main effects and trends for the magnitude of error in the relative distance, angle, and abeam time judgments. FOV was significant for the directional magnitude of error in the relative distance, angle, and height judgments. Pilots also provided subjective terrain awareness ratings that were compared with the judgment based measures. The study found that elevation fishnet, photo fishnet, and photo elevation fishnet textures best supported spatial awareness for both the judgments and the subjective awareness measures.

49 CFR 821.17 - Motions to dismiss, for judgment on the pleadings and for summary judgment.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-10-01

... shall be filed within 10 days after service of the law judge's order on the motion. (b) Motions to... a matter of law. (d) Motions for summary judgment. A party may file a motion for summary judgment on... dismissal, judgment on the pleadings and summary judgment orders. When a law judge grants a motion to...

49 CFR 821.17 - Motions to dismiss, for judgment on the pleadings and for summary judgment.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-10-01

... shall be filed within 10 days after service of the law judge's order on the motion. (b) Motions to... a matter of law. (d) Motions for summary judgment. A party may file a motion for summary judgment on... dismissal, judgment on the pleadings and summary judgment orders. When a law judge grants a motion to...

49 CFR 821.17 - Motions to dismiss, for judgment on the pleadings and for summary judgment.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-10-01

... shall be filed within 10 days after service of the law judge's order on the motion. (b) Motions to... a matter of law. (d) Motions for summary judgment. A party may file a motion for summary judgment on... dismissal, judgment on the pleadings and summary judgment orders. When a law judge grants a motion to...

49 CFR 821.17 - Motions to dismiss, for judgment on the pleadings and for summary judgment.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-10-01

... shall be filed within 10 days after service of the law judge's order on the motion. (b) Motions to... a matter of law. (d) Motions for summary judgment. A party may file a motion for summary judgment on... dismissal, judgment on the pleadings and summary judgment orders. When a law judge grants a motion to...

49 CFR 821.17 - Motions to dismiss, for judgment on the pleadings and for summary judgment.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-10-01

... shall be filed within 10 days after service of the law judge's order on the motion. (b) Motions to... a matter of law. (d) Motions for summary judgment. A party may file a motion for summary judgment on... dismissal, judgment on the pleadings and summary judgment orders. When a law judge grants a motion to...

Set-relevance determines the impact of distractors on episodic memory retrieval.

PubMed

Kwok, Sze Chai; Shallice, Tim; Macaluso, Emiliano

2014-09-01

We investigated the interplay between stimulus-driven attention and memory retrieval with a novel interference paradigm that engaged both systems concurrently on each trial. Participants encoded a 45-min movie on Day 1 and, on Day 2, performed a temporal order judgment task during fMRI. Each retrieval trial comprised three images presented sequentially, and the task required participants to judge the temporal order of the first and the last images ("memory probes") while ignoring the second image, which was task irrelevant ("attention distractor"). We manipulated the content relatedness and the temporal proximity between the distractor and the memory probes, as well as the temporal distance between two probes. Behaviorally, short temporal distances between the probes led to reduced retrieval performance. Distractors that at encoding were temporally close to the first probe image reduced these costs, specifically when the distractor was content unrelated to the memory probes. The imaging results associated the distractor probe temporal proximity with activation of the right ventral attention network. By contrast, the precuneus was activated for high-content relatedness between distractors and probes and in trials including a short distance between the two memory probes. The engagement of the right ventral attention network by specific types of distractors suggests a link between stimulus-driven attention control and episodic memory retrieval, whereas the activation pattern of the precuneus implicates this region in memory search within knowledge/content-based hierarchies.

Spatio-temporal patterns of event-related potentials related to audiovisual synchrony judgments in older adults.

PubMed

Chan, Yu Man; Pianta, Michael Julian; Bode, Stefan; McKendrick, Allison Maree

2017-07-01

Older adults have altered perception of the relative timing between auditory and visual stimuli, even when stimuli are scaled to equate detectability. To help understand why, this study investigated the neural correlates of audiovisual synchrony judgments in older adults using electroencephalography (EEG). Fourteen younger (18-32 year old) and 16 older (61-74 year old) adults performed an audiovisual synchrony judgment task on flash-pip stimuli while EEG was recorded. All participants were assessed to have healthy vision and hearing for their age. Observers responded to whether audiovisual pairs were perceived as synchronous or asynchronous via a button press. The results showed that the onset of predictive sensory information for synchrony judgments was not different between groups. Channels over auditory areas contributed more to this predictive sensory information than visual areas. The spatial-temporal profile of the EEG activity also indicates that older adults used different resources to maintain a similar level of performance in audiovisual synchrony judgments compared with younger adults. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Dyslexic children show short-term memory deficits in phonological storage and serial rehearsal: an fMRI study.

PubMed

Beneventi, Harald; Tønnessen, Finn Egil; Ersland, Lars

2009-01-01

Dyslexia is primarily associated with a phonological processing deficit. However, the clinical manifestation also includes a reduced verbal working memory (WM) span. It is unclear whether this WM impairment is caused by the phonological deficit or a distinct WM deficit. The main aim of this study was to investigate neuronal activation related to phonological storage and rehearsal of serial order in WM in a sample of 13-year-old dyslexic children compared with age-matched nondyslexic children. A sequential verbal WM task with two tasks was used. In the Letter Probe task, the probe consisted of a single letter and the judgment was for the presence or absence of that letter in the prior sequence of six letters. In the Sequence Probe (SP) task, the probe consisted of all six letters and the judgment was for a match of their serial order with the temporal order in the prior sequence. Group analyses as well as single-subject analysis were performed with the statistical parametric mapping software SPM2. In the Letter Probe task, the dyslexic readers showed reduced activation in the left precentral gyrus (BA6) compared to control group. In the Sequence Probe task, the dyslexic readers showed reduced activation in the prefrontal cortex and the superior parietal cortex (BA7) compared to the control subjects. Our findings suggest that a verbal WM impairment in dyslexia involves an extended neural network including the prefrontal cortex and the superior parietal cortex. Reduced activation in the left BA6 in both the Letter Probe and Sequence Probe tasks may be caused by a deficit in phonological processing. However, reduced bilateral activation in the BA7 in the Sequence Probe task only could indicate a distinct working memory deficit in dyslexia associated with temporal order processing.

Individual differences in moral judgment competence influence neural correlates of socio-normative judgments

PubMed Central

Wartenburger, Isabell; Mériau, Katja; Scheibe, Christina; Goodenough, Oliver R.; Villringer, Arno; van der Meer, Elke; Heekeren, Hauke R.

2008-01-01

To investigate how individual differences in moral judgment competence are reflected in the human brain, we used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, while 23 participants made either socio-normative or grammatical judgments. Participants with lower moral judgment competence recruited the left ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the left posterior superior temporal sulcus more than participants with greater competence in this domain when identifying social norm violations. Moreover, moral judgment competence scores were inversely correlated with activity in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) during socio-normative relative to grammatical judgments. Greater activity in right DLPFC in participants with lower moral judgment competence indicates increased recruitment of rule-based knowledge and its controlled application during socio-normative judgments. These data support current models of the neurocognition of morality according to which both emotional and cognitive components play an important role. PMID:19015093

Concurrent emotional pictures modulate temporal order judgments of spatially separated audio-tactile stimuli.

PubMed

Jia, Lina; Shi, Zhuanghua; Zang, Xuelian; Müller, Hermann J

2013-11-06

Although attention can be captured toward high-arousal stimuli, little is known about how perceiving emotion in one modality influences the temporal processing of non-emotional stimuli in other modalities. We addressed this issue by presenting observers spatially uninformative emotional pictures while they performed an audio-tactile temporal-order judgment (TOJ) task. In Experiment 1, audio-tactile stimuli were presented at the same location straight ahead of the participants, who had to judge "which modality came first?". In Experiments 2 and 3, the audio-tactile stimuli were delivered one to the left and the other to the right side, and participants had to judge "which side came first?". We found both negative and positive high-arousal pictures to significantly bias TOJs towards the tactile and away from the auditory event when the audio-tactile stimuli were spatially separated; by contrast, there was no such bias when the audio-tactile stimuli originated from the same location. To further examine whether this bias is attributable to the emotional meanings conveyed by the pictures or to their high arousal effect, we compared and contrasted the influences of near-body threat vs. remote threat (emotional) pictures on audio-tactile TOJs in Experiment 3. The bias manifested only in the near-body threat condition. Taken together, the findings indicate that visual stimuli conveying meanings of near-body interaction activate a sensorimotor functional link prioritizing the processing of tactile over auditory signals when these signals are spatially separated. In contrast, audio-tactile signals from the same location engender strong crossmodal integration, thus counteracting modality-based attentional shifts induced by the emotional pictures. © 2013 Published by Elsevier B.V.

Illusory Reversal of Causality between Touch and Vision has No Effect on Prism Adaptation Rate.

PubMed

Tanaka, Hirokazu; Homma, Kazuhiro; Imamizu, Hiroshi

2012-01-01

Learning, according to Oxford Dictionary, is "to gain knowledge or skill by studying, from experience, from being taught, etc." In order to learn from experience, the central nervous system has to decide what action leads to what consequence, and temporal perception plays a critical role in determining the causality between actions and consequences. In motor adaptation, causality between action and consequence is implicitly assumed so that a subject adapts to a new environment based on the consequence caused by her action. Adaptation to visual displacement induced by prisms is a prime example; the visual error signal associated with the motor output contributes to the recovery of accurate reaching, and a delayed feedback of visual error can decrease the adaptation rate. Subjective feeling of temporal order of action and consequence, however, can be modified or even reversed when her sense of simultaneity is manipulated with an artificially delayed feedback. Our previous study (Tanaka et al., 2011; Exp. Brain Res.) demonstrated that the rate of prism adaptation was unaffected when the subjective delay of visual feedback was shortened. This study asked whether subjects could adapt to prism adaptation and whether the rate of prism adaptation was affected when the subjective temporal order was illusory reversed. Adapting to additional 100 ms delay and its sudden removal caused a positive shift of point of simultaneity in a temporal order judgment experiment, indicating an illusory reversal of action and consequence. We found that, even in this case, the subjects were able to adapt to prism displacement with the learning rate that was statistically indistinguishable to that without temporal adaptation. This result provides further evidence to the dissociation between conscious temporal perception and motor adaptation.

Oxytocin enhances brain function in children with autism.

PubMed

Gordon, Ilanit; Vander Wyk, Brent C; Bennett, Randi H; Cordeaux, Cara; Lucas, Molly V; Eilbott, Jeffrey A; Zagoory-Sharon, Orna; Leckman, James F; Feldman, Ruth; Pelphrey, Kevin A

2013-12-24

Following intranasal administration of oxytocin (OT), we measured, via functional MRI, changes in brain activity during judgments of socially (Eyes) and nonsocially (Vehicles) meaningful pictures in 17 children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (ASD). OT increased activity in the striatum, the middle frontal gyrus, the medial prefrontal cortex, the right orbitofrontal cortex, and the left superior temporal sulcus. In the striatum, nucleus accumbens, left posterior superior temporal sulcus, and left premotor cortex, OT increased activity during social judgments and decreased activity during nonsocial judgments. Changes in salivary OT concentrations from baseline to 30 min postadministration were positively associated with increased activity in the right amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex during social vs. nonsocial judgments. OT may thus selectively have an impact on salience and hedonic evaluations of socially meaningful stimuli in children with ASD, and thereby facilitate social attunement. These findings further the development of a neurophysiological systems-level understanding of mechanisms by which OT may enhance social functioning in children with ASD.

Temporal ventriloquism: crossmodal interaction on the time dimension. 1. Evidence from auditory-visual temporal order judgment.

PubMed

Bertelson, Paul; Aschersleben, Gisa

2003-10-01

In the well-known visual bias of auditory location (alias the ventriloquist effect), auditory and visual events presented in separate locations appear closer together, provided the presentations are synchronized. Here, we consider the possibility of the converse phenomenon: crossmodal attraction on the time dimension conditional on spatial proximity. Participants judged the order of occurrence of sound bursts and light flashes, respectively, separated in time by varying stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) and delivered either in the same or in different locations. Presentation was organized using randomly mixed psychophysical staircases, by which the SOA was reduced progressively until a point of uncertainty was reached. This point was reached at longer SOAs with the sounds in the same frontal location as the flashes than in different places, showing that apparent temporal separation is effectively longer in the first condition. Together with a similar one obtained recently in a case of tactile-visual discrepancy, this result supports a view in which timing and spatial layout of the inputs play to some extent inter-changeable roles in the pairing operation at the base of crossmodal interaction.

Temporal Precision of Neuronal Information in a Rapid Perceptual Judgment

PubMed Central

Ghose, Geoffrey M.; Harrison, Ian T.

2009-01-01

In many situations, such as pedestrians crossing a busy street or prey evading predators, rapid decisions based on limited perceptual information are critical for survival. The brevity of these perceptual judgments constrains how neuronal signals are integrated or pooled over time because the underlying sequence of processes, from sensation to perceptual evaluation to motor planning and execution, all occur within several hundred milliseconds. Because most previous physiological studies of these processes have relied on tasks requiring considerably longer temporal integration, the neuronal basis of such rapid decisions remains largely unexplored. In this study, we examine the temporal precision of neuronal activity associated with a rapid perceptual judgment. We find that the activity of individual neurons over tens of milliseconds can reliably convey information about sensory events and was well correlated with the animals' judgments. There was a strong correlation between sensory reliability and the correlation with behavioral choice, suggesting that rapid decisions were preferentially based on the most reliable sensory signals. We also find that a simple model in which the responses of a small number of individual neurons (<5) are summed can completely explain behavioral performance. These results suggest that neuronal circuits are sufficiently precise to allow for cognitive decisions to be based on small numbers of action potentials from highly reliable neurons. PMID:19109454

Temporal precision of neuronal information in a rapid perceptual judgment.

PubMed

Ghose, Geoffrey M; Harrison, Ian T

2009-03-01

In many situations, such as pedestrians crossing a busy street or prey evading predators, rapid decisions based on limited perceptual information are critical for survival. The brevity of these perceptual judgments constrains how neuronal signals are integrated or pooled over time because the underlying sequence of processes, from sensation to perceptual evaluation to motor planning and execution, all occur within several hundred milliseconds. Because most previous physiological studies of these processes have relied on tasks requiring considerably longer temporal integration, the neuronal basis of such rapid decisions remains largely unexplored. In this study, we examine the temporal precision of neuronal activity associated with a rapid perceptual judgment. We find that the activity of individual neurons over tens of milliseconds can reliably convey information about sensory events and was well correlated with the animals' judgments. There was a strong correlation between sensory reliability and the correlation with behavioral choice, suggesting that rapid decisions were preferentially based on the most reliable sensory signals. We also find that a simple model in which the responses of a small number of individual neurons (<5) are summed can completely explain behavioral performance. These results suggest that neuronal circuits are sufficiently precise to allow for cognitive decisions to be based on small numbers of action potentials from highly reliable neurons.

The Effect of Congenital Deafness on Duration Judgment

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kowalska, Joanna; Szelag, Elzbieta

2006-01-01

Objective: Congenital deafness provides the opportunity to study how atypical sensory and language experiences affect different aspects of information processing, e.g., time perception. Methods: Using two methods of temporal estimation, reproduction (Exp. 1) and production (Exp. 2), the effect of deafness on duration judgment was investigated…

Spatio-temporal processing of tactile stimuli in autistic children

PubMed Central

Wada, Makoto; Suzuki, Mayuko; Takaki, Akiko; Miyao, Masutomo; Spence, Charles; Kansaku, Kenji

2014-01-01

Altered multisensory integration has been reported in autism; however, little is known concerning how the autistic brain processes spatio-temporal information concerning tactile stimuli. We report a study in which a crossed-hands illusion was investigated in autistic children. Neurotypical individuals often experience a subjective reversal of temporal order judgments when their hands are stimulated while crossed, and the illusion is known to be acquired in early childhood. However, under those conditions where the somatotopic representation is given priority over the actual spatial location of the hands, such reversals may not occur. Here, we showed that a significantly smaller illusory reversal was demonstrated in autistic children than in neurotypical children. Furthermore, in an additional experiment, the young boys who had higher Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) scores generally showed a smaller crossed hands deficit. These results suggest that rudimentary spatio-temporal processing of tactile stimuli exists in autistic children, and the altered processing may interfere with the development of an external frame of reference in real-life situations. PMID:25100146

Rapid temporal recalibration is unique to audiovisual stimuli.

PubMed

Van der Burg, Erik; Orchard-Mills, Emily; Alais, David

2015-01-01

Following prolonged exposure to asynchronous multisensory signals, the brain adapts to reduce the perceived asynchrony. Here, in three separate experiments, participants performed a synchrony judgment task on audiovisual, audiotactile or visuotactile stimuli and we used inter-trial analyses to examine whether temporal recalibration occurs rapidly on the basis of a single asynchronous trial. Even though all combinations used the same subjects, task and design, temporal recalibration occurred for audiovisual stimuli (i.e., the point of subjective simultaneity depended on the preceding trial's modality order), but none occurred when the same auditory or visual event was combined with a tactile event. Contrary to findings from prolonged adaptation studies showing recalibration for all three combinations, we show that rapid, inter-trial recalibration is unique to audiovisual stimuli. We conclude that recalibration occurs at two different timescales for audiovisual stimuli (fast and slow), but only on a slow timescale for audiotactile and visuotactile stimuli.

Genetics Home Reference: GRN-related frontotemporal dementia

MedlinePlus

... temporal lobes . The frontal lobes are involved in reasoning, planning, judgment, and problem-solving, while the temporal ... MND. Phenotype variability in progranulin mutation carriers: a clinical, neuropsychological, imaging and genetic study. Brain. 2008 Mar; ...

Brain correlates of aesthetic judgment of beauty.

PubMed

Jacobsen, Thomas; Schubotz, Ricarda I; Höfel, Lea; Cramon, D Yves V

2006-01-01

Functional MRI was used to investigate the neural correlates of aesthetic judgments of beauty of geometrical shapes. Participants performed evaluative aesthetic judgments (beautiful or not?) and descriptive symmetry judgments (symmetric or not?) on the same stimulus material. Symmetry was employed because aesthetic judgments are known to be often guided by criteria of symmetry. Novel, abstract graphic patterns were presented to minimize influences of attitudes or memory-related processes and to test effects of stimulus symmetry and complexity. Behavioral results confirmed the influence of stimulus symmetry and complexity on aesthetic judgments. Direct contrasts showed specific activations for aesthetic judgments in the frontomedian cortex (BA 9/10), bilateral prefrontal BA 45/47, and posterior cingulate, left temporal pole, and the temporoparietal junction. In contrast, symmetry judgments elicited specific activations in parietal and premotor areas subserving spatial processing. Interestingly, beautiful judgments enhanced BOLD signals not only in the frontomedian cortex, but also in the left intraparietal sulcus of the symmetry network. Moreover, stimulus complexity caused differential effects for each of the two judgment types. Findings indicate aesthetic judgments of beauty to rely on a network partially overlapping with that underlying evaluative judgments on social and moral cues and substantiate the significance of symmetry and complexity for our judgment of beauty.

Dysarthria of Motor Neuron Disease: Clinician Judgments of Severity.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Seikel, J. Anthony; And Others

1990-01-01

This study investigated the relationship between the temporal-acoustic parameters of the speech of 15 adults with motor neuron disease. Differences in predictions of the progression of the disease and clinician judgments of dysarthria severity were found to relate to the linguistic systems of both speaker and judge. (Author/JDD)

25 CFR 11.501 - Judgments in civil actions.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-04-01

... 25 Indians 1 2011-04-01 2011-04-01 false Judgments in civil actions. 11.501 Section 11.501 Indians BUREAU OF INDIAN AFFAIRS, DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR LAW AND ORDER COURTS OF INDIAN OFFENSES AND LAW AND ORDER CODE Civil Actions § 11.501 Judgments in civil actions. (a) In all civil cases, judgment shall...

25 CFR 11.501 - Judgments in civil actions.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-04-01

... 25 Indians 1 2014-04-01 2014-04-01 false Judgments in civil actions. 11.501 Section 11.501 Indians BUREAU OF INDIAN AFFAIRS, DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR LAW AND ORDER COURTS OF INDIAN OFFENSES AND LAW AND ORDER CODE Civil Actions § 11.501 Judgments in civil actions. (a) In all civil cases, judgment shall...

25 CFR 11.501 - Judgments in civil actions.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-04-01

... 25 Indians 1 2013-04-01 2013-04-01 false Judgments in civil actions. 11.501 Section 11.501 Indians BUREAU OF INDIAN AFFAIRS, DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR LAW AND ORDER COURTS OF INDIAN OFFENSES AND LAW AND ORDER CODE Civil Actions § 11.501 Judgments in civil actions. (a) In all civil cases, judgment shall...

25 CFR 11.501 - Judgments in civil actions.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-04-01

... 25 Indians 1 2012-04-01 2011-04-01 true Judgments in civil actions. 11.501 Section 11.501 Indians BUREAU OF INDIAN AFFAIRS, DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR LAW AND ORDER COURTS OF INDIAN OFFENSES AND LAW AND ORDER CODE Civil Actions § 11.501 Judgments in civil actions. (a) In all civil cases, judgment shall...

An adaptive staircase procedure for the E-Prime programming environment.

PubMed

Hairston, W David; Maldjian, Joseph A

2009-01-01

Many studies need to determine a subject's threshold for a given task. This can be achieved efficiently using an adaptive staircase procedure. While the logic and algorithms for staircases have been well established, the few pre-programmed routines currently available to researchers require at least moderate programming experience to integrate into new paradigms and experimental settings. Here, we describe a freely distributed routine developed for the E-Prime programming environment that can be easily integrated into any experimental protocol with only a basic understanding of E-Prime. An example experiment (visual temporal-order-judgment task) where subjects report the order of occurrence of two circles illustrates the behavior and consistency of the routine.

Bias or equality? Unconscious thought equally integrates temporally scattered information.

PubMed

Li, Jiansheng; Gao, Qiyang; Zhou, Jifan; Li, Xinyu; Zhang, Meng; Shen, Mowei

2014-04-01

In previous experiments on unconscious thought, information was presented to participants in one continuous session; however, in daily life, information is delivered in a temporally partitioned way. We examined whether unconscious thought could equally integrate temporally scattered information when making overall evaluations. When presenting participants with information in two temporally partitioned sessions, participants' overall evaluation was based on neither the information in the first session (Experiment 1) nor that in the second session (Experiment 2); instead, information in both sessions were equally integrated to reach a final judgment. Conscious thought, however, overemphasized information in the second session. Experiments 3 and 4 further ruled out possible influencing factors including differences in the distributions of positive/negative attributes in the first and second sessions and on-line judgment. These findings suggested that unconscious thought can integrate information from a wider range of periods during an evaluation, while conscious thought cannot. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Atypical temporal activation pattern and central-right brain compensation during semantic judgment task in children with early left brain damage.

PubMed

Chang, Yi-Tzu; Lin, Shih-Che; Meng, Ling-Fu; Fan, Yang-Teng

In this study we investigated the event-related potentials (ERPs) during the semantic judgment task (deciding if the two Chinese characters were semantically related or unrelated) to identify the timing of neural activation in children with early left brain damage (ELBD). The results demonstrated that compared with the controls, children with ELBD had (1) competitive accuracy and reaction time in the semantic judgment task, (2) weak operation of the N400, (3) stronger, earlier and later compensational positivities (referred to the enhanced P200, P250, and P600 amplitudes) in the central and right region of the brain to successfully engage in semantic judgment. Our preliminary findings indicate that temporally postlesional reorganization is in accordance with the proposed right-hemispheric organization of speech after early left-sided brain lesion. During semantic processing, the orthography has a greater effect on the children with ELBD, and a later semantic reanalysis (P600) is required due to the less efficient N400 at the former stage for semantic integration. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Dissociable patterns of brain activity for mentalizing about known others: a role for attachment

PubMed Central

Laurita, Anne C.; Hazan, Cindy

2017-01-01

Abstract The human brain tracks dynamic changes within the social environment, forming and updating representations of individuals in our social milieu. This mechanism of social navigation builds an increasingly complex map of persons with whom we are familiar and form attachments to guide adaptive social behaviors. We examined the neural representation of known others along a continuum of attachment using fMRI. Heterosexual adults (N = 29, 16 females), in romantic relationships for more than 2 years, made trait judgments for a romantic partner, parent, close friend, familiar acquaintance and self-during scanning. Multivariate analysis, partial least squares, was used to identify whole-brain patterns of brain activation associated with trait judgments of known others across a continuum of attachment. Across conditions, trait judgments engaged the default network and lateral prefrontal cortex. Judgments about oneself and a partner were associated with a common activation pattern encompassing anterior and middle cingulate, posterior superior temporal sulcus, as well as anterior insula. Parent and close friend judgments engaged medial and anterior temporal lobe regions. These results provide novel evidence that mentalizing about known familiar others results in differential brain activity. We provide initial evidence that the representation of adult attachment is a distinguishing feature of these differences. PMID:28407150

Assessing the effect of physical differences in the articulation of consonants and vowels on audiovisual temporal perception

PubMed Central

Vatakis, Argiro; Maragos, Petros; Rodomagoulakis, Isidoros; Spence, Charles

2012-01-01

We investigated how the physical differences associated with the articulation of speech affect the temporal aspects of audiovisual speech perception. Video clips of consonants and vowels uttered by three different speakers were presented. The video clips were analyzed using an auditory-visual signal saliency model in order to compare signal saliency and behavioral data. Participants made temporal order judgments (TOJs) regarding which speech-stream (auditory or visual) had been presented first. The sensitivity of participants' TOJs and the point of subjective simultaneity (PSS) were analyzed as a function of the place, manner of articulation, and voicing for consonants, and the height/backness of the tongue and lip-roundedness for vowels. We expected that in the case of the place of articulation and roundedness, where the visual-speech signal is more salient, temporal perception of speech would be modulated by the visual-speech signal. No such effect was expected for the manner of articulation or height. The results demonstrate that for place and manner of articulation, participants' temporal percept was affected (although not always significantly) by highly-salient speech-signals with the visual-signals requiring smaller visual-leads at the PSS. This was not the case when height was evaluated. These findings suggest that in the case of audiovisual speech perception, a highly salient visual-speech signal may lead to higher probabilities regarding the identity of the auditory-signal that modulate the temporal window of multisensory integration of the speech-stimulus. PMID:23060756

Contingent capture effects in temporal order judgments.

PubMed

Born, Sabine; Kerzel, Dirk; Pratt, Jay

2015-08-01

The contingent attentional capture hypothesis proposes that visual stimuli that do not possess characteristics relevant for the current task will not capture attention, irrespective of their bottom-up saliency. Typically, contingent capture is tested in a spatial cuing paradigm, comparing manual reaction times (RTs) across different conditions. However, attention may act through several mechanisms and RTs may not be ideal to disentangle those different components. In 3 experiments, we examined whether color singleton cues provoke cuing effects in temporal order judgments (TOJs) and whether they would be contingent on attentional control sets. Experiment 1 showed that color singleton cues indeed produce cuing effects in TOJs, even in a cluttered and dynamic target display containing multiple heterogeneous distractors. In Experiment 2, consistent with contingent capture, we observed reliable cuing effects only when the singleton cue matched participants' current attentional control set. Experiment 3 suggests that a sensory interaction account of the differences found in Experiment 2 is unlikely. Our results help to discern the attentional components that may play a role in contingent capture. Further, we discuss a number of other effects (e.g., reversed cuing effects) that are found in RTs, but so far have not been reported in TOJs. Those differences suggest that RTs are influenced by a multitude of mechanisms; however, not all of these mechanisms may affect TOJs. We conclude by highlighting how the study of attentional capture in TOJs provides valuable insights for the attention literature, but also for studies concerned with the perceived timing between stimuli. (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).

Recognition, Development and Correlates of Self-Defined Physical Attractiveness among Young Children.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Downs, A. Chris; Reagan, Mary A.

A study was conducted to investigate issues related to the development of preschool children's self-definitions of attractiveness. Research questions were (1) At what ages can children state a self-definition of attractiveness? (2) Are self-definitions temporally stable? (3) To what degree are children's self-judgments similar to judgments made of…

Moral Judgment and Its Relation to Second-Order Theory of Mind

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fu, Genyue; Xiao, Wen S.; Killen, Melanie; Lee, Kang

2014-01-01

Recent research indicates that moral judgment and 1st-order theory of mind abilities are related. What is not known, however, is how 2nd-order theory of mind is related to moral judgment. In the present study, we extended previous findings by administering a morally relevant theory of mind task (an accidental transgressor) to 4- to 7-year-old…

Inability and Obligation in Moral Judgment

PubMed Central

Buckwalter, Wesley; Turri, John

2015-01-01

It is often thought that judgments about what we ought to do are limited by judgments about what we can do, or that “ought implies can.” We conducted eight experiments to test the link between a range of moral requirements and abilities in ordinary moral evaluations. Moral obligations were repeatedly attributed in tandem with inability, regardless of the type (Experiments 1–3), temporal duration (Experiment 5), or scope (Experiment 6) of inability. This pattern was consistently observed using a variety of moral vocabulary to probe moral judgments and was insensitive to different levels of seriousness for the consequences of inaction (Experiment 4). Judgments about moral obligation were no different for individuals who can or cannot perform physical actions, and these judgments differed from evaluations of a non-moral obligation (Experiment 7). Together these results demonstrate that commonsense morality rejects the “ought implies can” principle for moral requirements, and that judgments about moral obligation are made independently of considerations about ability. By contrast, judgments of blame were highly sensitive to considerations about ability (Experiment 8), which suggests that commonsense morality might accept a “blame implies can” principle. PMID:26296206

Temporal Ventriloquism Reveals Intact Audiovisual Temporal Integration in Amblyopia.

PubMed

Richards, Michael D; Goltz, Herbert C; Wong, Agnes M F

2018-02-01

We have shown previously that amblyopia involves impaired detection of asynchrony between auditory and visual events. To distinguish whether this impairment represents a defect in temporal integration or nonintegrative multisensory processing (e.g., cross-modal matching), we used the temporal ventriloquism effect in which visual temporal order judgment (TOJ) is normally enhanced by a lagging auditory click. Participants with amblyopia (n = 9) and normally sighted controls (n = 9) performed a visual TOJ task. Pairs of clicks accompanied the two lights such that the first click preceded the first light, or second click lagged the second light by 100, 200, or 450 ms. Baseline audiovisual synchrony and visual-only conditions also were tested. Within both groups, just noticeable differences for the visual TOJ task were significantly reduced compared with baseline in the 100- and 200-ms click lag conditions. Within the amblyopia group, poorer stereo acuity and poorer visual acuity in the amblyopic eye were significantly associated with greater enhancement in visual TOJ performance in the 200-ms click lag condition. Audiovisual temporal integration is intact in amblyopia, as indicated by perceptual enhancement in the temporal ventriloquism effect. Furthermore, poorer stereo acuity and poorer visual acuity in the amblyopic eye are associated with a widened temporal binding window for the effect. These findings suggest that previously reported abnormalities in audiovisual multisensory processing may result from impaired cross-modal matching rather than a diminished capacity for temporal audiovisual integration.

Multisensory perceptual learning of temporal order: audiovisual learning transfers to vision but not audition.

PubMed

Alais, David; Cass, John

2010-06-23

An outstanding question in sensory neuroscience is whether the perceived timing of events is mediated by a central supra-modal timing mechanism, or multiple modality-specific systems. We use a perceptual learning paradigm to address this question. Three groups were trained daily for 10 sessions on an auditory, a visual or a combined audiovisual temporal order judgment (TOJ). Groups were pre-tested on a range TOJ tasks within and between their group modality prior to learning so that transfer of any learning from the trained task could be measured by post-testing other tasks. Robust TOJ learning (reduced temporal order discrimination thresholds) occurred for all groups, although auditory learning (dichotic 500/2000 Hz tones) was slightly weaker than visual learning (lateralised grating patches). Crossmodal TOJs also displayed robust learning. Post-testing revealed that improvements in temporal resolution acquired during visual learning transferred within modality to other retinotopic locations and orientations, but not to auditory or crossmodal tasks. Auditory learning did not transfer to visual or crossmodal tasks, and neither did it transfer within audition to another frequency pair. In an interesting asymmetry, crossmodal learning transferred to all visual tasks but not to auditory tasks. Finally, in all conditions, learning to make TOJs for stimulus onsets did not transfer at all to discriminating temporal offsets. These data present a complex picture of timing processes. The lack of transfer between unimodal groups indicates no central supramodal timing process for this task; however, the audiovisual-to-visual transfer cannot be explained without some form of sensory interaction. We propose that auditory learning occurred in frequency-tuned processes in the periphery, precluding interactions with more central visual and audiovisual timing processes. Functionally the patterns of featural transfer suggest that perceptual learning of temporal order may be optimised to object-centered rather than viewer-centered constraints.

Interactions between the spatial and temporal stimulus factors that influence multisensory integration in human performance.

PubMed

Stevenson, Ryan A; Fister, Juliane Krueger; Barnett, Zachary P; Nidiffer, Aaron R; Wallace, Mark T

2012-05-01

In natural environments, human sensory systems work in a coordinated and integrated manner to perceive and respond to external events. Previous research has shown that the spatial and temporal relationships of sensory signals are paramount in determining how information is integrated across sensory modalities, but in ecologically plausible settings, these factors are not independent. In the current study, we provide a novel exploration of the impact on behavioral performance for systematic manipulations of the spatial location and temporal synchrony of a visual-auditory stimulus pair. Simple auditory and visual stimuli were presented across a range of spatial locations and stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs), and participants performed both a spatial localization and simultaneity judgment task. Response times in localizing paired visual-auditory stimuli were slower in the periphery and at larger SOAs, but most importantly, an interaction was found between the two factors, in which the effect of SOA was greater in peripheral as opposed to central locations. Simultaneity judgments also revealed a novel interaction between space and time: individuals were more likely to judge stimuli as synchronous when occurring in the periphery at large SOAs. The results of this study provide novel insights into (a) how the speed of spatial localization of an audiovisual stimulus is affected by location and temporal coincidence and the interaction between these two factors and (b) how the location of a multisensory stimulus impacts judgments concerning the temporal relationship of the paired stimuli. These findings provide strong evidence for a complex interdependency between spatial location and temporal structure in determining the ultimate behavioral and perceptual outcome associated with a paired multisensory (i.e., visual-auditory) stimulus.

[Role of the orbitofrontal cortex in moral judgment].

PubMed

Mimura, Masaru

2010-11-01

The neural substrates of moral judgments have recently been advocated to consist of widely distributed brain networks including the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), anterior temporal lobe and superior temporal gyrus. Moral judgments could be regarded as a conflict between the top-down rational/logical processes and the bottom-up irrational/emotional processes. Individuals with OFC damage are usually difficult to inhibit emotionally-driven outrages, thereby demonstrating severe impairment of moral judgments despite their well-preserved moral knowledge. Individuals with OFC damage frequently present with anti-social less moral behaviors. However, clinical observation indicates that some OFC patients may show "hypermoral" tendency in the sense that they are too strict to overlook other person's offense. Two representative cases with OFC damage were reported, both presented with extreme rage against others' offensive behaviors. To further elucidate the "hypermorality" of OFC patients, an experiment was performed in which patients with OFC damage and healthy control participants were asked to determine punishments for other's fictitious crimes that varied in perpetrator responsibility and crime severity. Individuals with OFC damage punished more strictly than healthy controls those persons for mitigating circumstances. The results are consistent with clinical observation of OFC patients' highly rigid and inflexible behaviors against third person's offense.

The roles of categorical and coordinate spatial relations in recognizing buildings.

PubMed

Palermo, Liana; Piccardi, Laura; Nori, Raffaella; Giusberti, Fiorella; Guariglia, Cecilia

2012-11-01

Categorical spatial information is considered more useful for recognizing objects, and coordinate spatial information for guiding actions--for example, during navigation or grasping. In contrast with this assumption, we hypothesized that buildings, unlike other categories of objects, require both categorical and coordinate spatial information in order to be recognized. This hypothesis arose from evidence that right-brain-damaged patients have deficits in both coordinate judgments and recognition of buildings and from the fact that buildings are very useful for guiding navigation in urban environments. To test this hypothesis, we assessed 210 healthy college students while they performed four different tasks that required categorical and coordinate judgments and the recognition of common objects and buildings. Our results showed that both categorical and coordinate spatial representations are necessary to recognize a building, whereas only categorical representations are necessary to recognize an object. We discuss our data in view of a recent neural framework for visuospatial processing, suggesting that recognizing buildings may specifically activate the parieto-medial-temporal pathway.

The contribution of local features to familiarity judgments in music.

PubMed

Bigand, Emmanuel; Gérard, Yannick; Molin, Paul

2009-07-01

The contributions of local and global features to object identification depend upon the context. For example, while local features play an essential role in identification of words and objects, the global features are more influential in face recognition. In order to evaluate the respective strengths of local and global features for face recognition, researchers usually ask participants to recognize human faces (famous or learned) in normal and scrambled pictures. In this paper, we address a similar issue in music. We present the results of an experiment in which musically untrained participants were asked to differentiate famous from unknown musical excerpts that were presented in normal or scrambled ways. Manipulating the size of the temporal window on which the scrambling procedure was applied allowed us to evaluate the minimal length of time necessary for participants to make a familiarity judgment. Quite surprisingly, the minimum duration for differentiation of famous from unknown pieces is extremely short. This finding highlights the contribution of very local features to music memory.

Outline for a theory of intelligence

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Albus, James S.

1991-01-01

Intelligence is defined as that which produces successful behavior. Intelligence is assumed to result from natural selection. A model is proposed that integrates knowledge from research in both natural and artificial systems. The model consists of a hierarchical system architecture wherein: (1) control bandwidth decreases about an order of magnitude at each higher level, (2) perceptual resolution of spatial and temporal patterns contracts about an order-of-magnitude at each higher level, (3) goals expand in scope and planning horizons expand in space and time about an order-of-magnitude at each higher level, and (4) models of the world and memories of events expand their range in space and time by about an order-of-magnitude at each higher level. At each level, functional modules perform behavior generation (task decomposition planning and execution), world modeling, sensory processing, and value judgment. Sensory feedback control loops are closed at every level.

Is moral beauty different from facial beauty? Evidence from an fMRI study.

PubMed

Wang, Tingting; Mo, Lei; Mo, Ce; Tan, Li Hai; Cant, Jonathan S; Zhong, Luojin; Cupchik, Gerald

2015-06-01

Is moral beauty different from facial beauty? Two functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments were performed to answer this question. Experiment 1 investigated the network of moral aesthetic judgments and facial aesthetic judgments. Participants performed aesthetic judgments and gender judgments on both faces and scenes containing moral acts. The conjunction analysis of the contrasts 'facial aesthetic judgment > facial gender judgment' and 'scene moral aesthetic judgment > scene gender judgment' identified the common involvement of the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), inferior temporal gyrus and medial superior frontal gyrus, suggesting that both types of aesthetic judgments are based on the orchestration of perceptual, emotional and cognitive components. Experiment 2 examined the network of facial beauty and moral beauty during implicit perception. Participants performed a non-aesthetic judgment task on both faces (beautiful vs common) and scenes (containing morally beautiful vs neutral information). We observed that facial beauty (beautiful faces > common faces) involved both the cortical reward region OFC and the subcortical reward region putamen, whereas moral beauty (moral beauty scenes > moral neutral scenes) only involved the OFC. Moreover, compared with facial beauty, moral beauty spanned a larger-scale cortical network, indicating more advanced and complex cerebral representations characterizing moral beauty. © The Author (2014). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Crossmodal Statistical Binding of Temporal Information and Stimuli Properties Recalibrates Perception of Visual Apparent Motion

PubMed Central

Zhang, Yi; Chen, Lihan

2016-01-01

Recent studies of brain plasticity that pertain to time perception have shown that fast training of temporal discrimination in one modality, for example, the auditory modality, can improve performance of temporal discrimination in another modality, such as the visual modality. We here examined whether the perception of visual Ternus motion could be recalibrated through fast crossmodal statistical binding of temporal information and stimuli properties binding. We conducted two experiments, composed of three sessions each: pre-test, learning, and post-test. In both the pre-test and the post-test, participants classified the Ternus display as either “element motion” or “group motion.” For the training session in Experiment 1, we constructed two types of temporal structures, in which two consecutively presented sound beeps were dominantly (80%) flanked by one leading visual Ternus frame and by one lagging visual Ternus frame (VAAV) or dominantly inserted by two Ternus visual frames (AVVA). Participants were required to respond which interval (auditory vs. visual) was longer. In Experiment 2, we presented only a single auditory–visual pair but with similar temporal configurations as in Experiment 1, and asked participants to perform an audio–visual temporal order judgment. The results of these two experiments support that statistical binding of temporal information and stimuli properties can quickly and selectively recalibrate the sensitivity of perceiving visual motion, according to the protocols of the specific bindings. PMID:27065910

The effect of concurrent semantic categorization on delayed serial recall.

PubMed

Acheson, Daniel J; MacDonald, Maryellen C; Postle, Bradley R

2011-01-01

The influence of semantic processing on the serial ordering of items in short-term memory was explored using a novel dual-task paradigm. Participants engaged in 2 picture-judgment tasks while simultaneously performing delayed serial recall. List material varied in the presence of phonological overlap (Experiments 1 and 2) and in semantic content (concrete words in Experiment 1 and 3; nonwords in Experiments 2 and 3). Picture judgments varied in the extent to which they required accessing visual semantic information (i.e., semantic categorization and line orientation judgments). Results showed that, relative to line-orientation judgments, engaging in semantic categorization judgments increased the proportion of item-ordering errors for concrete lists but did not affect error proportions for nonword lists. Furthermore, although more ordering errors were observed for phonologically similar relative to dissimilar lists, no interactions were observed between the phonological overlap and picture-judgment task manipulations. These results demonstrate that lexical-semantic representations can affect the serial ordering of items in short-term memory. Furthermore, the dual-task paradigm provides a new method for examining when and how semantic representations affect memory performance.

The Effect of Concurrent Semantic Categorization on Delayed Serial Recall

PubMed Central

Acheson, Daniel J.; MacDonald, Maryellen C.; Postle, Bradley R.

2010-01-01

The influence of semantic processing on the serial ordering of items in short-term memory was explored using a novel dual-task paradigm. Subjects engaged in two picture judgment tasks while simultaneously performing delayed serial recall. List material varied in the presence of phonological overlap (Experiments 1 and 2) and in semantic content (concrete words in Experiment 1 and 3; nonwords in Experiments 2 and 3). Picture judgments varied in the extent to which they required accessing visual semantic information (i.e., semantic categorization and line orientation judgments). Results showed that, relative to line orientation judgments, engaging in semantic categorization judgments increased the proportion of item ordering errors for concrete lists but did not affect error proportions for nonword lists. Furthermore, although more ordering errors were observed for phonologically similar relative to dissimilar lists, no interactions were observed between the phonological overlap and picture judgment task manipulations. These results thus demonstrate that lexical-semantic representations can affect the serial ordering of items in short-term memory. Furthermore, the dual-task paradigm provides a new method for examining when and how semantic representations affect memory performance. PMID:21058880

Rethinking Familiarity: Remember/Know Judgments in Free Recall

PubMed Central

Mickes, Laura; Seale-Carlisle, Travis M.; Wixted, John T.

2013-01-01

Although frequently used with recognition, a few studies have used the Remember/Know procedure with free recall. In each case, participants gave Know judgments to a significant number of recalled items (items that were presumably not remembered on the basis of familiarity). What do these Know judgments mean? We investigated this issue using a source memory/free-recall procedure. For each word that was recalled, participants were asked to (a) make a confidence rating on a 5-point scale, (b) make a Remember/Know judgment, and (c) recollect a source detail. The large majority of both Remember judgments and Know judgments were made with high confidence and high accuracy, but source memory was nevertheless higher for Remember judgments than for Know judgments. These source memory results correspond to what is found using recognition, and they raise the possibility that Know judgments in free recall identify the cue-dependent retrieval of item-only information from an episodic memory search set. In agreement with this idea, we also found that the temporal dynamics of free recall were similar for high-confidence Remember and high-confidence Know judgments (as if both judgments reflected retrieval from the same search set). If Know judgments in free recall do in fact reflect the episodic retrieval of item-only information, it seems reasonable to suppose that the same might be true of high-confidence Know judgments in recognition. If so, then a longstanding debate about the role of the hippocampus in recollection and familiarity may have a natural resolution. PMID:23637470

Is moral beauty different from facial beauty? Evidence from an fMRI study

PubMed Central

Wang, Tingting; Mo, Ce; Tan, Li Hai; Cant, Jonathan S.; Zhong, Luojin; Cupchik, Gerald

2015-01-01

Is moral beauty different from facial beauty? Two functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments were performed to answer this question. Experiment 1 investigated the network of moral aesthetic judgments and facial aesthetic judgments. Participants performed aesthetic judgments and gender judgments on both faces and scenes containing moral acts. The conjunction analysis of the contrasts ‘facial aesthetic judgment > facial gender judgment’ and ‘scene moral aesthetic judgment > scene gender judgment’ identified the common involvement of the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), inferior temporal gyrus and medial superior frontal gyrus, suggesting that both types of aesthetic judgments are based on the orchestration of perceptual, emotional and cognitive components. Experiment 2 examined the network of facial beauty and moral beauty during implicit perception. Participants performed a non-aesthetic judgment task on both faces (beautiful vs common) and scenes (containing morally beautiful vs neutral information). We observed that facial beauty (beautiful faces > common faces) involved both the cortical reward region OFC and the subcortical reward region putamen, whereas moral beauty (moral beauty scenes > moral neutral scenes) only involved the OFC. Moreover, compared with facial beauty, moral beauty spanned a larger-scale cortical network, indicating more advanced and complex cerebral representations characterizing moral beauty. PMID:25298010

Global loudness of rising- and falling-intensity tones: How temporal profile characteristics shape overall judgments.

PubMed

Ponsot, Emmanuel; Susini, Patrick; Meunier, Sabine

2017-07-01

The mechanisms underlying global loudness judgments of rising- or falling-intensity tones were further investigated in two magnitude estimation experiments. By manipulating the temporal characteristics of such stimuli, it was examined whether judgments could be accounted for by an integration of their loudest portion over a certain temporal window associated to a "decay mechanism" downsizing this integration over time for falling ramps. In experiment 1, 1-kHz intensity-ramps were stretched in time between 1 and 16 s keeping their dynamics (difference between maximum and minimum levels) unchanged. While global loudness of rising tones increased up to 6 s, evaluations of falling tones increased at a weaker rate and slightly decayed between 6 and 16 s, resulting in significant differences between the two patterns. In experiment 2, ramps were stretched in time between 2 and 12 s keeping their slopes (rate of change in dB/s) unchanged. In this context, the main effect of duration became non-significant and the interaction between the two profiles remained, although the decay of falling tones was not significant. These results qualitatively support the view that the global loudness computation of intensity-ramps involves an integration of their loudest portions; the presence of a decay mechanism could, however, not be attested.

Do working memory-driven attention shifts speed up visual awareness?

PubMed

Pan, Yi; Cheng, Qiu-Ping

2011-11-01

Previous research has shown that content representations in working memory (WM) can bias attention in favor of matching stimuli in the scene. Using a visual prior-entry procedure, we here investigate whether such WM-driven attention shifts can speed up the conscious awareness of memory-matching relative to memory-mismatching stimuli. Participants were asked to hold a color cue in WM and to subsequently perform a temporal order judgment (TOJ) task by reporting either of two different-colored circles (presented to the left and right of fixation with a variable temporal interval) as having the first onset. One of the two TOJ circles could match the memory cue in color. We found that awareness of the temporal order of the circle onsets was not affected by the contents of WM, even when participants were explicitly informed that one of the TOJ circles would always match the WM contents. The null effect of WM on TOJs was not due to an inability of the memory-matching item to capture attention, since response times to the target in a follow-up experiment were improved when it appeared at the location of the memory-matching item. The present findings suggest that WM-driven attention shifts cannot accelerate phenomenal awareness of matching stimuli in the visual field.

A dynamic neural field model of temporal order judgments.

PubMed

Hecht, Lauren N; Spencer, John P; Vecera, Shaun P

2015-12-01

Temporal ordering of events is biased, or influenced, by perceptual organization-figure-ground organization-and by spatial attention. For example, within a region assigned figural status or at an attended location, onset events are processed earlier (Lester, Hecht, & Vecera, 2009; Shore, Spence, & Klein, 2001), and offset events are processed for longer durations (Hecht & Vecera, 2011; Rolke, Ulrich, & Bausenhart, 2006). Here, we present an extension of a dynamic field model of change detection (Johnson, Spencer, Luck, & Schöner, 2009; Johnson, Spencer, & Schöner, 2009) that accounts for both the onset and offset performance for figural and attended regions. The model posits that neural populations processing the figure are more active, resulting in a peak of activation that quickly builds toward a detection threshold when the onset of a target is presented. This same enhanced activation for some neural populations is maintained when a present target is removed, creating delays in the perception of the target's offset. We discuss the broader implications of this model, including insights regarding how neural activation can be generated in response to the disappearance of information. (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).

Individual differences in first- and second-order temporal judgment.

PubMed

Corcoran, Andrew W; Groot, Christopher; Bruno, Aurelio; Johnston, Alan; Cropper, Simon J

2018-01-01

The ability of subjects to identify and reproduce brief temporal intervals is influenced by many factors whether they be stimulus-based, task-based or subject-based. The current study examines the role individual differences play in subsecond and suprasecond timing judgments, using the schizoptypy personality scale as a test-case approach for quantifying a broad range of individual differences. In two experiments, 129 (Experiment 1) and 141 (Experiment 2) subjects completed the O-LIFE personality questionnaire prior to performing a modified temporal-bisection task. In the bisection task, subjects responded to two identical instantiations of a luminance grating presented in a 4deg window, 4deg above fixation for 1.5 s (Experiment 1) or 3 s (Experiment 2). Subjects initiated presentation with a button-press, and released the button when they considered the stimulus to be half-way through (750/1500 ms). Subjects were then asked to indicate their 'most accurate estimate' of the two intervals. In this way we measure both performance on the task (a first-order measure) and the subjects' knowledge of their performance (a second-order measure). In Experiment 1 the effect of grating-drift and feedback on performance was also examined. Experiment 2 focused on the static/no-feedback condition. For the group data, Experiment 1 showed a significant effect of presentation order in the baseline condition (no feedback), which disappeared when feedback was provided. Moving the stimulus had no effect on perceived duration. Experiment 2 showed no effect of stimulus presentation order. This elimination of the subsecond order-effect was at the expense of accuracy, as the mid-point of the suprasecond interval was generally underestimated. Response precision increased as a proportion of total duration, reducing the variance below that predicted by Weber's law. This result is consistent with a breakdown of the scalar properties of time perception in the early suprasecond range. All subjects showed good insight into their own performance, though that insight did not necessarily correlate with the veridical bisection point. In terms of personality, we found evidence of significant differences in performance along the Unusual Experiences subscale, of most theoretical interest here, in the subsecond condition only. There was also significant correlation with Impulsive Nonconformity and Cognitive Disorganisation in the sub- and suprasecond conditions, respectively. Overall, these data support a partial dissociation of timing mechanisms at very short and slightly longer intervals. Further, these results suggest that perception is not the only critical mitigator of confidence in temporal experience, since individuals can effectively compensate for differences in perception at the level of metacognition in early suprasecond time. Though there are individual differences in performance, these are perhaps less than expected from previous reports and indicate an effective timing mechanism dealing with brief durations independent of the influence of significant personality trait differences.

Moral judgment and its relation to second-order theory of mind.

PubMed

Fu, Genyue; Xiao, Wen S; Killen, Melanie; Lee, Kang

2014-08-01

Recent research indicates that moral judgment and 1st-order theory of mind abilities are related. What is not known, however, is how 2nd-order theory of mind is related to moral judgment. In the present study, we extended previous findings by administering a morally relevant theory of mind task (an accidental transgressor) to 4- to 7-year-old Chinese children (N = 79) and analyzing connections with 2nd-order theory of mind understanding. Using hierarchical multiple regression analyses, we found that above and beyond age, children's 1st-order theory of mind and 2nd-order theory of mind each significantly and uniquely contributed to children's moral evaluations of the intention in the accidental transgression. These findings highlight the important roles that 1st- and 2nd-order theory of mind play in leading children to make appropriate moral judgments based on an actor's intention in a social situation. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved.

5 CFR 838.103 - Definitions.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-01-01

... Court Orders § 838.103 Definitions. In this part (except subpart J)— Child abuse creditor means an individual who applies for benefits under CSRS or FERS based on a child abuse judgment enforcement order. Child abuse judgment enforcement order means a court or administrative order requiring OPM to pay a...

5 CFR 838.103 - Definitions.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-01-01

... Court Orders § 838.103 Definitions. In this part (except subpart J)— Child abuse creditor means an individual who applies for benefits under CSRS or FERS based on a child abuse judgment enforcement order. Child abuse judgment enforcement order means a court or administrative order requiring OPM to pay a...

5 CFR 838.103 - Definitions.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-01-01

... Court Orders § 838.103 Definitions. In this part (except subpart J)— Child abuse creditor means an individual who applies for benefits under CSRS or FERS based on a child abuse judgment enforcement order. Child abuse judgment enforcement order means a court or administrative order requiring OPM to pay a...

5 CFR 838.103 - Definitions.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-01-01

... Court Orders § 838.103 Definitions. In this part (except subpart J)— Child abuse creditor means an individual who applies for benefits under CSRS or FERS based on a child abuse judgment enforcement order. Child abuse judgment enforcement order means a court or administrative order requiring OPM to pay a...

5 CFR 838.103 - Definitions.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-01-01

... Court Orders § 838.103 Definitions. In this part (except subpart J)— Child abuse creditor means an individual who applies for benefits under CSRS or FERS based on a child abuse judgment enforcement order. Child abuse judgment enforcement order means a court or administrative order requiring OPM to pay a...

The Effect of Attribute Order on Judgment in Chinese and English

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tavassoli, Nader T.; Lee, Yih Hwai

2004-01-01

The authors found that the order of attribute presentation had a stronger effect on judgment in English than in Chinese. In Experiment 1, with a sample of 102 female and 63 male bilingual Singaporeans, the authors found that participants' memory-based judgments showed a stronger primacy effect in English than in Chinese that was mediated by recall…

Speaking two languages with different number naming systems: What implications for magnitude judgments in bilinguals at different stages of language acquisition?

PubMed

Van Rinsveld, Amandine; Schiltz, Christine; Landerl, Karin; Brunner, Martin; Ugen, Sonja

2016-08-01

Differences between languages in terms of number naming systems may lead to performance differences in number processing. The current study focused on differences concerning the order of decades and units in two-digit number words (i.e., unit-decade order in German but decade-unit order in French) and how they affect number magnitude judgments. Participants performed basic numerical tasks, namely two-digit number magnitude judgments, and we used the compatibility effect (Nuerk et al. in Cognition 82(1):B25-B33, 2001) as a hallmark of language influence on numbers. In the first part we aimed to understand the influence of language on compatibility effects in adults coming from German or French monolingual and German-French bilingual groups (Experiment 1). The second part examined how this language influence develops at different stages of language acquisition in individuals with increasing bilingual proficiency (Experiment 2). Language systematically influenced magnitude judgments such that: (a) The spoken language(s) modulated magnitude judgments presented as Arabic digits, and (b) bilinguals' progressive language mastery impacted magnitude judgments presented as number words. Taken together, the current results suggest that the order of decades and units in verbal numbers may qualitatively influence magnitude judgments in bilinguals and monolinguals, providing new insights into how number processing can be influenced by language(s).

The effect of attribute order on judgment in Chinese and English.

PubMed

Tavassoli, Nader T; Lee, Yih Hwai

2004-12-01

The authors found that the order of attribute presentation had a stronger effect on judgment in English than in Chinese. In Experiment 1, with a sample of 102 female and 63 male bilingual Singaporeans, the authors found that participants' memory-based judgments showed a stronger primacy effect in English than in Chinese that was mediated by recall from long-term memory. In contrast, participants' online (immediate) judgments showed a primacy effect in both languages that was unmediated by recall from short-term memory. In Experiment 2, with a sample of 67 female and 53 male bilingual Singaporeans, the authors found that participants' online judgments were more influenced by the attribute order of a previously seen competitive advertisement in English than in Chinese. A cross-cultural field study in Mainland China and the United Kingdom provided external validity for the experimental results. copyright (c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved.

Attentional Modulation of Masked Repetition and Categorical Priming in Young and Older Adults

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fabre, Ludovic; Lemaire, Patrick; Grainger, Jonathan

2007-01-01

Three experiments examined the effects of temporal attention and aging on masked repetition and categorical priming for numbers and words. Participants' temporal attention was manipulated by varying the stimulus onset asynchrony (i.e., constant or variable SOA). In Experiment 1, participants performed a parity judgment task and a lexical decision…

Electrophysiological evidence for differential processing of numerical quantity and order in humans.

PubMed

Turconi, Eva; Jemel, Boutheina; Rossion, Bruno; Seron, Xavier

2004-09-01

It is yet unclear whether the processing of number magnitude and order rely on common or different functional processes and neural substrates. On the one hand, recent neuroimaging studies show that quantity and order coding activate the same areas in the parietal and prefrontal cortices. On the other hand, evidence from developmental and neuropsychological studies suggest dissociated mechanisms for processing quantity and order information. To clarify this issue, the present study investigated the spatio-temporal course of quantity and order coding operations using event-related potentials (ERPs). Twenty-four subjects performed a quantity task (classifying numbers as smaller or larger than 15) and an order task on the same material (classifying numbers as coming before or after 15), as well as a control order task on letters (classifying letters as coming before or after M). Behavioral results showed a classical distance effect (decreasing reaction times [RTs] with increasing distance from the standard) for all tasks. In agreement with previous electrophysiological evidence, this effect was significant on a P2 parietal component for numerical material. However, the difference between processing numbers close or far from the target appeared earlier and was larger on the left hemisphere for quantity processing, while it was delayed and bilateral for order processing. There was also a significant distance effect in all tasks on parietal sites for the following P3 component elicited by numbers, but this effect was larger on prefrontal areas for the order judgment. In conclusion, both quantity and order show similar behavioral effects, but they are associated with different spatio-temporal courses in parietal and prefrontal cortices.

Better, Stronger, Faster: Self-Serving Judgment, Affect Regulation, and the Optimal Vigilance Hypothesis.

PubMed

Roese, Neal J; Olson, James M

2007-06-01

Self-serving judgments, in which the self is viewed more favorably than other people, are ubiquitous. Their dynamic variation within individuals may be explained in terms of the regulation of affect. Self-serving judgments produce positive emotions, and threat increases self-serving judgments (a compensatory pattern that restores affect to a set point or baseline). Perceived mutability is a key moderator of these judgments; low mutability (i.e., the circumstance is closed to modification) triggers a cognitive response aimed at affect regulation, whereas high mutability (i.e., the circumstance is open to further modification) activates direct behavioral remediation. Threats often require immediate response, whereas positive events do not. Because of this brief temporal window, an active mechanism is needed to restore negative (but not positive) affective shifts back to a set point. Without this active reset, an earlier threat would make the individual less vigilant toward a new threat. Thus, when people are sad, they aim to return their mood to baseline, often via self-serving judgments. We argue that asymmetric homeostasis enables optimal vigilance, which establishes a coherent theoretical account of the role of self-serving judgments in affect regulation. © 2007 Association for Psychological Science.

Better, Stronger, Faster Self-Serving Judgment, Affect Regulation, and the Optimal Vigilance Hypothesis

PubMed Central

Roese, Neal J.; Olson, James M.

2008-01-01

Self-serving judgments, in which the self is viewed more favorably than other people, are ubiquitous. Their dynamic variation within individuals may be explained in terms of the regulation of affect. Self-serving judgments produce positive emotions, and threat increases self-serving judgments (a compensatory pattern that restores affect to a set point or baseline). Perceived mutability is a key moderator of these judgments; low mutability (i.e., the circumstance is closed to modification) triggers a cognitive response aimed at affect regulation, whereas high mutability (i.e., the circumstance is open to further modification) activates direct behavioral remediation. Threats often require immediate response, whereas positive events do not. Because of this brief temporal window, an active mechanism is needed to restore negative (but not positive) affective shifts back to a set point. Without this active reset, an earlier threat would make the individual less vigilant toward a new threat. Thus, when people are sad, they aim to return their mood to baseline, often via self-serving judgments. We argue that asymmetric homeostasis enables optimal vigilance, which establishes a coherent theoretical account of the role of self-serving judgments in affect regulation. PMID:18552989

Neural development of mentalizing in moral judgment from adolescence to adulthood.

PubMed

Harenski, Carla L; Harenski, Keith A; Shane, Matthew S; Kiehl, Kent A

2012-01-01

The neural mechanisms underlying moral judgment have been extensively studied in healthy adults. How these mechanisms evolve from adolescence to adulthood has received less attention. Brain regions that have been consistently implicated in moral judgment in adults, including the superior temporal cortex and prefrontal cortex, undergo extensive developmental changes from adolescence to adulthood. Thus, their role in moral judgment may also change over time. In the present study, 51 healthy male participants age 13–53 were scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they viewed pictures that did or did not depict situations considered by most individuals to represent moral violations, and rated their degree of moral violation severity. Consistent with predictions, a regression analysis revealed a positive correlation between age and hemodynamic activity in the temporo-parietal junction when participants made decisions regarding moral severity.This region is known to contribute to mentalizing processes during moral judgment in adults and suggests that adolescents use these types of inferences less during moral judgment than do adults. A positive correlation with age was also present in the posterior cingulate. Overall, the results suggest that the brain regions utilized in moral judgment change over development.

Judgments relative to patterns: how temporal sequence patterns affect judgments and memory.

PubMed

Kusev, Petko; Ayton, Peter; van Schaik, Paul; Tsaneva-Atanasova, Krasimira; Stewart, Neil; Chater, Nick

2011-12-01

Six experiments studied relative frequency judgment and recall of sequentially presented items drawn from 2 distinct categories (i.e., city and animal). The experiments show that judged frequencies of categories of sequentially encountered stimuli are affected by certain properties of the sequence configuration. We found (a) a first-run effect whereby people overestimated the frequency of a given category when that category was the first repeated category to occur in the sequence and (b) a dissociation between judgments and recall; respondents may judge 1 event more likely than the other and yet recall more instances of the latter. Specifically, the distribution of recalled items does not correspond to the frequency estimates for the event categories, indicating that participants do not make frequency judgments by sampling their memory for individual items as implied by other accounts such as the availability heuristic (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973) and the availability process model (Hastie & Park, 1986). We interpret these findings as reflecting the operation of a judgment heuristic sensitive to sequential patterns and offer an account for the relationship between memory and judged frequencies of sequentially encountered stimuli.

On the importance of looking back: the role of recursive remindings in recency judgments and cued recall.

PubMed

Jacoby, Larry L; Wahlheim, Christopher N

2013-07-01

Suppose that you were asked which of two movies you had most recently seen. The results of the experiments reported here suggest that your answer would be more accurate if, when viewing the later movie, you were reminded of the earlier one. In the present experiments, we investigated the role of remindings in recency judgments and cued-recall performance. We did this by presenting a list composed of two instances from each of several different categories and later asking participants to select (Exp. 1) or to recall (Exp. 2) the more recently presented instance. Reminding was manipulated by varying instructions to look back over memory of earlier instances during the presentation of later instances. As compared to a control condition, cued-recall performance revealed facilitation effects when remindings occurred and were later recollected, but interference effects in their absence. The effects of reminding on recency judgments paralleled those on cued recall of more recently presented instances. We interpret these results as showing that reminding produces a recursive representation that embeds memory for an earlier-presented category instance into that of a later-presented one and, thereby, preserves their temporal order. Large individual differences in the probabilities of remindings and of their later recollection were observed. The widespread importance of recursive reminding for theory and for applied purposes is discussed.

Criminal decision making: the development of adolescent judgment, criminal responsibility, and culpability.

PubMed

Fried, C S; Reppucci, N D

2001-02-01

Theories of judgment in decision making hypothesize that throughout adolescence, judgment is impaired because the development of several psychosocial factors that are presumed to influence decision making lags behind the development of the cognitive capacities that are required to make mature decisions. This study uses an innovative video technique to examine the role of several psychosocial factors--temporal perspective, peer influence, and risk perception--in adolescent criminal decision making. Results based on data collected from 56 adolescents between the ages of 13 and 18 years revealed that detained youth were more likely to think of future-oriented consequences of engaging in the depicted delinquent act and less likely to anticipate pressure from their friends than nondetained youth. Examination of the developmental functions of the psychosocial factors indicates age-based differences on standardized measures of temporal perspective and resistance to peer influence and on measures of the role of risk perception in criminal decision making. Assessments of criminal responsibility and culpability were predicted by age and ethnicity. Implications for punishment in the juvenile justice system are discussed.

Postdictive modulation of visual orientation.

PubMed

Kawabe, Takahiro

2012-01-01

The present study investigated how visual orientation is modulated by subsequent orientation inputs. Observers were presented a near-vertical Gabor patch as a target, followed by a left- or right-tilted second Gabor patch as a distracter in the spatial vicinity of the target. The task of the observers was to judge whether the target was right- or left-tilted (Experiment 1) or whether the target was vertical or not (Supplementary experiment). The judgment was biased toward the orientation of the distracter (the postdictive modulation of visual orientation). The judgment bias peaked when the target and distracter were temporally separated by 100 ms, indicating a specific temporal mechanism for this phenomenon. However, when the visibility of the distracter was reduced via backward masking, the judgment bias disappeared. On the other hand, the low-visibility distracter could still cause a simultaneous orientation contrast, indicating that the distracter orientation is still processed in the visual system (Experiment 2). Our results suggest that the postdictive modulation of visual orientation stems from spatiotemporal integration of visual orientation on the basis of a slow feature matching process.

A quantum theory account of order effects and conjunction fallacies in political judgments.

PubMed

Yearsley, James M; Trueblood, Jennifer S

2017-09-06

Are our everyday judgments about the world around us normative? Decades of research in the judgment and decision-making literature suggest the answer is no. If people's judgments do not follow normative rules, then what rules if any do they follow? Quantum probability theory is a promising new approach to modeling human behavior that is at odds with normative, classical rules. One key advantage of using quantum theory is that it explains multiple types of judgment errors using the same basic machinery, unifying what have previously been thought of as disparate phenomena. In this article, we test predictions from quantum theory related to the co-occurrence of two classic judgment phenomena, order effects and conjunction fallacies, using judgments about real-world events (related to the U.S. presidential primaries). We also show that our data obeys two a priori and parameter free constraints derived from quantum theory. Further, we examine two factors that moderate the effects, cognitive thinking style (as measured by the Cognitive Reflection Test) and political ideology.

Neural substrates of similarity and rule-based strategies in judgment

PubMed Central

von Helversen, Bettina; Karlsson, Linnea; Rasch, Björn; Rieskamp, Jörg

2014-01-01

Making accurate judgments is a core human competence and a prerequisite for success in many areas of life. Plenty of evidence exists that people can employ different judgment strategies to solve identical judgment problems. In categorization, it has been demonstrated that similarity-based and rule-based strategies are associated with activity in different brain regions. Building on this research, the present work tests whether solving two identical judgment problems recruits different neural substrates depending on people's judgment strategies. Combining cognitive modeling of judgment strategies at the behavioral level with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we compare brain activity when using two archetypal judgment strategies: a similarity-based exemplar strategy and a rule-based heuristic strategy. Using an exemplar-based strategy should recruit areas involved in long-term memory processes to a larger extent than a heuristic strategy. In contrast, using a heuristic strategy should recruit areas involved in the application of rules to a larger extent than an exemplar-based strategy. Largely consistent with our hypotheses, we found that using an exemplar-based strategy led to relatively higher BOLD activity in the anterior prefrontal and inferior parietal cortex, presumably related to retrieval and selective attention processes. In contrast, using a heuristic strategy led to relatively higher activity in areas in the dorsolateral prefrontal and the temporal-parietal cortex associated with cognitive control and information integration. Thus, even when people solve identical judgment problems, different neural substrates can be recruited depending on the judgment strategy involved. PMID:25360099

Human, Nature, Dynamism: The Effects of Content and Movement Perception on Brain Activations during the Aesthetic Judgment of Representational Paintings

PubMed Central

Di Dio, Cinzia; Ardizzi, Martina; Massaro, Davide; Di Cesare, Giuseppe; Gilli, Gabriella; Marchetti, Antonella; Gallese, Vittorio

2016-01-01

Movement perception and its role in aesthetic experience have been often studied, within empirical aesthetics, in relation to the human body. No such specificity has been defined in neuroimaging studies with respect to contents lacking a human form. The aim of this work was to explore, through functional magnetic imaging (f MRI), how perceived movement is processed during the aesthetic judgment of paintings using two types of content: human subjects and scenes of nature. Participants, untutored in the arts, were shown the stimuli and asked to make aesthetic judgments. Additionally, they were instructed to observe the paintings and to rate their perceived movement in separate blocks. Observation highlighted spontaneous processes associated with aesthetic experience, whereas movement judgment outlined activations specifically related to movement processing. The ratings recorded during aesthetic judgment revealed that nature scenes received higher scored than human content paintings. The imaging data showed similar activation, relative to baseline, for all stimuli in the three tasks, including activation of occipito-temporal areas, posterior parietal, and premotor cortices. Contrast analyses within aesthetic judgment task showed that human content activated, relative to nature, precuneus, fusiform gyrus, and posterior temporal areas, whose activation was prominent for dynamic human paintings. In contrast, nature scenes activated, relative to human stimuli, occipital and posterior parietal cortex/precuneus, involved in visuospatial exploration and pragmatic coding of movement, as well as central insula. Static nature paintings further activated, relative to dynamic nature stimuli, central and posterior insula. Besides insular activation, which was specific for aesthetic judgment, we found a large overlap in the activation pattern characterizing each stimulus dimension (content and dynamism) across observation, aesthetic judgment, and movement judgment tasks. These findings support the idea that the aesthetic evaluation of artworks depicting both human subjects and nature scenes involves a motor component, and that the associated neural processes occur quite spontaneously in the viewer. Furthermore, considering the functional roles of posterior and central insula, we suggest that nature paintings may evoke aesthetic processes requiring an additional proprioceptive and sensori-motor component implemented by “motor accessibility” to the represented scenario, which is needed to judge the aesthetic value of the observed painting. PMID:26793087

Judgments about Work and the Features of Young Adults’ Jobs *

PubMed Central

Johnson, Monica Kirkpatrick; Monserud, Maria

2010-01-01

This study revisits the relationship between adolescent judgments about work and later job characteristics, tackling the twin temporal dimensions of age and history. Drawing on 15 consecutive cohorts of high school seniors, we examine 1) whether adolescents' judgments about work become more strongly predictive of the characteristics of their jobs as they move through their twenties, and 2) whether the relationship between adolescents' judgments about work and their later job characteristics has weakened across cohorts of high school seniors between 1976 and 1990. Findings indicate a limited role of history; the larger life course story of these findings is tied to age. Adolescent judgments about work, measured in the senior year of high school, became more predictive of earnings with age during this period of the life course. They were also most predictive of the level of intrinsic job characteristics at the oldest age we examined, but the pattern was not one of progressive strengthening with age as it was for earnings. PMID:20802796

Event-related potential evidence of accessing gender stereotypes to aid source monitoring.

PubMed

Leynes, P Andrew; Crawford, Jarret T; Radebaugh, Anne M; Taranto, Elizabeth

2013-01-23

Source memory for the speaker's voice (male or female) was investigated when semantic knowledge (gender stereotypes) could and could not inform the episodic source judgment while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. Source accuracy was greater and response times were faster when stereotypes could predict the speaker's voice at test. Recollection supported source judgments in both conditions as indicated by significant parietal "old/new" ERP effects (500-800ms). Prototypical late ERP effects (the right frontal "old/new" effect and the late posterior negativity, LPN) were evident when source judgment was based solely on episodic memory. However, these two late ERP effects were diminished and a novel, frontal-negative ERP with left-central topography was observed when stereotypes aided source judgments. This pattern of ERP activity likely reflects activation of left frontal or left temporal lobes when semantic knowledge, in the form of a gender stereotype, is accessed to inform the episodic source judgment. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The Big Three of Comparative Judgment: On the Effects of Social, Temporal, and Dimensional Comparisons on Academic Self-Concept

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Müller-Kalthoff, Hanno; Helm, Friederike; Möller, Jens

2017-01-01

Students evaluate their domain-specific abilities by comparing their own achievement in one domain to that of others (social comparison), to their own previous achievement (temporal comparison), as well as their own achievement in another domain (dimensional comparison). The theories underlying these three comparison processes each assume an…

Neural Correlates of Temporal Auditory Processing in Developmental Dyslexia during German Vowel Length Discrimination: An fMRI Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Steinbrink, Claudia; Groth, Katarina; Lachmann, Thomas; Riecker, Axel

2012-01-01

This fMRI study investigated phonological vs. auditory temporal processing in developmental dyslexia by means of a German vowel length discrimination paradigm (Groth, Lachmann, Riecker, Muthmann, & Steinbrink, 2011). Behavioral and fMRI data were collected from dyslexics and controls while performing same-different judgments of vowel duration in…

Dissociations among judgments do not reflect cognitive priority: an associative explanation of memory for frequency information in contingency learning.

PubMed

Vadillo, Miguel A; Luque, David

2013-03-01

Previous research on causal learning has usually made strong claims about the relative complexity and temporal priority of some processes over others based on evidence about dissociations between several types of judgments. In particular, it has been argued that the dissociation between causal judgments and trial-type frequency information is incompatible with the general cognitive architecture proposed by associative models. In contrast with this view, we conduct an associative analysis of this process showing that this need not be the case. We conclude that any attempt to gain a better insight on the cognitive architecture involved in contingency learning cannot rely solely on data about these dissociations.

Integration of Intention and Outcome for Moral Judgment in Frontotemporal Dementia: Brain Structural Signatures.

PubMed

Baez, Sandra; Kanske, Philipp; Matallana, Diana; Montañes, Patricia; Reyes, Pablo; Slachevsky, Andrea; Matus, Cristian; Vigliecca, Nora Silvana; Torralva, Teresa; Manes, Facundo; Ibanez, Agustin

2016-01-01

Moral judgment has been proposed to rely on a distributed brain network. This function is impaired in behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), a condition involving damage to some regions of this network. However, no studies have investigated moral judgment in bvFTD via structural neuroimaging. We compared the performance of 21 bvFTD patients and 19 controls on a moral judgment task involving scenarios that discriminate between the contributions of intentions and outcomes. Voxel-based morphometry was used to assess (a) the atrophy pattern in bvFTD patients, (b) associations between gray matter (GM) volume and moral judgments, and (c) structural differences between bvFTD subgroups (patients with relatively preserved moral judgment and patients with severer moral judgment impairments). Patients judged attempted harm as more permissible and accidental harm as less permissible than controls. The groups' performance on accidental harm was associated with GM volume in the precuneus. In controls, it was al- so associated with the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC). Also, both groups' performance on attempted harm was associated with GM volume in the temporoparietal junction. Patients exhibiting worse performance displayed smaller GM volumes in the precuneus and temporal pole. Results suggest that moral judgment abnormalities in bvFTD are associated with impaired integration of intentions and outcomes, which depends on an extended brain network. In bvFTD, moral judgment seems to critically depend on areas beyond the VMPFC. © 2016 S. Karger AG, Basel.

Moving Events in Time: Time-Referent Hand-Arm Movements Influence Perceived Temporal Distance to Past Events

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Blom, Stephanie S. A. H.; Semin, Gun R.

2013-01-01

We examine and find support for the hypothesis that time-referent hand-arm movements influence temporal judgments. In line with the concept of "left is associated with earlier times, and right is associated with later times," we show that performing left (right) hand-arm movements while thinking about a past event increases (decreases) the…

A General Audiovisual Temporal Processing Deficit in Adult Readers With Dyslexia.

PubMed

Francisco, Ana A; Jesse, Alexandra; Groen, Margriet A; McQueen, James M

2017-01-01

Because reading is an audiovisual process, reading impairment may reflect an audiovisual processing deficit. The aim of the present study was to test the existence and scope of such a deficit in adult readers with dyslexia. We tested 39 typical readers and 51 adult readers with dyslexia on their sensitivity to the simultaneity of audiovisual speech and nonspeech stimuli, their time window of audiovisual integration for speech (using incongruent /aCa/ syllables), and their audiovisual perception of phonetic categories. Adult readers with dyslexia showed less sensitivity to audiovisual simultaneity than typical readers for both speech and nonspeech events. We found no differences between readers with dyslexia and typical readers in the temporal window of integration for audiovisual speech or in the audiovisual perception of phonetic categories. The results suggest an audiovisual temporal deficit in dyslexia that is not specific to speech-related events. But the differences found for audiovisual temporal sensitivity did not translate into a deficit in audiovisual speech perception. Hence, there seems to be a hiatus between simultaneity judgment and perception, suggesting a multisensory system that uses different mechanisms across tasks. Alternatively, it is possible that the audiovisual deficit in dyslexia is only observable when explicit judgments about audiovisual simultaneity are required.

Crossmodal attention switching: auditory dominance in temporal discrimination tasks.

PubMed

Lukas, Sarah; Philipp, Andrea M; Koch, Iring

2014-11-01

Visual stimuli are often processed more efficiently than accompanying stimuli in another modality. In line with this "visual dominance", earlier studies on attentional switching showed a clear benefit for visual stimuli in a bimodal visual-auditory modality-switch paradigm that required spatial stimulus localization in the relevant modality. The present study aimed to examine the generality of this visual dominance effect. The modality appropriateness hypothesis proposes that stimuli in different modalities are differentially effectively processed depending on the task dimension, so that processing of visual stimuli is favored in the dimension of space, whereas processing auditory stimuli is favored in the dimension of time. In the present study, we examined this proposition by using a temporal duration judgment in a bimodal visual-auditory switching paradigm. Two experiments demonstrated that crossmodal interference (i.e., temporal stimulus congruence) was larger for visual stimuli than for auditory stimuli, suggesting auditory dominance when performing temporal judgment tasks. However, attention switch costs were larger for the auditory modality than for visual modality, indicating a dissociation of the mechanisms underlying crossmodal competition in stimulus processing and modality-specific biasing of attentional set. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Recollection-dependent memory for event duration in large-scale spatial navigation

PubMed Central

Barense, Morgan D.

2017-01-01

Time and space represent two key aspects of episodic memories, forming the spatiotemporal context of events in a sequence. Little is known, however, about how temporal information, such as the duration and the order of particular events, are encoded into memory, and if it matters whether the memory representation is based on recollection or familiarity. To investigate this issue, we used a real world virtual reality navigation paradigm where periods of navigation were interspersed with pauses of different durations. Crucially, participants were able to reliably distinguish the durations of events that were subjectively “reexperienced” (i.e., recollected), but not of those that were familiar. This effect was not found in temporal order (ordinal) judgments. We also show that the active experience of the passage of time (holding down a key while waiting) moderately enhanced duration memory accuracy. Memory for event duration, therefore, appears to rely on the hippocampally supported ability to recollect or reexperience an event enabling the reinstatement of both its duration and its spatial context, to distinguish it from other events in a sequence. In contrast, ordinal memory appears to rely on familiarity and recollection to a similar extent. PMID:28202714

Not all order memory is equal: Test demands reveal dissociations in memory for sequence information.

PubMed

Jonker, Tanya R; MacLeod, Colin M

2017-02-01

Remembering the order of a sequence of events is a fundamental feature of episodic memory. Indeed, a number of formal models represent temporal context as part of the memory system, and memory for order has been researched extensively. Yet, the nature of the code(s) underlying sequence memory is still relatively unknown. Across 4 experiments that manipulated encoding task, we found evidence for 3 dissociable facets of order memory. Experiment 1 introduced a test requiring a judgment of which of 2 alternatives had immediately followed a word during encoding. This measure revealed better retention of interitem associations following relational encoding (silent reading) than relatively item-specific encoding (judging referent size), a pattern consistent with that observed in previous research using order reconstruction tests. In sharp contrast, Experiment 2 demonstrated the reverse pattern: Memory for the studied order of 2 sequentially presented items was actually better following item-specific encoding than following relational encoding. Experiment 3 reproduced this dissociation in a single experiment using both tests. Experiment 4 extended these findings by further dissociating the roles of relational encoding and item strength in the 2 tests. Taken together, these results indicate that memory for event sequence is influenced by (a) interitem associations, (b) the emphasized directionality of an association, and (c) an item's strength independent of other items. Memory for order is more complicated than has been portrayed in theories of memory and its nuances should be carefully considered when designing tests and models of temporal and relational memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).

Implicit and explicit processing of kanji and kana words and non-words studied with fMRI.

PubMed

Thuy, Dinh Ha Duy; Matsuo, Kayako; Nakamura, Kimihiro; Toma, Keiichiro; Oga, Tatsuhide; Nakai, Toshiharu; Shibasaki, Hiroshi; Fukuyama, Hidenao

2004-11-01

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we investigated the implicit language processing of kanji and kana words (i.e., hiragana transcriptions of normally written kanji words) and non-words. Twelve right-handed native Japanese speakers performed size judgments for character stimuli (implicit language task for linguistic stimuli), size judgments for scrambled-character stimuli (implicit language task for non-linguistic stimuli), and lexical decisions (explicit language task). The size judgments for scrambled-kanji stimuli and scrambled-kana stimuli produced activations on the bilateral lingual gyri (BA 18), the bilateral occipitotemporal regions (BA 19/37), and the bilateral superior and inferior parietal cortices (BA 7/40). Interestingly, besides these areas, activations of the left inferior frontal region (Broca's area, BA 44/45) and the left posterior inferior temporal cortex (PITC, BA 37), which have been considered as language areas, were additionally activated during size judgment for kanji character stimuli. Size judgment for kana character stimuli also activated Broca's area, the left PITC, and the left supramarginal gyrus (SMG, BA 40). The activations of these language areas were replicated in the lexical decisions for both kanji and kana. These findings suggest that language processing of both kanji and kana scripts is obligatory to literate Japanese subjects. Moreover, comparison between the scrambled kanji and the scrambled kana showed no activation in the language areas, while greater activation in the bilateral fusiform gyri (left-side predominant) was found in kanji vs. kana comparison during the size judgment and the lexical decision. Kana minus kanji activated the left SMG during the size judgment, and Broca's area and the left middle/superior temporal junction during the lexical decision. These results probably reflect that in implicit or explicit reading of kanji words and kana words (i.e., hiragana transcriptions of kanji words), although using largely overlapping cortical regions, there are still some differences. Kanji reading may involve more heavily visual orthographic retrieval and lexical-semantic system through the ventral route, while kana transcriptions of kanji words require phonological recoding to gain semantic access through the dorsal route.

Children's understanding of promising, lying, and false belief.

PubMed

Maas, Fay K

2008-07-01

Understanding promising and lying requires an understanding of intention and the ability to interpret mental states. The author examined (a) the extent to which 4- to 6-year-olds focus on the sincerity of the speaker's intention when the 4-to 6-year-olds make judgments about promises and lies and (b) whether false-belief reasoning skills are related to understanding promising and lying. Participants watched videotaped stories and made promise and lie judgments from their own perspective and from the listener-character's perspective. Children also completed false-belief reasoning tasks. Older children made more correct promise judgments from both perspectives. All children made correct lie judgments from the listener's perspective. The author found that Ist-order false-belief reasoning was related to making judgments from the participant's perspective; 2nd-order false-belief reasoning was related to making judgments from the listener-character's perspective. Results suggest that children's understanding of promising and lying moves from a focus on outcome toward a focus on the belief that each utterance is designed to create.

5 CFR 838.1101 - Purpose and scope.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-01-01

... (CONTINUED) COURT ORDERS AFFECTING RETIREMENT BENEFITS Court Orders Under the Child Abuse Accountability Act... of Personnel Management will follow upon the receipt of claims arising out of child abuse judgment... annuities or refunds of employee contributions are available to satisfy a child abuse judgment enforcement...

5 CFR 838.1101 - Purpose and scope.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-01-01

... (CONTINUED) COURT ORDERS AFFECTING RETIREMENT BENEFITS Court Orders Under the Child Abuse Accountability Act... of Personnel Management will follow upon the receipt of claims arising out of child abuse judgment... annuities or refunds of employee contributions are available to satisfy a child abuse judgment enforcement...

5 CFR 838.1101 - Purpose and scope.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-01-01

... (CONTINUED) COURT ORDERS AFFECTING RETIREMENT BENEFITS Court Orders Under the Child Abuse Accountability Act... of Personnel Management will follow upon the receipt of claims arising out of child abuse judgment... annuities or refunds of employee contributions are available to satisfy a child abuse judgment enforcement...

5 CFR 838.1101 - Purpose and scope.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-01-01

... (CONTINUED) COURT ORDERS AFFECTING RETIREMENT BENEFITS Court Orders Under the Child Abuse Accountability Act... of Personnel Management will follow upon the receipt of claims arising out of child abuse judgment... annuities or refunds of employee contributions are available to satisfy a child abuse judgment enforcement...

5 CFR 838.1101 - Purpose and scope.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-01-01

... (CONTINUED) COURT ORDERS AFFECTING RETIREMENT BENEFITS Court Orders Under the Child Abuse Accountability Act... of Personnel Management will follow upon the receipt of claims arising out of child abuse judgment... annuities or refunds of employee contributions are available to satisfy a child abuse judgment enforcement...

Brain activations during judgments of positive self-conscious emotion and positive basic emotion: pride and joy.

PubMed

Takahashi, Hidehiko; Matsuura, Masato; Koeda, Michihiko; Yahata, Noriaki; Suhara, Tetsuya; Kato, Motoichiro; Okubo, Yoshiro

2008-04-01

We aimed to investigate the neural correlates associated with judgments of a positive self-conscious emotion, pride, and elucidate the difference between pride and a basic positive emotion, joy, at the neural basis level using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Study of the neural basis associated with pride might contribute to a better understanding of the pride-related behaviors observed in neuropsychiatric disorders. Sixteen healthy volunteers were studied. The participants read sentences expressing joy or pride contents during the scans. Pride conditions activated the right posterior superior temporal sulcus and left temporal pole, the regions implicated in the neural substrate of social cognition or theory of mind. However, against our prediction, we did not find brain activation in the medial prefrontal cortex, a region responsible for inferring others' intention or self-reflection. Joy condition produced activations in the ventral striatum and insula/operculum, the key nodes of processing of hedonic or appetitive stimuli. Our results support the idea that pride is a self-conscious emotion, requiring the ability to detect the intention of others. At the same time, judgment of pride might require less self-reflection compared with those of negative self-conscious emotions such as guilt or embarrassment.

Separate elements of episodic memory subserved by distinct hippocampal-prefrontal connections.

PubMed

Barker, Gareth R I; Banks, Paul J; Scott, Hannah; Ralph, G Scott; Mitrophanous, Kyriacos A; Wong, Liang-Fong; Bashir, Zafar I; Uney, James B; Warburton, E Clea

2017-02-01

Episodic memory formation depends on information about a stimulus being integrated within a precise spatial and temporal context, a process dependent on the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. Investigations of putative functional interactions between these regions are complicated by multiple direct and indirect hippocampal-prefrontal connections. Here application of a pharmacogenetic deactivation technique enabled us to investigate the mnemonic contributions of two direct hippocampal-medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) pathways, one arising in the dorsal CA1 (dCA1) and the other in the intermediate CA1 (iCA1). While deactivation of either pathway impaired episodic memory, the resulting pattern of mnemonic deficits was different: deactivation of the dCA1→mPFC pathway selectively disrupted temporal order judgments while iCA1→mPFC pathway deactivation disrupted spatial memory. These findings reveal a previously unsuspected division of function among CA1 neurons that project directly to the mPFC. Such subnetworks may enable the distinctiveness of contextual information to be maintained in an episodic memory circuit.

Neural pattern change during encoding of a narrative predicts retrospective duration estimates

PubMed Central

Lositsky, Olga; Chen, Janice; Toker, Daniel; Honey, Christopher J; Shvartsman, Michael; Poppenk, Jordan L; Hasson, Uri; Norman, Kenneth A

2016-01-01

What mechanisms support our ability to estimate durations on the order of minutes? Behavioral studies in humans have shown that changes in contextual features lead to overestimation of past durations. Based on evidence that the medial temporal lobes and prefrontal cortex represent contextual features, we related the degree of fMRI pattern change in these regions with people’s subsequent duration estimates. After listening to a radio story in the scanner, participants were asked how much time had elapsed between pairs of clips from the story. Our ROI analyses found that duration estimates were correlated with the neural pattern distance between two clips at encoding in the right entorhinal cortex. Moreover, whole-brain searchlight analyses revealed a cluster spanning the right anterior temporal lobe. Our findings provide convergent support for the hypothesis that retrospective time judgments are driven by 'drift' in contextual representations supported by these regions. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.16070.001 PMID:27801645

On the Processing of Semantic Aspects of Experience in the Anterior Medial Temporal Lobe: An Event-Related fMRI Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Meyer, Patric; Mecklinger, Axel; Friederici, Angela D.

2010-01-01

Recognition memory based on familiarity judgments is a form of declarative memory that has been repeatedly associated with the anterior medial temporal lobe. It has been argued that this region sustains familiarity-based recognition not only by retrieving item-specific information but also by coding for those semantic aspects of an event that…

Cognitive Abilities Explaining Age-Related Changes in Time Perception of Short and Long Durations

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Zelanti, Pierre S.; Droit-Volet, Sylvie

2011-01-01

The current study investigated how the development of cognitive abilities explains the age-related changes in temporal judgment over short and long duration ranges from 0.5 to 30 s. Children (5- and 9-year-olds) as well as adults were given a temporal bisection task with four different duration ranges: a duration range shorter than 1 s, two…

77 FR 35031 - 4 OTC, Inc.; Decision and Order

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2012-06-12

...-captioned matter. [ALJ Exhibit Exh. 3]. On May 24, 2010, the Government filed a Motion For Summary Judgment And To Stay The Dates For The Parties To Submit Prehearing Statements (``Motion for Summary Judgment... its response to the Government's Motion for Summary Judgment. Therein, the Respondent stated that it...

Temporally Regular Musical Primes Facilitate Subsequent Syntax Processing in Children with Specific Language Impairment.

PubMed

Bedoin, Nathalie; Brisseau, Lucie; Molinier, Pauline; Roch, Didier; Tillmann, Barbara

2016-01-01

Children with developmental language disorders have been shown to be also impaired in rhythm and meter perception. Temporal processing and its link to language processing can be understood within the dynamic attending theory. An external stimulus can stimulate internal oscillators, which orient attention over time and drive speech signal segmentation to provide benefits for syntax processing, which is impaired in various patient populations. For children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and dyslexia, previous research has shown the influence of an external rhythmic stimulation on subsequent language processing by comparing the influence of a temporally regular musical prime to that of a temporally irregular prime. Here we tested whether the observed rhythmic stimulation effect is indeed due to a benefit provided by the regular musical prime (rather than a cost subsequent to the temporally irregular prime). Sixteen children with SLI and 16 age-matched controls listened to either a regular musical prime sequence or an environmental sound scene (without temporal regularities in event occurrence; i.e., referred to as "baseline condition") followed by grammatically correct and incorrect sentences. They were required to perform grammaticality judgments for each auditorily presented sentence. Results revealed that performance for the grammaticality judgments was better after the regular prime sequences than after the baseline sequences. Our findings are interpreted in the theoretical framework of the dynamic attending theory (Jones, 1976) and the temporal sampling (oscillatory) framework for developmental language disorders (Goswami, 2011). Furthermore, they encourage the use of rhythmic structures (even in non-verbal materials) to boost linguistic structure processing and outline perspectives for rehabilitation.

Electrophysiological Correlates of Individual Differences in Perception of Audiovisual Temporal Asynchrony

PubMed Central

Kaganovich, Natalya; Schumaker, Jennifer

2016-01-01

Sensitivity to the temporal relationship between auditory and visual stimuli is key to efficient audiovisual integration. However, even adults vary greatly in their ability to detect audiovisual temporal asynchrony. What underlies this variability is currently unknown. We recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) while participants performed a simultaneity judgment task on a range of audiovisual (AV) and visual-auditory (VA) stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) and compared ERP responses in good and poor performers to the 200 ms SOA, which showed the largest individual variability in the number of synchronous perceptions. Analysis of ERPs to the VA200 stimulus yielded no significant results. However, those individuals who were more sensitive to the AV200 SOA had significantly more positive voltage between 210 and 270 ms following the sound onset. In a follow-up analysis, we showed that the mean voltage within this window predicted approximately 36% of variability in sensitivity to AV temporal asynchrony in a larger group of participants. The relationship between the ERP measure in the 210-270 ms window and accuracy on the simultaneity judgment task also held for two other AV SOAs with significant individual variability - 100 and 300 ms. Because the identified window was time-locked to the onset of sound in the AV stimulus, we conclude that sensitivity to AV temporal asynchrony is shaped to a large extent by the efficiency in the neural encoding of sound onsets. PMID:27094850

Provider judgments of patients in pain: seeking symptom certainty.

PubMed

Tait, Raymond C; Chibnall, John T; Kalauokalani, Donna

2009-01-01

Uncertainty often surrounds judgments of pain, especially when pain is chronic. In order to simplify their decisions, providers adduce information from a variety of sources. Unfortunately, an extensive literature suggests that the information that is brought to bear actually can bias pain judgments, resulting in judgments that consistently differ from patient reports, with a potential negative impact on treatment. This review examines the pain assessment literature from a social cognition perspective that emphasizes interpersonal and situational factors that can influence judgments. Consistent with that model, it organizes research findings into three broad domains that have been shown to systematically influence assessments of pain, involving patient, provider, and situational factors. A causal model for pain judgment is proposed, and its implications for clinical research and practice are explored. In order to minimize the uncertainty that can characterize symptoms such as chronic pain, practitioners bring information to bear on pain assessment that can lead to misjudgments. While intuitively appealing, much of the information that is considered often has little association with pain severity and/or adjustment. A more rational decision-making process can reduce the judgment errors common to pain assessment and treatment.

Repeated Measurement of Absolute and Relative Judgments of Loudness: Clinical Relevance for Prescriptive Fitting of Aided Target Gains for soft, Comfortable, and Loud, But Ok Sound Levels.

PubMed

Formby, Craig; Payne, JoAnne; Yang, Xin; Wu, Delphanie; Parton, Jason M

2017-02-01

This study was undertaken with the purpose of streamlining clinical measures of loudness growth to facilitate and enhance prescriptive fitting of nonlinear hearing aids. Repeated measures of loudness at 500 and 3,000 Hz were obtained bilaterally at monthly intervals over a 6-month period from three groups of young adult listeners. All volunteers had normal audiometric hearing sensitivity and middle ear function, and all denied problems related to sound tolerance. Group 1 performed judgments of soft and loud, but OK for presentation of ascending sound levels. We defined these judgments operationally as absolute judgments of loudness. Group 2 initially performed loudness judgments across a continuum of seven loudness categories ranging from judgments of very soft to uncomfortably loud for presentation of ascending sound levels per the Contour Test of Loudness; we defined these judgments as relative judgments of loudness. In the same session, they then performed the absolute judgments for soft and loud, but OK sound levels. Group 3 performed the same set of loudness judgments as did group 2, but the task order was reversed such that they performed the absolute judgments initially within each test session followed by the relative judgments. The key findings from this study were as follows: (1) Within group, the absolute and relative tasks yielded clinically similar judgments for soft and for loud, but OK sound levels. These judgments were largely independent of task order, ear, frequency, or trial order within a given session. (2) Loudness judgments increased, on average, by ∼3 dB between the first and last test session, which is consistent with the commonly reported acclimatization effect reported for incremental changes in loudness discomfort levels as a consequence of chronic bilateral hearing aid use. (3) Measured and predicted comfortable judgments of loudness were in good agreement for the individual listener and for groups of listeners. These comfortable judgments bisect the measured levels judged for soft and for loud, but OK sounds. (4) Loudness judgments within the same loudness category varied across listeners within group by as much as 50 to 60 dB. Such large variation in judgments of loudness is problematic, especially because hearing-impaired listeners are known to exhibit similarly large ranges of intersubject response variation and, yet, poplar prescriptive fitting strategies continue to use average rather than individual loudness data to fit nonlinear hearing aids. The primary conclusions drawn from these findings are that reliable absolute judgments of soft and loud, but OK are clinically practical and economical to measure and, from these judgments, good estimates of comfortable loudness can also be predicted for individuals or for groups of listeners. Such loudness data, as measured as described in this report, offer promise for streamlining and enhancing prescriptive fitting of nonlinear hearing aids to target gain settings for soft (audible), comfortable , and loud, but OK (tolerable) sound inputs for the individual listener.

Repeated Measurement of Absolute and Relative Judgments of Loudness: Clinical Relevance for Prescriptive Fitting of Aided Target Gains for soft, Comfortable, and Loud, But Ok Sound Levels

PubMed Central

Formby, Craig; Payne, JoAnne; Yang, Xin; Wu, Delphanie; Parton, Jason M.

2017-01-01

This study was undertaken with the purpose of streamlining clinical measures of loudness growth to facilitate and enhance prescriptive fitting of nonlinear hearing aids. Repeated measures of loudness at 500 and 3,000 Hz were obtained bilaterally at monthly intervals over a 6-month period from three groups of young adult listeners. All volunteers had normal audiometric hearing sensitivity and middle ear function, and all denied problems related to sound tolerance. Group 1 performed judgments of soft and loud, but OK for presentation of ascending sound levels. We defined these judgments operationally as absolute judgments of loudness. Group 2 initially performed loudness judgments across a continuum of seven loudness categories ranging from judgments of very soft to uncomfortably loud for presentation of ascending sound levels per the Contour Test of Loudness; we defined these judgments as relative judgments of loudness. In the same session, they then performed the absolute judgments for soft and loud, but OK sound levels. Group 3 performed the same set of loudness judgments as did group 2, but the task order was reversed such that they performed the absolute judgments initially within each test session followed by the relative judgments. The key findings from this study were as follows: (1) Within group, the absolute and relative tasks yielded clinically similar judgments for soft and for loud, but OK sound levels. These judgments were largely independent of task order, ear, frequency, or trial order within a given session. (2) Loudness judgments increased, on average, by ∼3 dB between the first and last test session, which is consistent with the commonly reported acclimatization effect reported for incremental changes in loudness discomfort levels as a consequence of chronic bilateral hearing aid use. (3) Measured and predicted comfortable judgments of loudness were in good agreement for the individual listener and for groups of listeners. These comfortable judgments bisect the measured levels judged for soft and for loud, but OK sounds. (4) Loudness judgments within the same loudness category varied across listeners within group by as much as 50 to 60 dB. Such large variation in judgments of loudness is problematic, especially because hearing-impaired listeners are known to exhibit similarly large ranges of intersubject response variation and, yet, poplar prescriptive fitting strategies continue to use average rather than individual loudness data to fit nonlinear hearing aids. The primary conclusions drawn from these findings are that reliable absolute judgments of soft and loud, but OK are clinically practical and economical to measure and, from these judgments, good estimates of comfortable loudness can also be predicted for individuals or for groups of listeners. Such loudness data, as measured as described in this report, offer promise for streamlining and enhancing prescriptive fitting of nonlinear hearing aids to target gain settings for soft (audible), comfortable, and loud, but OK (tolerable) sound inputs for the individual listener. PMID:28286363

Human Object-Similarity Judgments Reflect and Transcend the Primate-IT Object Representation

PubMed Central

Mur, Marieke; Meys, Mirjam; Bodurka, Jerzy; Goebel, Rainer; Bandettini, Peter A.; Kriegeskorte, Nikolaus

2013-01-01

Primate inferior temporal (IT) cortex is thought to contain a high-level representation of objects at the interface between vision and semantics. This suggests that the perceived similarity of real-world objects might be predicted from the IT representation. Here we show that objects that elicit similar activity patterns in human IT (hIT) tend to be judged as similar by humans. The IT representation explained the human judgments better than early visual cortex, other ventral-stream regions, and a range of computational models. Human similarity judgments exhibited category clusters that reflected several categorical divisions that are prevalent in the IT representation of both human and monkey, including the animate/inanimate and the face/body division. Human judgments also reflected the within-category representation of IT. However, the judgments transcended the IT representation in that they introduced additional categorical divisions. In particular, human judgments emphasized human-related additional divisions between human and non-human animals and between man-made and natural objects. hIT was more similar to monkey IT than to human judgments. One interpretation is that IT has evolved visual-feature detectors that distinguish between animates and inanimates and between faces and bodies because these divisions are fundamental to survival and reproduction for all primate species, and that other brain systems serve to more flexibly introduce species-dependent and evolutionarily more recent divisions. PMID:23525516

The role of the right posterior parietal cortex in temporal order judgment.

PubMed

Woo, Sung-Ho; Kim, Ki-Hyun; Lee, Kyoung-Min

2009-03-01

Perceived order of two consecutive stimuli may not correspond to the order of their physical onsets. Such a disagreement presumably results from a difference in the speed of stimulus processing toward central decision mechanisms. Since previous evidence suggests that the right posterior parietal cortex (PPC) plays a role in modulating the processing speed of a visual target, we applied single-pulse TMS over the region in 14 normal subjects, while they judged the temporal order of two consecutive visual stimuli. Stimulus-onset-asynchrony (SOA) randomly varied between -100 and 100 ms in 20-ms steps (with a positive SOA when a target appeared on the right hemi-field before the other on the left), and a point of subjective simultaneity was measured for individual subjects. TMS stimulation was time-locked at 50, 100, 150, and 200 ms after the onset of the first stimulus, and results in trials with TMS on right PPC were compared with those in trials without TMS. TMS over the right PPC delayed the detection of a visual target in the contralateral, i.e., left hemi-field by 24 (+/-7 SE) ms and 16 (+/-4 SE) ms, when the stimulation was given at 50 and 100 ms after the first target onset. In contrast, TMS on the left PPC was not effective. These results show that the right PPC is important in a timely detection of a target appearing on the left visual field, especially in competition with another target simultaneously appearing in the opposite field.

An fMRI study of semantic processing in men with schizophrenia

PubMed Central

Kubicki, M.; McCarley, R.W.; Nestor, P.G.; Huh, T.; Kikinis, R.; Shenton, M.E.; Wible, C.G.

2009-01-01

As a means toward understanding the neural bases of schizophrenic thought disturbance, we examined brain activation patterns in response to semantically and superficially encoded words in patients with schizophrenia. Nine male schizophrenic and 9 male control subjects were tested in a visual levels of processing (LOP) task first outside the magnet and then during the fMRI scanning procedures (using a different set of words). During the experiments visual words were presented under two conditions. Under the deep, semantic encoding condition, subjects made semantic judgments as to whether the words were abstract or concrete. Under the shallow, nonsemantic encoding condition, subjects made perceptual judgments of the font size (uppercase/lowercase) of the presented words. After performance of the behavioral task, a recognition test was used to assess the depth of processing effect, defined as better performance for semantically encoded words than for perceptually encoded words. For the scanned version only, the words for both conditions were repeated in order to assess repetition-priming effects. Reaction times were assessed in both testing scenarios. Both groups showed the expected depth of processing effect for recognition, and control subjects showed the expected increased activation of the left inferior prefrontal cortex (LIPC) under semantic encoding relative to perceptual encoding conditions as well as repetition priming for semantic conditions only. In contrast, schizophrenics showed similar patterns of fMRI activation regardless of condition. Most striking in relation to controls, patients showed decreased LIFC activation concurrent with increased left superior temporal gyrus activation for semantic encoding versus shallow encoding. Furthermore, schizophrenia subjects did not show the repetition priming effect, either behaviorally or as a decrease in LIPC activity. In patients with schizophrenia, LIFC underactivation and left superior temporal gyrus overactivation for semantically encoded words may reflect a disease-related disruption of a distributed frontal temporal network that is engaged in the representation and processing of meaning of words, text, and discourse and which may underlie schizophrenic thought disturbance. PMID:14683698

An fMRI study of semantic processing in men with schizophrenia.

PubMed

Kubicki, M; McCarley, R W; Nestor, P G; Huh, T; Kikinis, R; Shenton, M E; Wible, C G

2003-12-01

As a means toward understanding the neural bases of schizophrenic thought disturbance, we examined brain activation patterns in response to semantically and superficially encoded words in patients with schizophrenia. Nine male schizophrenic and 9 male control subjects were tested in a visual levels of processing (LOP) task first outside the magnet and then during the fMRI scanning procedures (using a different set of words). During the experiments visual words were presented under two conditions. Under the deep, semantic encoding condition, subjects made semantic judgments as to whether the words were abstract or concrete. Under the shallow, nonsemantic encoding condition, subjects made perceptual judgments of the font size (uppercase/lowercase) of the presented words. After performance of the behavioral task, a recognition test was used to assess the depth of processing effect, defined as better performance for semantically encoded words than for perceptually encoded words. For the scanned version only, the words for both conditions were repeated in order to assess repetition-priming effects. Reaction times were assessed in both testing scenarios. Both groups showed the expected depth of processing effect for recognition, and control subjects showed the expected increased activation of the left inferior prefrontal cortex (LIPC) under semantic encoding relative to perceptual encoding conditions as well as repetition priming for semantic conditions only. In contrast, schizophrenics showed similar patterns of fMRI activation regardless of condition. Most striking in relation to controls, patients showed decreased LIFC activation concurrent with increased left superior temporal gyrus activation for semantic encoding versus shallow encoding. Furthermore, schizophrenia subjects did not show the repetition priming effect, either behaviorally or as a decrease in LIPC activity. In patients with schizophrenia, LIFC underactivation and left superior temporal gyrus overactivation for semantically encoded words may reflect a disease-related disruption of a distributed frontal temporal network that is engaged in the representation and processing of meaning of words, text, and discourse and which may underlie schizophrenic thought disturbance.

False memories and confabulation.

PubMed

Johnson, M K; Raye, C L

1998-04-01

Memory distortions range from the benign (thinking you mailed a check that you only thought about mailing), to the serious (confusing what you heard after a crime with what you actually saw), to the fantastic (claiming you piloted a spaceship). We review theoretical ideas and empirical evidence about the source monitoring processes underlying both true and false memories. Neuropsychological studies show that certain forms of brain damage (such as combined frontal and medial-temporal lesions) might result in profound source confusions, called confabulations. Neuroimaging techniques provide new evidence regarding more specific links between underlying brain mechanisms and the normal cognitive processes involved in evaluating memories. One hypothesis is that the right prefrontal cortex (PFC) subserves heuristic judgments based on easily assessed qualities (such as familiarity or perceptual detail) and the left PFC (or the right and left PFC together) subserves more systematic judgments requiring more careful analysis of memorial qualities or retrieval and evaluation of additional supporting or disconfirming information. Such heuristic and systematic processes can be disrupted not only by brain damage but also, for example, by hypnosis, social demands and motivational factors, suggesting caution in the methods used by `memory exploring' professions (therapists, police officers, lawyers, etc.) in order to avoid inducing false memories.

Enough Skill to Kill: Intentionality Judgments and the Moral Valence of Action

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Guglielmo, Steve; Malle, Bertram F.

2010-01-01

Extant models of moral judgment assume that an action's intentionality precedes assignments of blame. Knobe (2003b) challenged this fundamental order and proposed instead that the badness or blameworthiness of an action directs (and thus unduly biases) people's intentionality judgments. His and other researchers' studies suggested that blameworthy…

Long Ago It Was Meant to Be: The Interplay Between Time, Construal, and Fate Beliefs

PubMed Central

Burrus, Jeremy; Roese, Neal J.

2008-01-01

Fate means that an event was meant to be, that is, predetermined by prior unseen forces. Most people believe in fate, which seems at odds with similarly pervasive beliefs that alternative past actions would have brought about different circumstances (i.e., counterfactual beliefs). Two experiments revealed that construal level accounts for the relative plausibility of fate versus counterfactual explanations. Construal was manipulated in Experiment 1, such that goal pursuits framed in abstract (“why?”) as opposed to concrete (“how?”) terms heightened fate but not counterfactual attributions. Extending this finding, Experiment 2 showed that fate judgments were higher for temporally distant than recent past events, an effect mediated by construal perceptions. Neither counterfactual nor luck judgments varied with temporal distance. These findings help to explain how individuals explain complicated yet meaningful life events while extending the reach of Trope and Liberman’s (2003) construal-level theory. PMID:16861309

5 CFR 838.1111 - Amounts subject to child abuse judgment enforcement orders.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-01-01

... 5 Administrative Personnel 2 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Amounts subject to child abuse judgment... Under the Child Abuse Accountability Act Availability of Funds § 838.1111 Amounts subject to child abuse... child abuse enforcement orders only if all of the conditions necessary for payment of the employee...

5 CFR 838.1111 - Amounts subject to child abuse judgment enforcement orders.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-01-01

... 5 Administrative Personnel 2 2013-01-01 2013-01-01 false Amounts subject to child abuse judgment... Under the Child Abuse Accountability Act Availability of Funds § 838.1111 Amounts subject to child abuse... child abuse enforcement orders only if all of the conditions necessary for payment of the employee...

5 CFR 838.1111 - Amounts subject to child abuse judgment enforcement orders.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-01-01

... 5 Administrative Personnel 2 2014-01-01 2014-01-01 false Amounts subject to child abuse judgment... Under the Child Abuse Accountability Act Availability of Funds § 838.1111 Amounts subject to child abuse... child abuse enforcement orders only if all of the conditions necessary for payment of the employee...

5 CFR 838.1111 - Amounts subject to child abuse judgment enforcement orders.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-01-01

... 5 Administrative Personnel 2 2012-01-01 2012-01-01 false Amounts subject to child abuse judgment... Under the Child Abuse Accountability Act Availability of Funds § 838.1111 Amounts subject to child abuse... child abuse enforcement orders only if all of the conditions necessary for payment of the employee...

5 CFR 838.1111 - Amounts subject to child abuse judgment enforcement orders.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-01-01

... 5 Administrative Personnel 2 2011-01-01 2011-01-01 false Amounts subject to child abuse judgment... Under the Child Abuse Accountability Act Availability of Funds § 838.1111 Amounts subject to child abuse... child abuse enforcement orders only if all of the conditions necessary for payment of the employee...

Information order and outcome framing: an assesment of judgment bias in a naturalistic decision-making context.

PubMed

Perrin, B M; Barnett, B J; Walrath, L; Grossman, J D

2001-01-01

Findings that decision makers can come to different conclusions depending on the order in which they receive information have been termed the "information order bias." When trained, experienced individuals exhibit similar behaviors; however, it has been argued that this result is not a bias, but rather, a pattern-matching process. This study provides a critical examination of this claim. It also assesses both experts' susceptibility to an outcome framing bias and the effects of varying task loads on judgment. Using a simulation of state-of-the-art ship defensive systems operated by experienced, active-duty U.S. Navy officers, we found no evidence of a framing bias, while task load had a minor, but systematic effect. The order in which information was received had a significant impact, with the effect being consistent with a judgment bias. Nonetheless, we note that pattern-matching processes, similar to those that produce inferential and reconstructive effects on memory, could also explain our results. Actual or potential applications of this research include decision support system interfaces or training programs that might be developed to reduce judgment bias.

The Effect of Information Analysis Automation Display Content on Human Judgment Performance in Noisy Environments.

PubMed

Bass, Ellen J; Baumgart, Leigh A; Shepley, Kathryn Klein

2013-03-01

Displaying both the strategy that information analysis automation employs to makes its judgments and variability in the task environment may improve human judgment performance, especially in cases where this variability impacts the judgment performance of the information analysis automation. This work investigated the contribution of providing either information analysis automation strategy information, task environment information, or both, on human judgment performance in a domain where noisy sensor data are used by both the human and the information analysis automation to make judgments. In a simplified air traffic conflict prediction experiment, 32 participants made probability of horizontal conflict judgments under different display content conditions. After being exposed to the information analysis automation, judgment achievement significantly improved for all participants as compared to judgments without any of the automation's information. Participants provided with additional display content pertaining to cue variability in the task environment had significantly higher aided judgment achievement compared to those provided with only the automation's judgment of a probability of conflict. When designing information analysis automation for environments where the automation's judgment achievement is impacted by noisy environmental data, it may be beneficial to show additional task environment information to the human judge in order to improve judgment performance.

Explicit and Implicit Confidence Judgments and Developmental Differences in Metamemory: An Eye-Tracking Approach

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Roderer, Thomas; Roebers, Claudia M.

2010-01-01

In the present study, primary school children's ability to give accurate confidence judgments (CJ) was addressed, with a special focus on uncertainty monitoring. In order to investigate the effects of memory retrieval processes on monitoring judgments, item difficulty in a vocabulary learning task (Japanese symbols) was manipulated. Moreover, as a…

Neural timing signal for precise tactile timing judgments

PubMed Central

Watanabe, Junji; Nishida, Shin'ya

2016-01-01

The brain can precisely encode the temporal relationship between tactile inputs. While behavioural studies have demonstrated precise interfinger temporal judgments, the underlying neural mechanism remains unknown. Computationally, two kinds of neural responses can act as the information source. One is the phase-locked response to the phase of relatively slow inputs, and the other is the response to the amplitude change of relatively fast inputs. To isolate the contributions of these components, we measured performance of a synchrony judgment task for sine wave and amplitude-modulation (AM) wave stimuli. The sine wave stimulus was a low-frequency sinusoid, with the phase shifted in the asynchronous stimulus. The AM wave stimulus was a low-frequency sinusoidal AM of a 250-Hz carrier, with only the envelope shifted in the asynchronous stimulus. In the experiment, three stimulus pairs, two synchronous ones and one asynchronous one, were sequentially presented to neighboring fingers, and participants were asked to report which one was the asynchronous pair. We found that the asynchrony of AM waves could be detected as precisely as single impulse pair, with the threshold asynchrony being ∼20 ms. On the other hand, the asynchrony of sine waves could not be detected at all in the range from 5 to 30 Hz. Our results suggest that the timing signal for tactile judgments is provided not by the stimulus phase information but by the envelope of the response of the high-frequency-sensitive Pacini channel (PC), although they do not exclude a possible contribution of the envelope of non-PCs. PMID:26843600

25 CFR 11.208 - May Individual Indian Money accounts be used for payment of judgments?

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-04-01

... 25 Indians 1 2014-04-01 2014-04-01 false May Individual Indian Money accounts be used for payment of judgments? 11.208 Section 11.208 Indians BUREAU OF INDIAN AFFAIRS, DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR LAW AND ORDER COURTS OF INDIAN OFFENSES AND LAW AND ORDER CODE Courts of Indian Offenses; Personnel...

25 CFR 11.208 - May Individual Indian Money accounts be used for payment of judgments?

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-04-01

... 25 Indians 1 2011-04-01 2011-04-01 false May Individual Indian Money accounts be used for payment of judgments? 11.208 Section 11.208 Indians BUREAU OF INDIAN AFFAIRS, DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR LAW AND ORDER COURTS OF INDIAN OFFENSES AND LAW AND ORDER CODE Courts of Indian Offenses; Personnel...

25 CFR 11.208 - May Individual Indian Money accounts be used for payment of judgments?

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-04-01

... 25 Indians 1 2013-04-01 2013-04-01 false May Individual Indian Money accounts be used for payment of judgments? 11.208 Section 11.208 Indians BUREAU OF INDIAN AFFAIRS, DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR LAW AND ORDER COURTS OF INDIAN OFFENSES AND LAW AND ORDER CODE Courts of Indian Offenses; Personnel...

25 CFR 11.208 - May Individual Indian Money accounts be used for payment of judgments?

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-04-01

... 25 Indians 1 2012-04-01 2011-04-01 true May Individual Indian Money accounts be used for payment of judgments? 11.208 Section 11.208 Indians BUREAU OF INDIAN AFFAIRS, DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR LAW AND ORDER COURTS OF INDIAN OFFENSES AND LAW AND ORDER CODE Courts of Indian Offenses; Personnel...

Understanding How Grammatical Aspect Influences Legal Judgment

PubMed Central

Sherrill, Andrew M.; Eerland, Anita; Zwaan, Rolf A.; Magliano, Joseph P.

2015-01-01

Recent evidence suggests that grammatical aspect can bias how individuals perceive criminal intentionality during discourse comprehension. Given that criminal intentionality is a common criterion for legal definitions (e.g., first-degree murder), the present study explored whether grammatical aspect may also impact legal judgments. In a series of four experiments participants were provided with a legal definition and a description of a crime in which the grammatical aspect of provocation and murder events were manipulated. Participants were asked to make a decision (first- vs. second-degree murder) and then indicate factors that impacted their decision. Findings suggest that legal judgments can be affected by grammatical aspect but the most robust effects were limited to temporal dynamics (i.e., imperfective aspect results in more murder actions than perfective aspect), which may in turn influence other representational systems (i.e., number of murder actions positively predicts perceived intentionality). In addition, findings demonstrate that the influence of grammatical aspect on situation model construction and evaluation is dependent upon the larger linguistic and semantic context. Together, the results suggest grammatical aspect has indirect influences on legal judgments to the extent that variability in aspect changes the features of the situation model that align with criteria for making legal judgments. PMID:26496364

A neuroscientific approach to normative judgment in law and justice.

PubMed Central

Goodenough, Oliver R; Prehn, Kristin

2004-01-01

Developments in cognitive neuroscience are providing new insights into the nature of normative judgment. Traditional views in such disciplines as philosophy, religion, law, psychology and economics have differed over the role and usefulness of intuition and emotion in judging blameworthiness. Cognitive psychology and neurobiology provide new tools and methods for studying questions of normative judgment. Recently, a consensus view has emerged, which recognizes important roles for emotion and intuition and which suggests that normative judgment is a distributed process in the brain. Testing this approach through lesion and scanning studies has linked a set of brain regions to such judgment, including the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, orbitofrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex and posterior superior temporal sulcus. Better models of emotion and intuition will help provide further clarification of the processes involved. The study of law and justice is less well developed. We advance a model of law in the brain which suggests that law can recruit a wider variety of sources of information and paths of processing than do the intuitive moral responses that have been studied so far. We propose specific hypotheses and lines of further research that could help test this approach. PMID:15590612

A neuroscientific approach to normative judgment in law and justice.

PubMed

Goodenough, Oliver R; Prehn, Kristin

2004-11-29

Developments in cognitive neuroscience are providing new insights into the nature of normative judgment. Traditional views in such disciplines as philosophy, religion, law, psychology and economics have differed over the role and usefulness of intuition and emotion in judging blameworthiness. Cognitive psychology and neurobiology provide new tools and methods for studying questions of normative judgment. Recently, a consensus view has emerged, which recognizes important roles for emotion and intuition and which suggests that normative judgment is a distributed process in the brain. Testing this approach through lesion and scanning studies has linked a set of brain regions to such judgment, including the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, orbitofrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex and posterior superior temporal sulcus. Better models of emotion and intuition will help provide further clarification of the processes involved. The study of law and justice is less well developed. We advance a model of law in the brain which suggests that law can recruit a wider variety of sources of information and paths of processing than do the intuitive moral responses that have been studied so far. We propose specific hypotheses and lines of further research that could help test this approach.

Motivation and Affective Judgments Differentially Recruit Neurons in the Primate Dorsolateral Prefrontal and Anterior Cingulate Cortex

PubMed Central

Amemori, Ken-ichi; Amemori, Satoko

2015-01-01

The judgment of whether to accept or to reject an offer is determined by positive and negative affect related to the offer, but affect also induces motivational responses. Rewarding and aversive cues influence the firing rates of many neurons in primate prefrontal and cingulate neocortical regions, but it still is unclear whether neurons in these regions are related to affective judgment or to motivation. To address this issue, we recorded simultaneously the neuronal spike activities of single units in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) of macaque monkeys as they performed approach–avoidance (Ap–Av) and approach–approach (Ap–Ap) decision-making tasks that can behaviorally dissociate affective judgment and motivation. Notably, neurons having activity correlated with motivational condition could be distinguished from neurons having activity related to affective judgment, especially in the Ap–Av task. Although many neurons in both regions exhibited similar, selective patterns of task-related activity, we found a larger proportion of neurons activated in low motivational conditions in the dlPFC than in the ACC, and the onset of this activity was significantly earlier in the dlPFC than in the ACC. Furthermore, the temporal onsets of affective judgment represented by neuronal activities were significantly slower in the low motivational conditions than in the other conditions. These findings suggest that motivation and affective judgment both recruit dlPFC and ACC neurons but with differential degrees of involvement and timing. PMID:25653353

Study on the Algorithm of Judgment Matrix in Analytic Hierarchy Process

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lu, Zhiyong; Qin, Futong; Jin, Yican

2017-10-01

A new algorithm is proposed for the non-consistent judgment matrix in AHP. A primary judgment matrix is generated firstly through pre-ordering the targeted factor set, and a compared matrix is built through the top integral function. Then a relative error matrix is created by comparing the compared matrix with the primary judgment matrix which is regulated under the control of the relative error matrix and the dissimilar degree of the matrix step by step. Lastly, the targeted judgment matrix is generated to satisfy the requirement of consistence and the least dissimilar degree. The feasibility and validity of the proposed method are verified by simulation results.

The Effect of Information Analysis Automation Display Content on Human Judgment Performance in Noisy Environments

PubMed Central

Bass, Ellen J.; Baumgart, Leigh A.; Shepley, Kathryn Klein

2014-01-01

Displaying both the strategy that information analysis automation employs to makes its judgments and variability in the task environment may improve human judgment performance, especially in cases where this variability impacts the judgment performance of the information analysis automation. This work investigated the contribution of providing either information analysis automation strategy information, task environment information, or both, on human judgment performance in a domain where noisy sensor data are used by both the human and the information analysis automation to make judgments. In a simplified air traffic conflict prediction experiment, 32 participants made probability of horizontal conflict judgments under different display content conditions. After being exposed to the information analysis automation, judgment achievement significantly improved for all participants as compared to judgments without any of the automation's information. Participants provided with additional display content pertaining to cue variability in the task environment had significantly higher aided judgment achievement compared to those provided with only the automation's judgment of a probability of conflict. When designing information analysis automation for environments where the automation's judgment achievement is impacted by noisy environmental data, it may be beneficial to show additional task environment information to the human judge in order to improve judgment performance. PMID:24847184

Rational temporal predictions can underlie apparent failures to delay gratification.

PubMed

McGuire, Joseph T; Kable, Joseph W

2013-04-01

An important category of seemingly maladaptive decisions involves failure to postpone gratification. A person pursuing a desirable long-run outcome may abandon it in favor of a short-run alternative that has been available all along. Here we present a theoretical framework in which this seemingly irrational behavior emerges from stable preferences and veridical judgments. Our account recognizes that decision makers generally face uncertainty regarding the time at which future outcomes will materialize. When timing is uncertain, the value of persistence depends crucially on the nature of a decision maker's prior temporal beliefs. Certain forms of temporal beliefs imply that a delay's predicted remaining length increases as a function of time already waited. In this type of situation, the rational, utility-maximizing strategy is to persist for a limited amount of time and then give up. We show empirically that people's explicit predictions of remaining delay lengths indeed increase as a function of elapsed time in several relevant domains, implying that temporal judgments offer a rational basis for limiting persistence. We then develop our framework into a simple working model and show how it accounts for individual differences in a laboratory task (the well-known "marshmallow test"). We conclude that delay-of-gratification failure, generally viewed as a manifestation of limited self-control capacity, can instead arise as an adaptive response to the perceived statistics of one's environment.

Rational temporal predictions can underlie apparent failures to delay gratification

PubMed Central

McGuire, Joseph T.; Kable, Joseph W.

2013-01-01

An important category of seemingly maladaptive decisions involves failure to postpone gratification. A person pursuing a desirable long-run outcome may abandon it in favor of a short-run alternative that has been available all along. Here we present a theoretical framework in which this seemingly irrational behavior emerges from stable preferences and veridical judgments. Our account recognizes that decision makers generally face uncertainty regarding the time at which future outcomes will materialize. When timing is uncertain, the value of persistence depends crucially on the nature of a decision-maker’s prior temporal beliefs. Certain forms of temporal beliefs imply that a delay’s predicted remaining length increases as a function of time already waited. In this type of situation, the rational, utility-maximizing strategy is to persist for a limited amount of time and then give up. We show empirically that people’s explicit predictions of remaining delay lengths indeed increase as a function of elapsed time in several relevant domains, implying that temporal judgments offer a rational basis for limiting persistence. We then develop our framework into a simple working model and show how it accounts for individual differences in a laboratory task (the well-known “marshmallow test”). We conclude that delay-of-gratification failure, generally viewed as a manifestation of limited self-control capacity, can instead arise as an adaptive response to the perceived statistics of one’s environment. PMID:23458085

78 FR 32443 - United States, et al. v. Cinemark Holdings, Inc., et al.; Proposed Final Judgment and Competitive...

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2013-05-30

... DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE Antitrust Division United States, et al. v. Cinemark Holdings, Inc., et al.; Proposed Final Judgment and Competitive Impact Statement Notice is hereby given pursuant to the Antitrust Procedures and Penalties Act, 15 U.S.C. 16(b)-(h), that a proposed Final Judgment, Hold Separate Stipulation and Order and Competitive Impact...

Neural dichotomy of word concreteness: a view from functional neuroimaging.

PubMed

Kumar, Uttam

2016-02-01

Our perception about the representation and processing of concrete and abstract concepts is based on the fact that concrete words are highly imagined and remembered faster than abstract words. In order to explain the processing differences between abstract and concrete concepts, various theories have been proposed, yet there is no unanimous consensus about its neural implication. The present study investigated the processing of concrete and abstract words during an orthography judgment task (implicit semantic processing) using functional magnetic resonance imaging to validate the involvement of the neural regions. Relative to non-words, both abstract and concrete words show activation in the regions of bilateral hemisphere previously associated with semantic processing. The common areas (conjunction analyses) observed for abstract and concrete words are bilateral inferior frontal gyrus (BA 44/45), left superior parietal (BA 7), left fusiform gyrus and bilateral middle occipital. The additional areas for abstract words were noticed in bilateral superior temporal and bilateral middle temporal region, whereas no distinct region was noticed for concrete words. This suggests that words with abstract concepts recruit additional language regions in the brain.

Temporal Structure and Complexity Affect Audio-Visual Correspondence Detection

PubMed Central

Denison, Rachel N.; Driver, Jon; Ruff, Christian C.

2013-01-01

Synchrony between events in different senses has long been considered the critical temporal cue for multisensory integration. Here, using rapid streams of auditory and visual events, we demonstrate how humans can use temporal structure (rather than mere temporal coincidence) to detect multisensory relatedness. We find psychophysically that participants can detect matching auditory and visual streams via shared temporal structure for crossmodal lags of up to 200 ms. Performance on this task reproduced features of past findings based on explicit timing judgments but did not show any special advantage for perfectly synchronous streams. Importantly, the complexity of temporal patterns influences sensitivity to correspondence. Stochastic, irregular streams – with richer temporal pattern information – led to higher audio-visual matching sensitivity than predictable, rhythmic streams. Our results reveal that temporal structure and its complexity are key determinants for human detection of audio-visual correspondence. The distinctive emphasis of our new paradigms on temporal patterning could be useful for studying special populations with suspected abnormalities in audio-visual temporal perception and multisensory integration. PMID:23346067

FMRI investigation of cross-modal interactions in beat perception: Audition primes vision, but not vice versa

PubMed Central

Grahn, Jessica A.; Henry, Molly J.; McAuley, J. Devin

2011-01-01

How we measure time and integrate temporal cues from different sensory modalities are fundamental questions in neuroscience. Sensitivity to a “beat” (such as that routinely perceived in music) differs substantially between auditory and visual modalities. Here we examined beat sensitivity in each modality, and examined cross-modal influences, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to characterize brain activity during perception of auditory and visual rhythms. In separate fMRI sessions, participants listened to auditory sequences or watched visual sequences. The order of auditory and visual sequence presentation was counterbalanced so that cross-modal order effects could be investigated. Participants judged whether sequences were speeding up or slowing down, and the pattern of tempo judgments was used to derive a measure of sensitivity to an implied beat. As expected, participants were less sensitive to an implied beat in visual sequences than in auditory sequences. However, visual sequences produced a stronger sense of beat when preceded by auditory sequences with identical temporal structure. Moreover, increases in brain activity were observed in the bilateral putamen for visual sequences preceded by auditory sequences when compared to visual sequences without prior auditory exposure. No such order-dependent differences (behavioral or neural) were found for the auditory sequences. The results provide further evidence for the role of the basal ganglia in internal generation of the beat and suggest that an internal auditory rhythm representation may be activated during visual rhythm perception. PMID:20858544

True and false memories, parietal cortex, and confidence judgments

PubMed Central

Urgolites, Zhisen J.; Smith, Christine N.

2015-01-01

Recent studies have asked whether activity in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) and the neocortex can distinguish true memory from false memory. A frequent complication has been that the confidence associated with correct memory judgments (true memory) is typically higher than the confidence associated with incorrect memory judgments (false memory). Accordingly, it has often been difficult to know whether a finding is related to memory confidence or memory accuracy. In the current study, participants made recognition memory judgments with confidence ratings in response to previously studied scenes and novel scenes. The left hippocampus and 16 other brain regions distinguished true and false memories when confidence ratings were different for the two conditions. Only three regions (all in the parietal cortex) distinguished true and false memories when confidence ratings were equated. These findings illustrate the utility of taking confidence ratings into account when identifying brain regions associated with true and false memories. Neural correlates of true and false memories are most easily interpreted when confidence ratings are similar for the two kinds of memories. PMID:26472645

Motivation and affective judgments differentially recruit neurons in the primate dorsolateral prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortex.

PubMed

Amemori, Ken-ichi; Amemori, Satoko; Graybiel, Ann M

2015-02-04

The judgment of whether to accept or to reject an offer is determined by positive and negative affect related to the offer, but affect also induces motivational responses. Rewarding and aversive cues influence the firing rates of many neurons in primate prefrontal and cingulate neocortical regions, but it still is unclear whether neurons in these regions are related to affective judgment or to motivation. To address this issue, we recorded simultaneously the neuronal spike activities of single units in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) of macaque monkeys as they performed approach-avoidance (Ap-Av) and approach-approach (Ap-Ap) decision-making tasks that can behaviorally dissociate affective judgment and motivation. Notably, neurons having activity correlated with motivational condition could be distinguished from neurons having activity related to affective judgment, especially in the Ap-Av task. Although many neurons in both regions exhibited similar, selective patterns of task-related activity, we found a larger proportion of neurons activated in low motivational conditions in the dlPFC than in the ACC, and the onset of this activity was significantly earlier in the dlPFC than in the ACC. Furthermore, the temporal onsets of affective judgment represented by neuronal activities were significantly slower in the low motivational conditions than in the other conditions. These findings suggest that motivation and affective judgment both recruit dlPFC and ACC neurons but with differential degrees of involvement and timing. Copyright © 2015 the authors 0270-6474/15/351939-15$15.00/0.

Attention modulations on the perception of social hierarchy at distinct temporal stages: an electrophysiological investigation.

PubMed

Feng, Chunliang; Tian, Tengxiang; Feng, Xue; Luo, Yue-Jia

2015-04-01

Recent behavioral and neuroscientific studies have revealed the preferential processing of superior-hierarchy cues. However, it remains poorly understood whether top-down controlled mechanisms modulate temporal dynamics of neurocognitive substrates underlying the preferential processing of these biologically and socially relevant cues. This was investigated in the current study by recording event-related potentials from participants who were presented with superior or inferior social hierarchy. Participants performed a hierarchy-judgment task that required attention to hierarchy cues or a gender-judgment task that withdrew their attention from these cues. Superior-hierarchy cues evoked stronger neural responses than inferior-hierarchy cues at both early (N170/N200) and late (late positive potential, LPP) temporal stages. Notably, the modulations of top-down attention were identified on the LPP component, such that superior-hierarchy cues evoked larger LPP amplitudes than inferior-hierarchy cues only in the attended condition; whereas the modulations of the N170/N200 component by hierarchy cues were evident in both attended and unattended conditions. These findings suggest that the preferential perception of superior-hierarchy cues involves both relatively automatic attentional bias at the early temporal stage as well as flexible and voluntary cognitive evaluation at the late temporal stage. Finally, these hierarchy-related effects were absent when participants were shown the same stimuli which, however, were not associated with social-hierarchy information in a non-hierarchy task (Experiment 2), suggesting that effects of social hierarchy at early and late temporal stages could not be accounted for by differences in physical attributes between these social cues. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Neural evidence for moral intuition and the temporal dynamics of interactions between emotional processes and moral cognition.

PubMed

Gui, Dan-Yang; Gan, Tian; Liu, Chao

2016-01-01

Behavioral and neurological studies have revealed that emotions influence moral cognition. Although moral stimuli are emotionally charged, the time course of interactions between emotions and moral judgments remains unknown. In the present study, we investigated the temporal dynamics of the interaction between emotional processes and moral cognition. The results revealed that when making moral judgments, the time course of the event-related potential (ERP) waveform was significantly different between high emotional arousal and low emotional arousal contexts. Different stages of processing were distinguished, showing distinctive interactions between emotional processes and moral reasoning. The precise time course of moral intuition and moral reasoning sheds new light on theoretical models of moral psychology. Specifically, the N1 component (interpreted as representing moral intuition) did not appear to be influenced by emotional arousal. However, the N2 component and late positive potential were strongly affected by emotional arousal; the slow wave was influenced by both emotional arousal and morality, suggesting distinct moral processing at different emotional arousal levels.

Investigating the functional neuroanatomy of concrete and abstract word processing through direct electric stimulation (DES) during awake surgery.

PubMed

Orena, E F; Caldiroli, D; Acerbi, F; Barazzetta, I; Papagno, C

2018-06-05

Neuropsychological, neuroimaging and electrophysiological studies demonstrate that abstract and concrete word processing relies not only on the activity of a common bilateral network but also on dedicated networks. The neuropsychological literature has shown that a selective sparing of abstract relative to concrete words can be documented in lesions of the left anterior temporal regions. We investigated concrete and abstract word processing in 10 patients undergoing direct electrical stimulation (DES) for brain mapping during awake surgery in the left hemisphere. A lexical decision and a concreteness judgment task were added to the neuropsychological assessment during intra-operative monitoring. On the concreteness judgment, DES delivered over the inferior frontal gyrus significantly decreased abstract word accuracy while accuracy for concrete words decreased when the anterior temporal cortex was stimulated. These results are consistent with a lexical-semantic model that distinguishes between concrete and abstract words related to different neural substrates in the left hemisphere.

Escaping the recent past: Which stimulus dimensions influence proactive interference?

PubMed Central

Craig, Kimberly S.; Berman, Marc G.; Jonides, John; Lustig, Cindy

2013-01-01

Proactive interference occurs when information from the past disrupts current processing and is a major source of confusion and errors in short-term memory (Wickens, Born & Allen, 1963). The present investigation examines potential boundary conditions for interference, testing the hypothesis that potential competitors must be similar along task-relevant dimensions to influence proactive interference effects. We manipulated both the type of task being completed (Experiments 1, 2 and 3) and dimensions of similarity irrelevant to the current task (Experiments 4 and 5) to determine how the recent presentation of a probe item would affect the speed with which participants could reject that item. Experiments 1, 2 and 3 contrasted short-term memory judgments, which require temporal information, with semantic and perceptual judgments, for which temporal information is irrelevant. In Experiments 4 and 5, task-irrelevant information (perceptual similarity) was manipulated within the recent probes task. We found that interference from past items affected short-term memory (STM) task performance but did not affect performance in semantic or perceptual judgment tasks. Conversely, similarity along a nominally-irrelevant perceptual dimension did not affect the magnitude of interference in STM tasks. Results are consistent with the view that items in STM are represented by noisy codes consisting of multiple dimensions, and that interference occurs when items are similar to each other and thus compete along the dimensions relevant to target selection. PMID:23297049

Escaping the recent past: which stimulus dimensions influence proactive interference?

PubMed

Craig, Kimberly S; Berman, Marc G; Jonides, John; Lustig, Cindy

2013-07-01

Proactive interference occurs when information from the past disrupts current processing and is a major source of confusion and errors in short-term memory (STM; Wickens, Born, & Allen, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 2:440-445, 1963). The present investigation examines potential boundary conditions for interference, testing the hypothesis that potential competitors must be similar along task-relevant dimensions to influence proactive interference effects. We manipulated both the type of task being completed (Experiments 1, 2, and 3) and dimensions of similarity irrelevant to the current task (Experiments 4 and 5) to determine how the recent presentation of a probe item would affect the speed with which participants could reject that item. Experiments 1, 2, and 3 contrasted STM judgments, which require temporal information, with semantic and perceptual judgments, for which temporal information is irrelevant. In Experiments 4 and 5, task-irrelevant information (perceptual similarity) was manipulated within the recent probes task. We found that interference from past items affected STM task performance but did not affect performance in semantic or perceptual judgment tasks. Conversely, similarity along a nominally irrelevant perceptual dimension did not affect the magnitude of interference in STM tasks. Results are consistent with the view that items in STM are represented by noisy codes consisting of multiple dimensions and that interference occurs when items are similar to each other and, thus, compete along the dimensions relevant to target selection.

The temporal evolution of conceptual object representations revealed through models of behavior, semantics and deep neural networks.

PubMed

Bankson, B B; Hebart, M N; Groen, I I A; Baker, C I

2018-05-17

Visual object representations are commonly thought to emerge rapidly, yet it has remained unclear to what extent early brain responses reflect purely low-level visual features of these objects and how strongly those features contribute to later categorical or conceptual representations. Here, we aimed to estimate a lower temporal bound for the emergence of conceptual representations by defining two criteria that characterize such representations: 1) conceptual object representations should generalize across different exemplars of the same object, and 2) these representations should reflect high-level behavioral judgments. To test these criteria, we compared magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings between two groups of participants (n = 16 per group) exposed to different exemplar images of the same object concepts. Further, we disentangled low-level from high-level MEG responses by estimating the unique and shared contribution of models of behavioral judgments, semantics, and different layers of deep neural networks of visual object processing. We find that 1) both generalization across exemplars as well as generalization of object-related signals across time increase after 150 ms, peaking around 230 ms; 2) representations specific to behavioral judgments emerged rapidly, peaking around 160 ms. Collectively, these results suggest a lower bound for the emergence of conceptual object representations around 150 ms following stimulus onset. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Virtual Morality: Transitioning from Moral Judgment to Moral Action?

PubMed Central

Francis, Kathryn B.; Howard, Charles; Howard, Ian S.; Gummerum, Michaela; Ganis, Giorgio; Anderson, Grace; Terbeck, Sylvia

2016-01-01

The nature of moral action versus moral judgment has been extensively debated in numerous disciplines. We introduce Virtual Reality (VR) moral paradigms examining the action individuals take in a high emotionally arousing, direct action-focused, moral scenario. In two studies involving qualitatively different populations, we found a greater endorsement of utilitarian responses–killing one in order to save many others–when action was required in moral virtual dilemmas compared to their judgment counterparts. Heart rate in virtual moral dilemmas was significantly increased when compared to both judgment counterparts and control virtual tasks. Our research suggests that moral action may be viewed as an independent construct to moral judgment, with VR methods delivering new prospects for investigating and assessing moral behaviour. PMID:27723826

Cognitive and affective theory of mind share the same local patterns of activity in posterior temporal but not medial prefrontal cortex

PubMed Central

Hofstetter, Christoph; Vuilleumier, Patrik

2014-01-01

Understanding emotions in others engages specific brain regions in temporal and medial prefrontal cortices. These activations are often attributed to more general cognitive ‘mentalizing’ functions, associated with theory of mind and also necessary to represent people’s non-emotional mental states, such as beliefs or intentions. Here, we directly investigated whether understanding emotional feelings recruit similar or specific brain systems, relative to other non-emotional mental states. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging with multivoxel pattern analysis in 46 volunteers to compare activation patterns in theory-of-mind tasks for emotions, relative to beliefs or somatic states accompanied with pain. We found a striking dissociation between the temporoparietal cortex, that exhibited a remarkable voxel-by-voxel pattern overlap between emotions and beliefs (but not pain), and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, that exhibited distinct (and yet nearby) patterns of activity during the judgment of beliefs and emotions in others. Pain judgment was instead associated with activity in the supramarginal gyrus, middle cingulate cortex and middle insular cortex. Our data reveal for the first time a functional dissociation within brain networks sub-serving theory of mind for different mental contents, with a common recruitment for cognitive and affective states in temporal regions, and distinct recruitment in prefrontal areas. PMID:23770622

Drug benefit decisions among older adults: a policy-capturing analysis.

PubMed

Cline, Richard R; Gupta, Kiran

2006-01-01

Under the Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act, beneficiaries remaining in the traditional fee-for-service plan will face a variety of drug benefit options provided by private stand-alone prescription drug plans. Although these plans likely will differ with regard to a number of important attributes, little is known about older adults' judgment processes in this context. The objectives of this study were to 1) better understand the manner in which drug insurance attributes are weighted in older adults' judgments of drug benefit suitability, 2) explore variability in judgment strategies among seniors, and 3) assess seniors' insight into their judgment policies. Three focus groups were conducted with 19 older adults to elicit important drug plan attributes. A policy-capturing study with 32 seniors, none of whom had participated in the focus groups, then was employed to quantify the impacts of these attributes on judgments of plan suitability. Focus group participants reported that copayment, monthly premium, deductible, formulary use, and mail-order pharmacy use were important drug insurance attributes. The policy-capturing study showed that deductibles and premiums were weighted most heavily in judgment formation. However, significant variability in judgment policies was apparent, with 3 distinct groups emerging from cluster analysis. The first emphasized deductibles and copayments, the second premiums and deductibles, and the third use of a mail-order pharmacy and deductibles. Study volunteers exhibited insight into the role of some plan attributes in their judgments, but not others. Cost-sharing provisions appear to be most important in older adults' evaluations of drug benefit plans. However, significant heterogeneity in attribute preferences also was apparent in this study. Older adults may not be cognizant of the manner in which some plan attributes affect their evaluations, suggesting a role for decision aids in this process.

How Do Changes in Speed Affect the Perception of Duration?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Matthews, William J.

2011-01-01

Six experiments investigated how changes in stimulus speed influence subjective duration. Participants saw rotating or translating shapes in three conditions: constant speed, accelerating motion, and decelerating motion. The distance moved and average speed were the same in all three conditions. In temporal judgment tasks, the constant-speed…

Justice as a Dynamic Construct: Effects of Individual Trajectories on Distal Work Outcomes

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hausknecht, John P.; Sturman, Michael C.; Roberson, Quinetta M.

2011-01-01

Despite an amassing organizational justice literature, few studies have directly addressed the temporal patterning of justice judgments and the effects that changes in these perceptions have on important work outcomes. Drawing from Gestalt characteristics theory (Ariely & Carmon, 2000, 2003), we examine the concept of justice trajectories…

Reversing Spoken Items--Mind Twisting Not Tongue Twisting

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rudner, Mary; Ronnberg, Jerker; Hugdahl, Kenneth

2005-01-01

Using 12 participants we conducted an fMRI study involving two tasks, word reversal and rhyme judgment, based on pairs of natural speech stimuli, to study the neural correlates of manipulating auditory imagery under taxing conditions. Both tasks engaged the left anterior superior temporal gyrus, reflecting previously established perceptual…

Internal Clock Processes and the Filled-Duration Illusion

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wearden, John H.; Norton, Roger; Martin, Simon; Montford-Bebb, Oliver

2007-01-01

In 3 experiments, the authors compared duration judgments of filled stimuli (tones) with unfilled ones (intervals defined by clicks or gaps in tones). Temporal generalization procedures (Experiment 1) and verbal estimation procedures (Experiments 2 and 3) all showed that subjective durations of the tones were considerably longer than those of…

The temporal dynamics of heading perception in the presence of moving objects

PubMed Central

Fajen, Brett R.

2015-01-01

Many forms of locomotion rely on the ability to accurately perceive one's direction of locomotion (i.e., heading) based on optic flow. Although accurate in rigid environments, heading judgments may be biased when independently moving objects are present. The aim of this study was to systematically investigate the conditions in which moving objects influence heading perception, with a focus on the temporal dynamics and the mechanisms underlying this bias. Subjects viewed stimuli simulating linear self-motion in the presence of a moving object and judged their direction of heading. Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that heading perception is biased when the object crosses or almost crosses the observer's future path toward the end of the trial, but not when the object crosses earlier in the trial. Nonetheless, heading perception is not based entirely on the instantaneous optic flow toward the end of the trial. This was demonstrated in Experiment 3 by varying the portion of the earlier part of the trial leading up to the last frame that was presented to subjects. When the stimulus duration was long enough to include the part of the trial before the moving object crossed the observer's path, heading judgments were less biased. The findings suggest that heading perception is affected by the temporal evolution of optic flow. The time course of dorsal medial superior temporal area (MSTd) neuron responses may play a crucial role in perceiving heading in the presence of moving objects, a property not captured by many existing models. PMID:26510765

Reverse correlating trustworthy faces in young and older adults

PubMed Central

Éthier-Majcher, Catherine; Joubert, Sven; Gosselin, Frédéric

2013-01-01

Little is known about how older persons determine if someone deserves their trust or not based on their facial appearance, a process referred to as “facial trustworthiness.”In the past few years, Todorov and colleagues have argued that, in young adults, trustworthiness judgments are an extension of emotional judgments, and therefore, that trust judgments are made based on a continuum between anger and happiness (Todorov, 2008; Engell et al., 2010). Evidence from the literature on emotion processing suggest that older adults tend to be less efficient than younger adults in the recognition of negative facial expressions (Calder et al., 2003; Firestone et al., 2007; Ruffman et al., 2008; Chaby and Narme, 2009). Based on Todorov';s theory and the fact that older adults seem to be less efficient than younger adults in identifying emotional expressions, one could expect that older individuals would have different representations of trustworthy faces and that they would use different cues than younger adults in order to make such judgments. We verified this hypothesis using a variation of Mangini and Biederman's (2004) reverse correlation method in order to test and compare classification images resulting from trustworthiness (in the context of money investment), from happiness, and from anger judgments in two groups of participants: young adults and older healthy adults. Our results show that for elderly participants, both happy and angry representations are correlated with trustworthiness judgments. However, in young adults, trustworthiness judgments are mainly correlated with happiness representations. These results suggest that young and older adults differ in their way of judging trustworthiness. PMID:24046755

Contrasting Semantic versus Inhibitory Processing in the Angular Gyrus: An fMRI Study.

PubMed

Lewis, Gwyneth A; Poeppel, David; Murphy, Gregory L

2018-06-06

Recent studies of semantic memory have focused on dissociating the neural bases of two foundational components of human thought: taxonomic categories, which group similar objects like dogs and seals based on features, and thematic categories, which group dissimilar objects like dogs and leashes based on events. While there is emerging consensus that taxonomic concepts are represented in the anterior temporal lobe, there is disagreement over whether thematic concepts are represented in the angular gyrus (AG). We previously found AG sensitivity to both kinds of concepts; however, some accounts suggest that such activity reflects inhibition of irrelevant information rather than thematic activation. To test these possibilities, an fMRI experiment investigated both types of conceptual relations in the AG during two semantic judgment tasks. Each task trained participants to give negative responses (inhibition) or positive responses (activation) to word pairs based on taxonomic and thematic criteria of relatedness. Results showed AG engagement during both negative judgments and thematic judgments, but not during positive judgments about taxonomic pairs. Together, the results suggest that activity in the AG reflects functions that include both thematic (but not taxonomic) processing and inhibiting irrelevant semantic information.

Emotional and Utilitarian Appraisals of Moral Dilemmas Are Encoded in Separate Areas and Integrated in Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex

PubMed Central

Montaser-Kouhsari, Leila; Woodward, James; Rangel, Antonio

2015-01-01

Moral judgment often requires making difficult tradeoffs (e.g., is it appropriate to torture to save the lives of innocents at risk?). Previous research suggests that both emotional appraisals and more deliberative utilitarian appraisals influence such judgments and that these appraisals often conflict. However, it is unclear how these different types of appraisals are represented in the brain, or how they are integrated into an overall moral judgment. We addressed these questions using an fMRI paradigm in which human subjects provide separate emotional and utilitarian appraisals for different potential actions, and then make difficult moral judgments constructed from combinations of these actions. We found that anterior cingulate, insula, and superior temporal gyrus correlated with emotional appraisals, whereas temporoparietal junction and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex correlated with utilitarian appraisals. Overall moral value judgments were represented in an anterior portion of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Critically, the pattern of responses and functional interactions between these three sets of regions are consistent with a model in which emotional and utilitarian appraisals are computed independently and in parallel, and passed to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex where they are integrated into an overall moral value judgment. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Popular accounts of moral judgment often describe it as a battle for control between two systems, one intuitive and emotional, the other rational and utilitarian, engaged in winner-take-all inhibitory competition. Using a novel fMRI paradigm, we identified distinct neural signatures of emotional and utilitarian appraisals and used them to test different models of how they compete for the control of moral behavior. Importantly, we find little support for competitive inhibition accounts. Instead, moral judgments resembled the architecture of simple economic choices: distinct regions represented emotional and utilitarian appraisals independently and passed this information to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex for integration into an overall moral value signal. PMID:26354924

Emotional and Utilitarian Appraisals of Moral Dilemmas Are Encoded in Separate Areas and Integrated in Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex.

PubMed

Hutcherson, Cendri A; Montaser-Kouhsari, Leila; Woodward, James; Rangel, Antonio

2015-09-09

Moral judgment often requires making difficult tradeoffs (e.g., is it appropriate to torture to save the lives of innocents at risk?). Previous research suggests that both emotional appraisals and more deliberative utilitarian appraisals influence such judgments and that these appraisals often conflict. However, it is unclear how these different types of appraisals are represented in the brain, or how they are integrated into an overall moral judgment. We addressed these questions using an fMRI paradigm in which human subjects provide separate emotional and utilitarian appraisals for different potential actions, and then make difficult moral judgments constructed from combinations of these actions. We found that anterior cingulate, insula, and superior temporal gyrus correlated with emotional appraisals, whereas temporoparietal junction and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex correlated with utilitarian appraisals. Overall moral value judgments were represented in an anterior portion of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Critically, the pattern of responses and functional interactions between these three sets of regions are consistent with a model in which emotional and utilitarian appraisals are computed independently and in parallel, and passed to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex where they are integrated into an overall moral value judgment. Significance statement: Popular accounts of moral judgment often describe it as a battle for control between two systems, one intuitive and emotional, the other rational and utilitarian, engaged in winner-take-all inhibitory competition. Using a novel fMRI paradigm, we identified distinct neural signatures of emotional and utilitarian appraisals and used them to test different models of how they compete for the control of moral behavior. Importantly, we find little support for competitive inhibition accounts. Instead, moral judgments resembled the architecture of simple economic choices: distinct regions represented emotional and utilitarian appraisals independently and passed this information to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex for integration into an overall moral value signal. Copyright © 2015 the authors 0270-6474/15/3512593-14$15.00/0.

The temporal stability and predictive validity of pupils' causal attributions for difficult classroom behaviour.

PubMed

Lambert, Nathan; Miller, Andy

2010-12-01

Recent studies have investigated the causal attributions for difficult pupil behaviour made by teachers, pupils, and parents but none have investigated the temporal stability or predictive validity of these attributions. This study examines the causal attributions made for difficult classroom behaviour by students on two occasions 30 months apart. The longitudinal stability of these attributions is considered as is the predictive validity of the first set of attributions in relation to teachers' later judgments about individual students' behaviour. Two hundred and seventeen secondary school age pupils (114 males, 103 females) provided data on the two occasions. Teachers also rated each student's behaviour at the two times. A questionnaire listing 63 possible causes of classroom misbehaviour was delivered to pupils firstly when they were in Year 7 (aged 11-12) and then again, 30 months later. Responses were analysed through exploratory factor analysis (EFA). Additionally, teachers were asked to rate the standard of behaviour of each of the students on the two occasions. EFA of the Years 7 and 10 data indicated that pupils' attributions yielded broadly similar five-factor models with the perceived relative importance of these factors remaining the same. Analysis also revealed a predictive relationship between pupils' attributions regarding the factor named culture of misbehaviour in Year 7, and teachers' judgments of their standard of behaviour in Year 10. The present study suggests that young adolescents' causal attributions for difficult classroom behaviour remain stable over time and are predictive of teachers' later judgments about their behaviour.

Regressing Team Performance on Collective Efficacy: Considerations of Temporal Proximity and Concordance

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Myers, Nicholas D.; Paiement, Craig A.; Feltz, Deborah L.

2007-01-01

The purpose of this study was to determine to what degree collective efficacy judgments based on summative team performance capabilities exhibited different levels of prediction for three additive intervals of team performance in women's ice hockey. Collective efficacy beliefs of 12 teams were assessed prior to Friday's game and Saturday's game…

Evaluating Warning Sound Urgency with Reaction Times

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Suied, Clara; Susini, Patrick; McAdams, Stephen

2008-01-01

It is well-established that subjective judgments of perceived urgency of alarm sounds can be affected by acoustic parameters. In this study, the authors investigated an objective measurement, the reaction time (RT), to test the effectiveness of temporal parameters of sounds in the context of warning sounds. Three experiments were performed using a…

Functional Neuroimaging of Self-Referential Encoding with Age

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gutchess, Angela H.; Kensinger, Elizabeth A.; Schacter, Daniel L.

2010-01-01

Aging impacts memory formation and the engagement of frontal and medial temporal regions. However, much of the research to date has focused on the encoding of neutral verbal and visual information. The present fMRI study investigated age differences in a social encoding task while participants made judgments about the self or another person.…

Arrows of Time in Early Childhood.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Friedman, William J.

2003-01-01

Three studies examined development of the perception of temporally unidirectional transformation, such as dropping blocks, with 3.5- to 6.5-year-olds who compared forward and backward videotapes of events or made individual judgments of what would happen if action were attempted. Findings indicated that even 3.5- to 4.5-year-olds recognized the…

The neural basis for novel semantic categorization.

PubMed

Koenig, Phyllis; Smith, Edward E; Glosser, Guila; DeVita, Chris; Moore, Peachie; McMillan, Corey; Gee, Jim; Grossman, Murray

2005-01-15

We monitored regional cerebral activity with BOLD fMRI during acquisition of a novel semantic category and subsequent categorization of test stimuli by a rule-based strategy or a similarity-based strategy. We observed different patterns of activation in direct comparisons of rule- and similarity-based categorization. During rule-based category acquisition, subjects recruited anterior cingulate, thalamic, and parietal regions to support selective attention to perceptual features, and left inferior frontal cortex to helps maintain rules in working memory. Subsequent rule-based categorization revealed anterior cingulate and parietal activation while judging stimuli whose conformity with the rules was readily apparent, and left inferior frontal recruitment during judgments of stimuli whose conformity was less apparent. By comparison, similarity-based category acquisition showed recruitment of anterior prefrontal and posterior cingulate regions, presumably to support successful retrieval of previously encountered exemplars from long-term memory, and bilateral temporal-parietal activation for perceptual feature integration. Subsequent similarity-based categorization revealed temporal-parietal, posterior cingulate, and anterior prefrontal activation. These findings suggest that large-scale networks support relatively distinct categorization processes during the acquisition and judgment of semantic category knowledge.

A Quantum Theoretical Explanation for Probability Judgment Errors

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Busemeyer, Jerome R.; Pothos, Emmanuel M.; Franco, Riccardo; Trueblood, Jennifer S.

2011-01-01

A quantum probability model is introduced and used to explain human probability judgment errors including the conjunction and disjunction fallacies, averaging effects, unpacking effects, and order effects on inference. On the one hand, quantum theory is similar to other categorization and memory models of cognition in that it relies on vector…

Monitoring Communication with Patients: Analyzing Judgments of Satisfaction (JOS)

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wagner-Menghin, Michaela; de Bruin, Anique; van Merriënboer, Jeroen J. G.

2016-01-01

Medical students struggle to put into practice communication skills learned in medical school. In order to improve our instructional designs, better insight into the cause of this lack of transfer is foundational. We therefore explored students' cognitions by soliciting self-evaluations of their history-taking skills, coined "judgments of…

Workplace-Based Assessment: Raters' Performance Theories and Constructs

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Govaerts, M. J. B.; Van de Wiel, M. W. J.; Schuwirth, L. W. T.; Van der Vleuten, C. P. M.; Muijtjens, A. M. M.

2013-01-01

Weaknesses in the nature of rater judgments are generally considered to compromise the utility of workplace-based assessment (WBA). In order to gain insight into the underpinnings of rater behaviours, we investigated how raters form impressions of and make judgments on trainee performance. Using theoretical frameworks of social cognition and…

Simulation and the Development of Clinical Judgment: A Quantitative Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Holland, Susan

2015-01-01

The purpose of this quantitative pretest posttest quasi-experimental research study was to explore the effect of the NESD on clinical judgment in associate degree nursing students and compare the differences between groups when the Nursing Education Simulation Design (NESD) guided simulation in order to identify educational strategies promoting…

'Utilitarian' judgments in sacrificial moral dilemmas do not reflect impartial concern for the greater good.

PubMed

Kahane, Guy; Everett, Jim A C; Earp, Brian D; Farias, Miguel; Savulescu, Julian

2015-01-01

A growing body of research has focused on so-called 'utilitarian' judgments in moral dilemmas in which participants have to choose whether to sacrifice one person in order to save the lives of a greater number. However, the relation between such 'utilitarian' judgments and genuine utilitarian impartial concern for the greater good remains unclear. Across four studies, we investigated the relationship between 'utilitarian' judgment in such sacrificial dilemmas and a range of traits, attitudes, judgments and behaviors that either reflect or reject an impartial concern for the greater good of all. In Study 1, we found that rates of 'utilitarian' judgment were associated with a broadly immoral outlook concerning clear ethical transgressions in a business context, as well as with sub-clinical psychopathy. In Study 2, we found that 'utilitarian' judgment was associated with greater endorsement of rational egoism, less donation of money to a charity, and less identification with the whole of humanity, a core feature of classical utilitarianism. In Studies 3 and 4, we found no association between 'utilitarian' judgments in sacrificial dilemmas and characteristic utilitarian judgments relating to assistance to distant people in need, self-sacrifice and impartiality, even when the utilitarian justification for these judgments was made explicit and unequivocal. This lack of association remained even when we controlled for the antisocial element in 'utilitarian' judgment. Taken together, these results suggest that there is very little relation between sacrificial judgments in the hypothetical dilemmas that dominate current research, and a genuine utilitarian approach to ethics. Copyright © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

‘Utilitarian’ judgments in sacrificial moral dilemmas do not reflect impartial concern for the greater good

PubMed Central

Kahane, Guy; Everett, Jim A.C.; Earp, Brian D.; Farias, Miguel; Savulescu, Julian

2015-01-01

A growing body of research has focused on so-called ‘utilitarian’ judgments in moral dilemmas in which participants have to choose whether to sacrifice one person in order to save the lives of a greater number. However, the relation between such ‘utilitarian’ judgments and genuine utilitarian impartial concern for the greater good remains unclear. Across four studies, we investigated the relationship between ‘utilitarian’ judgment in such sacrificial dilemmas and a range of traits, attitudes, judgments and behaviors that either reflect or reject an impartial concern for the greater good of all. In Study 1, we found that rates of ‘utilitarian’ judgment were associated with a broadly immoral outlook concerning clear ethical transgressions in a business context, as well as with sub-clinical psychopathy. In Study 2, we found that ‘utilitarian’ judgment was associated with greater endorsement of rational egoism, less donation of money to a charity, and less identification with the whole of humanity, a core feature of classical utilitarianism. In Studies 3 and 4, we found no association between ‘utilitarian’ judgments in sacrificial dilemmas and characteristic utilitarian judgments relating to assistance to distant people in need, self-sacrifice and impartiality, even when the utilitarian justification for these judgments was made explicit and unequivocal. This lack of association remained even when we controlled for the antisocial element in ‘utilitarian’ judgment. Taken together, these results suggest that there is very little relation between sacrificial judgments in the hypothetical dilemmas that dominate current research, and a genuine utilitarian approach to ethics. PMID:25460392

Blind prediction of natural video quality.

PubMed

Saad, Michele A; Bovik, Alan C; Charrier, Christophe

2014-03-01

We propose a blind (no reference or NR) video quality evaluation model that is nondistortion specific. The approach relies on a spatio-temporal model of video scenes in the discrete cosine transform domain, and on a model that characterizes the type of motion occurring in the scenes, to predict video quality. We use the models to define video statistics and perceptual features that are the basis of a video quality assessment (VQA) algorithm that does not require the presence of a pristine video to compare against in order to predict a perceptual quality score. The contributions of this paper are threefold. 1) We propose a spatio-temporal natural scene statistics (NSS) model for videos. 2) We propose a motion model that quantifies motion coherency in video scenes. 3) We show that the proposed NSS and motion coherency models are appropriate for quality assessment of videos, and we utilize them to design a blind VQA algorithm that correlates highly with human judgments of quality. The proposed algorithm, called video BLIINDS, is tested on the LIVE VQA database and on the EPFL-PoliMi video database and shown to perform close to the level of top performing reduced and full reference VQA algorithms.

Dual-task interference effects on cross-modal numerical order and sound intensity judgments: the more the louder?

PubMed

Alards-Tomalin, Doug; Walker, Alexander C; Nepon, Hillary; Leboe-McGowan, Launa C

2017-09-01

In the current study, cross-task interactions between number order and sound intensity judgments were assessed using a dual-task paradigm. Participants first categorized numerical sequences composed of Arabic digits as either ordered (ascending, descending) or non-ordered. Following each number sequence, participants then had to judge the intensity level of a target sound. Experiment 1 emphasized processing the two tasks independently (serial processing), while Experiments 2 and 3 emphasized processing the two tasks simultaneously (parallel processing). Cross-task interference occurred only when the task required parallel processing and was specific to ascending numerical sequences, which led to a higher proportion of louder sound intensity judgments. In Experiment 4 we examined whether this unidirectional interaction was the result of participants misattributing enhanced processing fluency experienced on ascending sequences as indicating a louder target sound. The unidirectional finding could not be entirely attributed to misattributed processing fluency, and may also be connected to experientially derived conceptual associations between ascending number sequences and greater magnitude, consistent with conceptual mapping theory.

The perceived effectiveness of persuasive messages: questions of structure, referent, and bias.

PubMed

Dillard, James Price; Ye, Sun

2008-03-01

To gain a sense of the persuasive efficacy of a message prior to implementation of a campaign, researchers often gather judgments of perceived effectiveness (PE). At present, they do so without much knowledge of the conceptual meaning or empirical properties of PE. In the spirit of construct explication, we report a study intended to address a series of questions about PE. Using student (N = 155) and community samples (N = 100), we found the following: (a) PE is a two-dimensional judgment involving global evaluations of message impact and specific judgments of message attributes, but it may be reducible to a single second-order factor, (b) most individuals reported using more than one referent (i.e., person or group) when making PE judgments, but the choice of referents varies by message and judge, and (c) judgments of PE are biased upward as a function of the number of referents chosen. Suggestions are offered for enhancing the validity of PE judgments in formative campaign research.

The influence of context boundaries on memory for the sequential order of events.

PubMed

DuBrow, Sarah; Davachi, Lila

2013-11-01

Episodic memory allows people to reexperience the past by recovering the sequences of events that characterize those prior experiences. Although experience is continuous, people are able to selectively retrieve and reexperience more discrete episodes from their past, raising the possibility that some elements become tightly related to each other in memory, whereas others do not. The current series of experiments was designed to ask how shifts in context during an experience influence how people remember the past. Specifically, we asked how context shifts influence the ability to remember the relative order of past events, a hallmark of episodic memory. We found that memory for the order of events was enhanced within, rather than across, context shifts, or boundaries (Experiment 1). Next, we showed that this relative enhancement in order memory was eliminated when across-item associative processing was disrupted (Experiment 2), suggesting that context shifts have a selective effect on sequential binding. Finally, we provide evidence that the act of making order memory judgments involves the reactivation of representations that bridged the tested items (Experiment 3). Together, these data suggest that boundaries may serve to parse continuous experience into sequences of contextually related events and that this organization facilitates remembering the temporal order of events that share the same context. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved.

Processing temporal agreement in a tenseless language: an ERP study of Mandarin Chinese.

PubMed

Qiu, Yinchen; Zhou, Xiaolin

2012-03-29

Human languages are equipped with an impressive repertoire of time-encoding devices which vary significantly across different cultures. Previous research on temporal processing has focused on morphosyntactic processes in Indo-European languages. This study investigated the neural correlates of temporal processing in Mandarin Chinese, a language that is not morphologically marked for tense. In a sentence acceptability judgment task, we manipulated the agreement between semantically enriched temporal adverbs or a highly grammaticalized aspectual particle (-guo) and temporal noun phrases. Disagreement of both the temporal adverbs and the aspectual particle elicited a centro-parietal P600 effect in event-related potentials (ERPs) whereas only disagreeing temporal adverbs evoked an additional broadly distributed N400 effect. Moreover, a sustained negativity effect was observed on both the words following the critical ones and the last words in sentences with temporal disagreement. These results reveal both commonalities and differences between Chinese and Indo-European languages in temporal agreement processing. In particular, we demonstrate that temporal reference in Chinese relies on both lexical semantics and morphosyntactic processes and that the level of grammaticalization of linguistic devices representing similar temporal information is reflected in differential ERP responses. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Perceptual Simulations and Linguistic Representations Have Differential Effects on Speeded Relatedness Judgments and Recognition Memory

PubMed Central

Tse, Chi-Shing; Kurby, Christopher A.; Du, Feng

2010-01-01

We examined the effect of spatial iconicity (a perceptual simulation of canonical locations of objects) and word-order frequency on language processing and episodic memory of orientation. Participants made speeded relatedness judgments to pairs of words presented in locations typical to their real world arrangements (e.g., ceiling on top and floor on bottom). They then engaged in a surprise orientation recognition task for the word pairs. We replicated Louwerse’s finding (2008) that word-order frequency has a stronger effect on semantic relatedness judgments than spatial iconicity. This is consistent with recent suggestions that linguistic representations have a stronger impact on immediate decisions about verbal materials than perceptual simulations. In contrast, spatial iconicity enhanced episodic memory of orientation to a greater extent than word-order frequency did. This new finding indicates that perceptual simulations have an important role in episodic memory. Results are discussed with respect to theories of perceptual representation and linguistic processing. PMID:19742388

Future versus present: time perspective and pupillary response in a relatedness judgment task investigating temporal event knowledge.

PubMed

Nowack, Kati; Milfont, Taciano L; van der Meer, Elke

2013-02-01

Mental representations of events contain many components such as typical agents, instruments, objects as well as a temporal dimension that is directed towards the future. While the role of temporal orientation (chronological, reverse) in event knowledge has been demonstrated by numerous studies, little is known about the influence of time perspective (present or future) as source of individual differences affecting event knowledge. The present study combined behavioral data with task-evoked pupil dilation to examine the impact of time perspective on cognitive resource allocation. In a relatedness judgment task, everyday events like raining were paired with an object feature like wet. Chronological items were processed more easily than reverse items regardless of time perspective. When more automatic processes were applied, greater scores on future time perspective were associated with lower error rates for chronological items. This suggests that a match between a strong focus on future consequences and items with a temporal orientation directed toward the future serves to enhance responding accuracy. Indexed by pupillary data, future-oriented participants invested more cognitive resources while outperforming present-oriented participants in reaction times across all conditions. This result was supported by a principal component analysis on the pupil data, which demonstrated the same impact of time perspective on the factor associated with more general aspects of cognitive effort. These findings suggest that future time perspective may be linked to a more general cognitive performance characteristic that improves overall task performance. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Ordinality and the nature of symbolic numbers.

PubMed

Lyons, Ian M; Beilock, Sian L

2013-10-23

The view that representations of symbolic and nonsymbolic numbers are closely tied to one another is widespread. However, the link between symbolic and nonsymbolic numbers is almost always inferred from cardinal processing tasks. In the current work, we show that considering ordinality instead points to striking differences between symbolic and nonsymbolic numbers. Human behavioral and neural data show that ordinal processing of symbolic numbers (Are three Indo-Arabic numerals in numerical order?) is distinct from symbolic cardinal processing (Which of two numerals represents the greater quantity?) and nonsymbolic number processing (ordinal and cardinal judgments of dot-arrays). Behaviorally, distance-effects were reversed when assessing ordinality in symbolic numbers, but canonical distance-effects were observed for cardinal judgments of symbolic numbers and all nonsymbolic judgments. At the neural level, symbolic number-ordering was the only numerical task that did not show number-specific activity (greater than control) in the intraparietal sulcus. Only activity in left premotor cortex was specifically associated with symbolic number-ordering. For nonsymbolic numbers, activation in cognitive-control areas during ordinal processing and a high degree of overlap between ordinal and cardinal processing networks indicate that nonsymbolic ordinality is assessed via iterative cardinality judgments. This contrasts with a striking lack of neural overlap between ordinal and cardinal judgments anywhere in the brain for symbolic numbers, suggesting that symbolic number processing varies substantially with computational context. Ordinal processing sheds light on key differences between symbolic and nonsymbolic number processing both behaviorally and in the brain. Ordinality may prove important for understanding the power of representing numbers symbolically.

Cognitive Engineering of Advanced Information Technology for Air Force Systems Design and Deployment: Prototype for Air Defense Intelligence and Operations

DTIC Science & Technology

1989-10-01

train members of the eventual decision-making group to have different strategies, called " policies ," for making inferences and/or decisions. For example...group task, the task side of the lens model is structured so that each person must modify his judgment policy by learning from the other person in order...judgment policy ; that is, they would receive in both pictorial and textual form a description of how each person combines information to make a judgment

A Survey of Neuropsychologists’ Practices and Perspectives Regarding the Assessment of Judgment Ability

PubMed Central

Rabin, Laura A.; Borgos, Marlana J.; Saykin, Andrew J.

2012-01-01

Judgment is an important aspect of cognitive and real-world functioning that is commonly assessed during neuropsychological evaluations. This study utilized a brief, online survey to examine neuropsychologists’ practices and perspectives regarding available judgment instruments. Participants (n=290, 17% response rate) were randomly selected members of the International Neuropsychological Society and the National Academy of Neuropsychology. Respondents rank-ordered the following issues that should be incorporated into assessments of judgment (from most to least important): safety, ability to perform activities of daily living, and problem solving/decision making about medical, financial, social/ethical, and legal matters. A majority of respondents reported that they “often” or “always” assessed judgment when evaluating patients with traumatic brain injury (89%), dementia (87%), and psychiatric disorders (70%). Surprisingly, the top-ranked instruments were not tests of judgment per se, and included the WAIS-III Comprehension, Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, and WAIS-III Similarities. Further, 61% of respondents were slightly confident, and only 23% were very confident, in their ability to assess a patient’s judgment skills with their current tests. The overwhelming majority (87%) of respondents perceived a need for improved measures. Overall results indicate use of varied techniques by neuropsychologists to evaluate judgment and suggest the need for additional tests of this cognitive domain. PMID:19023743

When the Future Feels Worse than the Past: A Temporal Inconsistency in Moral Judgment

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Caruso, Eugene M.

2010-01-01

Logically, an unethical behavior performed yesterday should also be unethical if performed tomorrow. However, the present studies suggest that the timing of a transgression has a systematic effect on people's beliefs about its moral acceptability. Because people's emotional reactions tend to be more extreme for future events than for past events,…

Detecting affiliation in colaughter across 24 societies

PubMed Central

Bryant, Gregory A.; Fessler, Daniel M. T.; Clint, Edward; Aarøe, Lene; Apicella, Coren L.; Petersen, Michael Bang; Bickham, Shaneikiah T.; Bolyanatz, Alexander; Chavez, Brenda; De Smet, Delphine; Díaz, Cinthya; Fančovičová, Jana; Fux, Michal; Giraldo-Perez, Paulina; Hu, Anning; Kamble, Shanmukh V.; Kameda, Tatsuya; Li, Norman P.; Luberti, Francesca R.; Prokop, Pavol; Quintelier, Katinka; Scelza, Brooke A.; Shin, Hyun Jung; Soler, Montserrat; Stieger, Stefan; van den Hende, Ellis A.; Viciana-Asensio, Hugo; Yildizhan, Saliha Elif; Yong, Jose C.; Yuditha, Tessa; Zhou, Yi

2016-01-01

Laughter is a nonverbal vocal expression that often communicates positive affect and cooperative intent in humans. Temporally coincident laughter occurring within groups is a potentially rich cue of affiliation to overhearers. We examined listeners’ judgments of affiliation based on brief, decontextualized instances of colaughter between either established friends or recently acquainted strangers. In a sample of 966 participants from 24 societies, people reliably distinguished friends from strangers with an accuracy of 53–67%. Acoustic analyses of the individual laughter segments revealed that, across cultures, listeners’ judgments were consistently predicted by voicing dynamics, suggesting perceptual sensitivity to emotionally triggered spontaneous production. Colaughter affords rapid and accurate appraisals of affiliation that transcend cultural and linguistic boundaries, and may constitute a universal means of signaling cooperative relationships. PMID:27071114

The Degree of Early Life Stress Predicts Decreased Medial Prefrontal Activations and the Shift from Internally to Externally Guided Decision Making: An Exploratory NIRS Study during Resting State and Self-Oriented Task

PubMed Central

Nakao, Takashi; Matsumoto, Tomoya; Morita, Machiko; Shimizu, Daisuke; Yoshimura, Shinpei; Northoff, Georg; Morinobu, Shigeru; Okamoto, Yasumasa; Yamawaki, Shigeto

2013-01-01

Early life stress (ELS), an important risk factor for psychopathology in mental disorders, is associated neuronally with decreased functional connectivity within the default mode network (DMN) in the resting state. Moreover, it is linked with greater deactivation in DMN during a working memory task. Although DMN shows large amplitudes of very low-frequency oscillations (VLFO) and strong involvement during self-oriented tasks, these features’ relation to ELS remains unclear. Therefore, our preliminary study investigated the relationship between ELS and the degree of frontal activations during a resting state and self-oriented task using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). From 22 healthy participants, regional hemodynamic changes in 43 front-temporal channels were recorded during 5 min resting states, and execution of a self-oriented task (color-preference judgment) and a control task (color-similarity judgment). Using a child abuse and trauma scale, ELS was quantified. We observed that ELS showed a negative correlation with medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) activation during both resting state and color-preference judgment. In contrast, no significant correlation was found between ELS and MPFC activation during color-similarity judgment. Additionally, we observed that ELS and the MPFC activation during color-preference judgment were associated behaviorally with the rate of similar color choice in preference judgment, which suggests that, for participants with higher ELS, decisions in the color-preference judgment were based on an external criterion (color similarity) rather than an internal criterion (subjective preference). Taken together, our neuronal and behavioral findings show that high ELS is related to lower MPFC activation during both rest and self-oriented tasks. This is behaviorally manifest in an abnormal shift from internally to externally guided decision making, even under circumstances where internal guidance is required. PMID:23840186

Eye of the Beholder: Stage Entrance Behavior and Facial Expression Affect Continuous Quality Ratings in Music Performance

PubMed Central

Waddell, George; Williamon, Aaron

2017-01-01

Judgments of music performance quality are commonly employed in music practice, education, and research. However, previous studies have demonstrated the limited reliability of such judgments, and there is now evidence that extraneous visual, social, and other “non-musical” features can unduly influence them. The present study employed continuous measurement techniques to examine how the process of forming a music quality judgment is affected by the manipulation of temporally specific visual cues. Video footage comprising an appropriate stage entrance and error-free performance served as the standard condition (Video 1). This footage was manipulated to provide four additional conditions, each identical save for a single variation: an inappropriate stage entrance (Video 2); the presence of an aural performance error midway through the piece (Video 3); the same error accompanied by a negative facial reaction by the performer (Video 4); the facial reaction with no corresponding aural error (Video 5). The participants were 53 musicians and 52 non-musicians (N = 105) who individually assessed the performance quality of one of the five randomly assigned videos via a digital continuous measurement interface and headphones. The results showed that participants viewing the “inappropriate” stage entrance made judgments significantly more quickly than those viewing the “appropriate” entrance, and while the poor entrance caused significantly lower initial scores among those with musical training, the effect did not persist long into the performance. The aural error caused an immediate drop in quality judgments that persisted to a lower final score only when accompanied by the frustrated facial expression from the pianist; the performance error alone caused a temporary drop only in the musicians' ratings, and the negative facial reaction alone caused no reaction regardless of participants' musical experience. These findings demonstrate the importance of visual information in forming evaluative and aesthetic judgments in musical contexts and highlight how visual cues dynamically influence those judgments over time. PMID:28487662

Diagnostic causal reasoning with verbal information.

PubMed

Meder, Björn; Mayrhofer, Ralf

2017-08-01

In diagnostic causal reasoning, the goal is to infer the probability of causes from one or multiple observed effects. Typically, studies investigating such tasks provide subjects with precise quantitative information regarding the strength of the relations between causes and effects or sample data from which the relevant quantities can be learned. By contrast, we sought to examine people's inferences when causal information is communicated through qualitative, rather vague verbal expressions (e.g., "X occasionally causes A"). We conducted three experiments using a sequential diagnostic inference task, where multiple pieces of evidence were obtained one after the other. Quantitative predictions of different probabilistic models were derived using the numerical equivalents of the verbal terms, taken from an unrelated study with different subjects. We present a novel Bayesian model that allows for incorporating the temporal weighting of information in sequential diagnostic reasoning, which can be used to model both primacy and recency effects. On the basis of 19,848 judgments from 292 subjects, we found a remarkably close correspondence between the diagnostic inferences made by subjects who received only verbal information and those of a matched control group to whom information was presented numerically. Whether information was conveyed through verbal terms or numerical estimates, diagnostic judgments closely resembled the posterior probabilities entailed by the causes' prior probabilities and the effects' likelihoods. We observed interindividual differences regarding the temporal weighting of evidence in sequential diagnostic reasoning. Our work provides pathways for investigating judgment and decision making with verbal information within a computational modeling framework. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Story Content as a Factor in Children's Moral Judgments.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Moran, James D., III

This study investigates effects of perceived rule-breaking on the moral reasoning of young children. Thirty first-grade children (15 males and 15 females) were read 10 randomly ordered moral judgment stories by one of three experimenters. Each story was accompanied by a two-frame cartoon-like drawing depicting the action. Two stories of each of…

Applying Research to Making Life-Affecting Judgments and Decisions

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gibbs, Leonard

2007-01-01

This keynote address argues that in order for baccalaureate and masters degree students to apply research to make better judgments and decisions in their life-affecting practice and in response to the information revolution, the helping professions need to redesign (from the bottom up) not overhaul (make a few changes in) the way research methods…

Faculty Salary Equity: Issues in Regression Model Selection. AIR 1992 Annual Forum Paper.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Moore, Nelle

This paper discusses the determination of college faculty salary inequity and identifies the areas in which human judgment must be used in order to conduct a statistical analysis of salary equity. In addition, it provides some informed guidelines for making those judgments. The paper provides a framework for selecting salary equity models, based…

Event-Related Potential (ERP) Evidence for Varied Recollection during Source Monitoring

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Leynes, P. Andrew; Phillips, Michelle C.

2008-01-01

The source monitoring framework (SMF; M. K. Johnson, S. Hashtroudi, & D. S. Lindsay, 1993) posits that source monitoring can be supported by varying degrees of recollection. Source judgments were made for words heard at study (male or female voice) followed by remember/know (RK) judgments in order to assess differences in degrees of recollection…

The Contact Principle and Utilitarian Moral Judgments in Young Children

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Pellizzoni, Sandra; Siegal, Michael; Surian, Luca

2010-01-01

In three experiments involving 207 preschoolers and 28 adults, we investigated the extent to which young children base moral judgments of actions aimed to protect others on utilitarian principles. When asked to judge the rightness of intervening to hurt one person in order to save five others, the large majority of children aged 3 to 5 years…

20 CFR 725.605 - Defaults.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-04-01

... supplementary order is in accordance with law. Review of the judgment may be had as in civil suits for damages at common law. Final proceedings to execute the judgment may be had by writ of execution in the form used by the court in suits at common law in actions of assumpsit. No fee shall be required for filing...

20 CFR 725.605 - Defaults.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-04-01

... supplementary order is in accordance with law. Review of the judgment may be had as in civil suits for damages at common law. Final proceedings to execute the judgment may be had by writ of execution in the form used by the court in suits at common law in actions of assumpsit. No fee shall be required for filing...

20 CFR 725.605 - Defaults.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-04-01

... supplementary order is in accordance with law. Review of the judgment may be had as in civil suits for damages at common law. Final proceedings to execute the judgment may be had by writ of execution in the form used by the court in suits at common law in actions of assumpsit. No fee shall be required for filing...

20 CFR 725.605 - Defaults.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-04-01

... supplementary order is in accordance with law. Review of the judgment may be had as in civil suits for damages at common law. Final proceedings to execute the judgment may be had by writ of execution in the form used by the court in suits at common law in actions of assumpsit. No fee shall be required for filing...

20 CFR 725.605 - Defaults.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-04-01

... supplementary order is in accordance with law. Review of the judgment may be had as in civil suits for damages at common law. Final proceedings to execute the judgment may be had by writ of execution in the form used by the court in suits at common law in actions of assumpsit. No fee shall be required for filing...

A Group Decision Framework with Intuitionistic Preference Relations and Its Application to Low Carbon Supplier Selection.

PubMed

Tong, Xiayu; Wang, Zhou-Jing

2016-09-19

This article develops a group decision framework with intuitionistic preference relations. An approach is first devised to rectify an inconsistent intuitionistic preference relation to derive an additive consistent one. A new aggregation operator, the so-called induced intuitionistic ordered weighted averaging (IIOWA) operator, is proposed to aggregate individual intuitionistic fuzzy judgments. By using the mean absolute deviation between the original and rectified intuitionistic preference relations as an order inducing variable, the rectified consistent intuitionistic preference relations are aggregated into a collective preference relation. This treatment is presumably able to assign different weights to different decision-makers' judgments based on the quality of their inputs (in terms of consistency of their original judgments). A solution procedure is then developed for tackling group decision problems with intuitionistic preference relations. A low carbon supplier selection case study is developed to illustrate how to apply the proposed decision model in practice.

A Group Decision Framework with Intuitionistic Preference Relations and Its Application to Low Carbon Supplier Selection

PubMed Central

Tong, Xiayu; Wang, Zhou-Jing

2016-01-01

This article develops a group decision framework with intuitionistic preference relations. An approach is first devised to rectify an inconsistent intuitionistic preference relation to derive an additive consistent one. A new aggregation operator, the so-called induced intuitionistic ordered weighted averaging (IIOWA) operator, is proposed to aggregate individual intuitionistic fuzzy judgments. By using the mean absolute deviation between the original and rectified intuitionistic preference relations as an order inducing variable, the rectified consistent intuitionistic preference relations are aggregated into a collective preference relation. This treatment is presumably able to assign different weights to different decision-makers’ judgments based on the quality of their inputs (in terms of consistency of their original judgments). A solution procedure is then developed for tackling group decision problems with intuitionistic preference relations. A low carbon supplier selection case study is developed to illustrate how to apply the proposed decision model in practice. PMID:27657097

Noradrenaline effects on social behaviour, intergroup relations, and moral decisions.

PubMed

Terbeck, S; Savulescu, J; Chesterman, L P; Cowen, P J

2016-07-01

Recent research has begun to elucidate the neural basis of higher order social concepts, such as the mechanisms involved in intergroup relations, and moral judgments. Most theories have concentrated on higher order emotions, such as guilt, shame, or empathy, as core mechanisms. Accordingly, psychopharmacological and neurobiological studies have investigated the effects of manipulating serotonin or oxytocin activity on moral and social decisions and attitudes. However, recently it has been determined that changes in more basic emotions, such as fear and anger, might also have a significant role in social and moral cognition. This article summarizes psychopharmacological and fMRI research on the role of noradrenaline in higher order social cognition suggesting that indeed noradrenergic mediated affective changes might play key - and probably causal - role in certain social attitudes and moral judgments. Social judgments may also be directly influenced by numerous neurotransmitter manipulations but these effects could be mediated by modulation of basic emotions which appear to play an essential role in the formation of social concepts and moral behaviour. Copyright © 2016. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Typical Neural Representations of Action Verbs Develop without Vision

PubMed Central

Caramazza, A.; Pascual-Leone, A.; Saxe, R.

2012-01-01

Many empiricist theories hold that concepts are composed of sensory–motor primitives. For example, the meaning of the word “run” is in part a visual image of running. If action concepts are partly visual, then the concepts of congenitally blind individuals should be altered in that they lack these visual features. We compared semantic judgments and neural activity during action verb comprehension in congenitally blind and sighted individuals. Participants made similarity judgments about pairs of nouns and verbs that varied in the visual motion they conveyed. Blind adults showed the same pattern of similarity judgments as sighted adults. We identified the left middle temporal gyrus (lMTG) brain region that putatively stores visual–motion features relevant to action verbs. The functional profile and location of this region was identical in sighted and congenitally blind individuals. Furthermore, the lMTG was more active for all verbs than nouns, irrespective of visual–motion features. We conclude that the lMTG contains abstract representations of verb meanings rather than visual–motion images. Our data suggest that conceptual brain regions are not altered by the sensory modality of learning. PMID:21653285

Unifying Kohlberg with Information Integration: The Moral Algebra of Recompense and of Kohlbergian Moral Informers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hommers, Wilfried; Lee, Wha-Yong

2010-01-01

In order to unify two major theories of moral judgment, a novel task is employed which combines elements of Kohlberg's stage theory and of the theory of information integration. In contrast to the format of Kohlberg's moral judgment interview, a nonverbal and quantitative response which makes low demands on verbal facility was used. Moral…

Is a neutral expression also a neutral stimulus? A study with functional magnetic resonance.

PubMed

Carvajal, Fernando; Rubio, Sandra; Serrano, Juan M; Ríos-Lago, Marcos; Alvarez-Linera, Juan; Pacheco, Lara; Martín, Pilar

2013-08-01

Although neutral faces do not initially convey an explicit emotional message, it has been found that individuals tend to assign them an affective content. Moreover, previous research has shown that affective judgments are mediated by the task they have to perform. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging in 21 healthy participants, we focus this study on the cerebral activity patterns triggered by neutral and emotional faces in two different tasks (social or gender judgments). Results obtained, using conjunction analyses, indicated that viewing both emotional and neutral faces evokes activity in several similar brain areas indicating a common neural substrate. Moreover, neutral faces specifically elicit activation of cerebellum, frontal and temporal areas, while emotional faces involve the cuneus, anterior cingulated gyrus, medial orbitofrontal cortex, posterior superior temporal gyrus, precentral/postcentral gyrus and insula. The task selected was also found to influence brain activity, in that the social task recruited frontal areas while the gender task involved the posterior cingulated, inferior parietal lobule and middle temporal gyrus to a greater extent. Specifically, in the social task viewing neutral faces was associated with longer reaction times and increased activity of left dorsolateral frontal cortex compared with viewing facial expressions of emotions. In contrast, in the same task emotional expressions distinctively activated the left amygdale. The results are discussed taking into consideration the fact that, like other facial expressions, neutral expressions are usually assigned some emotional significance. However, neutral faces evoke a greater activation of circuits probably involved in more elaborate cognitive processing.

Visual and auditory perception in preschool children at risk for dyslexia.

PubMed

Ortiz, Rosario; Estévez, Adelina; Muñetón, Mercedes; Domínguez, Carolina

2014-11-01

Recently, there has been renewed interest in perceptive problems of dyslexics. A polemic research issue in this area has been the nature of the perception deficit. Another issue is the causal role of this deficit in dyslexia. Most studies have been carried out in adult and child literates; consequently, the observed deficits may be the result rather than the cause of dyslexia. This study addresses these issues by examining visual and auditory perception in children at risk for dyslexia. We compared children from preschool with and without risk for dyslexia in auditory and visual temporal order judgment tasks and same-different discrimination tasks. Identical visual and auditory, linguistic and nonlinguistic stimuli were presented in both tasks. The results revealed that the visual as well as the auditory perception of children at risk for dyslexia is impaired. The comparison between groups in auditory and visual perception shows that the achievement of children at risk was lower than children without risk for dyslexia in the temporal tasks. There were no differences between groups in auditory discrimination tasks. The difficulties of children at risk in visual and auditory perceptive processing affected both linguistic and nonlinguistic stimuli. Our conclusions are that children at risk for dyslexia show auditory and visual perceptive deficits for linguistic and nonlinguistic stimuli. The auditory impairment may be explained by temporal processing problems and these problems are more serious for processing language than for processing other auditory stimuli. These visual and auditory perceptive deficits are not the consequence of failing to learn to read, thus, these findings support the theory of temporal processing deficit. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Emotional Modulation of Interval Timing and Time Perception

PubMed Central

Lake, Jessica I.; LaBar, Kevin S.; Meck, Warren H.

2017-01-01

Like other senses, our perception of time is not veridical, but rather, is modulated by changes in environmental context. Anecdotal experiences suggest that emotions can be powerful modulators of time perception; nevertheless, the functional and neural mechanisms underlying emotion-induced temporal distortions remain unclear. Widely accepted pacemaker-accumulator models of time perception suggest that changes in arousal and attention have unique influences on temporal judgments and contribute to emotional distortions of time perception. However, such models conflict with current views of arousal and attention suggesting that current models of time perception do not adequately explain the variability in emotion-induced temporal distortions. Instead, findings provide support for a new perspective of emotion-induced temporal distortions that emphasizes both the unique and interactive influences of arousal and attention on time perception over time. Using this framework, we discuss plausible functional and neural mechanisms of emotion-induced temporal distortions and how these temporal distortions may have important implications for our understanding of how emotions modulate our perceptual experiences in service of adaptive responding to biologically relevant stimuli. PMID:26972824

Temporal processing dysfunction in schizophrenia.

PubMed

Carroll, Christine A; Boggs, Jennifer; O'Donnell, Brian F; Shekhar, Anantha; Hetrick, William P

2008-07-01

Schizophrenia may be associated with a fundamental disturbance in the temporal coordination of information processing in the brain, leading to classic symptoms of schizophrenia such as thought disorder and disorganized and contextually inappropriate behavior. Despite the growing interest and centrality of time-dependent conceptualizations of the pathophysiology of schizophrenia, there remains a paucity of research directly examining overt timing performance in the disorder. Accordingly, the present study investigated timing in schizophrenia using a well-established task of time perception. Twenty-three individuals with schizophrenia and 22 non-psychiatric control participants completed a temporal bisection task, which required participants to make temporal judgments about auditory and visually presented durations ranging from 300 to 600 ms. Both schizophrenia and control groups displayed greater visual compared to auditory timing variability, with no difference between groups in the visual modality. However, individuals with schizophrenia exhibited less temporal precision than controls in the perception of auditory durations. These findings correlated with parameter estimates obtained from a quantitative model of time estimation, and provide evidence of a fundamental deficit in temporal auditory precision in schizophrenia.

I know I've seen you before: Distinguishing recent-single-exposure-based familiarity from pre-existing familiarity

PubMed Central

Gimbel, Sarah I.; Brewer, James B.; Maril, Anat

2018-01-01

This study examines how individuals differentiate recent-single-exposure-based familiarity from pre-existing familiarity. If these are two distinct cognitive processes, are they supported by the same neural bases? This study examines how recent-single-exposure-based familiarity and multiple-previous-exposure-based familiarity are supported and represented in the brain using functional MRI. In a novel approach, we first behaviorally show that subjects can divide retrieval of items in pre-existing memory into judgments of recollection and familiarity. Then, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we examine the differences in blood oxygen level dependent activity and regional connectivity during judgments of recent-single-exposure-based and pre-existing familiarity. Judgments of these two types of familiarity showed distinct regions of activation in a whole-brain analysis, in medial temporal lobe (MTL) substructures, and in MTL substructure functional-correlations with other brain regions. Specifically, within the MTL, perirhinal cortex showed increased activation during recent-single-exposure-based familiarity while parahippocampal cortex showed increased activation during judgments of pre-existing familiarity. We find that recent-single-exposure-based and pre-existing familiarity are represented as distinct neural processes in the brain; this is supported by differing patterns of brain activation and regional correlations. This spatially distinct regional brain involvement suggests that the two separate experiences of familiarity, recent-exposure-based familiarity and pre-existing familiarity, may be cognitively distinct. PMID:28073651

Differential use of temporal cues to the /s/-/z/ contrast by native and non-native speakers of English.

PubMed

Flege, J E; Hillenbrand, J

1986-02-01

This study examined the effect of linguistic experience on perception of the English /s/-/z/ contrast in word-final position. The durations of the periodic ("vowel") and aperiodic ("fricative") portions of stimuli, ranging from peas to peace, were varied in a 5 X 5 factorial design. Forced-choice identification judgments were elicited from two groups of native speakers of American English differing in dialect, and from two groups each of native speakers of French, Swedish, and Finnish differing in English-language experience. The results suggested that the non-native subjects used cues established for the perception of phonetic contrasts in their native language to identify fricatives as /s/ or /z/. Lengthening vowel duration increased /z/ judgments in all eight subject groups, although the effect was smaller for native speakers of French than for native speakers of the other languages. Shortening fricative duration, on the other hand, significantly decreased /z/ judgments only by the English and French subjects. It did not influence voicing judgments by the Swedish and Finnish subjects, even those who had lived for a year or more in an English-speaking environment. These findings raise the question of whether adults who learn a foreign language can acquire the ability to integrate multiple acoustic cues to a phonetic contrast which does not exist in their native language.

Judging arrival times of incoming traffic vehicles is not a prerequisite for safely crossing an intersection: Differential effects of vehicle size and type in passive judgment and active driving tasks.

PubMed

Mathieu, Julie; Bootsma, Reinoud J; Berthelon, Catherine; Montagne, Gilles

2017-02-01

Using a fixed-base driving simulator we compared the effects of the size and type of traffic vehicles (i.e., normal-sized or double-sized cars or motorcycles) approaching an intersection in two different tasks. In the perceptual judgment task, passively moving participants estimated when a traffic vehicle would reach the intersection for actual arrival times (ATs) of 1, 2, or 3s. In line with earlier findings, ATs were generally underestimated, the more so the longer the actual AT. Results revealed that vehicle size affected judgments in particular for the larger actual ATs (2 and 3s), with double-sized vehicles then being judged as arriving earlier than normal-sized vehicles. Vehicle type, on the other hand, affected judgments at the smaller actual ATs (1 and 2s), with cars then being judged as arriving earlier than motorcycles. In the behavioral task participants actively drove the simulator to cross the intersection by passing through a gap in a train of traffic. Analyses of the speed variations observed during the active intersection-crossing task revealed that the size and type of vehicles in the traffic train did not affect driving behavior in the same way as in the AT judgment task. First, effects were considerably smaller, affecting driving behavior only marginally. Second, effects were opposite to expectations based on AT judgments: driver approach speeds were smaller (rather than larger) when confronted with double-sized vehicles as compared to their normal-sized counterparts and when confronted with cars as compared to motorcycles. Finally, the temporality of the effects was different on the two tasks: vehicle size affected driver approach speed in the final stages of approach rather than early on, while vehicle type affected driver approach speed early on rather than later. Overall, we conclude that the active control of approach to the intersection is not based on successive judgments of traffic vehicle arrival times. These results thereby question the general belief that arrival time estimates are crucial for safe interaction with traffic. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

16 CFR 1025.25 - Summary decisions and orders.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-01-01

... 16 Commercial Practices 2 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Summary decisions and orders. 1025.25... ADJUDICATIVE PROCEEDINGS Prehearing Procedures, Motions, Interlocutory Appeals, Summary Judgments, Settlements § 1025.25 Summary decisions and orders. (a) Motion. Any party may file a motion, with a supporting...

The speed of metacognition: taking time to get to know one's structural knowledge.

PubMed

Mealor, Andy D; Dienes, Zoltan

2013-03-01

The time course of different metacognitive experiences of knowledge was investigated using artificial grammar learning. Experiment 1 revealed that when participants are aware of the basis of their judgments (conscious structural knowledge) decisions are made most rapidly, followed by decisions made with conscious judgment but without conscious knowledge of underlying structure (unconscious structural knowledge), and guess responses (unconscious judgment knowledge) were made most slowly, even when controlling for differences in confidence and accuracy. In experiment 2, short response deadlines decreased the accuracy of unconscious but not conscious structural knowledge. Conversely, the deadline decreased the proportion of conscious structural knowledge in favour of guessing. Unconscious structural knowledge can be applied rapidly but becomes more reliable with additional metacognitive processing time whereas conscious structural knowledge is an all-or-nothing response that cannot always be applied rapidly. These dissociations corroborate quite separate theories of recognition (dual-process) and metacognition (higher order thought and cross-order integration). Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The right hemisphere in esthetic perception.

PubMed

Bromberger, Bianca; Sternschein, Rebecca; Widick, Page; Smith, William; Chatterjee, Anjan

2011-01-01

Little about the neuropsychology of art perception and evaluation is known. Most neuropsychological approaches to art have focused on art production and have been anecdotal and qualitative. The field is in desperate need of quantitative methods if it is to advance. Here, we combine a quantitative approach to the assessment of art with modern voxel-lesion-symptom-mapping methods to determine brain-behavior relationships in art perception. We hypothesized that perception of different attributes of art are likely to be disrupted by damage to different regions of the brain. Twenty participants with right hemisphere damage were given the Assessment of Art Attributes, which is designed to quantify judgments of descriptive attributes of visual art. Each participant rated 24 paintings on 6 conceptual attributes (depictive accuracy, abstractness, emotion, symbolism, realism, and animacy) and 6 perceptual attributes (depth, color temperature, color saturation, balance, stroke, and simplicity) and their interest in and preference for these paintings. Deviation scores were obtained for each brain-damaged participant for each attribute based on correlations with group average ratings from 30 age-matched healthy participants. Right hemisphere damage affected participants' judgments of abstractness, accuracy, and stroke quality. Damage to areas within different parts of the frontal parietal and lateral temporal cortices produced deviation in judgments in four of six conceptual attributes (abstractness, symbolism, realism, and animacy). Of the formal attributes, only depth was affected by inferior prefrontal damage. No areas of brain damage were associated with deviations in interestingness or preference judgments. The perception of conceptual and formal attributes in artwork may in part dissociate from each other and from evaluative judgments. More generally, this approach demonstrates the feasibility of quantitative approaches to the neuropsychology of art.

The tacit dimension of clinical judgment.

PubMed Central

Goldman, G. M.

1990-01-01

Two distinct views of the nature of clinical judgment are identified and contrasted. The dominant view that clinical judgment is a fully explicit process is compared to the relatively neglected view that tacit knowledge plays a substantial role in the clinician's mental operations. The tacit dimension of medical thinking is explored at length. The discussion suggests severe limits when applying decision analysis, expert systems, and computer-aided cost-benefit review to medicine. The goals and practices of postgraduate medical education are also examined from this perspective, as are various other implications for the clinician. The paper concludes that it is valuable to explore the nature of medical thinking in order to improve clinical practice and education. Such explorations should, however, take cognizance of the often overlooked tacit dimension of clinical judgment. Possible constraints on the medical applicability of both formal expert systems and heavily didactic instructional programs are considered. PMID:2356625

Judgment in crossing a road between objects coming in the opposite lane

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Matsumiya, Kazumichi; Kaneko, Hirohiko

2008-05-01

When cars are oncoming in the opposite lane of a road, a driver is able to judge whether his/her car can cross the road at an intersection without a collision with the oncoming cars. We developed a model for the human judgment used to cross a road between oncoming objects. In the model, in order to make the judgment to cross the road, the human visual system compares the time interval it takes for an oncoming object to pass the observer with the time interval it takes for the observer to cross the road. We conducted a psychophysical experiment to test the model prediction. The result showed that human performance is in good agreement with the theoretical consequence provided by the model, suggesting that the human visual system uses not only the visually timed information of the approaching object but also the timed information of self-action for the judgment about crossing the road.

Numerical Order and Quantity Processing in Number Comparison

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Turconi, Eva; Campbell, Jamie I. D.; Seron, Xavier

2006-01-01

We investigated processing of numerical order information and its relation to mechanisms of numerical quantity processing. In two experiments, performance on a quantity-comparison task (e.g. 2 5; which is larger?) was compared with performance on a relative-order judgment task (e.g. 2 5; ascending or descending order?). The comparison task…

49 CFR 511.25 - Summary decision and order.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-10-01

... 49 Transportation 6 2010-10-01 2010-10-01 false Summary decision and order. 511.25 Section 511.25...; Interlocutory Appeals; Summary Judgment; Settlement § 511.25 Summary decision and order. (a) Motion. Any party may move, with a supporting memorandum, for a Summary Decision and Order in its favor upon all or any...

Frontotemporal neural systems supporting semantic processing in Alzheimer's disease.

PubMed

Peelle, Jonathan E; Powers, John; Cook, Philip A; Smith, Edward E; Grossman, Murray

2014-03-01

We hypothesized that semantic memory for object concepts involves both representations of visual feature knowledge in modality-specific association cortex and heteromodal regions that are important for integrating and organizing this semantic knowledge so that it can be used in a flexible, contextually appropriate manner. We examined this hypothesis in an fMRI study of mild Alzheimer's disease (AD). Participants were presented with pairs of printed words and asked whether the words matched on a given visual-perceptual feature (e.g., guitar, violin: SHAPE). The stimuli probed natural kinds and manufactured objects, and the judgments involved shape or color. We found activation of bilateral ventral temporal cortex and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during semantic judgments, with AD patients showing less activation of these regions than healthy seniors. Moreover, AD patients showed less ventral temporal activation than did healthy seniors for manufactured objects, but not for natural kinds. We also used diffusion-weighted MRI of white matter to examine fractional anisotropy (FA). Patients with AD showed significantly reduced FA in the superior longitudinal fasciculus and inferior frontal-occipital fasciculus, which carry projections linking temporal and frontal regions of this semantic network. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that semantic memory is supported in part by a large-scale neural network involving modality-specific association cortex, heteromodal association cortex, and projections between these regions. The semantic deficit in AD thus arises from gray matter disease that affects the representation of feature knowledge and processing its content, as well as white matter disease that interrupts the integrated functioning of this large-scale network.

Correlation of individual differences in audiovisual asynchrony across stimuli and tasks: New constraints on temporal renormalization theory.

PubMed

Ipser, Alberta; Karlinski, Maayan; Freeman, Elliot D

2018-05-07

Sight and sound are out of synch in different people by different amounts for different tasks. But surprisingly, different concurrent measures of perceptual asynchrony correlate negatively (Freeman et al., 2013). Thus, if vision subjectively leads audition in one individual, the same individual might show a visual lag in other measures of audiovisual integration (e.g., McGurk illusion, Stream-Bounce illusion). This curious negative correlation was first observed between explicit temporal order judgments and implicit phoneme identification tasks, performed concurrently as a dual task, using incongruent McGurk stimuli. Here we used a new set of explicit and implicit tasks and congruent stimuli, to test whether this negative correlation persists across testing sessions, and whether it might be an artifact of using specific incongruent stimuli. None of these manipulations eliminated the negative correlation between explicit and implicit measures. This supports the generalizability and validity of the phenomenon, and offers new theoretical insights into its explanation. Our previously proposed "temporal renormalization" theory assumes that the timings of sensory events registered within the brain's different multimodal subnetworks are each perceived relative to a representation of the typical average timing of such events across the wider network. Our new data suggest that this representation is stable and generic, rather than dependent on specific stimuli or task contexts, and that it may be acquired through experience with a variety of simultaneous stimuli. Our results also add further evidence that speech comprehension may be improved in some individuals by artificially delaying voices relative to lip-movements. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

The late positive potential indexes a role for emotion during learning of trust from eye-gaze cues

PubMed Central

Manssuer, Luis R.; Roberts, Mark V.; Tipper, Steven P.

2015-01-01

Gaze direction perception triggers rapid visuospatial orienting to the location observed by others. When this is congruent with the location of a target, reaction times are faster than when incongruent. Functional magnetic resonance imaging studies suggest that the non-joint attention induced by incongruent cues are experienced as more emotionally negative and this could relate to less favorable trust judgments of the faces when gaze-cues are contingent with identity. Here, we provide further support for these findings using time-resolved event-related potentials. In addition to replicating the effects of identity-contingent gaze-cues on reaction times and trust judgments, we discovered that the emotion-related late positive potential increased across blocks to incongruent compared to congruent faces before, during and after the gaze-cue, suggesting both learning and retrieval of emotion states associated with the face. We also discovered that the face-recognition-related N250 component appeared to localize to sources in anterior temporal areas. Our findings provide unique electrophysiological evidence for the role of emotion in learning trust from gaze-cues, suggesting that the retrieval of face evaluations during interaction may take around 1000 ms and that the N250 originates from anterior temporal face patches. PMID:25731599

In a year, memory will benefit from learning, tomorrow it won't: distance and construal level effects on the basis of metamemory judgments.

PubMed

Halamish, Vered; Nussinson, Ravit; Ben-Ari, Liat

2013-09-01

Metamemory judgments may rely on 2 bases of information: subjective experience and abstract theories about memory. On the basis of construal level theory, we predicted that psychological distance and construal level (i.e., concrete vs. abstract thinking) would have a qualitative impact on the relative reliance on these 2 bases: When considering learning from proximity or under a low-construal mindset, learners would rely more heavily on their experience, whereas when considering learning from a distance or under a high-construal mindset, they would rely more heavily on their abstract theories. Consistent with this prediction, results of 2 experiments revealed that temporal distance (Experiment 1) and construal level (Experiment 2) affected the stability bias--the failure to predict the benefits of learning. When considering learning from proximity or using a low-construal mindset, participants relied less heavily on their theory regarding the benefits of learning and were therefore insensitive to future learning. However, when considering learning from temporal distance or using a high-construal mindset, participants relied more heavily on their theory and were therefore better able to predict the benefits of future learning, thus overcoming the stability bias. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved.

Does attention speed up processing? Decreases and increases of processing rates in visual prior entry.

PubMed

Tünnermann, Jan; Petersen, Anders; Scharlau, Ingrid

2015-03-02

Selective visual attention improves performance in many tasks. Among others, it leads to "prior entry"--earlier perception of an attended compared to an unattended stimulus. Whether this phenomenon is purely based on an increase of the processing rate of the attended stimulus or if a decrease in the processing rate of the unattended stimulus also contributes to the effect is, up to now, unanswered. Here we describe a novel approach to this question based on Bundesen's Theory of Visual Attention, which we use to overcome the limitations of earlier prior-entry assessment with temporal order judgments (TOJs) that only allow relative statements regarding the processing speed of attended and unattended stimuli. Prevalent models of prior entry in TOJs either indirectly predict a pure acceleration or cannot model the difference between acceleration and deceleration. In a paradigm that combines a letter-identification task with TOJs, we show that indeed acceleration of the attended and deceleration of the unattended stimuli conjointly cause prior entry. © 2015 ARVO.

Executive functioning and processing speed in age-related differences in time estimation: a comparison of young, old, and very old adults.

PubMed

Baudouin, Alexia; Isingrini, Michel; Vanneste, Sandrine

2018-01-25

Age-related differences in time estimation were examined by comparing the temporal performance of young, young-old, and old-old adults, in relation to two major theories of cognitive aging: executive decline and cognitive slowing. We tested the hypothesis that processing speed and executive function are differentially involved in timing depending on the temporal task used. We also tested the assumption of greater age-related effects in time estimation in old-old participants. Participants performed two standard temporal tasks: duration production and duration reproduction. They also completed tests measuring executive function and processing speed. Findings supported the view that executive function is the best mediator of reproduction performance and inversely that processing speed is the best mediator of production performance. They also showed that young-old participants provide relatively accurate temporal judgments compared to old-old participants. These findings are discussed in terms of compensation mechanisms in aging.

Adductor spasmodic dysphonia: Relationships between acoustic indices and perceptual judgments

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Cannito, Michael P.; Sapienza, Christine M.; Woodson, Gayle; Murry, Thomas

2003-04-01

This study investigated relationships between acoustical indices of spasmodic dysphonia and perceptual scaling judgments of voice attributes made by expert listeners. Audio-recordings of The Rainbow Passage were obtained from thirty one speakers with spasmodic dysphonia before and after a BOTOX injection of the vocal folds. Six temporal acoustic measures were obtained across 15 words excerpted from each reading sample, including both frequency of occurrence and percent time for (1) aperiodic phonation, (2) phonation breaks, and (3) fundamental frequency shifts. Visual analog scaling judgments were also obtained from six voice experts using an interactive computer interface to quantify four voice attributes (i.e., overall quality, roughness, brokenness, breathiness) in a carefully psychoacoustically controlled environment, using the same reading passages as stimuli. Number and percent aperiodicity and phonation breaks correlated significanly with perceived overall voice quality, roughness, and brokenness before and after the BOTOX injection. Breathiness was correlated with aperidocity only prior to injection, while roughness also correlated with frequency shifts following injection. Factor analysis reduced perceived attributes to two principal components: glottal squeezing and breathiness. The acoustic measures demonstrated a strong regression relationship with perceived glottal squeezing, but no regression relationship with breathiness was observed. Implications for an analysis of pathologic voices will be discussed.

The meaning of city noises: Investigating sound quality in Paris (France)

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Dubois, Daniele; Guastavino, Catherine; Maffiolo, Valerie; Guastavino, Catherine; Maffiolo, Valerie

2004-05-01

The sound quality of Paris (France) was investigated by using field inquiries in actual environments (open questionnaires) and using recordings under laboratory conditions (free-sorting tasks). Cognitive categories of soundscapes were inferred by means of psycholinguistic analyses of verbal data and of mathematical analyses of similarity judgments. Results show that auditory judgments mainly rely on source identification. The appraisal of urban noise therefore depends on the qualitative evaluation of noise sources. The salience of human sounds in public spaces has been demonstrated, in relation to pleasantness judgments: soundscapes with human presence tend to be perceived as more pleasant than soundscapes consisting solely of mechanical sounds. Furthermore, human sounds are qualitatively processed as indicators of human outdoor activities, such as open markets, pedestrian areas, and sidewalk cafe districts that reflect city life. In contrast, mechanical noises (mainly traffic noise) are commonly described in terms of physical properties (temporal structure, intensity) of a permanent background noise that also characterizes urban areas. This connotes considering both quantitative and qualitative descriptions to account for the diversity of cognitive interpretations of urban soundscapes, since subjective evaluations depend both on the meaning attributed to noise sources and on inherent properties of the acoustic signal.

Perceptual response and information pick-up strategies within a family of sports.

PubMed

Ida, Hirofumi; Fukuhara, Kazunobu; Ishii, Motonobu; Inoue, Tetsuri

2013-02-01

The purpose of this study was to determine whether and how the perceptual response of athletes differed depending on their sporting expertise. This was achieved by comparing the responses of tennis and soft tennis players. Twelve experienced tennis players and 12 experienced soft tennis players viewed computer graphic serve motions simulated by a motion perturbation technique, and then scaled their anticipatory judgments regarding the direction, speed, and spin of the ball on a visual analogue scale. Experiment 1 evaluated the player's judgments in response to test motions rendered with a complete polygon model. The results revealed significantly different anticipatory judgments between the player groups when an elbow rotation perturbation was applied to the test serve motion. Experiment 2 used spatially occluded models in order to investigate the effectiveness of local information in making anticipatory judgments. The results suggested that the isolation of visual information had less effect on the judgment of the tennis players than on that of the soft tennis players. In conclusion, the domain of sporting expertise, including those of closely related sports, cannot only differentiate the anticipatory judgment of a ball's future flight path, but also affect the utilization strategy for the local kinematic information. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Temporal parameters and time course of perceptual latency priming.

PubMed

Scharlau, Ingrid; Neumann, Odmar

2003-06-01

Visual stimuli (primes) reduce the perceptual latency of a target appearing at the same location (perceptual latency priming, PLP). Three experiments assessed the time course of PLP by masked and, in Experiment 3, unmasked primes. Experiments 1 and 2 investigated the temporal parameters that determine the size of priming. Stimulus onset asynchrony was found to exert the main influence accompanied by a small effect of prime duration. Experiment 3 used a large range of priming onset asynchronies. We suggest to explain PLP by the Asynchronous Updating Model which relates it to the asynchrony of 2 central coding processes, preattentive coding of basic visual features and attentional orienting as a prerequisite for perceptual judgments and conscious perception.

Neural Correlates of Multisensory Perceptual Learning

PubMed Central

Powers, Albert R.; Hevey, Matthew A.; Wallace, Mark T.

2012-01-01

The brain’s ability to bind incoming auditory and visual stimuli depends critically on the temporal structure of this information. Specifically, there exists a temporal window of audiovisual integration within which stimuli are highly likely to be perceived as part of the same environmental event. Several studies have described the temporal bounds of this window, but few have investigated its malleability. Recently, our laboratory has demonstrated that a perceptual training paradigm is capable of eliciting a 40% narrowing in the width of this window that is stable for at least one week after cessation of training. In the current study we sought to reveal the neural substrates of these changes. Eleven human subjects completed an audiovisual simultaneity judgment training paradigm, immediately before and after which they performed the same task during an event-related 3T fMRI session. The posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) and areas of auditory and visual cortex exhibited robust BOLD decreases following training, and resting state and effective connectivity analyses revealed significant increases in coupling among these cortices after training. These results provide the first evidence of the neural correlates underlying changes in multisensory temporal binding and that likely represent the substrate for a multisensory temporal binding window. PMID:22553032

Low Vocal Pitch Preference Drives First Impressions Irrespective of Context in Male Voices but Not in Female Voices.

PubMed

Tsantani, Maria S; Belin, Pascal; Paterson, Helena M; McAleer, Phil

2016-08-01

Vocal pitch has been found to influence judgments of perceived trustworthiness and dominance from a novel voice. However, the majority of findings arise from using only male voices and in context-specific scenarios. In two experiments, we first explore the influence of average vocal pitch on first-impression judgments of perceived trustworthiness and dominance, before establishing the existence of an overall preference for high or low pitch across genders. In Experiment 1, pairs of high- and low-pitched temporally reversed recordings of male and female vocal utterances were presented in a two-alternative forced-choice task. Results revealed a tendency to select the low-pitched voice over the high-pitched voice as more trustworthy, for both genders, and more dominant, for male voices only. Experiment 2 tested an overall preference for low-pitched voices, and whether judgments were modulated by speech content, using forward and reversed speech to manipulate context. Results revealed an overall preference for low pitch, irrespective of direction of speech, in male voices only. No such overall preference was found for female voices. We propose that an overall preference for low pitch is a default prior in male voices irrespective of context, whereas pitch preferences in female voices are more context- and situation-dependent. The present study confirms the important role of vocal pitch in the formation of first-impression personality judgments and advances understanding of the impact of context on pitch preferences across genders.

I know I've seen you before: Distinguishing recent-single-exposure-based familiarity from pre-existing familiarity.

PubMed

Gimbel, Sarah I; Brewer, James B; Maril, Anat

2017-03-01

This study examines how individuals differentiate recent-single-exposure-based familiarity from pre-existing familiarity. If these are two distinct cognitive processes, are they supported by the same neural bases? This study examines how recent-single-exposure-based familiarity and multiple-previous-exposure-based familiarity are supported and represented in the brain using functional MRI. In a novel approach, we first behaviorally show that subjects can divide retrieval of items in pre-existing memory into judgments of recollection and familiarity. Then, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we examine the differences in blood oxygen level dependent activity and regional connectivity during judgments of recent-single-exposure-based and pre-existing familiarity. Judgments of these two types of familiarity showed distinct regions of activation in a whole-brain analysis, in medial temporal lobe (MTL) substructures, and in MTL substructure functional-correlations with other brain regions. Specifically, within the MTL, perirhinal cortex showed increased activation during recent-single-exposure-based familiarity while parahippocampal cortex showed increased activation during judgments of pre-existing familiarity. We find that recent-single-exposure-based and pre-existing familiarity are represented as distinct neural processes in the brain; this is supported by differing patterns of brain activation and regional correlations. This spatially distinct regional brain involvement suggests that the two separate experiences of familiarity, recent-exposure-based familiarity and pre-existing familiarity, may be cognitively distinct. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Time and Order Effects on Causal Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Alvarado, Angelica; Jara, Elvia; Vila, Javier; Rosas, Juan M.

2006-01-01

Five experiments were conducted to explore trial order and retention interval effects upon causal predictive judgments. Experiment 1 found that participants show a strong effect of trial order when a stimulus was sequentially paired with two different outcomes compared to a condition where both outcomes were presented intermixed. Experiment 2…

7 CFR 985.68 - Personal liability.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-01-01

... Regulations of the Department of Agriculture (Continued) AGRICULTURAL MARKETING SERVICE (Marketing Agreements and Orders; Fruits, Vegetables, Nuts), DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE MARKETING ORDER REGULATING THE... way whatsoever, to any person for errors in judgment, mistakes, or other acts, either of commission or...

Alcohol dependence associated with increased utilitarian moral judgment: a case control study.

PubMed

Khemiri, Lotfi; Guterstam, Joar; Franck, Johan; Jayaram-Lindström, Nitya

2012-01-01

Recent studies indicate that emotional processes, mediated by the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC), are of great importance for moral judgment. Neurological patients with VMPC dysfunction have been shown to generate increased utilitarian moral judgments, i.e. are more likely to endorse emotionally aversive actions in order to maximize aggregate welfare, when faced with emotionally salient personal moral dilemmas. Patients with alcohol dependence (AD) also exhibit impairments in functions mediated by the prefrontal cortex, but whether they exhibit increased utilitarian moral reasoning has not previously been investigated. The aim of this study was to investigate moral judgment in AD patients (n = 20) compared to healthy controls (n = 20) matched by sex, age and education years. Each subject responded to a battery of 50 hypothetical dilemmas categorized as non-moral, moral impersonal and moral personal. They also responded to a questionnaire evaluating explicit knowledge of social and moral norms. Results confirmed our hypothesis that AD patients generated increased utilitarian moral judgment compared to controls when faced with moral personal dilemmas. Crucially, there was no difference in their responses to non-moral or impersonal moral dilemmas, nor knowledge of explicit social and moral norms. One possible explanation is that damage to the VMPC, caused by long term repeated exposure to alcohol results in emotional dysfunction, predisposing to utilitarian moral judgment. This work elucidates a novel aspect of the neuropsychological profile of AD patients, namely a tendency to generate utilitarian moral judgment when faced with emotionally salient moral personal dilemmas.

Alcohol Dependence Associated with Increased Utilitarian Moral Judgment: A Case Control Study

PubMed Central

Khemiri, Lotfi; Guterstam, Joar; Franck, Johan; Jayaram-Lindström, Nitya

2012-01-01

Recent studies indicate that emotional processes, mediated by the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC), are of great importance for moral judgment. Neurological patients with VMPC dysfunction have been shown to generate increased utilitarian moral judgments, i.e. are more likely to endorse emotionally aversive actions in order to maximize aggregate welfare, when faced with emotionally salient personal moral dilemmas. Patients with alcohol dependence (AD) also exhibit impairments in functions mediated by the prefrontal cortex, but whether they exhibit increased utilitarian moral reasoning has not previously been investigated. The aim of this study was to investigate moral judgment in AD patients (n = 20) compared to healthy controls (n = 20) matched by sex, age and education years. Each subject responded to a battery of 50 hypothetical dilemmas categorized as non-moral, moral impersonal and moral personal. They also responded to a questionnaire evaluating explicit knowledge of social and moral norms. Results confirmed our hypothesis that AD patients generated increased utilitarian moral judgment compared to controls when faced with moral personal dilemmas. Crucially, there was no difference in their responses to non-moral or impersonal moral dilemmas, nor knowledge of explicit social and moral norms. One possible explanation is that damage to the VMPC, caused by long term repeated exposure to alcohol results in emotional dysfunction, predisposing to utilitarian moral judgment. This work elucidates a novel aspect of the neuropsychological profile of AD patients, namely a tendency to generate utilitarian moral judgment when faced with emotionally salient moral personal dilemmas. PMID:22761922

Time perception impairs sensory-motor integration in Parkinson’s disease

PubMed Central

2013-01-01

It is well known that perception and estimation of time are fundamental for the relationship between humans and their environment. However, this temporal information processing is inefficient in patients with Parkinson’ disease (PD), resulting in temporal judgment deficits. In general, the pathophysiology of PD has been described as a dysfunction in the basal ganglia, which is a multisensory integration station. Thus, a deficit in the sensorimotor integration process could explain many of the Parkinson symptoms, such as changes in time perception. This physiological distortion may be better understood if we analyze the neurobiological model of interval timing, expressed within the conceptual framework of a traditional information-processing model called “Scalar Expectancy Theory”. Therefore, in this review we discuss the pathophysiology and sensorimotor integration process in PD, the theories and neural basic mechanisms involved in temporal processing, and the main clinical findings about the impact of time perception in PD. PMID:24131660

Selective attention to temporal features on nested time scales.

PubMed

Henry, Molly J; Herrmann, Björn; Obleser, Jonas

2015-02-01

Meaningful auditory stimuli such as speech and music often vary simultaneously along multiple time scales. Thus, listeners must selectively attend to, and selectively ignore, separate but intertwined temporal features. The current study aimed to identify and characterize the neural network specifically involved in this feature-selective attention to time. We used a novel paradigm where listeners judged either the duration or modulation rate of auditory stimuli, and in which the stimulation, working memory demands, response requirements, and task difficulty were held constant. A first analysis identified all brain regions where individual brain activation patterns were correlated with individual behavioral performance patterns, which thus supported temporal judgments generically. A second analysis then isolated those brain regions that specifically regulated selective attention to temporal features: Neural responses in a bilateral fronto-parietal network including insular cortex and basal ganglia decreased with degree of change of the attended temporal feature. Critically, response patterns in these regions were inverted when the task required selectively ignoring this feature. The results demonstrate how the neural analysis of complex acoustic stimuli with multiple temporal features depends on a fronto-parietal network that simultaneously regulates the selective gain for attended and ignored temporal features. © The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

[Orbitofrontal cortex and morality].

PubMed

Funayama, Michitaka; Mimura, Masaru

2012-10-01

Research on the neural substrates of morality is a recently emerging field in neuroscience. The anatomical structures implicated to play a role in morality include the frontal lobe, temporal lobe, cingulate gyrus, amygdala, hippocampus, and basal ganglia. In particular, the orbitofrontal or ventromedial prefrontal areas are thought to be involved in decision-making, and damage to these areas is likely to cause decision-making deficits and/or problems in impulsive control, which may lead to antisocial and less moral behaviors. In this article, we focus on case presentation and theory development with regard to moral judgment. First, we discuss notable cases and syndromes developing after orbitofrontal/ventromedial prefrontal damage, such as the famous cases of Gage and EVR, cases of childhood orbitofrontal damage, forced collectionism, squalor syndrome, and hypermoral syndrome. We then review the proposed theories and neuropsychological mechanisms underlying decision-making deficits following orbitofrontal/ventromedial prefrontal damage, including the somatic-marker hypothesis, reversal learning, preference judgment, theory of mind, and moral dilemma.

The influence of action-outcome delay and arousal on sense of agency and the intentional binding effect.

PubMed

Wen, Wen; Yamashita, Atsushi; Asama, Hajime

2015-11-01

The sense of agency refers to the feeling of being able to initiate and control events through one's actions. The "intentional binding" effect (Haggard, Clark, & Kalogeras, 2002), refers to a subjective compression of the temporal interval between actions and their effects. The present study examined the influence of action-outcome delays and arousal on both the subjective judgment of agency and the intentional binding effect. In the experiment, participants pressed a key to trigger a central square to jump after various delays. A red central square was used in the high-arousal condition. Results showed that a longer interval between actions and their effects was associated with a lower sense of agency but a stronger intentional binding effect. Furthermore, although arousal enhanced the intentional binding effect, it did not influence the judgment of agency. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Inductive reasoning and judgment interference: experiments on Simpson's paradox.

PubMed

Fiedler, Klaus; Walther, Eva; Freytag, Peter; Nickel, Stefanie

2003-01-01

In a series of experiments on inductive reasoning, participants assessed the relationship between gender, success, and a covariate in a situation akin to Simpson's paradox: Although women were less successful then men according to overall statistics, they actually fared better then men at either of two universities. Understanding trivariate relationships of this kind requires cognitive routines similar to analysis of covariance. Across the first five experiments, however, participants generalized the disadvantage of women at the aggregate level to judgments referring to the different levels of the covariate, even when motivation was high and appropriate mental models were activated. The remaining three experiments demonstrated that Simpson's paradox could be mastered when the salience of the covariate was increased and when the salience of gender was decreased by the inclusion of temporal cues that disambiguate the causal status of the covariate. Copyright 2003 Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

Milestone Age Affects the Role of Health and Emotions in Life Satisfaction: A Preliminary Inquiry.

PubMed

Miron-Shatz, Talya; Bhargave, Rajesh; Doniger, Glen M

2015-01-01

Jill turns 40. Should this change how she evaluates her life, and would a similar change occur when she turns 41? Milestone age (e.g., 30, 40, 50)--a naturally occurring feature in personal timelines--has received much attention is popular culture, but little attention in academic inquiry. This study examines whether milestone birthdays change the way people evaluate their life. We show that life outlook is impacted by this temporal landmark, which appears to punctuate people's mental maps of their life cycle. At these milestone junctures, people take stock of where they stand and have a more evaluative perspective towards their lives when making life satisfaction judgments. Correspondingly, they place less emphasis on daily emotional experiences. We find that milestone agers (vs. other individuals) place greater weight on health satisfaction and BMI and lesser weight on daily positive emotions in their overall life satisfaction judgments, whereas negative emotions remain influential.

[The contribution of neuroscience to the understanding of moral behavior].

PubMed

Slachevsky, Andrea; Silva, Jaime R; Prenafeta, María Luisa; Novoa, Fernando

2009-03-01

The neuro-scientific study of moral actions and judgments is particularly relevant to medicine, especially when assessing behavior disorders secondary to brain diseases. In this paper, moral behavior is reviewed from an evolutionary and neuro-scientific perspective. We discuss the role of emotions in moral decisions, the role of brain development in moral development and the cerebral basis of moral behavior. Empirical evidence shows a relationship between brain and moral development: changes in cerebral architecture are related to changes in moral decision complexity. Moral development takes a long time, achieving its maturity during adulthood. It is suggested that moral cognition depends on cerebral regions and neural networks related to emotional and cognitive processing (i.e. prefrontal and temporal cortex) and that moral judgments are complex affective and cognitive phenomena. This paper concludes with the suggestion that a satisfactory clinical/legal evaluation of a patient requires that the neural basis of moral behavior should be taken into account.

From moral to legal judgment: the influence of normative context in lawyers and other academics

PubMed Central

Spranger, Tade M.; Erk, Susanne; Walter, Henrik

2011-01-01

Various kinds of normative judgments are an integral part of everyday life. We extended the scrutiny of social cognitive neuroscience into the domain of legal decisions, investigating two groups, lawyers and other academics, during moral and legal decision-making. While we found activation of brain areas comprising the so-called ‘moral brain’ in both conditions, there was stronger activation in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and middle temporal gyrus particularly when subjects made legal decisions, suggesting that these were made in respect to more explicit rules and demanded more complex semantic processing. Comparing both groups, our data show that behaviorally lawyers conceived themselves as emotionally less involved during normative decision-making in general. A group × condition interaction in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex suggests a modulation of normative decision-making by attention based on subjects’ normative expertise. PMID:20194515

From moral to legal judgment: the influence of normative context in lawyers and other academics.

PubMed

Schleim, Stephan; Spranger, Tade M; Erk, Susanne; Walter, Henrik

2011-01-01

Various kinds of normative judgments are an integral part of everyday life. We extended the scrutiny of social cognitive neuroscience into the domain of legal decisions, investigating two groups, lawyers and other academics, during moral and legal decision-making. While we found activation of brain areas comprising the so-called 'moral brain' in both conditions, there was stronger activation in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and middle temporal gyrus particularly when subjects made legal decisions, suggesting that these were made in respect to more explicit rules and demanded more complex semantic processing. Comparing both groups, our data show that behaviorally lawyers conceived themselves as emotionally less involved during normative decision-making in general. A group × condition interaction in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex suggests a modulation of normative decision-making by attention based on subjects' normative expertise.

Bayesian methods in reliability

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sander, P.; Badoux, R.

1991-11-01

The present proceedings from a course on Bayesian methods in reliability encompasses Bayesian statistical methods and their computational implementation, models for analyzing censored data from nonrepairable systems, the traits of repairable systems and growth models, the use of expert judgment, and a review of the problem of forecasting software reliability. Specific issues addressed include the use of Bayesian methods to estimate the leak rate of a gas pipeline, approximate analyses under great prior uncertainty, reliability estimation techniques, and a nonhomogeneous Poisson process. Also addressed are the calibration sets and seed variables of expert judgment systems for risk assessment, experimental illustrations of the use of expert judgment for reliability testing, and analyses of the predictive quality of software-reliability growth models such as the Weibull order statistics.

Perception of Hearing Aid-Processed Speech in Individuals with Late-Onset Auditory Neuropathy Spectrum Disorder.

PubMed

Mathai, Jijo Pottackal; Appu, Sabarish

2015-01-01

Auditory neuropathy spectrum disorder (ANSD) is a form of sensorineural hearing loss, causing severe deficits in speech perception. The perceptual problems of individuals with ANSD were attributed to their temporal processing impairment rather than to reduced audibility. This rendered their rehabilitation difficult using hearing aids. Although hearing aids can restore audibility, compression circuits in a hearing aid might distort the temporal modulations of speech, causing poor aided performance. Therefore, hearing aid settings that preserve the temporal modulations of speech might be an effective way to improve speech perception in ANSD. The purpose of the study was to investigate the perception of hearing aid-processed speech in individuals with late-onset ANSD. A repeated measures design was used to study the effect of various compression time settings on speech perception and perceived quality. Seventeen individuals with late-onset ANSD within the age range of 20-35 yr participated in the study. The word recognition scores (WRSs) and quality judgment of phonemically balanced words, processed using four different compression settings of a hearing aid (slow, medium, fast, and linear), were evaluated. The modulation spectra of hearing aid-processed stimuli were estimated to probe the effect of amplification on the temporal envelope of speech. Repeated measures analysis of variance and post hoc Bonferroni's pairwise comparisons were used to analyze the word recognition performance and quality judgment. The comparison between unprocessed and all four hearing aid-processed stimuli showed significantly higher perception using the former stimuli. Even though perception of words processed using slow compression time settings of the hearing aids were significantly higher than the fast one, their difference was only 4%. In addition, there were no significant differences in perception between any other hearing aid-processed stimuli. Analysis of the temporal envelope of hearing aid-processed stimuli revealed minimal changes in the temporal envelope across the four hearing aid settings. In terms of quality, the highest number of individuals preferred stimuli processed using slow compression time settings. Individuals who preferred medium ones followed this. However, none of the individuals preferred fast compression time settings. Analysis of quality judgment showed that slow, medium, and linear settings presented significantly higher preference scores than the fast compression setting. Individuals with ANSD showed no marked difference in perception of speech that was processed using the four different hearing aid settings. However, significantly higher preference, in terms of quality, was found for stimuli processed using slow, medium, and linear settings over the fast one. Therefore, whenever hearing aids are recommended for ANSD, those having slow compression time settings or linear amplification may be chosen over the fast (syllabic compression) one. In addition, WRSs obtained using hearing aid-processed stimuli were remarkably poorer than unprocessed stimuli. This shows that processing of speech through hearing aids might have caused a large reduction of performance in individuals with ANSD. However, further evaluation is needed using individually programmed hearing aids rather than hearing aid-processed stimuli. American Academy of Audiology.

Can Knowledge of Client Birth Order Bias Clinical Judgment?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Stewart, Allan E.

2004-01-01

Clinicians (N = 308) responded to identical counseling vignettes of a male client that differed only in the client's stated birth order. Clinicians developed different impressions about the client and his family experiences that corresponded with the prototypical descriptions of persons from 1 of 4 birth orders (i.e., first, middle, youngest, and…

The unity assumption facilitates cross-modal binding of musical, non-speech stimuli: The role of spectral and amplitude envelope cues.

PubMed

Chuen, Lorraine; Schutz, Michael

2016-07-01

An observer's inference that multimodal signals originate from a common underlying source facilitates cross-modal binding. This 'unity assumption' causes asynchronous auditory and visual speech streams to seem simultaneous (Vatakis & Spence, Perception & Psychophysics, 69(5), 744-756, 2007). Subsequent tests of non-speech stimuli such as musical and impact events found no evidence for the unity assumption, suggesting the effect is speech-specific (Vatakis & Spence, Acta Psychologica, 127(1), 12-23, 2008). However, the role of amplitude envelope (the changes in energy of a sound over time) was not previously appreciated within this paradigm. Here, we explore whether previous findings suggesting speech-specificity of the unity assumption were confounded by similarities in the amplitude envelopes of the contrasted auditory stimuli. Experiment 1 used natural events with clearly differentiated envelopes: single notes played on either a cello (bowing motion) or marimba (striking motion). Participants performed an un-speeded temporal order judgments task; viewing audio-visually matched (e.g., marimba auditory with marimba video) and mismatched (e.g., cello auditory with marimba video) versions of stimuli at various stimulus onset asynchronies, and were required to indicate which modality was presented first. As predicted, participants were less sensitive to temporal order in matched conditions, demonstrating that the unity assumption can facilitate the perception of synchrony outside of speech stimuli. Results from Experiments 2 and 3 revealed that when spectral information was removed from the original auditory stimuli, amplitude envelope alone could not facilitate the influence of audiovisual unity. We propose that both amplitude envelope and spectral acoustic cues affect the percept of audiovisual unity, working in concert to help an observer determine when to integrate across modalities.

Canonical Word Order of Japanese Ditransitive Sentences: A Preliminary Investigation through a Grammaticality Judgment Survey

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Shigenaga, Yasumasa

2014-01-01

There have been three competing analyses regarding the canonical word order of Japanese ditransitive sentences: a) "S-'ga' IO-'ni' DO-'o' V" is the canonical word order rather than "S-'ga' DO-'o' IO-'ni' V", b) both word orders are canonical, and c) the canonical word order depends on the type of the verb. The present study…

A Quantum Probability Model of Causal Reasoning

PubMed Central

Trueblood, Jennifer S.; Busemeyer, Jerome R.

2012-01-01

People can often outperform statistical methods and machine learning algorithms in situations that involve making inferences about the relationship between causes and effects. While people are remarkably good at causal reasoning in many situations, there are several instances where they deviate from expected responses. This paper examines three situations where judgments related to causal inference problems produce unexpected results and describes a quantum inference model based on the axiomatic principles of quantum probability theory that can explain these effects. Two of the three phenomena arise from the comparison of predictive judgments (i.e., the conditional probability of an effect given a cause) with diagnostic judgments (i.e., the conditional probability of a cause given an effect). The third phenomenon is a new finding examining order effects in predictive causal judgments. The quantum inference model uses the notion of incompatibility among different causes to account for all three phenomena. Psychologically, the model assumes that individuals adopt different points of view when thinking about different causes. The model provides good fits to the data and offers a coherent account for all three causal reasoning effects thus proving to be a viable new candidate for modeling human judgment. PMID:22593747

Effect of Explicit Evaluation on Neural Connectivity Related to Listening to Unfamiliar Music

PubMed Central

Liu, Chao; Brattico, Elvira; Abu-jamous, Basel; Pereira, Carlos S.; Jacobsen, Thomas; Nandi, Asoke K.

2017-01-01

People can experience different emotions when listening to music. A growing number of studies have investigated the brain structures and neural connectivities associated with perceived emotions. However, very little is known about the effect of an explicit act of judgment on the neural processing of emotionally-valenced music. In this study, we adopted the novel consensus clustering paradigm, called binarisation of consensus partition matrices (Bi-CoPaM), to study whether and how the conscious aesthetic evaluation of the music would modulate brain connectivity networks related to emotion and reward processing. Participants listened to music under three conditions – one involving a non-evaluative judgment, one involving an explicit evaluative aesthetic judgment, and one involving no judgment at all (passive listening only). During non-evaluative attentive listening we obtained auditory-limbic connectivity whereas when participants were asked to decide explicitly whether they liked or disliked the music excerpt, only two clusters of intercommunicating brain regions were found: one including areas related to auditory processing and action observation, and the other comprising higher-order structures involved with visual processing. Results indicate that explicit evaluative judgment has an impact on the neural auditory-limbic connectivity during affective processing of music. PMID:29311874

Credibility judgments of narratives: language, plausibility, and absorption.

PubMed

Nahari, Galit; Glicksohn, Joseph; Nachson, Israel

2010-01-01

Two experiments were conducted in order to find out whether textual features of narratives differentially affect credibility judgments made by judges having different levels of absorption (a disposition associated with rich visual imagination). Participants in both experiments were exposed to a textual narrative and requested to judge whether the narrator actually experienced the event he described in his story. In Experiment 1, the narrative varied in terms of language (literal, figurative) and plausibility (ordinary, anomalous). In Experiment 2, the narrative varied in terms of language only. The participants' perceptions of the plausibility of the story described and the extent to which they were absorbed in reading were measured. The data from both experiments together suggest that the groups applied entirely different criteria in credibility judgments. For high-absorption individuals, their credibility judgment depends on the degree to which the text can be assimilated into their own vivid imagination, whereas for low-absorption individuals it depends mainly on plausibility. That is, high-absorption individuals applied an experiential mental set while judging the credibility of the narrator, whereas low-absorption individuals applied an instrumental mental set. Possible cognitive mechanisms and implications for credibility judgments are discussed.

If only I had taken my usual route…: age-related differences in counter-factual thinking.

PubMed

Horhota, Michelle; Mienaltowski, Andrew; Blanchard-Fields, Fredda

2012-01-01

Previous research suggests that young adults can shift between rational and experiential modes of thinking when forming social judgments. The present study examines whether older adults demonstrate this flexibility in thinking. Young and older adults completed an If-only task adapted from Epstein, Lipson, and Huh's (1992 , Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 62, 328) examination of individuals' ability to adopt rational or experiential modes of thought while making a judgment about characters who experience a negative event that could have been avoided. Consistent with our expectations for their judgments of the characters, young adults shifted between experiential and rational modes of thought when instructed to do so. Conversely, regardless of the mode of thought being used or the order with which they adopted the different modes of thought (i.e., shifting from experiential to rational in Study 1 and from rational to experiential in Study 2), older adults consistently offered judgments and justifications that reflected a preference for experiential-based thought.

Visual features as stepping stones toward semantics: Explaining object similarity in IT and perception with non-negative least squares

PubMed Central

Jozwik, Kamila M.; Kriegeskorte, Nikolaus; Mur, Marieke

2016-01-01

Object similarity, in brain representations and conscious perception, must reflect a combination of the visual appearance of the objects on the one hand and the categories the objects belong to on the other. Indeed, visual object features and category membership have each been shown to contribute to the object representation in human inferior temporal (IT) cortex, as well as to object-similarity judgments. However, the explanatory power of features and categories has not been directly compared. Here, we investigate whether the IT object representation and similarity judgments are best explained by a categorical or a feature-based model. We use rich models (>100 dimensions) generated by human observers for a set of 96 real-world object images. The categorical model consists of a hierarchically nested set of category labels (such as “human”, “mammal”, and “animal”). The feature-based model includes both object parts (such as “eye”, “tail”, and “handle”) and other descriptive features (such as “circular”, “green”, and “stubbly”). We used non-negative least squares to fit the models to the brain representations (estimated from functional magnetic resonance imaging data) and to similarity judgments. Model performance was estimated on held-out images not used in fitting. Both models explained significant variance in IT and the amounts explained were not significantly different. The combined model did not explain significant additional IT variance, suggesting that it is the shared model variance (features correlated with categories, categories correlated with features) that best explains IT. The similarity judgments were almost fully explained by the categorical model, which explained significantly more variance than the feature-based model. The combined model did not explain significant additional variance in the similarity judgments. Our findings suggest that IT uses features that help to distinguish categories as stepping stones toward a semantic representation. Similarity judgments contain additional categorical variance that is not explained by visual features, reflecting a higher-level more purely semantic representation. PMID:26493748

Visual features as stepping stones toward semantics: Explaining object similarity in IT and perception with non-negative least squares.

PubMed

Jozwik, Kamila M; Kriegeskorte, Nikolaus; Mur, Marieke

2016-03-01

Object similarity, in brain representations and conscious perception, must reflect a combination of the visual appearance of the objects on the one hand and the categories the objects belong to on the other. Indeed, visual object features and category membership have each been shown to contribute to the object representation in human inferior temporal (IT) cortex, as well as to object-similarity judgments. However, the explanatory power of features and categories has not been directly compared. Here, we investigate whether the IT object representation and similarity judgments are best explained by a categorical or a feature-based model. We use rich models (>100 dimensions) generated by human observers for a set of 96 real-world object images. The categorical model consists of a hierarchically nested set of category labels (such as "human", "mammal", and "animal"). The feature-based model includes both object parts (such as "eye", "tail", and "handle") and other descriptive features (such as "circular", "green", and "stubbly"). We used non-negative least squares to fit the models to the brain representations (estimated from functional magnetic resonance imaging data) and to similarity judgments. Model performance was estimated on held-out images not used in fitting. Both models explained significant variance in IT and the amounts explained were not significantly different. The combined model did not explain significant additional IT variance, suggesting that it is the shared model variance (features correlated with categories, categories correlated with features) that best explains IT. The similarity judgments were almost fully explained by the categorical model, which explained significantly more variance than the feature-based model. The combined model did not explain significant additional variance in the similarity judgments. Our findings suggest that IT uses features that help to distinguish categories as stepping stones toward a semantic representation. Similarity judgments contain additional categorical variance that is not explained by visual features, reflecting a higher-level more purely semantic representation. Copyright © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

The effect of interference on temporal order memory for random and fixed sequences in nondemented older adults.

PubMed

Tolentino, Jerlyn C; Pirogovsky, Eva; Luu, Trinh; Toner, Chelsea K; Gilbert, Paul E

2012-05-21

Two experiments tested the effect of temporal interference on order memory for fixed and random sequences in young adults and nondemented older adults. The results demonstrate that temporal order memory for fixed and random sequences is impaired in nondemented older adults, particularly when temporal interference is high. However, temporal order memory for fixed sequences is comparable between older adults and young adults when temporal interference is minimized. The results suggest that temporal order memory is less efficient and more susceptible to interference in older adults, possibly due to impaired temporal pattern separation.

Human discrimination of visual direction of motion with and without smooth pursuit eye movements

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Krukowski, Anton E.; Pirog, Kathleen A.; Beutter, Brent R.; Brooks, Kevin R.; Stone, Leland S.

2003-01-01

It has long been known that ocular pursuit of a moving target has a major influence on its perceived speed (Aubert, 1886; Fleischl, 1882). However, little is known about the effect of smooth pursuit on the perception of target direction. Here we compare the precision of human visual-direction judgments under two oculomotor conditions (pursuit vs. fixation). We also examine the impact of stimulus duration (200 ms vs. 800 ms) and absolute direction (cardinal vs. oblique). Our main finding is that direction discrimination thresholds in the fixation and pursuit conditions are indistinguishable. Furthermore, the two oculomotor conditions showed oblique effects of similar magnitudes. These data suggest that the neural direction signals supporting perception are the same with or without pursuit, despite remarkably different retinal stimulation. During fixation, the stimulus information is restricted to large, purely peripheral retinal motion, while during steady-state pursuit, the stimulus information consists of small, unreliable foveal retinal motion and a large efference-copy signal. A parsimonious explanation of our findings is that the signal limiting the precision of direction judgments is a neural estimate of target motion in head-centered (or world-centered) coordinates (i.e., a combined retinal and eye motion signal) as found in the medial superior temporal area (MST), and not simply an estimate of retinal motion as found in the middle temporal area (MT).

Is he being bad? Social and language brain networks during social judgment in children with autism.

PubMed

Carter, Elizabeth J; Williams, Diane L; Minshew, Nancy J; Lehman, Jill F

2012-01-01

Individuals with autism often violate social rules and have lower accuracy in identifying and explaining inappropriate social behavior. Twelve children with autism (AD) and thirteen children with typical development (TD) participated in this fMRI study of the neurofunctional basis of social judgment. Participants indicated in which of two pictures a boy was being bad (Social condition) or which of two pictures was outdoors (Physical condition). In the within-group Social-Physical comparison, TD children used components of mentalizing and language networks [bilateral inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), bilateral medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), and bilateral posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS)], whereas AD children used a network that was primarily right IFG and bilateral pSTS, suggesting reduced use of social and language networks during this social judgment task. A direct group comparison on the Social-Physical contrast showed that the TD group had greater mPFC, bilateral IFG, and left superior temporal pole activity than the AD group. No regions were more active in the AD group than in the group with TD in this comparison. Both groups successfully performed the task, which required minimal language. The groups also performed similarly on eyetracking measures, indicating that the activation results probably reflect the use of a more basic strategy by the autism group rather than performance disparities. Even though language was unnecessary, the children with TD recruited language areas during the social task, suggesting automatic encoding of their knowledge into language; however, this was not the case for the children with autism. These findings support behavioral research indicating that, whereas children with autism may recognize socially inappropriate behavior, they have difficulty using spoken language to explain why it is inappropriate. The fMRI results indicate that AD children may not automatically use language to encode their social understanding, making expression and generalization of this knowledge more difficult.

Is He Being Bad? Social and Language Brain Networks during Social Judgment in Children with Autism

PubMed Central

Carter, Elizabeth J.; Williams, Diane L.; Minshew, Nancy J.; Lehman, Jill F.

2012-01-01

Individuals with autism often violate social rules and have lower accuracy in identifying and explaining inappropriate social behavior. Twelve children with autism (AD) and thirteen children with typical development (TD) participated in this fMRI study of the neurofunctional basis of social judgment. Participants indicated in which of two pictures a boy was being bad (Social condition) or which of two pictures was outdoors (Physical condition). In the within-group Social–Physical comparison, TD children used components of mentalizing and language networks [bilateral inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), bilateral medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), and bilateral posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS)], whereas AD children used a network that was primarily right IFG and bilateral pSTS, suggesting reduced use of social and language networks during this social judgment task. A direct group comparison on the Social–Physical contrast showed that the TD group had greater mPFC, bilateral IFG, and left superior temporal pole activity than the AD group. No regions were more active in the AD group than in the group with TD in this comparison. Both groups successfully performed the task, which required minimal language. The groups also performed similarly on eyetracking measures, indicating that the activation results probably reflect the use of a more basic strategy by the autism group rather than performance disparities. Even though language was unnecessary, the children with TD recruited language areas during the social task, suggesting automatic encoding of their knowledge into language; however, this was not the case for the children with autism. These findings support behavioral research indicating that, whereas children with autism may recognize socially inappropriate behavior, they have difficulty using spoken language to explain why it is inappropriate. The fMRI results indicate that AD children may not automatically use language to encode their social understanding, making expression and generalization of this knowledge more difficult. PMID:23082151

Gridded uncertainty in fossil fuel carbon dioxide emission maps, a CDIAC example

DOE PAGES

Andres, Robert J.; Boden, Thomas A.; Higdon, David M.

2016-12-05

Due to a current lack of physical measurements at appropriate spatial and temporal scales, all current global maps and distributions of fossil fuel carbon dioxide (FFCO2) emissions use one or more proxies to distribute those emissions. These proxies and distribution schemes introduce additional uncertainty into these maps. This paper examines the uncertainty associated with the magnitude of gridded FFCO2 emissions. This uncertainty is gridded at the same spatial and temporal scales as the mass magnitude maps. This gridded uncertainty includes uncertainty contributions from the spatial, temporal, proxy, and magnitude components used to create the magnitude map of FFCO2 emissions. Throughoutmore » this process, when assumptions had to be made or expert judgment employed, the general tendency in most cases was toward overestimating or increasing the magnitude of uncertainty. The results of the uncertainty analysis reveal a range of 4–190 %, with an average of 120 % (2 σ) for populated and FFCO2-emitting grid spaces over annual timescales. This paper also describes a methodological change specific to the creation of the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) FFCO2 emission maps: the change from a temporally fixed population proxy to a temporally varying population proxy.« less

Gridded uncertainty in fossil fuel carbon dioxide emission maps, a CDIAC example

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Andres, Robert J.; Boden, Thomas A.; Higdon, David M.

Due to a current lack of physical measurements at appropriate spatial and temporal scales, all current global maps and distributions of fossil fuel carbon dioxide (FFCO2) emissions use one or more proxies to distribute those emissions. These proxies and distribution schemes introduce additional uncertainty into these maps. This paper examines the uncertainty associated with the magnitude of gridded FFCO2 emissions. This uncertainty is gridded at the same spatial and temporal scales as the mass magnitude maps. This gridded uncertainty includes uncertainty contributions from the spatial, temporal, proxy, and magnitude components used to create the magnitude map of FFCO2 emissions. Throughoutmore » this process, when assumptions had to be made or expert judgment employed, the general tendency in most cases was toward overestimating or increasing the magnitude of uncertainty. The results of the uncertainty analysis reveal a range of 4–190 %, with an average of 120 % (2 σ) for populated and FFCO2-emitting grid spaces over annual timescales. This paper also describes a methodological change specific to the creation of the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) FFCO2 emission maps: the change from a temporally fixed population proxy to a temporally varying population proxy.« less

Gridded uncertainty in fossil fuel carbon dioxide emission maps, a CDIAC example

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Andres, Robert J.; Boden, Thomas A.; Higdon, David M.

2016-12-01

Due to a current lack of physical measurements at appropriate spatial and temporal scales, all current global maps and distributions of fossil fuel carbon dioxide (FFCO2) emissions use one or more proxies to distribute those emissions. These proxies and distribution schemes introduce additional uncertainty into these maps. This paper examines the uncertainty associated with the magnitude of gridded FFCO2 emissions. This uncertainty is gridded at the same spatial and temporal scales as the mass magnitude maps. This gridded uncertainty includes uncertainty contributions from the spatial, temporal, proxy, and magnitude components used to create the magnitude map of FFCO2 emissions. Throughout this process, when assumptions had to be made or expert judgment employed, the general tendency in most cases was toward overestimating or increasing the magnitude of uncertainty. The results of the uncertainty analysis reveal a range of 4-190 %, with an average of 120 % (2σ) for populated and FFCO2-emitting grid spaces over annual timescales. This paper also describes a methodological change specific to the creation of the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) FFCO2 emission maps: the change from a temporally fixed population proxy to a temporally varying population proxy.

Spatiotemporal neural dynamics of moral judgment: A high-density ERP study

PubMed Central

Yoder, Keith J.

2014-01-01

Morality is a pervasive aspect of human nature across all cultures, and neuroscience investigations are necessary for identifying what computational mechanisms underpin moral cognition. The current study used high-density ERPs to examine how moral evaluations are mediated by automatic and controlled processes as well as how quickly information and causal-intentional representations can be extracted when viewing morally laden behavior. The study also explored the extent to which individual dispositions in affective and cognitive empathy as well as justice sensitivity influence the encoding of moral valence when healthy participants make moral judgments about prosocial (interpersonal assistance) and antisocial (interpersonal harm) actions. Moral judgment differences were reflected in differential amplitudes for components associated with cognitive appraisal (LPP) as well as early components associated with emotional salience (N1 and N2). Moreover, source estimation was performed to indicate potential neural generators. A posterior-to-anterior shift was observed, with current density peaks first in right inferior parietal cortex (at the temporoparietal junction), then later in medial prefrontal cortex. Cognitive empathy scores predicted behavioral ratings of blame as well as differential amplitudes in LPP and component activity at posterior sites. Overall, this study offers important insights into the temporal unfolding of moral evaluations, including when in time individual differences in empathy influence neural encoding of moral valence. PMID:24905282

The contribution of emotion and cognition to moral sensitivity: a neurodevelopmental study.

PubMed

Decety, Jean; Michalska, Kalina J; Kinzler, Katherine D

2012-01-01

Whether emotion is a source of moral judgments remains controversial. This study combined neurophysiological measures, including functional magnetic resonance imaging, eye-tracking, and pupillary response with behavioral measures assessing affective and moral judgments across age. One hundred and twenty-six participants aged between 4 and 37 years viewed scenarios depicting intentional versus accidental actions that caused harm/damage to people and objects. Morally, salient scenarios evoked stronger empathic sadness in young participants and were associated with enhanced activity in the amygdala, insula, and temporal poles. While intentional harm was evaluated as equally wrong across all participants, ratings of deserved punishments and malevolent intent gradually became more differentiated with age. Furthermore, age-related increase in activity was detected in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in response to intentional harm to people, as well as increased functional connectivity between this region and the amygdala. Our study provides evidence that moral reasoning involves a complex integration between affective and cognitive processes that gradually changes with age and can be viewed in dynamic transaction across the course of ontogenesis. The findings support the view that negative emotion alerts the individual to the moral salience of a situation by bringing discomfort and thus can serve as an antecedent to moral judgment.

The effect of congenital deafness on duration judgment.

PubMed

Kowalska, Joanna; Szelag, Elzbieta

2006-09-01

Congenital deafness provides the opportunity to study how atypical sensory and language experiences affect different aspects of information processing, e.g., time perception. Using two methods of temporal estimation, reproduction (Exp. 1) and production (Exp. 2), the effect of deafness on duration judgment was investigated within a time domain of a few seconds. We examined 16 congenitally deaf adolescents, aged between 16 and 19 years, and 16 normally hearing subjects, matched for gender and age. In Exp. 1 subjects were asked to reproduce durations from 1 to 5.5 s, whereas in Exp. 2 they produced durations from 1 to 6 s. The results showed that in both experiments, the region of accurate estimation was significantly limited in deaf individuals, compared to normal hearing ones. Deaf adolescents judged accurately only intervals around 3 s, whereas they overestimated standards shorter than 2 s and underestimated those above 3 s. In contrast, controls correctly estimated the majority of standards applied in both experiments, with the exception of underreproduction of intervals longer than 3 s (Exp. 1). The effect of deafness on the accuracy of duration judgment can be linked to differences in the use of conventional time units, applied strategy as well as cognitive processes such as attention or working memory.

The effects of aging on the neural correlates of subjective and objective recollection.

PubMed

Duarte, Audrey; Henson, Richard N; Graham, Kim S

2008-09-01

High-functioning older adults can exhibit normal recollection when measured subjectively, via "remember" judgments, but not when measured objectively, via source judgments, whereas low-functioning older adults exhibit impairments for both measures. A potential explanation for this is that typical subjective and objective tests of recollection necessitate different processing demands, supported by distinct brain regions, and that deficits in these tests are observed according to the degree of age-related changes in these regions. Here, we used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure the effects of aging on neural correlates of subjective and objective measures of recollection, in young, high-functioning (Old-High) and low-functioning (Old-Low) older adults. Behaviorally, the Old-High group showed intact subjective ("remember" judgments) but impaired objective recollection (for 1 of 2 spatial or temporal sources), whereas the Old-Low group was impaired on both measures. Imaging data showed changes in parietal subjective recollection effects in the Old-Low group and in lateral frontal objective recollection effects in both older adult groups. Our results highlight the importance of examining performance variability in older adults and suggest that differential effects of aging on brain regions are associated with different patterns of performance on tests of subjective and objective recollection.

Difference magnitude is not measured by discrimination steps for order of point patterns.

PubMed

Protonotarios, Emmanouil D; Johnston, Alan; Griffin, Lewis D

2016-07-01

We have shown in previous work that the perception of order in point patterns is consistent with an interval scale structure (Protonotarios, Baum, Johnston, Hunter, & Griffin, 2014). The psychophysical scaling method used relies on the confusion between stimuli with similar levels of order, and the resulting discrimination scale is expressed in just-noticeable differences (jnds). As with other perceptual dimensions, an interesting question is whether suprathreshold (perceptual) differences are consistent with distances between stimuli on the discrimination scale. To test that, we collected discrimination data, and data based on comparison of perceptual differences. The stimuli were jittered square lattices of dots, covering the range from total disorder (Poisson) to perfect order (square lattice), roughly equally spaced on the discrimination scale. Observers picked the most ordered pattern from a pair, and the pair of patterns with the greatest difference in order from two pairs. Although the judgments of perceptual difference were found to be consistent with an interval scale, like the discrimination judgments, no common interval scale that could predict both sets of data was possible. In particular, the midpattern of the perceptual scale is 11 jnds away from the ordered end, and 5 jnds from the disordered end of the discrimination scale.

Social projection to ingroups and outgroups: a review and meta-analysis.

PubMed

Robbins, Jordan M; Krueger, Joachim I

2005-01-01

Social projection is the tendency to expect similarities between oneself and others. A review of the literature and a meta-analysis reveal that projection is stronger when people make judgments about ingroups than when they make judgments about outgroups. Analysis of moderator variables further reveals that ingroup projection is stronger for laboratory groups than for real social categories. The mode of analysis (i.e., nomothetic vs. idiographic) and the order of judgments (i.e., self or group judged first) have no discernable effects. Outgroup projection is positive, but small in size. Together, these findings support the view that projection can serve as an egocentric heuristic for inductive reasoning. The greater strength of ingroup projection can contribute to ingroup-favoritism, perceptions of ingroup homogeneity, and cooperation with ingroup members.

Sleep-dependent facilitation of episodic memory details.

PubMed

van der Helm, Els; Gujar, Ninad; Nishida, Masaki; Walker, Matthew P

2011-01-01

While a role for sleep in declarative memory processing is established, the qualitative nature of this consolidation benefit, and the physiological mechanisms mediating it, remain debated. Here, we investigate the impact of sleep physiology on characteristics of episodic memory using an item- (memory elements) and context- (contextual details associated with those elements) learning paradigm; the latter being especially dependent on the hippocampus. Following back-to-back encoding of two word lists, each associated with a different context, participants were assigned to either a Nap-group, who obtained a 120-min nap, or a No Nap-group. Six hours post-encoding, participants performed a recognition test involving item-memory and context-memory judgments. In contrast to item-memory, which demonstrated no between-group differences, a significant benefit in context-memory developed in the Nap-group, the extent of which correlated both with the amount of stage-2 NREM sleep and frontal fast sleep-spindles. Furthermore, a difference was observed on the basis of word-list order, with the sleep benefit and associated physiological correlations being selective for the second word-list, learned last (most proximal to sleep). These findings suggest that sleep may preferentially benefit contextual (hippocampal-dependent) aspects of memory, supported by sleep-spindle oscillations, and that the temporal order of initial learning differentially determines subsequent offline consolidation.

Temporal lobe structures and facial emotion recognition in schizophrenia patients and nonpsychotic relatives.

PubMed

Goghari, Vina M; Macdonald, Angus W; Sponheim, Scott R

2011-11-01

Temporal lobe abnormalities and emotion recognition deficits are prominent features of schizophrenia and appear related to the diathesis of the disorder. This study investigated whether temporal lobe structural abnormalities were associated with facial emotion recognition deficits in schizophrenia and related to genetic liability for the disorder. Twenty-seven schizophrenia patients, 23 biological family members, and 36 controls participated. Several temporal lobe regions (fusiform, superior temporal, middle temporal, amygdala, and hippocampus) previously associated with face recognition in normative samples and found to be abnormal in schizophrenia were evaluated using volumetric analyses. Participants completed a facial emotion recognition task and an age recognition control task under time-limited and self-paced conditions. Temporal lobe volumes were tested for associations with task performance. Group status explained 23% of the variance in temporal lobe volume. Left fusiform gray matter volume was decreased by 11% in patients and 7% in relatives compared with controls. Schizophrenia patients additionally exhibited smaller hippocampal and middle temporal volumes. Patients were unable to improve facial emotion recognition performance with unlimited time to make a judgment but were able to improve age recognition performance. Patients additionally showed a relationship between reduced temporal lobe gray matter and poor facial emotion recognition. For the middle temporal lobe region, the relationship between greater volume and better task performance was specific to facial emotion recognition and not age recognition. Because schizophrenia patients exhibited a specific deficit in emotion recognition not attributable to a generalized impairment in face perception, impaired emotion recognition may serve as a target for interventions.

Multisensory perceptual learning is dependent upon task difficulty.

PubMed

De Niear, Matthew A; Koo, Bonhwang; Wallace, Mark T

2016-11-01

There has been a growing interest in developing behavioral tasks to enhance temporal acuity as recent findings have demonstrated changes in temporal processing in a number of clinical conditions. Prior research has demonstrated that perceptual training can enhance temporal acuity both within and across different sensory modalities. Although certain forms of unisensory perceptual learning have been shown to be dependent upon task difficulty, this relationship has not been explored for multisensory learning. The present study sought to determine the effects of task difficulty on multisensory perceptual learning. Prior to and following a single training session, participants completed a simultaneity judgment (SJ) task, which required them to judge whether a visual stimulus (flash) and auditory stimulus (beep) presented in synchrony or at various stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) occurred synchronously or asynchronously. During the training session, participants completed the same SJ task but received feedback regarding the accuracy of their responses. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three levels of difficulty during training: easy, moderate, and hard, which were distinguished based on the SOAs used during training. We report that only the most difficult (i.e., hard) training protocol enhanced temporal acuity. We conclude that perceptual training protocols for enhancing multisensory temporal acuity may be optimized by employing audiovisual stimuli for which it is difficult to discriminate temporal synchrony from asynchrony.

Children's understanding of yesterday and tomorrow.

PubMed

Zhang, Meng; Hudson, Judith A

2018-06-01

A picture-sentence matching task was used to investigate children's understanding of yesterday and tomorrow. In Experiment 1, 3- to 5-year-olds viewed two pictures of an object with a visible change of state (e.g., a carved pumpkin and an intact pumpkin) while listening to sentences referring to past or future actions ("I carved the pumpkin yesterday" or "I'm gonna carve the pumpkin tomorrow") and selected the matching picture. Children performed better with past tense sentences than with future tense sentences, and including tomorrow in future tense sentences increased accuracy. In the next two experiments, 4- and 5-year-olds (Experiment 2) and adults (Experiment 3) completed the same task but with sentences containing conflicting temporal information ("I carved the pumpkin tomorrow"). Children tended to select pictures depicting the outcome of actions regardless of tense or temporal adverb, whereas adults' judgments were based on temporal adverbs. In Experiment 4, 3- to 5-year-olds completed tasks requiring either forward or backward temporal reasoning about sentences referring to before, after, yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Across sentence types, forward temporal reasoning was easier for children than backward temporal reasoning. Altogether, results indicated that children understand yesterday better than tomorrow due to the increased cognitive demands involved in reasoning about future events. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Children with a history of SLI show reduced sensitivity to audiovisual temporal asynchrony: an ERP study.

PubMed

Kaganovich, Natalya; Schumaker, Jennifer; Leonard, Laurence B; Gustafson, Dana; Macias, Danielle

2014-08-01

The authors examined whether school-age children with a history of specific language impairment (H-SLI), their peers with typical development (TD), and adults differ in sensitivity to audiovisual temporal asynchrony and whether such difference stems from the sensory encoding of audiovisual information. Fifteen H-SLI children, 15 TD children, and 15 adults judged whether a flashed explosion-shaped figure and a 2-kHz pure tone occurred simultaneously. The stimuli were presented at 0-, 100-, 200-, 300-, 400-, and 500-ms temporal offsets. This task was combined with EEG recordings. H-SLI children were profoundly less sensitive to temporal separations between auditory and visual modalities compared with their TD peers. Those H-SLI children who performed better at simultaneity judgment also had higher language aptitude. TD children were less accurate than adults, revealing a remarkably prolonged developmental course of the audiovisual temporal discrimination. Analysis of early event-related potential components suggested that poor sensory encoding was not a key factor in H-SLI children's reduced sensitivity to audiovisual asynchrony. Audiovisual temporal discrimination is impaired in H-SLI children and is still immature during mid-childhood in TD children. The present findings highlight the need for further evaluation of the role of atypical audiovisual processing in the development of SLI.

Children with a history of SLI show reduced sensitivity to audiovisual temporal asynchrony: An ERP Study

PubMed Central

Kaganovich, Natalya; Schumaker, Jennifer; Leonard, Laurence B.; Gustafson, Dana; Macias, Danielle

2014-01-01

Purpose We examined whether school-age children with a history of SLI (H-SLI), their typically developing (TD) peers, and adults differ in sensitivity to audiovisual temporal asynchrony and whether such difference stems from the sensory encoding of audiovisual information. Method 15 H-SLI children, 15 TD children, and 15 adults judged whether a flashed explosion-shaped figure and a 2 kHz pure tone occurred simultaneously. The stimuli were presented at 0, 100, 200, 300, 400, and 500 ms temporal offsets. This task was combined with EEG recordings. Results H-SLI children were profoundly less sensitive to temporal separations between auditory and visual modalities compared to their TD peers. Those H-SLI children who performed better at simultaneity judgment also had higher language aptitude. TD children were less accurate than adults, revealing a remarkably prolonged developmental course of the audiovisual temporal discrimination. Analysis of early ERP components suggested that poor sensory encoding was not a key factor in H-SLI children’s reduced sensitivity to audiovisual asynchrony. Conclusions Audiovisual temporal discrimination is impaired in H-SLI children and is still immature during mid-childhood in TD children. The present findings highlight the need for further evaluation of the role of atypical audiovisual processing in the development of SLI. PMID:24686922

Musical Scales in Tone Sequences Improve Temporal Accuracy.

PubMed

Li, Min S; Di Luca, Massimiliano

2018-01-01

Predicting the time of stimulus onset is a key component in perception. Previous investigations of perceived timing have focused on the effect of stimulus properties such as rhythm and temporal irregularity, but the influence of non-temporal properties and their role in predicting stimulus timing has not been exhaustively considered. The present study aims to understand how a non-temporal pattern in a sequence of regularly timed stimuli could improve or bias the detection of temporal deviations. We presented interspersed sequences of 3, 4, 5, and 6 auditory tones where only the timing of the last stimulus could slightly deviate from isochrony. Participants reported whether the last tone was 'earlier' or 'later' relative to the expected regular timing. In two conditions, the tones composing the sequence were either organized into musical scales or they were random tones. In one experiment, all sequences ended with the same tone; in the other experiment, each sequence ended with a different tone. Results indicate higher discriminability of anisochrony with musical scales and with longer sequences, irrespective of the knowledge of the final tone. Such an outcome suggests that the predictability of non-temporal properties, as enabled by the musical scale pattern, can be a factor in determining the sensitivity of time judgments.

Neural signatures of lexical tone reading.

PubMed

Kwok, Veronica P Y; Wang, Tianfu; Chen, Siping; Yakpo, Kofi; Zhu, Linlin; Fox, Peter T; Tan, Li Hai

2015-01-01

Research on how lexical tone is neuroanatomically represented in the human brain is central to our understanding of cortical regions subserving language. Past studies have exclusively focused on tone perception of the spoken language, and little is known as to the lexical tone processing in reading visual words and its associated brain mechanisms. In this study, we performed two experiments to identify neural substrates in Chinese tone reading. First, we used a tone judgment paradigm to investigate tone processing of visually presented Chinese characters. We found that, relative to baseline, tone perception of printed Chinese characters were mediated by strong brain activation in bilateral frontal regions, left inferior parietal lobule, left posterior middle/medial temporal gyrus, left inferior temporal region, bilateral visual systems, and cerebellum. Surprisingly, no activation was found in superior temporal regions, brain sites well known for speech tone processing. In activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis to combine results of relevant published studies, we attempted to elucidate whether the left temporal cortex activities identified in Experiment one is consistent with those found in previous studies of auditory lexical tone perception. ALE results showed that only the left superior temporal gyrus and putamen were critical in auditory lexical tone processing. These findings suggest that activation in the superior temporal cortex associated with lexical tone perception is modality-dependent. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

What are judgment skills in health literacy? A psycho-cognitive perspective of judgment and decision-making research

PubMed Central

Riva, Silvia; Antonietti, Alessandro; Iannello, Paola; Pravettoni, Gabriella

2015-01-01

Objective The aim of this review is to summarize current research relating to psychological processes involved in judgment and decision-making (JDM) and identify which processes can be incorporated and used in the construct of health literacy (HL) in order to enrich its conceptualization and to provide more information about people’s preferences. Methods The literature review was aimed at identifying comprehensive research in the field; therefore appropriate databases were searched for English language articles dated from 1998 to 2015. Results Several psychological processes have been found to be constituents of JDM and potentially incorporated in the definition of HL: cognition, self-regulation, emotion, reasoning-thinking, and social perception. Conclusion HL research can benefit from this JDM literature overview, first, by elaborating on the idea that judgment is multidimensional and constituted by several specific processes, and second, by using the results to implement the definition of “judgment skills”. Moreover, this review can favor the development of new instruments that can measure HL. Practical implications Future researchers in HL should work together with researchers in psychological sciences not only to investigate the processes behind JDM in-depth but also to create effective opportunities to improve HL in all patients, to promote good decisions, and orient patients’ preferences in all health contexts. PMID:26648700

Are judgments a form of data clustering? Reexamining contrast effects with the k-means algorithm.

PubMed

Boillaud, Eric; Molina, Guylaine

2015-04-01

A number of theories have been proposed to explain in precise mathematical terms how statistical parameters and sequential properties of stimulus distributions affect category ratings. Various contextual factors such as the mean, the midrange, and the median of the stimuli; the stimulus range; the percentile rank of each stimulus; and the order of appearance have been assumed to influence judgmental contrast. A data clustering reinterpretation of judgmental relativity is offered wherein the influence of the initial choice of centroids on judgmental contrast involves 2 combined frequency and consistency tendencies. Accounts of the k-means algorithm are provided, showing good agreement with effects observed on multiple distribution shapes and with a variety of interaction effects relating to the number of stimuli, the number of response categories, and the method of skewing. Experiment 1 demonstrates that centroid initialization accounts for contrast effects obtained with stretched distributions. Experiment 2 demonstrates that the iterative convergence inherent to the k-means algorithm accounts for the contrast reduction observed across repeated blocks of trials. The concept of within-cluster variance minimization is discussed, as is the applicability of a backward k-means calculation method for inferring, from empirical data, the values of the centroids that would serve as a representation of the judgmental context. (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved.

What are judgment skills in health literacy? A psycho-cognitive perspective of judgment and decision-making research.

PubMed

Riva, Silvia; Antonietti, Alessandro; Iannello, Paola; Pravettoni, Gabriella

2015-01-01

The aim of this review is to summarize current research relating to psychological processes involved in judgment and decision-making (JDM) and identify which processes can be incorporated and used in the construct of health literacy (HL) in order to enrich its conceptualization and to provide more information about people's preferences. The literature review was aimed at identifying comprehensive research in the field; therefore appropriate databases were searched for English language articles dated from 1998 to 2015. Several psychological processes have been found to be constituents of JDM and potentially incorporated in the definition of HL: cognition, self-regulation, emotion, reasoning-thinking, and social perception. HL research can benefit from this JDM literature overview, first, by elaborating on the idea that judgment is multidimensional and constituted by several specific processes, and second, by using the results to implement the definition of "judgment skills". Moreover, this review can favor the development of new instruments that can measure HL. Future researchers in HL should work together with researchers in psychological sciences not only to investigate the processes behind JDM in-depth but also to create effective opportunities to improve HL in all patients, to promote good decisions, and orient patients' preferences in all health contexts.

5 CFR 838.1121 - Procedures and requirements.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-01-01

... REGULATIONS (CONTINUED) COURT ORDERS AFFECTING RETIREMENT BENEFITS Court Orders Under the Child Abuse... 581 of this chapter that appears valid on its face. (2)(i) After OPM has determined that a child abuse... validity of the legal process. (ii) OPM will not delay compliance with a child abuse judgment enforcement...

5 CFR 838.1121 - Procedures and requirements.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-01-01

... REGULATIONS (CONTINUED) COURT ORDERS AFFECTING RETIREMENT BENEFITS Court Orders Under the Child Abuse... 581 of this chapter that appears valid on its face. (2)(i) After OPM has determined that a child abuse... validity of the legal process. (ii) OPM will not delay compliance with a child abuse judgment enforcement...

5 CFR 838.1121 - Procedures and requirements.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-01-01

... REGULATIONS (CONTINUED) COURT ORDERS AFFECTING RETIREMENT BENEFITS Court Orders Under the Child Abuse... 581 of this chapter that appears valid on its face. (2)(i) After OPM has determined that a child abuse... validity of the legal process. (ii) OPM will not delay compliance with a child abuse judgment enforcement...

5 CFR 838.1121 - Procedures and requirements.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-01-01

... REGULATIONS (CONTINUED) COURT ORDERS AFFECTING RETIREMENT BENEFITS Court Orders Under the Child Abuse... 581 of this chapter that appears valid on its face. (2)(i) After OPM has determined that a child abuse... validity of the legal process. (ii) OPM will not delay compliance with a child abuse judgment enforcement...

The role of early stages of cortical visual processing in size and distance judgment: a transcranial direct current stimulation study.

PubMed

Costa, Thiago L; Costa, Marcelo F; Magalhães, Adsson; Rêgo, Gabriel G; Nagy, Balázs V; Boggio, Paulo S; Ventura, Dora F

2015-02-19

Recent research suggests that V1 plays an active role in the judgment of size and distance. Nevertheless, no research has been performed using direct brain stimulation to address this issue. We used transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS) to directly modulate the early stages of cortical visual processing while measuring size and distance perception with a psychophysical scaling method of magnitude estimation in a repeated-measures design. The subjects randomly received anodal, cathodal, and sham tDCS in separate sessions starting with size or distance judgment tasks. Power functions were fit to the size judgment data, whereas logarithmic functions were fit to distance judgment data. Slopes and R(2) were compared with separate repeated-measures analyses of variance with two factors: task (size vs. distance) and tDCS (anodal vs. cathodal vs. sham). Anodal tDCS significantly decreased slopes, apparently interfering with size perception. No effects were found for distance perception. Consistent with previous studies, the results of the size task appeared to reflect a prothetic continuum, whereas the results of the distance task seemed to reflect a metathetic continuum. The differential effects of tDCS on these tasks may support the hypothesis that different physiological mechanisms underlie judgments on these two continua. The results further suggest the complex involvement of the early visual cortex in size judgment tasks that go beyond the simple representation of low-level stimulus properties. This supports predictive coding models and experimental findings that suggest that higher-order visual areas may inhibit incoming information from the early visual cortex through feedback connections when complex tasks are performed. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Extracting Depth From Motion Parallax in Real-World and Synthetic Displays

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Hecht, Heiko; Kaiser, Mary K.; Aiken, William; Null, Cynthia H. (Technical Monitor)

1994-01-01

In psychophysical studies on human sensitivity to visual motion parallax (MP), the use of computer displays is pervasive. However, a number of potential problems are associated with such displays: cue conflicts arise when observers accommodate to the screen surface, and observer head and body movements are often not reflected in the displays. We investigated observers' sensitivity to depth information in MP (slant, depth order, relative depth) using various real-world displays and their computer-generated analogs. Angle judgments of real-world stimuli were consistently superior to judgments that were based on computer-generated stimuli. Similar results were found for perceived depth order and relative depth. Perceptual competence of observers tends to be underestimated in research that is based on computer generated displays. Such findings cannot be generalized to more realistic viewing situations.

Contextual interference effect on perceptual-cognitive skills training.

PubMed

Broadbent, David P; Causer, Joe; Ford, Paul R; Williams, A Mark

2015-06-01

Contextual interference (CI) effect predicts that a random order of practice for multiple skills is superior for learning compared to a blocked order. We report a novel attempt to examine the CI effect during acquisition and transfer of anticipatory judgments from simulation training to an applied sport situation. Participants were required to anticipate tennis shots under either a random practice schedule or a blocked practice schedule. Response accuracy was recorded for both groups in pretest, during acquisition, and on a 7-d retention test. Transfer of learning was assessed through a field-based tennis protocol that attempted to assess performance in an applied sport setting. The random practice group had significantly higher response accuracy scores on the 7-d laboratory retention test compared to the blocked group. Moreover, during the transfer of anticipatory judgments to an applied sport situation, the decision times of the random practice group were significantly lower compared to the blocked group. The CI effect extends to the training of anticipatory judgments through simulation techniques. Furthermore, we demonstrate for the first time that the CI effect increases transfer of learning from simulation training to an applied sport task, highlighting the importance of using appropriate practice schedules during simulation training.

[The BASYS observation system for the analysis of aggressive behavior in classroom-settings].

PubMed

Wettstein, Alexander

2012-01-01

Educational or therapeutic measures of aggressive student behavior are often based on the judgments of teachers. However, empirical studies show that the objectivity of these judgments is generally low. In order to assess aggressive behavior in classroom settings, we developed a context-sensitive observational system. The observation system exists in a version for teachers in action as well as a version for the uninvolved observer. The teacher version allows categorizing aggressive behavior while teaching. The aim is to differentiate the perception and the judgments of teachers, so that the judgments can serve as trustable diagnostic information. The version for an independent observer, in addition, contains categories to collect information about the context in which aggressions take place. The behavior observation system was tested in four field-studies in regular and special classes. The empirical results show that, after training, teachers were able to make objective observations, and that aggressive behavior depends to a large extent on situational factors. The system allows identification of problematic people-environment relationships and the derivation of intervention measures.

Moral complexity in middle childhood: children's evaluations of necessary harm.

PubMed

Jambon, Marc; Smetana, Judith G

2014-01-01

We assessed 5- to 11-year-olds' (N = 76) judgments of straightforward moral transgressions (prototypical harm) as well as their evaluations of complex, hypothetical scenarios in which an actor transgresses in order to prevent injury (necessary harm). The nature of the actor's transgression (psychological or physical harm) varied across participants. Moral judgments and justifications, knowledge of the actor's psychological experience, and their associations were examined. At all ages, children negatively evaluated prototypical harm; judgments of necessary harm became increasingly more forgiving with age as justifications pertaining to the actor's harm decreased. References to the actor's positive actions and children's tendency to coordinate conflicting concerns increased with age, but only when evaluating psychological harm. Across conditions, older children viewed transgressors as holding increasingly more positive attitudes toward their own actions, and this was uniquely associated with more forgiving moral judgments and justifications of necessary but not prototypical harm. Findings are discussed in relation to the emergence of more flexible and nuanced moral evaluations during middle childhood. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved.

Contribution of stimulus attributes to errors in duration and distance judgments--a developmental study.

PubMed

Matsuda, F; Lan, W C; Tanimura, R

1999-02-01

In Matsuda's 1996 study, 4- to 11-yr.-old children (N = 133) watched two cars running on two parallel tracks on a CRT display and judged whether their durations and distances were equal and, if not, which was larger. In the present paper, the relative contributions of the four critical stimulus attributes (whether temporal starting points, temporal stopping points, spatial starting points, and spatial stopping points were the same or different between two cars) to the production of errors were quantitatively estimated based on the data for rates of errors obtained by Matsuda. The present analyses made it possible not only to understand numerically the findings about qualitative characteristics of the critical attributes described by Matsuda, but also to add more detailed findings about them.

Optic variables used to judge future ball arrival position in expert and novice soccer players.

PubMed

Craig, Cathy M; Goulon, Cédric; Berton, Eric; Rao, Guillaume; Fernandez, Laure; Bootsma, Reinoud J

2009-04-01

Although many studies have looked at the perceptual-cognitive strategies used to make anticipatory judgments in sport, few have examined the informational invariants that our visual system may be attuned to. Using immersive interactive virtual reality to simulate the aerodynamics of the trajectory of a ball with and without sidespin, the present study examined the ability of expert and novice soccer players to make judgments about the ball's future arrival position. An analysis of their judgment responses showed how participants were strongly influenced by the ball's trajectory. The changes in trajectory caused by sidespin led to erroneous predictions about the ball's future arrival position. An analysis of potential informational variables that could explain these results points to the use of a first-order compound variable combining optical expansion and optical displacement.

Development of a body motion interactive system with a weight voting mechanism and computer vision technology

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lin, Chern-Sheng; Chen, Chia-Tse; Shei, Hung-Jung; Lay, Yun-Long; Chiu, Chuang-Chien

2012-09-01

This study develops a body motion interactive system with computer vision technology. This application combines interactive games, art performing, and exercise training system. Multiple image processing and computer vision technologies are used in this study. The system can calculate the characteristics of an object color, and then perform color segmentation. When there is a wrong action judgment, the system will avoid the error with a weight voting mechanism, which can set the condition score and weight value for the action judgment, and choose the best action judgment from the weight voting mechanism. Finally, this study estimated the reliability of the system in order to make improvements. The results showed that, this method has good effect on accuracy and stability during operations of the human-machine interface of the sports training system.

Working memory and spatial judgments: Cognitive load increases the central tendency bias.

PubMed

Allred, Sarah R; Crawford, L Elizabeth; Duffy, Sean; Smith, John

2016-12-01

Previous work demonstrates that memory for simple stimuli can be biased by information about the distribution of which the stimulus is a member. Specifically, people underestimate values greater than the distribution's average and overestimate values smaller than the average. This is referred to as the central tendency bias. This bias has been explained as an optimal use of both noisy sensory information and category information. In largely separate literature, cognitive load (CL) experiments attempt to manipulate the available working memory of participants in order to observe the effect on choice or judgments. In two experiments, we demonstrate that participants under high cognitive load exhibit a stronger central tendency bias than when under a low cognitive load. Although not anticipated at the outset, we also find that judgments exhibit an anchoring bias not described previously.

A Bayesian approach for calibrating probability judgments

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Firmino, Paulo Renato A.; Santana, Nielson A.

2012-10-01

Eliciting experts' opinions has been one of the main alternatives for addressing paucity of data. In the vanguard of this area is the development of calibration models (CMs). CMs are models dedicated to overcome miscalibration, i.e. judgment biases reflecting deficient strategies of reasoning adopted by the expert when inferring about an unknown. One of the main challenges of CMs is to determine how and when to intervene against miscalibration, in order to enhance the tradeoff between costs (time spent with calibration processes) and accuracy of the resulting models. The current paper dedicates special attention to this issue by presenting a dynamic Bayesian framework for monitoring, diagnosing, and handling miscalibration patterns. The framework is based on Beta-, Uniform, or Triangular-Bernoulli models and classes of judgmental calibration theories. Issues regarding the usefulness of the proposed framework are discussed and illustrated via simulation studies.

The effects of selective and divided attention on sensory precision and integration.

PubMed

Odegaard, Brian; Wozny, David R; Shams, Ladan

2016-02-12

In our daily lives, our capacity to selectively attend to stimuli within or across sensory modalities enables enhanced perception of the surrounding world. While previous research on selective attention has studied this phenomenon extensively, two important questions still remain unanswered: (1) how selective attention to a single modality impacts sensory integration processes, and (2) the mechanism by which selective attention improves perception. We explored how selective attention impacts performance in both a spatial task and a temporal numerosity judgment task, and employed a Bayesian Causal Inference model to investigate the computational mechanism(s) impacted by selective attention. We report three findings: (1) in the spatial domain, selective attention improves precision of the visual sensory representations (which were relatively precise), but not the auditory sensory representations (which were fairly noisy); (2) in the temporal domain, selective attention improves the sensory precision in both modalities (both of which were fairly reliable to begin with); (3) in both tasks, selective attention did not exert a significant influence over the tendency to integrate sensory stimuli. Therefore, it may be postulated that a sensory modality must possess a certain inherent degree of encoding precision in order to benefit from selective attention. It also appears that in certain basic perceptual tasks, the tendency to integrate crossmodal signals does not depend significantly on selective attention. We conclude with a discussion of how these results relate to recent theoretical considerations of selective attention. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Attention to Distinct Goal-relevant Features Differentially Guides Semantic Knowledge Retrieval.

PubMed

Hanson, Gavin K; Chrysikou, Evangelia G

2017-07-01

A critical aspect of conceptual knowledge is the selective activation of goal-relevant aspects of meaning. Although the contributions of ventrolateral prefrontal and posterior temporal areas to semantic cognition are well established, the precise role of posterior parietal cortex in semantic control remains unknown. Here, we examined whether this region modulates attention to goal-relevant features within semantic memory according to the same principles that determine the salience of task-relevant object properties during visual attention. Using multivoxel pattern analysis, we decoded attentional referents during a semantic judgment task, in which participants matched an object cue to a target according to concrete (i.e., color, shape) or abstract (i.e., function, thematic context) semantic features. The goal-relevant semantic feature participants attended to (e.g., color or shape, function or theme) could be decoded from task-associated cortical activity with above-chance accuracy, a pattern that held for both concrete and abstract semantic features. A Bayesian confusion matrix analysis further identified differential contributions to representing attentional demands toward specific object properties across lateral prefrontal, posterior temporal, and inferior parietal regions, with the dorsolateral pFC supporting distinctions between higher-order properties and the left intraparietal sulcus being the only region supporting distinctions across all semantic features. These results are the first to demonstrate that patterns of neural activity in the parietal cortex are sensitive to which features of a concept are attended to, thus supporting the contributions of posterior parietal cortex to semantic control.

Neural differences in the processing of semantic relationships across cultures.

PubMed

Gutchess, Angela H; Hedden, Trey; Ketay, Sarah; Aron, Arthur; Gabrieli, John D E

2010-06-01

The current study employed functional MRI to investigate the contribution of domain-general (e.g. executive functions) and domain-specific (e.g. semantic knowledge) processes to differences in semantic judgments across cultures. Previous behavioral experiments have identified cross-cultural differences in categorization, with East Asians preferring strategies involving thematic or functional relationships (e.g. cow-grass) and Americans preferring categorical relationships (e.g. cow-chicken). East Asians and American participants underwent functional imaging while alternating between categorical or thematic strategies to sort triads of words, as well as matching words on control trials. Many similarities were observed. However, across both category and relationship trials compared to match (control) trials, East Asians activated a frontal-parietal network implicated in controlled executive processes, whereas Americans engaged regions of the temporal lobes and the cingulate, possibly in response to conflict in the semantic content of information. The results suggest that cultures differ in the strategies employed to resolve conflict between competing semantic judgments.

A neural model of motion processing and visual navigation by cortical area MST.

PubMed

Grossberg, S; Mingolla, E; Pack, C

1999-12-01

Cells in the dorsal medial superior temporal cortex (MSTd) process optic flow generated by self-motion during visually guided navigation. A neural model shows how interactions between well-known neural mechanisms (log polar cortical magnification, Gaussian motion-sensitive receptive fields, spatial pooling of motion-sensitive signals and subtractive extraretinal eye movement signals) lead to emergent properties that quantitatively simulate neurophysiological data about MSTd cell properties and psychophysical data about human navigation. Model cells match MSTd neuron responses to optic flow stimuli placed in different parts of the visual field, including position invariance, tuning curves, preferred spiral directions, direction reversals, average response curves and preferred locations for stimulus motion centers. The model shows how the preferred motion direction of the most active MSTd cells can explain human judgments of self-motion direction (heading), without using complex heading templates. The model explains when extraretinal eye movement signals are needed for accurate heading perception, and when retinal input is sufficient, and how heading judgments depend on scene layouts and rotation rates.

Visual Mislocalization of Moving Objects in an Audiovisual Event.

PubMed

Kawachi, Yousuke

2016-01-01

The present study investigated the influence of an auditory tone on the localization of visual objects in the stream/bounce display (SBD). In this display, two identical visual objects move toward each other, overlap, and then return to their original positions. These objects can be perceived as either streaming through or bouncing off each other. In this study, the closest distance between object centers on opposing trajectories and tone presentation timing (none, 0 ms, ± 90 ms, and ± 390 ms relative to the instant for the closest distance) were manipulated. Observers were asked to judge whether the two objects overlapped with each other and whether the objects appeared to stream through, bounce off each other, or reverse their direction of motion. A tone presented at or around the instant of the objects' closest distance biased judgments toward "non-overlapping," and observers overestimated the physical distance between objects. A similar bias toward direction change judgments (bounce and reverse, not stream judgments) was also observed, which was always stronger than the non-overlapping bias. Thus, these two types of judgments were not always identical. Moreover, another experiment showed that it was unlikely that this observed mislocalization could be explained by other previously known mislocalization phenomena (i.e., representational momentum, the Fröhlich effect, and a turn-point shift). These findings indicate a new example of crossmodal mislocalization, which can be obtained without temporal offsets between audiovisual stimuli. The mislocalization effect is also specific to a more complex stimulus configuration of objects on opposing trajectories, with a tone that is presented simultaneously. The present study promotes an understanding of relatively complex audiovisual interactions beyond simple one-to-one audiovisual stimuli used in previous studies.

Visual Mislocalization of Moving Objects in an Audiovisual Event

PubMed Central

Kawachi, Yousuke

2016-01-01

The present study investigated the influence of an auditory tone on the localization of visual objects in the stream/bounce display (SBD). In this display, two identical visual objects move toward each other, overlap, and then return to their original positions. These objects can be perceived as either streaming through or bouncing off each other. In this study, the closest distance between object centers on opposing trajectories and tone presentation timing (none, 0 ms, ± 90 ms, and ± 390 ms relative to the instant for the closest distance) were manipulated. Observers were asked to judge whether the two objects overlapped with each other and whether the objects appeared to stream through, bounce off each other, or reverse their direction of motion. A tone presented at or around the instant of the objects’ closest distance biased judgments toward “non-overlapping,” and observers overestimated the physical distance between objects. A similar bias toward direction change judgments (bounce and reverse, not stream judgments) was also observed, which was always stronger than the non-overlapping bias. Thus, these two types of judgments were not always identical. Moreover, another experiment showed that it was unlikely that this observed mislocalization could be explained by other previously known mislocalization phenomena (i.e., representational momentum, the Fröhlich effect, and a turn-point shift). These findings indicate a new example of crossmodal mislocalization, which can be obtained without temporal offsets between audiovisual stimuli. The mislocalization effect is also specific to a more complex stimulus configuration of objects on opposing trajectories, with a tone that is presented simultaneously. The present study promotes an understanding of relatively complex audiovisual interactions beyond simple one-to-one audiovisual stimuli used in previous studies. PMID:27111759

CATEGORY-SPECIFIC SEMANTIC MEMORY: CONVERGING EVIDENCE FROM BOLD fMRI AND ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE

PubMed Central

Grossman, Murray; Peelle, Jonathan E.; Smith, Edward E.; McMillan, Corey T.; Cook, Philip; Powers, John; Dreyfuss, Michael; Bonner, Michael F.; Richmond, Lauren; Boller, Ashley; Camp, Emily; Burkholder, Lisa

2012-01-01

Patients with Alzheimer’s disease have category-specific semantic memory difficulty for natural relative to manufactured objects. We assessed the basis for this deficit by asking healthy adults and patients to judge whether pairs of words share a feature (e.g. “banana:lemon – COLOR”). In an fMRI study, healthy adults showed gray matter (GM) activation of temporal-occipital cortex (TOC) where visual-perceptual features may be represented, and prefrontal cortex (PFC) which may contribute to feature selection. Tractography revealed dorsal and ventral stream white matter (WM) projections between PFC and TOC. Patients had greater difficulty with natural than manufactured objects. This was associated with greater overlap between diseased GM areas correlated with natural kinds in patients and fMRI activation in healthy adults for natural than manufactured artifacts, and the dorsal WM projection between PFC and TOC in patients correlated only with judgments of natural kinds. Patients thus remained dependent on the same neural network as controls during judgments of natural kinds, despite disease in these areas. For manufactured objects, patients’ judgments showed limited correlations with PFC and TOC GM areas activated by controls, and did not correlate with the PFC-TOC dorsal WM tract. Regions outside of the PFC–TOC network thus may help support patients’ judgments of manufactured objects. We conclude that a large-scale neural network for semantic memory implicates both feature knowledge representations in modality-specific association cortex and heteromodal regions important for accessing this knowledge, and that patients’ relative deficit for natural kinds is due in part to their dependence on this network despite disease in these areas. PMID:23220494

Category-specific semantic memory: converging evidence from bold fMRI and Alzheimer's disease.

PubMed

Grossman, Murray; Peelle, Jonathan E; Smith, Edward E; McMillan, Corey T; Cook, Philip; Powers, John; Dreyfuss, Michael; Bonner, Michael F; Richmond, Lauren; Boller, Ashley; Camp, Emily; Burkholder, Lisa

2013-03-01

Patients with Alzheimer's disease have category-specific semantic memory difficulty for natural relative to manufactured objects. We assessed the basis for this deficit by asking healthy adults and patients to judge whether pairs of words share a feature (e.g. "banana:lemon-COLOR"). In an fMRI study, healthy adults showed gray matter (GM) activation of temporal-occipital cortex (TOC) where visual-perceptual features may be represented, and prefrontal cortex (PFC) which may contribute to feature selection. Tractography revealed dorsal and ventral stream white matter (WM) projections between PFC and TOC. Patients had greater difficulty with natural than manufactured objects. This was associated with greater overlap between diseased GM areas correlated with natural kinds in patients and fMRI activation in healthy adults for natural kinds. The dorsal WM projection between PFC and TOC in patients correlated only with judgments of natural kinds. Patients thus remained dependent on the same neural network as controls during judgments of natural kinds, despite disease in these areas. For manufactured objects, patients' judgments showed limited correlations with PFC and TOC GM areas activated by controls, and did not correlate with the PFC-TOC dorsal WM tract. Regions outside of the PFC-TOC network thus may help support patients' judgments of manufactured objects. We conclude that a large-scale neural network for semantic memory implicates both feature knowledge representations in modality-specific association cortex and heteromodal regions important for accessing this knowledge, and that patients' relative deficit for natural kinds is due in part to their dependence on this network despite disease in these areas. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

31 CFR 536.506 - Provision of certain legal services authorized.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-07-01

... specially designated narcotics trafficker or the enforcement of any lien, judgment, arbitral award, decree, or other order through execution, garnishment or other judicial process purporting to transfer or...

31 CFR 536.506 - Provision of certain legal services authorized.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-07-01

... specially designated narcotics trafficker or the enforcement of any lien, judgment, arbitral award, decree, or other order through execution, garnishment or other judicial process purporting to transfer or...

Second-Order Beliefs about Intention and Children's Attributions of Sociomoral Judgment

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Shiverick, Sean M.; Moore, Colleen F.

2007-01-01

Predicting how another person will evaluate the intention underlying an action involves consideration of second-order mental states. Children (ages 5-10 years) and college students (N=105) predicted an observer's belief about an actor's intention and evaluated the actor from both their own perspectives and the perspective of the observer. Younger…

Language Production and Reception: A Processability Theory Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Spinner, Patti

2013-01-01

Pienemann's Processability Theory (PT) predicts an order of emergence of morphosyntactic elements in second language (L2) production data. This research investigates whether the same order of emergence can be detected in L2 reception data, specifically, data from a timed audio grammaticality judgment task (GJT). The results from three related…

31 CFR 562.506 - Provision of certain legal services authorized.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-07-01

... into a settlement agreement or the enforcement of any lien, judgment, arbitral award, decree, or other order through execution, garnishment, or other judicial process purporting to transfer or otherwise...

31 CFR 542.507 - Provision of certain legal services authorized.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-07-01

... property or interests in property or the enforcement of any lien, judgment, arbitral award, decree, or other order through execution, garnishment, or other judicial process purporting to transfer or...

31 CFR 537.507 - Provision of certain legal services authorized.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-07-01

... property or interests in property or the enforcement of any lien, judgment, arbitral award, decree, or other order through execution, garnishment, or other judicial process purporting to transfer or...

31 CFR 542.507 - Provision of certain legal services authorized.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-07-01

... property or interests in property or the enforcement of any lien, judgment, arbitral award, decree, or other order through execution, garnishment, or other judicial process purporting to transfer or...

31 CFR 544.507 - Provision of certain legal services authorized.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-07-01

... into a settlement agreement or the enforcement of any lien, judgment, arbitral award, decree, or other order through execution, garnishment, or other judicial process purporting to transfer or otherwise...

31 CFR 541.507 - Provision of certain legal services authorized.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-07-01

... property or interests in property or the enforcement of any lien, judgment, arbitral award, decree, or other order through execution, garnishment, or other judicial process purporting to transfer or...

31 CFR 576.507 - Provision of certain legal services authorized.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-07-01

... into a settlement agreement or the enforcement of any lien, judgment, arbitral award, decree, or other order through execution, garnishment, or other judicial process purporting to transfer or otherwise...

31 CFR 545.513 - Provision of certain legal services authorized.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-07-01

... agreement affecting property or interests in property or the enforcement of any lien, judgment, arbitral award, decree, or other order through execution, garnishment, or other judicial process purporting to...

31 CFR 541.507 - Provision of certain legal services authorized.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-07-01

... property or interests in property or the enforcement of any lien, judgment, arbitral award, decree, or other order through execution, garnishment, or other judicial process purporting to transfer or...

31 CFR 588.507 - Provision of certain legal services authorized.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-07-01

... agreement affecting property or interests in property or the enforcement of any lien, judgment, arbitral award, decree, or other order through execution, garnishment, or other judicial process purporting to...

31 CFR 544.507 - Provision of certain legal services authorized.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-07-01

... into a settlement agreement or the enforcement of any lien, judgment, arbitral award, decree, or other order through execution, garnishment, or other judicial process purporting to transfer or otherwise...

31 CFR 537.507 - Provision of certain legal services authorized.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-07-01

... property or interests in property or the enforcement of any lien, judgment, arbitral award, decree, or other order through execution, garnishment, or other judicial process purporting to transfer or...

Cognitive error as the most frequent contributory factor in cases of medical injury: a study on verdict's judgment among closed claims in Japan.

PubMed

Tokuda, Yasuharu; Kishida, Naoki; Konishi, Ryota; Koizumi, Shunzo

2011-03-01

Cognitive errors in the course of clinical decision-making are prevalent in many cases of medical injury. We used information on verdict's judgment from closed claims files to determine the important cognitive factors associated with cases of medical injury. Data were collected from claims closed between 2001 to 2005 at district courts in Tokyo and Osaka, Japan. In each case, we recorded all the contributory cognitive, systemic, and patient-related factors judged in the verdicts to be causally related to the medical injury. We also analyzed the association between cognitive factors and cases involving paid compensation using a multivariable logistic regression model. Among 274 cases (mean age 49 years old; 45% women), there were 122 (45%) deaths and 67 (24%) major injuries (incomplete recovery within a year). In 103 cases (38%), the verdicts ordered hospitals to pay compensation (median; 8,000,000 Japanese Yen). An error in judgment (199/274, 73%) and failure of vigilance (177/274, 65%) were the most prevalent causative cognitive factors, and error in judgment was also significantly associated with paid compensation (odds ratio, 1.9; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.0-3.4). Systemic causative factors including poor teamwork (11/274, 4%) and technology failure (5/274, 2%) were less common. The closed claims analysis based on verdict's judgment showed that cognitive errors were common in cases of medical injury, with an error in judgment being most prevalent and closely associated with compensation payment. Reduction of this type of error is required to produce safer healthcare. 2010 Society of Hospital Medicine.

Neural correlates of lexicon and grammar: evidence from the production, reading, and judgment of inflection in aphasia.

PubMed

Ullman, Michael T; Pancheva, Roumyana; Love, Tracy; Yee, Eiling; Swinney, David; Hickok, Gregory

2005-05-01

Are the linguistic forms that are memorized in the mental lexicon and those that are specified by the rules of grammar subserved by distinct neurocognitive systems or by a single computational system with relatively broad anatomic distribution? On a dual-system view, the productive -ed-suffixation of English regular past tense forms (e.g., look-looked) depends upon the mental grammar, whereas irregular forms (e.g., dig-dug) are retrieved from lexical memory. On a single-mechanism view, the computation of both past tense types depends on associative memory. Neurological double dissociations between regulars and irregulars strengthen the dual-system view. The computation of real and novel, regular and irregular past tense forms was investigated in 20 aphasic subjects. Aphasics with non-fluent agrammatic speech and left frontal lesions were consistently more impaired at the production, reading, and judgment of regular than irregular past tenses. Aphasics with fluent speech and word-finding difficulties, and with left temporal/temporo-parietal lesions, showed the opposite pattern. These patterns held even when measures of frequency, phonological complexity, articulatory difficulty, and other factors were held constant. The data support the view that the memorized words of the mental lexicon are subserved by a brain system involving left temporal/temporo-parietal structures, whereas aspects of the mental grammar, in particular the computation of regular morphological forms, are subserved by a distinct system involving left frontal structures.

The role of mirroring and mentalizing networks in mediating action intentions in autism.

PubMed

Libero, Lauren E; Maximo, Jose O; Deshpande, Hrishikesh D; Klinger, Laura G; Klinger, Mark R; Kana, Rajesh K

2014-01-01

The ability to interpret agents' intent from their actions is a vital skill in successful social interaction. However, individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have been found to have difficulty in attributing intentions to others. The present study investigated the neural mechanisms of inferring intentions from actions in individuals with ASD. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data were acquired from 21 high-functioning young adults with ASD and 22 typically developing (TD) control participants, while making judgments about the means (how an action is performed) and intention (why an action is performed) of a model's actions. Across both groups of participants, the middle and superior temporal cortex, extending to temporoparietal junction, and posterior cingulate cortex, responded significantly to inferring the intent of an action, while inferior parietal lobule and occipital cortices were active for judgments about the means of an action. Participants with ASD had significantly reduced activation in calcarine sulcus and significantly increased activation in left inferior frontal gyrus, compared to TD peers, while attending to the intentions of actions. Also, ASD participants had weaker functional connectivity between frontal and posterior temporal regions while processing intentions. These results suggest that processing actions and intentions may not be mutually exclusive, with reliance on mirroring and mentalizing mechanisms mediating action understanding. Overall, inferring information about others' actions involves activation of the mirror neuron system and theory-of-mind regions, and this activation (and the synchrony between activated brain regions) appears altered in young adults with ASD.

The lexical processing of abstract and concrete nouns.

PubMed

Papagno, Costanza; Fogliata, Arianna; Catricalà, Eleonora; Miniussi, Carlo

2009-03-31

Recent activation studies have suggested different neural correlates for processing concrete and abstract words. However, the precise localization is far from being defined. One reason for the heterogeneity of these results could lie in the extreme variability of experimental paradigms, ranging from explicit semantic judgments to lexical decision tasks (auditory and/or visual). The present study explored the processing of abstract/concrete nouns by using repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) and a lexical decision paradigm in neurologically-unimpaired subjects. Four sites were investigated: left inferior frontal, bilaterally posterior-superior temporal and left posterior-inferior parietal. An interference on accuracy was found for abstract words when rTMS was applied over the left temporal site, while for concrete words accuracy decreased when rTMS was applied over the right temporal site. Accuracy for abstract words, but not for concrete words, decreased after frontal stimulation as compared to the sham condition. These results suggest that abstract lexical entries are stored in the posterior part of the left temporal superior gyrus and possibly in the left frontal inferior gyrus, while the regions involved in storing concrete items include the right temporal cortex. It cannot be excluded, however, that additional areas, not tested in this experiment, are involved in processing both, concrete and abstract nouns.

Unique semantic space in the brain of each beholder predicts perceived similarity

PubMed Central

Charest, Ian; Kievit, Rogier A.; Schmitz, Taylor W.; Deca, Diana; Kriegeskorte, Nikolaus

2014-01-01

The unique way in which each of us perceives the world must arise from our brain representations. If brain imaging could reveal an individual’s unique mental representation, it could help us understand the biological substrate of our individual experiential worlds in mental health and disease. However, imaging studies of object vision have focused on commonalities between individuals rather than individual differences and on category averages rather than representations of particular objects. Here we investigate the individually unique component of brain representations of particular objects with functional MRI (fMRI). Subjects were presented with unfamiliar and personally meaningful object images while we measured their brain activity on two separate days. We characterized the representational geometry by the dissimilarity matrix of activity patterns elicited by particular object images. The representational geometry remained stable across scanning days and was unique in each individual in early visual cortex and human inferior temporal cortex (hIT). The hIT representation predicted perceived similarity as reflected in dissimilarity judgments. Importantly, hIT predicted the individually unique component of the judgments when the objects were personally meaningful. Our results suggest that hIT brain representational idiosyncrasies accessible to fMRI are expressed in an individual's perceptual judgments. The unique way each of us perceives the world thus might reflect the individually unique representation in high-level visual areas. PMID:25246586

Detection of deception based on fMRI activation patterns underlying the production of a deceptive response and receiving feedback about the success of the deception after a mock murder crime

PubMed Central

Cui, Qian; Vanman, Eric J.; Wei, Dongtao; Yang, Wenjing; Jia, Lei

2014-01-01

The ability of a deceiver to track a victim’s ongoing judgments about the truthfulness of the deceit can be critical for successful deception. However, no study has yet investigated the neural circuits underlying receiving a judgment about one’s lie. To explore this issue, we used a modified Guilty Knowledge Test in a mock murder situation to simultaneously record the neural responses involved in producing deception and later when judgments of that deception were made. Producing deception recruited the bilateral inferior parietal lobules (IPLs), right ventral lateral prefrontal (VLPF) areas and right striatum, among which the activation of the right VLPF contributed mostly to diagnosing the identities of the participants, correctly diagnosing 81.25% of ‘murderers’ and 81.25% of ‘innocents’. Moreover, the participant’s response when their deception was successful uniquely recruited the right middle frontal gyrus, bilateral IPLs, bilateral orbitofrontal cortices, bilateral middle temporal gyrus and left cerebellum, among which the right IPL contributed mostly to diagnosing participants’ identities, correctly diagnosing 93.75% of murderers and 87.5% of innocents. This study shows that neural activity associated with being a successful liar (or not) is a feasible indicator for detecting lies and may be more valid than neural activity associated with producing deception. PMID:23946002

Judgment of musical emotions after cochlear implantation in adults with progressive deafness

PubMed Central

Ambert-Dahan, Emmanuèle; Giraud, Anne-Lise; Sterkers, Olivier; Samson, Séverine

2015-01-01

While cochlear implantation is rather successful in restoring speech comprehension in quiet environments (Nimmons et al., 2008), other auditory tasks, such as music perception, can remain challenging for implant users. Here, we tested how patients who had received a cochlear implant (CI) after post-lingual progressive deafness perceive emotions in music. Thirteen adult CI recipients with good verbal comprehension (dissyllabic words ≥70%) and 13 normal hearing participants matched for age, gender, and education listened to 40 short musical excerpts that selectively expressed fear, happiness, sadness, and peacefulness ( Vieillard et al., 2008). The participants were asked to rate (on a 0–100 scale) how much the musical stimuli expressed these four cardinal emotions, and to judge their emotional valence (unpleasant–pleasant) and arousal (relaxing–stimulating). Although CI users performed above chance level, their emotional judgments (mean correctness scores) were generally impaired for happy, scary, and sad, but not for peaceful excerpts. CI users also demonstrated deficits in perceiving arousal of musical excerpts, whereas rating of valence remained unaffected. The current findings indicate that judgments of emotional categories and dimensions of musical excerpts are not uniformly impaired after cochlear implantation. These results are discussed in relation to the relatively spared abilities of CI users in perceiving temporal (rhythm and metric) as compared to spectral (pitch and timbre) musical dimensions, which might benefit the processing of musical emotions (Cooper et al., 2008). PMID:25814961

Evidence for a neural correlate of a framing effect: bias-specific activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex during credibility judgments.

PubMed

Deppe, M; Schwindt, W; Krämer, J; Kugel, H; Plassmann, H; Kenning, P; Ringelstein, E B

2005-11-15

Neural processes within the medial prefrontal cortex play a crucial role in assessing and integrating emotional and other implicit information during decision-making. Phylogenetically, it was important for the individual to assess the relevance of all kinds of environmental stimuli in order to adapt behavior in a flexible manner. Consequently, we can in principle not exclude that environmental information covertly influences the evaluation of actually decision relevant facts ("framing effect"). To test the hypothesis that the medial prefrontal cortex is involved into a framing effect we employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during a binary credibility judgment task. Twenty-one subjects were asked to judge 30 normalized news magazine headlines by forced answers as "true" or "false". To confound the judgments by formally irrelevant framing information we presented each of the headlines in four different news magazines characterized by varying credibility. For each subject the susceptibility to the judgment confounder (framing information) was assessed by magazine-specific modifications of the answers given. We could show that individual activity changes of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex during the judgments correlate with the degree of an individual's susceptibility to the framing information. We found (i) a neural correlate of a framing effect as postulated by behavioral decision theorists that (ii) reflects interindividual differences in the degree of the susceptibility to framing information.

Relative judgment theory and the mediation of facial recognition: Implications for theories of eyewitness identification.

PubMed

McAdoo, Ryan M; Gronlund, Scott D

2016-01-01

Many in the eyewitness identification community believe that sequential lineups are superior to simultaneous lineups because simultaneous lineups encourage inappropriate choosing due to promoting comparisons among choices (a relative judgment strategy), but sequential lineups reduce this propensity by inducing comparisons of lineup members directly to memory rather than to each other (an absolute judgment strategy). Different versions of the relative judgment theory have implicated both discrete-state and continuous mediation of eyewitness decisions. The theory has never been formally specified, but (Yonelinas, J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn 20:1341-1354, 1994) dual-process models provide one possible specification, thereby allowing us to evaluate how eyewitness decisions are mediated. We utilized a ranking task (Kellen and Klauer, J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn 40:1795-1804, 2014) and found evidence for continuous mediation when facial stimuli match from study to test (Experiment 1) and when they mismatch (Experiment 2). This evidence, which is contrary to a version of relative judgment theory that has gained a lot of traction in the legal community, compels reassessment of the role that guessing plays in eyewitness identification. Future research should continue to test formal explanations in order to advance theory, expedite the development of new procedures that can enhance the reliability of eyewitness evidence, and to facilitate the exploration of task factors and emergent strategies that might influence when recognition is continuously or discretely mediated.

Using a fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method to determine product usability: A proposed theoretical framework.

PubMed

Zhou, Ronggang; Chan, Alan H S

2017-01-01

In order to compare existing usability data to ideal goals or to that for other products, usability practitioners have tried to develop a framework for deriving an integrated metric. However, most current usability methods with this aim rely heavily on human judgment about the various attributes of a product, but often fail to take into account of the inherent uncertainties in these judgments in the evaluation process. This paper presents a universal method of usability evaluation by combining the analytic hierarchical process (AHP) and the fuzzy evaluation method. By integrating multiple sources of uncertain information during product usability evaluation, the method proposed here aims to derive an index that is structured hierarchically in terms of the three usability components of effectiveness, efficiency, and user satisfaction of a product. With consideration of the theoretical basis of fuzzy evaluation, a two-layer comprehensive evaluation index was first constructed. After the membership functions were determined by an expert panel, the evaluation appraisals were computed by using the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation technique model to characterize fuzzy human judgments. Then with the use of AHP, the weights of usability components were elicited from these experts. Compared to traditional usability evaluation methods, the major strength of the fuzzy method is that it captures the fuzziness and uncertainties in human judgments and provides an integrated framework that combines the vague judgments from multiple stages of a product evaluation process.

The Effect of Interference on Temporal Order Memory for Random and Fixed Sequences in Nondemented Older Adults

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tolentino, Jerlyn C.; Pirogovsky, Eva; Luu, Trinh; Toner, Chelsea K.; Gilbert, Paul E.

2012-01-01

Two experiments tested the effect of temporal interference on order memory for fixed and random sequences in young adults and nondemented older adults. The results demonstrate that temporal order memory for fixed and random sequences is impaired in nondemented older adults, particularly when temporal interference is high. However, temporal order…

'Do not resuscitate order' in neonatology: authority rules.

PubMed

Niebrój, L T; Jadamus-Niebrój, D

2007-11-01

Ethical dilemmas in medicine should be resolved in light of four essential principles. To specify and guide concrete actions, it is necessary to 'supplement' these principles by certain other (substantive, authority and procedural) rules. The purpose of this paper is to establish and justify the authority rules regarding the order not to resuscitate newborns. The authority rules are intended to indicate who should decide, but they do not determine what should be chosen. Decision regarding newborn's treatment/letting die depends on medical and quality-of-life judgments. Parents, doctors, and society are considered to possess decisional authority in the matter. However, who in a given case should decide ought to be inferred from the reasoning which assumes, as its premises, the medical and quality-of-life judgments. The 'logical' syntax of this reasoning is presented in this paper.

Game management, context effects, and calibration: the case of yellow cards in soccer.

PubMed

Unkelbach, Christian; Memmert, Daniel

2008-02-01

Referees in German first-league soccer games do not award as many yellow cards in the beginning of a game as should be statistically expected. One explanation for this effect is the concept of game management (Mascarenhas, Collins, & Mortimer, 2002). Alternatively, the consistency model (Haubensak, 1992) explains the effect as a necessity of the judgment situation: Referees need to calibrate a judgment scale, and, to preserve degrees of freedom in that scale, they need to avoid extreme category judgments in the beginning (i.e., yellow cards). Experiment 1 shows that referees who judge scenes in the context of a game award fewer yellow cards than referees who see the same scenes in random order. Experiment 2 shows the combined influence of game management (by explicitly providing information about the game situation) and calibration (early vs. late scenes in the time course of a game). Theoretical implications for expert refereeing and referee training are discussed.

Re J (A Minor) (Wardship: Medical Treatment)

PubMed

1992-06-10

The Civil Division of England's Court of Appeal overturned the lower court's order of mechanical ventilation for a profoundly handicapped sixteen-month-old child against the clinical judgment of the child's doctors. Since hitting his head in a fall at age four weeks, J had not mentally developed past that time and he was blind and he suffered from severe cerebral palsy and epilepsy. He required nasogastric tubal feeding and, although he occasionally responded to sound, whether or not he recognized his caregivers was uncertain. His divorced mother and the local authority shared parental authority over J, who resided with foster parents. The consultant pediatrician reported that if J were to suffer a life-threatening event, ordinary resuscitation, antibiotics and physiotherapy would be appropriate, but intervention with intensive measures including mechanical ventilation would be medically inappropriate. Two other specialists agreed with those findings, but another consultant found mechanical ventilation not to be cruel and thought J could be weaned from it if it became so. The mother and local health authority asked the court to require the health authority to continue all treatment, including mechanical ventilation, of J. The Official Solicitor and the health authority opposed such an order. The lower court granted an interim order requiring mechanical ventilation if necessary over the five weeks prior to the main hearing. The appellate court viewed such an order as an abuse of judicial power and held that the physician's duty to the patient is to treat with the necessary consent in accord with the best clinical judgment and that, as long as those with parental authority consent to J's treatment by the health authority, he must be treated in accord with the best clinical judgment of that authority's personnel.

Differential processing of part-to-whole and part-to-part face priming: an ERP study.

PubMed

Jemel, B; George, N; Chaby, L; Fiori, N; Renault, B

1999-04-06

We provide electrophysiological evidence supporting the hypothesis that part and whole face processing involve distinct functional mechanisms. We used a congruency judgment task and studied part-to-whole and part-to-part priming effects. Neither part-to-whole nor part-to-part conditions elicited early congruency effects on face-specific ERP components, suggesting that activation of the internal representations should occur later on. However, these components showed differential responsiveness to whole faces and isolated eyes. In addition, although late ERP components were affected when the eye targets were not associated with the prime in both conditions, their temporal and topographical features depended on the latter. These differential effects suggest the existence of distributed neural networks in the inferior temporal cortex where part and whole facial representations may be stored.

Annual Fossil-Fuel CO2 Emissions: Uncertainty of Emissions Gridded by On Degree Latitude by One Degree Longitude (1950-2013) (V. 2016)

DOE Data Explorer

Andres, R. J. [CDIAC; Boden, T. A. [CDIAC

2016-01-01

The annual, gridded fossil-fuel CO2 emissions uncertainty estimates from 1950-2013 provided in this database are derived from time series of global, regional, and national fossil-fuel CO2 emissions (Boden et al. 2016). Andres et al. (2016) describes the basic methodology in estimating the uncertainty in the (gridded fossil fuel data product ). This uncertainty is gridded at the same spatial and temporal scales as the mass magnitude maps. This gridded uncertainty includes uncertainty contributions from the spatial, temporal, proxy, and magnitude components used to create the magnitude map of FFCO2 emissions. Throughout this process, when assumptions had to be made or expert judgment employed, the general tendency in most cases was toward overestimating or increasing the magnitude of uncertainty.

Monthly Fossil-Fuel CO2 Emissions: Uncertainty of Emissions Gridded by On Degree Latitude by One Degree Longitude (Uncertainties, V.2016)

DOE Data Explorer

Andres, J.A. [Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States); Boden, T.A. [Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)

2016-01-01

The monthly, gridded fossil-fuel CO2 emissions uncertainty estimates from 1950-2013 provided in this database are derived from time series of global, regional, and national fossil-fuel CO2 emissions (Boden et al. 2016). Andres et al. (2016) describes the basic methodology in estimating the uncertainty in the (gridded fossil fuel data product ). This uncertainty is gridded at the same spatial and temporal scales as the mass magnitude maps. This gridded uncertainty includes uncertainty contributions from the spatial, temporal, proxy, and magnitude components used to create the magnitude map of FFCO2 emissions. Throughout this process, when assumptions had to be made or expert judgment employed, the general tendency in most cases was toward overestimating or increasing the magnitude of uncertainty.

"Big Brown Dog" or "Brown Big Dog?" An Electrophysiological Study of Semantic Constraints on Prenominal Adjective Order

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kemmerer, David; Weber-Fox, Christine; Price, Karen; Zdanczyk, Cynthia; Way, Heather

2007-01-01

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants read and made acceptability judgments about sentences containing three types of adjective sequences: (1) normal sequences--e.g., "Jennifer rode a huge gray elephant"; (2) reversed sequences that violate grammatical-semantic constraints on linear order--e.g., *"Jennifer rode a…

31 CFR 586.509 - Provision of certain legal services authorized.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-07-01

... property are blocked pursuant to § 586.201 or the enforcement of any lien, judgment, arbitral award, decree, or other order through execution, garnishment or other judicial process purporting to transfer or...

Sometimes area counts more than number.

PubMed

Hurewitz, Felicia; Gelman, Rochel; Schnitzer, Brian

2006-12-19

Using an interference paradigm, we show across three experiments that adults' order judgments of numbers, sizes, or combined area of dots in pairs of arrays occur spontaneously and automatically, but at different speeds and levels of accuracy. Experiment 1 used circles whose sizes varied between but not within arrays. Variation in circle size interfered with judgments of which array had more circles. Experiment 2 used displays in which circle size varied within and between arrays. Between-array differences in the amount of "circle stuff" (area occupied by circles) interfered with judgments of number. Experiment 3 examined whether variation in number also interferes with judgments of area. Interference between discrete and continuous stimulus dimensions occurred in both directions, although it was stronger from the continuous to the discrete than vice versa. These results bear on interpretations of studies with infants and preschoolers wherein subjects respond on the basis of continuous quantity rather than discrete quantity. In light of our results with adults, these findings do not license the conclusion that young children cannot represent discrete quantity. Absent data on attentional hierarchies and speed of processing, it is premature to conclude that infant and child quantity processes are fundamentally different from that of adults.

Models of temporal enhanced ultrasound data for prostate cancer diagnosis: the impact of time-series order

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Nahlawi, Layan; Goncalves, Caroline; Imani, Farhad; Gaed, Mena; Gomez, Jose A.; Moussa, Madeleine; Gibson, Eli; Fenster, Aaron; Ward, Aaron D.; Abolmaesumi, Purang; Mousavi, Parvin; Shatkay, Hagit

2017-03-01

Recent studies have shown the value of Temporal Enhanced Ultrasound (TeUS) imaging for tissue characterization in transrectal ultrasound-guided prostate biopsies. Here, we present results of experiments designed to study the impact of temporal order of the data in TeUS signals. We assess the impact of variations in temporal order on the ability to automatically distinguish benign prostate-tissue from malignant tissue. We have previously used Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) to model TeUS data, as HMMs capture temporal order in time series. In the work presented here, we use HMMs to model malignant and benign tissues; the models are trained and tested on TeUS signals while introducing variation to their temporal order. We first model the signals in their original temporal order, followed by modeling the same signals under various time rearrangements. We compare the performance of these models for tissue characterization. Our results show that models trained over the original order-preserving signals perform statistically significantly better for distinguishing between malignant and benign tissues, than those trained on rearranged signals. The performance degrades as the amount of temporal-variation increases. Specifically, accuracy of tissue characterization decreases from 85% using models trained on original signals to 62% using models trained and tested on signals that are completely temporally-rearranged. These results indicate the importance of order in characterization of tissue malignancy from TeUS data.

Integration across Time Determines Path Deviation Discrimination for Moving Objects

PubMed Central

Whitaker, David; Levi, Dennis M.; Kennedy, Graeme J.

2008-01-01

Background Human vision is vital in determining our interaction with the outside world. In this study we characterize our ability to judge changes in the direction of motion of objects–a common task which can allow us either to intercept moving objects, or else avoid them if they pose a threat. Methodology/Principal Findings Observers were presented with objects which moved across a computer monitor on a linear path until the midline, at which point they changed their direction of motion, and observers were required to judge the direction of change. In keeping with the variety of objects we encounter in the real world, we varied characteristics of the moving stimuli such as velocity, extent of motion path and the object size. Furthermore, we compared performance for moving objects with the ability of observers to detect a deviation in a line which formed the static trace of the motion path, since it has been suggested that a form of static memory trace may form the basis for these types of judgment. The static line judgments were well described by a ‘scale invariant’ model in which any two stimuli which possess the same two-dimensional geometry (length/width) result in the same level of performance. Performance for the moving objects was entirely different. Irrespective of the path length, object size or velocity of motion, path deviation thresholds depended simply upon the duration of the motion path in seconds. Conclusions/Significance Human vision has long been known to integrate information across space in order to solve spatial tasks such as judgment of orientation or position. Here we demonstrate an intriguing mechanism which integrates direction information across time in order to optimize the judgment of path deviation for moving objects. PMID:18414653

Scale invariance of temporal order discrimination using complex, naturalistic events

PubMed Central

Kwok, Sze Chai; Macaluso, Emiliano

2015-01-01

Recent demonstrations of scale invariance in cognitive domains prompted us to investigate whether a scale-free pattern might exist in retrieving the temporal order of events from episodic memory. We present four experiments using an encoding-retrieval paradigm with naturalistic stimuli (movies or video clips). Our studies show that temporal order judgement retrieval times were negatively correlated with the temporal separation between two events in the movie. This relation held, irrespective of whether temporal distances were on the order of tens of minutes (Exp 1−2) or just a few seconds (Exp 3−4). Using the SIMPLE model, we factored in the retention delays between encoding and retrieval (delays of 24 h, 15 min, 1.5–2.5 s, and 0.5 s for Exp 1–4, respectively) and computed a temporal similarity score for each trial. We found a positive relation between similarity and retrieval times; that is, the more temporally similar two events, the slower the retrieval of their temporal order. Using Bayesian analysis, we confirmed the equivalence of the RT/similarity relation across all experiments, which included a vast range of temporal distances and retention delays. These results provide evidence for scale invariance during the retrieval of temporal order of episodic memories. PMID:25909581

Moral Severity is Represented as a Domain-General Magnitude.

PubMed

Powell, Derek; Horne, Zachary

2017-03-01

The severity of moral violations can vary by degree. For instance, although both are immoral, murder is a more severe violation than lying. Though this point is well established in Ethics and the law, relatively little research has been directed at examining how moral severity is represented psychologically. Most prominent moral psychological theories are aimed at explaining first-order moral judgments and are silent on second-order metaethical judgments, such as comparisons of severity. Here, the relative severity of 20 moral violations was established in a preliminary study. Then, a second group of participants were asked to decide which of two moral violations was more severe for all possible combinations of these 20 violations. Participant's response times exhibited two signatures of domain-general magnitude comparisons: we observed both a distance effect and a semantic congruity effect. These findings suggest that moral severity is represented in a similar fashion as other continuous magnitudes.

An improved rotated staggered-grid finite-difference method with fourth-order temporal accuracy for elastic-wave modeling in anisotropic media

DOE PAGES

Gao, Kai; Huang, Lianjie

2017-08-31

The rotated staggered-grid (RSG) finite-difference method is a powerful tool for elastic-wave modeling in 2D anisotropic media where the symmetry axes of anisotropy are not aligned with the coordinate axes. We develop an improved RSG scheme with fourth-order temporal accuracy to reduce the numerical dispersion associated with prolonged wave propagation or a large temporal step size. The high-order temporal accuracy is achieved by including high-order temporal derivatives, which can be converted to high-order spatial derivatives to reduce computational cost. Dispersion analysis and numerical tests show that our method exhibits very low temporal dispersion even with a large temporal step sizemore » for elastic-wave modeling in complex anisotropic media. Using the same temporal step size, our method is more accurate than the conventional RSG scheme. In conclusion, our improved RSG scheme is therefore suitable for prolonged modeling of elastic-wave propagation in 2D anisotropic media.« less

An improved rotated staggered-grid finite-difference method with fourth-order temporal accuracy for elastic-wave modeling in anisotropic media

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Gao, Kai; Huang, Lianjie

The rotated staggered-grid (RSG) finite-difference method is a powerful tool for elastic-wave modeling in 2D anisotropic media where the symmetry axes of anisotropy are not aligned with the coordinate axes. We develop an improved RSG scheme with fourth-order temporal accuracy to reduce the numerical dispersion associated with prolonged wave propagation or a large temporal step size. The high-order temporal accuracy is achieved by including high-order temporal derivatives, which can be converted to high-order spatial derivatives to reduce computational cost. Dispersion analysis and numerical tests show that our method exhibits very low temporal dispersion even with a large temporal step sizemore » for elastic-wave modeling in complex anisotropic media. Using the same temporal step size, our method is more accurate than the conventional RSG scheme. In conclusion, our improved RSG scheme is therefore suitable for prolonged modeling of elastic-wave propagation in 2D anisotropic media.« less

Spatial and temporal order memory in Korsakoff patients.

PubMed

Postma, Albert; Van Asselen, Marieke; Keuper, Olga; Wester, Arie J; Kessels, Roy P C

2006-05-01

This study directly compared how well Korsakoff patients can process spatial and temporal order information in memory under conditions that included presentation of only a single feature (i.e., temporal or spatial information), combined spatiotemporal presentation, and combined spatiotemporal order recall. Korsakoff patients were found to suffer comparable spatial and temporal order recall deficits. Of interest, recall of a single feature was the same when only spatial or temporal information was presented compared to conditions that included combined spatiotemporal, presentation and recall. In contrast, control participants performed worse when they have to recall both spatial and temporal order compared to when they have to recall only one of these features. These findings together indicate that spatial and temporal information are not automatically integrated. Korsakoff patients have profound problems in coding the feature at hand. Moreover, their lower recall of both features at the same time suggests that Korsakoff patients are impaired in binding different contextual attributes together in memory.

The effect of a sequential structure of practice for the training of perceptual-cognitive skills in tennis

PubMed Central

2017-01-01

Objective Anticipation of opponent actions, through the use of advanced (i.e., pre-event) kinematic information, can be trained using video-based temporal occlusion. Typically, this involves isolated opponent skills/shots presented as trials in a random order. However, two different areas of research concerning representative task design and contextual (non-kinematic) information, suggest this structure of practice restricts expert performance. The aim of this study was to examine the effect of a sequential structure of practice during video-based training of anticipatory behavior in tennis, as well as the transfer of these skills to the performance environment. Methods In a pre-practice-retention-transfer design, participants viewed life-sized video of tennis rallies across practice in either a sequential order (sequential group), in which participants were exposed to opponent skills/shots in the order they occur in the sport, or a non-sequential (non-sequential group) random order. Results In the video-based retention test, the sequential group was significantly more accurate in their anticipatory judgments when the retention condition replicated the sequential structure compared to the non-sequential group. In the non-sequential retention condition, the non-sequential group was more accurate than the sequential group. In the field-based transfer test, overall decision time was significantly faster in the sequential group compared to the non-sequential group. Conclusion Findings highlight the benefits of a sequential structure of practice for the transfer of anticipatory behavior in tennis. We discuss the role of contextual information, and the importance of representative task design, for the testing and training of perceptual-cognitive skills in sport. PMID:28355263

Intentionality, Morality, and the Incest Taboo in Madagascar.

PubMed

Sousa, Paulo; Swiney, Lauren

2016-01-01

In a recent article (Astuti and Bloch, 2015), cognitive anthropologists Astuti and Bloch claim that the Malagasy are ambivalent as to whether considerations of intentionality are relevant to moral judgments concerning incest and its presumed catastrophic consequences: when making moral judgments about those who commit incest, the Malagasy take into account whether the incest is intentional or not, but, when making moral judgments relating to incest's catastrophic consequences, they do not take intentionality into account. Astuti and Bloch explain the irrelevance of intentionality in terms of incest entailing such a fundamental attack on the transcendental social order that the Malagasy become dumbfounded and leave aside considerations of intentionality. Finally, they claim that a similar dumbfound reaction is what is involved in the moral dumbfounding concerning incest that social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has found in the US. In this article, we argue that (i) Astuti and Bloch are unclear about many aspects of their claims (in particular, about the moral judgments at stake), (ii) they do not provide sufficient evidence that considerations of intentionality are deemed irrelevant to moral judgments relating to incest's presumed catastrophic consequences (and hence for the claim that the Malagasy are ambivalent), (iii) their hypothesis that conceiving of incest as an attack on the transcendental social renders considerations of intentionality irrelevant lacks coherence, and (iv) the extension of their explanatory account to the moral dumfounding of American students in Haidt's well-known scenario of intentional incest is unwarranted.

Intentionality, Morality, and the Incest Taboo in Madagascar

PubMed Central

Sousa, Paulo; Swiney, Lauren

2016-01-01

In a recent article (Astuti and Bloch, 2015), cognitive anthropologists Astuti and Bloch claim that the Malagasy are ambivalent as to whether considerations of intentionality are relevant to moral judgments concerning incest and its presumed catastrophic consequences: when making moral judgments about those who commit incest, the Malagasy take into account whether the incest is intentional or not, but, when making moral judgments relating to incest’s catastrophic consequences, they do not take intentionality into account. Astuti and Bloch explain the irrelevance of intentionality in terms of incest entailing such a fundamental attack on the transcendental social order that the Malagasy become dumbfounded and leave aside considerations of intentionality. Finally, they claim that a similar dumbfound reaction is what is involved in the moral dumbfounding concerning incest that social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has found in the US. In this article, we argue that (i) Astuti and Bloch are unclear about many aspects of their claims (in particular, about the moral judgments at stake), (ii) they do not provide sufficient evidence that considerations of intentionality are deemed irrelevant to moral judgments relating to incest’s presumed catastrophic consequences (and hence for the claim that the Malagasy are ambivalent), (iii) their hypothesis that conceiving of incest as an attack on the transcendental social renders considerations of intentionality irrelevant lacks coherence, and (iv) the extension of their explanatory account to the moral dumfounding of American students in Haidt’s well-known scenario of intentional incest is unwarranted. PMID:27092099

Social trait judgment and affect recognition from static faces and video vignettes in schizophrenia

PubMed Central

McIntosh, Lindsey G.; Park, Sohee

2014-01-01

Social impairment is a core feature of schizophrenia, present from the pre-morbid stage and predictive of outcome, but the etiology of this deficit remains poorly understood. Successful and adaptive social interactions depend on one’s ability to make rapid and accurate judgments about others in real time. Our surprising ability to form accurate first impressions from brief exposures, known as “thin slices” of behavior has been studied very extensively in healthy participants. We sought to examine affect and social trait judgment from thin slices of static or video stimuli in order to investigate the ability of schizophrenic individuals to form reliable social impressions of others. 21 individuals with schizophrenia (SZ) and 20 matched healthy participants (HC) were asked to identify emotions and social traits for actors in standardized face stimuli as well as brief video clips. Sound was removed from videos to remove all verbal cues. Clinical symptoms in SZ and delusional ideation in both groups were measured. Results showed a general impairment in affect recognition for both types of stimuli in SZ. However, the two groups did not differ in the judgments of trustworthiness, approachability, attractiveness, and intelligence. Interestingly, in SZ, the severity of positive symptoms was correlated with higher ratings of attractiveness, trustworthiness, and approachability. Finally, increased delusional ideation in SZ was associated with a tendency to rate others as more trustworthy, while the opposite was true for HC. These findings suggest that complex social judgments in SZ are affected by symptomatology. PMID:25037526

Using a fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method to determine product usability: A proposed theoretical framework

PubMed Central

Zhou, Ronggang; Chan, Alan H. S.

2016-01-01

BACKGROUND: In order to compare existing usability data to ideal goals or to that for other products, usability practitioners have tried to develop a framework for deriving an integrated metric. However, most current usability methods with this aim rely heavily on human judgment about the various attributes of a product, but often fail to take into account of the inherent uncertainties in these judgments in the evaluation process. OBJECTIVE: This paper presents a universal method of usability evaluation by combining the analytic hierarchical process (AHP) and the fuzzy evaluation method. By integrating multiple sources of uncertain information during product usability evaluation, the method proposed here aims to derive an index that is structured hierarchically in terms of the three usability components of effectiveness, efficiency, and user satisfaction of a product. METHODS: With consideration of the theoretical basis of fuzzy evaluation, a two-layer comprehensive evaluation index was first constructed. After the membership functions were determined by an expert panel, the evaluation appraisals were computed by using the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation technique model to characterize fuzzy human judgments. Then with the use of AHP, the weights of usability components were elicited from these experts. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: Compared to traditional usability evaluation methods, the major strength of the fuzzy method is that it captures the fuzziness and uncertainties in human judgments and provides an integrated framework that combines the vague judgments from multiple stages of a product evaluation process. PMID:28035943

Differential roles of right temporal cortex and Broca's area in pitch processing: evidence from music and Mandarin.

PubMed

Nan, Yun; Friederici, Angela D

2013-09-01

Superior temporal and inferior frontal cortices are involved in the processing of pitch information in the domain of language and music. Here, we used fMRI to test the particular roles of these brain regions in the neural implementation of pitch in music and in tone language (Mandarin) with a group of Mandarin speaking musicians whose pertaining experiences in pitch are similar across domains. Our findings demonstrate that the neural network for pitch processing includes the pars triangularis of Broca's area and the right superior temporal gyrus (STG) across domains. Within this network, pitch sensitive activation in Broca's area is tightly linked to the behavioral performance of pitch congruity judgment, thereby reflecting controlled processes. Activation in the right STG is independent of performance and more sensitive to pitch congruity in music than in tone language, suggesting a domain-specific modulation of the perceptual processes. These observations provide a first glimpse at the cortical pitch processing network shared across domains. Copyright © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc., a Wiley company.

Mental traveling along psychological distances: The effects of cultural syndromes, perspective flexibility, and construal level.

PubMed

Wong, Vincent Chi; Wyer, Robert S

2016-07-01

Individuals' psychological distance from the stimuli they encounter in daily life can influence the abstractness or generality of the mental representations they form of these stimuli. However, these representations can also depend on the perspective from which the stimuli are construed. When individuals have either an individualistic social orientation or a short-term temporal orientation, they construe psychologically distal events more globally than they construe proximal ones, as implied by construal level theory (Trope & Liberman, 2010). When they have either a collectivistic social orientation or a long-term temporal orientation, however, they not only construe the implications of distal events more concretely than individuals with an egocentric perspective but also construe the implications of proximal events in more abstract terms. These effects are mediated by the flexibility of the perspectives that people take when they make judgments. Differences in perspective flexibility account for the impact of both situationally induced differences in social and temporal orientation and more chronic cultural differences in these orientations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

Neuropsychological deficits in temporal lobe epilepsy: A comprehensive review

PubMed Central

Zhao, Fengqing; Kang, Hai; You, LIbo; Rastogi, Priyanka; Venkatesh, D.; Chandra, Mina

2014-01-01

Temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) is the most prevalent form of complex partial seizures with temporal lobe origin of electrical abnormality. Studies have shown that recurrent seizures affect all aspects of cognitive functioning, including memory, language, praxis, executive functions, and social judgment, among several others. In this article, we will review these cognitive impairments along with their neuropathological correlates in a comprehensive manner. We will see that neuropsychological deficits are prevalent in TLE. Much of the effort has been laid on memory due to the notion that temporal lobe brain structures involved in TLE play a central role in consolidating information into memory. It seems that damage to the mesial structure of the temporal lobe, particularly the amygdale and hippocampus, has the main role in these memory difficulties and the neurobiological plausibility of the role of the temporal lobe in different aspects of memory. Here, we will cover the sub-domains of working memory and episodic memory deficits. This is we will further proceed to evaluate the evidences of executive function deficits in TLE and will see that set-shifting among other EFs is specifically affected in TLE as is social cognition. Finally, critical components of language related deficits are also found in the form of word-finding difficulties. To conclude, TLE affects several of cognitive function domains, but the etiopathogenesis of all these dysfunctions remain elusive. Further well-designed studies are needed for a better understanding of these disorders. PMID:25506156

Grouping and Segregation of Sensory Events by Actions in Temporal Audio-Visual Recalibration.

PubMed

Ikumi, Nara; Soto-Faraco, Salvador

2016-01-01

Perception in multi-sensory environments involves both grouping and segregation of events across sensory modalities. Temporal coincidence between events is considered a strong cue to resolve multisensory perception. However, differences in physical transmission and neural processing times amongst modalities complicate this picture. This is illustrated by cross-modal recalibration, whereby adaptation to audio-visual asynchrony produces shifts in perceived simultaneity. Here, we examined whether voluntary actions might serve as a temporal anchor to cross-modal recalibration in time. Participants were tested on an audio-visual simultaneity judgment task after an adaptation phase where they had to synchronize voluntary actions with audio-visual pairs presented at a fixed asynchrony (vision leading or vision lagging). Our analysis focused on the magnitude of cross-modal recalibration to the adapted audio-visual asynchrony as a function of the nature of the actions during adaptation, putatively fostering cross-modal grouping or, segregation. We found larger temporal adjustments when actions promoted grouping than segregation of sensory events. However, a control experiment suggested that additional factors, such as attention to planning/execution of actions, could have an impact on recalibration effects. Contrary to the view that cross-modal temporal organization is mainly driven by external factors related to the stimulus or environment, our findings add supporting evidence for the idea that perceptual adjustments strongly depend on the observer's inner states induced by motor and cognitive demands.

Grouping and Segregation of Sensory Events by Actions in Temporal Audio-Visual Recalibration

PubMed Central

Ikumi, Nara; Soto-Faraco, Salvador

2017-01-01

Perception in multi-sensory environments involves both grouping and segregation of events across sensory modalities. Temporal coincidence between events is considered a strong cue to resolve multisensory perception. However, differences in physical transmission and neural processing times amongst modalities complicate this picture. This is illustrated by cross-modal recalibration, whereby adaptation to audio-visual asynchrony produces shifts in perceived simultaneity. Here, we examined whether voluntary actions might serve as a temporal anchor to cross-modal recalibration in time. Participants were tested on an audio-visual simultaneity judgment task after an adaptation phase where they had to synchronize voluntary actions with audio-visual pairs presented at a fixed asynchrony (vision leading or vision lagging). Our analysis focused on the magnitude of cross-modal recalibration to the adapted audio-visual asynchrony as a function of the nature of the actions during adaptation, putatively fostering cross-modal grouping or, segregation. We found larger temporal adjustments when actions promoted grouping than segregation of sensory events. However, a control experiment suggested that additional factors, such as attention to planning/execution of actions, could have an impact on recalibration effects. Contrary to the view that cross-modal temporal organization is mainly driven by external factors related to the stimulus or environment, our findings add supporting evidence for the idea that perceptual adjustments strongly depend on the observer's inner states induced by motor and cognitive demands. PMID:28154529

Age-related Neural Differences in Affiliation and Isolation

PubMed Central

Beadle, Janelle N.; Yoon, Carolyn; Gutchess, Angela H.

2012-01-01

While previous aging studies have focused on particular components of social perception (e.g., theory of mind, self-referencing), little is known about age-related differences specifically for the neural basis of perception of affiliation and isolation. This study investigates age-related similarities and differences in the neural basis of affiliation and isolation. Participants viewed images of affiliation (groups engaged in social interaction), and isolation (lone individuals), as well as non-social stimuli (e.g., landscapes) while making pleasantness judgments and undergoing functional neuroimaging (BOLD fMRI). Results indicated age-related similarities in response to affiliation and isolation in recruitment of regions involved in theory of mind and self-referencing (e.g. temporal pole, medial prefrontal cortex). Yet, age-related differences also emerged in response to affiliation and isolation in regions implicated in theory of mind as well as self-referencing. Specifically, in response to isolation versus affiliation images, older adults showed greater recruitment than younger adults of the temporal pole, a region that is important for retrieval of personally-relevant memories utilized to understand others’ mental states. Furthermore, in response to images of affiliation versus isolation, older adults showed greater recruitment than younger adults of the precuneus, a region implicated in self-referencing. We suggest that age-related divergence in neural activation patterns underlying judgments of scenes depicting isolation versus affiliation may indicate that older adults’ theory of mind processes are driven by retrieval of isolation-relevant information. Moreover, older adults’ greater recruitment of the precuneus for affiliation versus isolation suggests that the positivity bias for emotional information may extend to social information involving affiliation. PMID:22371086

The relationship between neuropsychological tests of visuospatial function and lobar cortical thickness.

PubMed

Zink, Davor N; Miller, Justin B; Caldwell, Jessica Z K; Bird, Christopher; Banks, Sarah J

2018-06-01

Tests of visuospatial function are often administered in comprehensive neuropsychological evaluations. These tests are generally considered assays of parietal lobe function; however, the neural correlates of these tests, using modern imaging techniques, are not well understood. In the current study we investigated the relationship between three commonly used tests of visuospatial function and lobar cortical thickness in each hemisphere. Data from 374 patients who underwent a neuropsychological evaluation and MRI scans in an outpatient dementia clinic were included in the analysis. We examined the relationships between cortical thickness, as assessed with Freesurfer, and performance on three tests: Judgment of Line Orientation (JoLO), Block Design (BD) from the Fourth edition of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, and Brief Visuospatial Memory Test-Revised Copy Trial (BVMT-R-C) in patients who showed overall average performance on these tasks. Using a series of multiple regression models, we assessed which lobe's overall cortical thickness best predicted test performance. Among the individual lobes, JoLO performance was best predicted by cortical thickness in the right temporal lobe. BD performance was best predicted by cortical thickness in the right parietal lobe, and BVMT-R-C performance was best predicted by cortical thickness in the left parietal lobe. Performance on constructional tests of visuospatial function appears to correspond best with underlying cortical thickness of the parietal lobes, while performance on visuospatial judgment tests appears to correspond best to temporal lobe thickness. Future research using voxel-wise and connectivity techniques and including more diverse samples will help further understanding of the regions and networks involved in visuospatial tests.

Wanted: Secretary

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ryan, LaVerne C.

1974-01-01

Common qualifications for secretarial help are listed along with employers' pet peeves. Business educators must train prospective secretaries in qualities such as helpfulness, willingness to work, and judgment as well as in skills, in order to prepare them more adequately for the job market. (AG)

10 CFR 50.102 - Commission order for operation after revocation.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-01-01

... be operated for a period of time as, in the judgment of the Commission, the public convenience and... facility shall become effective. Just compensation shall be paid for the use of the facility. [40 FR 8790...

The effects of context on multidimensional spatial cognitive models. Ph.D. Thesis - Arizona Univ.

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Dupnick, E. G.

1979-01-01

Spatial cognitive models obtained by multidimensional scaling represent cognitive structure by defining alternatives as points in a coordinate space based on relevant dimensions such that interstimulus dissimilarities perceived by the individual correspond to distances between the respective alternatives. The dependence of spatial models on the context of the judgments required of the individual was investigated. Context, which is defined as a perceptual interpretation and cognitive understanding of a judgment situation, was analyzed and classified with respect to five characteristics: physical environment, social environment, task definition, individual perspective, and temporal setting. Four experiments designed to produce changes in the characteristics of context and to test the effects of these changes upon individual cognitive spaces are described with focus on experiment design, objectives, statistical analysis, results, and conclusions. The hypothesis is advanced that an individual can be characterized as having a master cognitive space for a set of alternatives. When the context changes, the individual appears to change the dimension weights to give a new spatial configuration. Factor analysis was used in the interpretation and labeling of cognitive space dimensions.

From Vivaldi to Beatles and back: predicting lateralized brain responses to music.

PubMed

Alluri, Vinoo; Toiviainen, Petri; Lund, Torben E; Wallentin, Mikkel; Vuust, Peter; Nandi, Asoke K; Ristaniemi, Tapani; Brattico, Elvira

2013-12-01

We aimed at predicting the temporal evolution of brain activity in naturalistic music listening conditions using a combination of neuroimaging and acoustic feature extraction. Participants were scanned using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) while listening to two musical medleys, including pieces from various genres with and without lyrics. Regression models were built to predict voxel-wise brain activations which were then tested in a cross-validation setting in order to evaluate the robustness of the hence created models across stimuli. To further assess the generalizability of the models we extended the cross-validation procedure by including another dataset, which comprised continuous fMRI responses of musically trained participants to an Argentinean tango. Individual models for the two musical medleys revealed that activations in several areas in the brain belonging to the auditory, limbic, and motor regions could be predicted. Notably, activations in the medial orbitofrontal region and the anterior cingulate cortex, relevant for self-referential appraisal and aesthetic judgments, could be predicted successfully. Cross-validation across musical stimuli and participant pools helped identify a region of the right superior temporal gyrus, encompassing the planum polare and the Heschl's gyrus, as the core structure that processed complex acoustic features of musical pieces from various genres, with or without lyrics. Models based on purely instrumental music were able to predict activation in the bilateral auditory cortices, parietal, somatosensory, and left hemispheric primary and supplementary motor areas. The presence of lyrics on the other hand weakened the prediction of activations in the left superior temporal gyrus. Our results suggest spontaneous emotion-related processing during naturalistic listening to music and provide supportive evidence for the hemispheric specialization for categorical sounds with realistic stimuli. We herewith introduce a powerful means to predict brain responses to music, speech, or soundscapes across a large variety of contexts. © 2013.

Reward priming eliminates color-driven affect in perception.

PubMed

Hu, Kesong

2018-01-03

Brain and behavior evidence suggests that colors have distinct affective properties. Here, we investigated how reward influences color-driven affect in perception. In Experiment 1, we assessed competition between blue and red patches during a temporal-order judgment (TOJ) across a range of stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). During the value reinforcement, reward was linked to either blue (version 1) or red (version 2) in the experiment. The same stimuli then served as test ones in the following unrewarded, unspeeded TOJ task. Our analysis showed that blue patches were consistently seen as occurring first, even when objectively appearing 2nd at short SOAs. This accelerated perception of blue over red was disrupted by prior primes related to reward (vs. neutral) but not perceptional (blue vs. red) priming. Experiment 2 replicated the findings of Experiment 1 while uncoupling action and stimulus values. These results are consistent with the blue-approach and red-avoidance motivation hypothesis and highlight an active nature of the association of reward priming and color processing. Together, the present study implies a link between reward and color affect and contributes to the understanding of how reward influences color affect in visual processing.

Neural activation and memory for natural scenes: Explicit and spontaneous retrieval.

PubMed

Weymar, Mathias; Bradley, Margaret M; Sege, Christopher T; Lang, Peter J

2018-05-06

Stimulus repetition elicits either enhancement or suppression in neural activity, and a recent fMRI meta-analysis of repetition effects for visual stimuli (Kim, 2017) reported cross-stimulus repetition enhancement in medial and lateral parietal cortex, as well as regions of prefrontal, temporal, and posterior cingulate cortex. Repetition enhancement was assessed here for repeated and novel scenes presented in the context of either an explicit episodic recognition task or an implicit judgment task, in order to study the role of spontaneous retrieval of episodic memories. Regardless of whether episodic memory was explicitly probed or not, repetition enhancement was found in medial posterior parietal (precuneus/cuneus), lateral parietal cortex (angular gyrus), as well as in medial prefrontal cortex (frontopolar), which did not differ by task. Enhancement effects in the posterior cingulate cortex were significantly larger during explicit compared to implicit task, primarily due to a lack of functional activity for new scenes. Taken together, the data are consistent with an interpretation that medial and (ventral) lateral parietal cortex are associated with spontaneous episodic retrieval, whereas posterior cingulate cortical regions may reflect task or decision processes. © 2018 Society for Psychophysiological Research.

Interface strategies in monolingual and end-state L2 Spanish grammars are not that different.

PubMed

Parafita Couto, María C; Mueller Gathercole, Virginia C; Stadthagen-González, Hans

2014-01-01

This study explores syntactic, pragmatic, and lexical influences on adherence to SV and VS orders in native and fluent L2 speakers of Spanish. A judgment task examined 20 native monolingual and 20 longstanding L2 bilingual Spanish speakers' acceptance of SV and VS structures. Seventy-six distinct verbs were tested under a combination of syntactic and pragmatic constraints. Our findings challenge the hypothesis that internal interfaces are acquired more easily than external interfaces (Sorace, 2005, 2011; Sorace and Filiaci, 2006; White, 2006). Additional findings are that (a) bilinguals' judgments are less firm overall than monolinguals' (i.e., monolinguals are more likely to give extreme "yes" or "no" judgments) and (b) individual verbs do not necessarily behave as predicted under standard definitions of unaccusatives and unergatives. Correlations of the patterns found in the data with verb frequencies suggest that usage-based accounts of grammatical knowledge could help provide insight into speakers' knowledge of these constructs.

[The role of the Medical Scientific Council's Forensic Committee in the consent judgments regarding private insurance companies].

PubMed

Horváth, János

2008-08-03

During recent years the Medical Scientific Council's Forensic Committee has provided for the professional revision of the medico-legal experts' opinions and settled the inconsonance between inconsistent opinions. This paper analyses the relationship between the revised experts' opinions in damage suits and the consent judgments. The author assesses and evaluates the role and importance of the revised experts' opinions by the Forensic Committee in the process of lawsuits. The Court has evaluated positively about two thirds of the revised experts' opinions and incorporated the Committee's answers to the forensic questions into the judgments. Sometimes it has happened that the judge misunderstood the basic medical and experts' opinions terms. In certain cases the consultant doctor of forensic medicine, the expert of social insurance and the doctor of the business insurance company used different terms, which resulted in ambiguity of terms appearing in the judgments. The author recommends to elaborate a new methodical newsletter that defines the most important experts' opinions terms and background knowledge regarding damages in a way which is clear to all, and clarifies them according to everyday practice in order to make sure that experts working in different fields and dispensers of justice use a common language.

Examining ERP correlates of recognition memory: Evidence of accurate source recognition without recollection

PubMed Central

Addante, Richard, J.; Ranganath, Charan; Yonelinas, Andrew, P.

2012-01-01

Recollection is typically associated with high recognition confidence and accurate source memory. However, subjects sometimes make accurate source memory judgments even for items that are not confidently recognized, and it is not known whether these responses are based on recollection or some other memory process. In the current study, we measured event related potentials (ERPs) while subjects made item and source memory confidence judgments in order to determine whether recollection supported accurate source recognition responses for items that were not confidently recognized. In line with previous studies, we found that recognition memory was associated with two ERP effects: an early on-setting FN400 effect, and a later parietal old-new effect [Late Positive Component (LPC)], which have been associated with familiarity and recollection, respectively. The FN400 increased gradually with item recognition confidence, whereas the LPC was only observed for highly confident recognition responses. The LPC was also related to source accuracy, but only for items that had received a high confidence item recognition response; accurate source judgments to items that were less confidently recognized did not exhibit the typical ERP correlate of recollection or familiarity, but rather showed a late, broadly distributed negative ERP difference. The results indicate that accurate source judgments of episodic context can occur even when recollection fails. PMID:22548808

Subliminal convergence of Kanji and Kana words: further evidence for functional parcellation of the posterior temporal cortex in visual word perception.

PubMed

Nakamura, Kimihiro; Dehaene, Stanislas; Jobert, Antoinette; Le Bihan, Denis; Kouider, Sid

2005-06-01

Recent evidence has suggested that the human occipitotemporal region comprises several subregions, each sensitive to a distinct processing level of visual words. To further explore the functional architecture of visual word recognition, we employed a subliminal priming method with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during semantic judgments of words presented in two different Japanese scripts, Kanji and Kana. Each target word was preceded by a subliminal presentation of either the same or a different word, and in the same or a different script. Behaviorally, word repetition produced significant priming regardless of whether the words were presented in the same or different script. At the neural level, this cross-script priming was associated with repetition suppression in the left inferior temporal cortex anterior and dorsal to the visual word form area hypothesized for alphabetical writing systems, suggesting that cross-script convergence occurred at a semantic level. fMRI also evidenced a shared visual occipito-temporal activation for words in the two scripts, with slightly more mesial and right-predominant activation for Kanji and with greater occipital activation for Kana. These results thus allow us to separate script-specific and script-independent regions in the posterior temporal lobe, while demonstrating that both can be activated subliminally.

[The problem of economic and population development (author's transl)].

PubMed

Maier, W

1977-04-01

The question is raised whether the apparent complexity and differentiation excludes chance. Generally a chance occurrence is without prior determination. The laws established by economics and demography with mathematical methods are therefore not capable to determine all facts because of their hypothetical arrangement. Reality can only be expressed in a categorical judgment. It is possible to arrive from hypothetical judgments--when there is A so there is B to an existence of a categorical B. Any theory of economic balance and any calculation in a demographic model to arrive at a balanced population development are methods which correlate facts with facts and allow conclusions when the correlation is actually existent. However, no conclusion as to the idea of determination of the generative behavior by economic production can be arrived at. Revorsely the conclusion that sociologie developments and generative behavior are completely independant of economic production is not possible. Hypothetical type of thinking in a model does not exclude chance and each fact has an element of chance in it. This appears to be a heuristic circle. Noncircular conclusions for the practice of life in order to advise, decide and act, do not exist without assumptions and without value judgments. In order to influence the development of the population continued scientific reflection, observation and argumentation is necessary. Correct technical functioning is translated into social realms. New reflections and interpretations are constantly required.

Sure I'm Sure: Prefrontal Oscillations Support Metacognitive Monitoring of Decision Making.

PubMed

Wokke, Martijn E; Cleeremans, Axel; Ridderinkhof, K Richard

2017-01-25

Successful decision making critically involves metacognitive processes such as monitoring and control of our decision process. Metacognition enables agents to modify ongoing behavior adaptively and determine what to do next in situations in which external feedback is not (immediately) available. Despite the importance of metacognition for many aspects of life, little is known about how our metacognitive system operates or about what kind of information is used for metacognitive (second-order) judgments. In particular, it remains an open question whether metacognitive judgments are based on the same information as first-order decisions. Here, we investigated the relationship between metacognitive performance and first-order task performance by recording EEG signals while participants were asked to make a "diagnosis" after seeing a sample of fictitious patient data (a complex pattern of colored moving dots of different sizes). To assess metacognitive performance, participants provided an estimate about the quality of their diagnosis on each trial. Results demonstrate that the information that contributes to first-order decisions differs from the information that supports metacognitive judgments. Further, time-frequency analyses of EEG signals reveal that metacognitive performance is associated specifically with prefrontal theta-band activity. Together, our findings are consistent with a hierarchical model of metacognition and suggest a crucial role for prefrontal oscillations in metacognitive performance. Monitoring and control of our decision process (metacognition) is a crucial aspect of adaptive decision making. Crucially, metacognitive skills enable us to adjust ongoing behavior and determine future decision making when immediate feedback is not available. In the present study, we constructed a "diagnosis task" that allowed us to assess in what way first-order task performance and metacognition are related to each other. Results demonstrate that the contribution of sensory evidence (size, color, and motion direction) differs between first- and second-order decision making. Further, our results indicate that metacognitive performance specifically is orchestrated by means of prefrontal theta oscillations. Together, our findings suggest a hierarchical model of metacognition. Copyright © 2017 the authors 0270-6474/17/370781-09$15.00/0.

The role of the right superior temporal gyrus in stimulus-centered spatial processing.

PubMed

Shah-Basak, Priyanka P; Chen, Peii; Caulfield, Kevin; Medina, Jared; Hamilton, Roy H

2018-05-01

Although emerging neuropsychological evidence supports the involvement of temporal areas, and in particular the right superior temporal gyrus (STG), in allocentric neglect deficits, the role of STG in healthy spatial processing remains elusive. While several functional brain imaging studies have demonstrated involvement of the STG in tasks involving explicit stimulus-centered judgments, prior rTMS studies targeting the right STG did not find the expected neglect-like rightward bias in size judgments using the conventional landmark task. The objective of the current study was to investigate whether disruption of the right STG using inhibitory repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) could impact stimulus-centered, allocentric spatial processing in healthy individuals. A lateralized version of the landmark task was developed to accentuate the dissociation between viewer-centered and stimulus-centered reference frames. We predicted that inhibiting activity in the right STG would decrease accuracy because of induced rightward bias centered on the line stimulus irrespective of its viewer-centered or egocentric locations. Eleven healthy, right-handed adults underwent the lateralized landmark task. After viewing each stimulus, participants had to judge whether the line was bisected, or whether the left (left-long trials) or the right segment (right-long trials) of the line was longer. Participants repeated the task before (pre-rTMS) and after (post-rTMS) receiving 20 min of 1 Hz rTMS over the right STG, the right supramarginal gyrus (SMG), and the vertex (a control site) during three separate visits. Linear mixed models for binomial data were generated with either accuracy or judgment errors as dependent variables, to compare 1) performance across trial types (bisection, non-bisection), and 2) pre- vs. post-rTMS performance between the vertex and the STG and the vertex and the SMG. Line eccentricity (z = 4.31, p < 0.0001) and line bisection (z = 5.49, p < 0.0001) were significant predictors of accuracy. In the models comparing the effects of rTMS, a significant two-way interaction with STG (z = -3.09, p = 0.002) revealed a decrease in accuracy of 9.5% and an increase in errors of the right-long type by 10.7% on bisection trials, in both left and right viewer-centered locations. No significant changes in leftward errors were found. These findings suggested an induced stimulus-centered rightward bias in our participants after STG stimulation. Notably, accuracy or errors were not influenced by SMG stimulation compared to vertex. In line with our predictions, the findings provide compelling evidence for right STG's involvement in healthy stimulus-centered spatial processing. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The logic-bias effect: The role of effortful processing in the resolution of belief-logic conflict.

PubMed

Howarth, Stephanie; Handley, Simon J; Walsh, Clare

2016-02-01

According to the default interventionist dual-process account of reasoning, belief-based responses to reasoning tasks are based on Type 1 processes generated by default, which must be inhibited in order to produce an effortful, Type 2 output based on the validity of an argument. However, recent research has indicated that reasoning on the basis of beliefs may not be as fast and automatic as this account claims. In three experiments, we presented participants with a reasoning task that was to be completed while they were generating random numbers (RNG). We used the novel methodology introduced by Handley, Newstead & Trippas (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 37, 28-43, 2011), which required participants to make judgments based upon either the validity of a conditional argument or the believability of its conclusion. The results showed that belief-based judgments produced lower rates of accuracy overall and were influenced to a greater extent than validity judgments by the presence of a conflict between belief and logic for both simple and complex arguments. These findings were replicated in Experiment 3, in which we controlled for switching demands in a blocked design. Across all three experiments, we found a main effect of RNG, implying that both instructional sets require some effortful processing. However, in the blocked design RNG had its greatest impact on logic judgments, suggesting that distinct executive resources may be required for each type of judgment. We discuss the implications of our findings for the default interventionist account and offer a parallel competitive model as an alternative interpretation for our findings.

Evidence for different processes involved in the effects of nontemporal stimulus size and numerical digit value on duration judgments.

PubMed

Rammsayer, Thomas H; Verner, Martin

2016-05-01

Perceived duration has been shown to be positively related to task-irrelevant, nontemporal stimulus magnitude. To account for this finding, Walsh's (2003) A Theory of Magnitude (ATOM) model suggests that magnitude of time is not differentiated from magnitude of other nontemporal stimulus characteristics and collectively processed by a generalized magnitude system. In Experiment 1, we investigated the combined effects of stimulus size and numerical quantity, as two nontemporal stimulus dimensions covered by the ATOM model, on duration judgments. Participants were required to reproduce the duration of target intervals marked by Arabic digits varying in physical size and numerical value. While the effect of stimulus size was effectively moderated by target duration, the effect of numerical value appeared to require attentional resources directed to the numerical value in order to become effective. Experiment 2 was designed to further elucidate the mediating influence of attention on the effect of numerical value on duration judgments. An effect of numerical value was only observed when participants' attention was directed to digit value, but not when participants were required to pay special attention to digit parity. While the ATOM model implies a common metrics and generalized magnitude processing for time, size, and quantity, the present findings provided converging evidence for the notion of two qualitatively different mechanisms underlying the effects of nontemporal stimulus size and numerical value on duration judgments. Furthermore, our data challenge the implicit common assumption that the effect of numerical value on duration judgments represents a continuously increasing function of digit magnitude.

A note by any other name: Intonation context rapidly changes absolute note judgments.

PubMed

Van Hedger, Stephen C; Heald, Shannon L M; Uddin, Sophia; Nusbaum, Howard C

2018-04-30

Absolute pitch (AP) judgments, by definition, do not require a reference note, and thus might be viewed as context independent. Here, we specifically test whether short-term exposure to particular intonation contexts influences AP categorization on a rapid time scale and whether such context effects can change from moment to moment. In Experiment 1, participants heard duets in which a "lead" instrument always began before a "secondary" instrument. Both instruments independently varied on intonation (flat, in-tune, or sharp). Despite participants being instructed to judge only the intonation of the secondary instrument, we found that participants treated the lead instrument's intonation as "in-tune" and intonation judgments of the secondary instrument were relativized against this standard. In Experiment 2, participants heard a short antecedent context melody (flat, in-tune, or sharp) followed by an isolated target note (flat, in-tune, or sharp). Target note intonation judgments were once again relativized against the context melody's intonation, though only for notes that were experienced in the context or implied by the context key signature. Moreover, maximally contrastive intonation combinations of context and target engendered systematic note misclassifications. For example, a flat melody resulted in a greater likelihood of misclassifying a "sharp F-sharp" as a "G." These results highlight that both intonation and note category judgments among AP possessors are rapidly modified by the listening environment on the order of seconds, arguing against an invariant mental representation of the absolute pitches of notes. Implications for general auditory theories of perception are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Adaptive decision making in a dynamic environment: a test of a sequential sampling model of relative judgment.

PubMed

Vuckovic, Anita; Kwantes, Peter J; Neal, Andrew

2013-09-01

Research has identified a wide range of factors that influence performance in relative judgment tasks. However, the findings from this research have been inconsistent. Studies have varied with respect to the identification of causal variables and the perceptual and decision-making mechanisms underlying performance. Drawing on the ecological rationality approach, we present a theory of the judgment and decision-making processes involved in a relative judgment task that explains how people judge a stimulus and adapt their decision process to accommodate their own uncertainty associated with those judgments. Undergraduate participants performed a simulated air traffic control conflict detection task. Across two experiments, we systematically manipulated variables known to affect performance. In the first experiment, we manipulated the relative distances of aircraft to a common destination while holding aircraft speeds constant. In a follow-up experiment, we introduced a direct manipulation of relative speed. We then fit a sequential sampling model to the data, and used the best fitting parameters to infer the decision-making processes responsible for performance. Findings were consistent with the theory that people adapt to their own uncertainty by adjusting their criterion and the amount of time they take to collect evidence in order to make a more accurate decision. From a practical perspective, the paper demonstrates that one can use a sequential sampling model to understand performance in a dynamic environment, allowing one to make sense of and interpret complex patterns of empirical findings that would otherwise be difficult to interpret using standard statistical analyses. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved.

Social trait judgment and affect recognition from static faces and video vignettes in schizophrenia.

PubMed

McIntosh, Lindsey G; Park, Sohee

2014-09-01

Social impairment is a core feature of schizophrenia, present from the pre-morbid stage and predictive of outcome, but the etiology of this deficit remains poorly understood. Successful and adaptive social interactions depend on one's ability to make rapid and accurate judgments about others in real time. Our surprising ability to form accurate first impressions from brief exposures, known as "thin slices" of behavior has been studied very extensively in healthy participants. We sought to examine affect and social trait judgment from thin slices of static or video stimuli in order to investigate the ability of schizophrenic individuals to form reliable social impressions of others. 21 individuals with schizophrenia (SZ) and 20 matched healthy participants (HC) were asked to identify emotions and social traits for actors in standardized face stimuli as well as brief video clips. Sound was removed from videos to remove all verbal cues. Clinical symptoms in SZ and delusional ideation in both groups were measured. Results showed a general impairment in affect recognition for both types of stimuli in SZ. However, the two groups did not differ in the judgments of trustworthiness, approachability, attractiveness, and intelligence. Interestingly, in SZ, the severity of positive symptoms was correlated with higher ratings of attractiveness, trustworthiness, and approachability. Finally, increased delusional ideation in SZ was associated with a tendency to rate others as more trustworthy, while the opposite was true for HC. These findings suggest that complex social judgments in SZ are affected by symptomatology. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The Values of Negative Teaching.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bier, Jesse

1983-01-01

Advocates introducing high school literature classes by analyzing the serious flaws in an important work such as Edgar Alan Poe's poem, "The Raven," in order to increase student involvement in evaluating literature, strengthen student trust of the teacher's judgment, and motivate students for positive criticism. (MM)

Regulating recognition decisions through incremental reinforcement learning.

PubMed

Han, Sanghoon; Dobbins, Ian G

2009-06-01

Does incremental reinforcement learning influence recognition memory judgments? We examined this question by subtly altering the relative validity or availability of feedback in order to differentially reinforce old or new recognition judgments. Experiment 1 probabilistically and incorrectly indicated that either misses or false alarms were correct in the context of feedback that was otherwise accurate. Experiment 2 selectively withheld feedback for either misses or false alarms in the context of feedback that was otherwise present. Both manipulations caused prominent shifts of recognition memory decision criteria that remained for considerable periods even after feedback had been altogether removed. Overall, these data demonstrate that incremental reinforcement-learning mechanisms influence the degree of caution subjects exercise when evaluating explicit memories.

Development of Sensitivity to Audiovisual Temporal Asynchrony during Mid-Childhood

PubMed Central

Kaganovich, Natalya

2015-01-01

Temporal proximity is one of the key factors determining whether events in different modalities are integrated into a unified percept. Sensitivity to audiovisual temporal asynchrony has been studied in adults in great detail. However, how such sensitivity matures during childhood is poorly understood. We examined perception of audiovisual temporal asynchrony in 7-8-year-olds, 10-11-year-olds, and adults by using a simultaneity judgment task (SJT). Additionally, we evaluated whether non-verbal intelligence, verbal ability, attention skills, or age influenced children's performance. On each trial, participants saw an explosion-shaped figure and heard a 2 kHz pure tone. These occurred at the following stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) - 0, 100, 200, 300, 400, and 500 ms. In half of all trials, the visual stimulus appeared first (VA condition) while in another half, the auditory stimulus appeared first (AV condition). Both groups of children were significantly more likely than adults to perceive asynchronous events as synchronous at all SOAs exceeding 100 ms, in both VA and AV conditions. Furthermore, only adults exhibited a significant shortening of RT at long SOAs compared to medium SOAs. Sensitivities to the VA and AV temporal asynchronies showed different developmental trajectories, with 10-11-year-olds outperforming 7-8-year-olds at the 300-500 ms SOAs, but only in the AV condition. Lastly, age was the only predictor of children's performance on the SJT. These results provide an important baseline against which children with developmental disorders associated with impaired audiovisual temporal function, such as autism, specific language impairment, and dyslexia may be compared. PMID:26569563

Atypical rapid audio-visual temporal recalibration in autism spectrum disorders.

PubMed

Noel, Jean-Paul; De Niear, Matthew A; Stevenson, Ryan; Alais, David; Wallace, Mark T

2017-01-01

Changes in sensory and multisensory function are increasingly recognized as a common phenotypic characteristic of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Furthermore, much recent evidence suggests that sensory disturbances likely play an important role in contributing to social communication weaknesses-one of the core diagnostic features of ASD. An established sensory disturbance observed in ASD is reduced audiovisual temporal acuity. In the current study, we substantially extend these explorations of multisensory temporal function within the framework that an inability to rapidly recalibrate to changes in audiovisual temporal relations may play an important and under-recognized role in ASD. In the paradigm, we present ASD and typically developing (TD) children and adolescents with asynchronous audiovisual stimuli of varying levels of complexity and ask them to perform a simultaneity judgment (SJ). In the critical analysis, we test audiovisual temporal processing on trial t as a condition of trial t - 1. The results demonstrate that individuals with ASD fail to rapidly recalibrate to audiovisual asynchronies in an equivalent manner to their TD counterparts for simple and non-linguistic stimuli (i.e., flashes and beeps, hand-held tools), but exhibit comparable rapid recalibration for speech stimuli. These results are discussed in terms of prior work showing a speech-specific deficit in audiovisual temporal function in ASD, and in light of current theories of autism focusing on sensory noise and stability of perceptual representations. Autism Res 2017, 10: 121-129. © 2016 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. © 2016 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Audiovisual integration in depth: multisensory binding and gain as a function of distance.

PubMed

Noel, Jean-Paul; Modi, Kahan; Wallace, Mark T; Van der Stoep, Nathan

2018-07-01

The integration of information across sensory modalities is dependent on the spatiotemporal characteristics of the stimuli that are paired. Despite large variation in the distance over which events occur in our environment, relatively little is known regarding how stimulus-observer distance affects multisensory integration. Prior work has suggested that exteroceptive stimuli are integrated over larger temporal intervals in near relative to far space, and that larger multisensory facilitations are evident in far relative to near space. Here, we sought to examine the interrelationship between these previously established distance-related features of multisensory processing. Participants performed an audiovisual simultaneity judgment and redundant target task in near and far space, while audiovisual stimuli were presented at a range of temporal delays (i.e., stimulus onset asynchronies). In line with the previous findings, temporal acuity was poorer in near relative to far space. Furthermore, reaction time to asynchronously presented audiovisual targets suggested a temporal window for fast detection-a range of stimuli asynchronies that was also larger in near as compared to far space. However, the range of reaction times over which multisensory response enhancement was observed was limited to a restricted range of relatively small (i.e., 150 ms) asynchronies, and did not differ significantly between near and far space. Furthermore, for synchronous presentations, these distance-related (i.e., near vs. far) modulations in temporal acuity and multisensory gain correlated negatively at an individual subject level. Thus, the findings support the conclusion that multisensory temporal binding and gain are asymmetrically modulated as a function of distance from the observer, and specifies that this relationship is specific for temporally synchronous audiovisual stimulus presentations.

Development of cognitive processing and judgments of knowledge in medical students: Analysis of progress test results.

PubMed

Cecilio-Fernandes, Dario; Kerdijk, Wouter; Jaarsma, A D Debbie C; Tio, René A

2016-11-01

Beside acquiring knowledge, medical students should also develop the ability to apply and reflect on it, requiring higher-order cognitive processing. Ideally, students should have reached higher-order cognitive processing when they enter the clinical program. Whether this is the case, is unknown. We investigated students' cognitive processing, and awareness of their knowledge during medical school. Data were gathered from 347 first-year preclinical and 196 first-year clinical students concerning the 2008 and 2011 Dutch progress tests. Questions were classified based upon Bloom's taxonomy: "simple questions" requiring lower and "vignette questions" requiring higher-order cognitive processing. Subsequently, we compared students' performance and awareness of their knowledge in 2008 to that in 2011 for each question type. Students' performance on each type of question increased as students progressed. Preclinical and first-year clinical students performed better on simple questions than on vignette questions. Third-year clinical students performed better on vignette questions than on simple questions. The accuracy of students' judgment of knowledge decreased over time. The progress test is a useful tool to assess students' cognitive processing and awareness of their knowledge. At the end of medical school, students achieved higher-order cognitive processing but their awareness of their knowledge had decreased.

34 CFR 80.36 - Procurement.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-07-01

... policies and procedures it uses for procurements from its non-Federal funds. The State will ensure that... will be responsible, in accordance with good administrative practice and sound business judgment, for... unreasonable requirements on firms in order for them to qualify to do business, (ii) Requiring unnecessary...

Distortion of time interval reproduction in an epileptic patient with a focal lesion in the right anterior insular/inferior frontal cortices.

PubMed

Monfort, Vincent; Pfeuty, Micha; Klein, Madelyne; Collé, Steffie; Brissart, Hélène; Jonas, Jacques; Maillard, Louis

2014-11-01

This case report on an epileptic patient suffering from a focal lesion at the junction of the right anterior insular cortex (AIC) and the adjacent inferior frontal cortex (IFC) provides the first evidence that damage to this brain region impairs temporal performance in a visual time reproduction task in which participants had to reproduce the presentation duration (3, 5 and 7s) of emotionally-neutral and -negative pictures. Strikingly, as compared to a group of healthy subjects, the AIC/IFC case considerably overestimated reproduction times despite normal variability. The effect was obtained in all duration and emotion conditions. Such a distortion in time reproduction was not observed in four other epileptic patients without insular or inferior frontal damage. Importantly, the absolute extent of temporal over-reproduction increased in proportion to the magnitude of the target durations, which concurs with the scalar property of interval timing, and points to an impairment of time-specific rather than of non temporal (such as motor) mechanisms. Our data suggest that the disability in temporal reproduction of the AIC/IFC case would result from a distorted memory representation of the encoded duration, occurring during the process of storage and/or of recovery from memory and leading to a deviation of the temporal judgment during the reproduction task. These findings support the recent proposal that the anterior insular/inferior frontal cortices would be involved in time interval representation. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Spatio-temporal dynamics of brain mechanisms in aversive classical conditioning: high-density event-related potential and brain electrical tomography analyses.

PubMed

Pizzagalli, Diego A; Greischar, Lawrence L; Davidson, Richard J

2003-01-01

Social cognition, including complex social judgments and attitudes, is shaped by individual learning experiences, where affect often plays a critical role. Aversive classical conditioning-a form of associative learning involving a relationship between a neutral event (conditioned stimulus, CS) and an aversive event (unconditioned stimulus, US)-represents a well-controlled paradigm to study how the acquisition of socially relevant knowledge influences behavior and the brain. Unraveling the temporal unfolding of brain mechanisms involved appears critical for an initial understanding about how social cognition operates. Here, 128-channel ERPs were recorded in 50 subjects during the acquisition phase of a differential aversive classical conditioning paradigm. The CS+ (two fearful faces) were paired 50% of the time with an aversive noise (CS upward arrow + /Paired), whereas in the remaining 50% they were not (CS upward arrow + /Unpaired); the CS- (two different fearful faces) were never paired with the noise. Scalp ERP analyses revealed differences between CS upward arrow + /Unpaired and CS- as early as approximately 120 ms post-stimulus. Tomographic source localization analyses revealed early activation modulated by the CS+ in the ventral visual pathway (e.g. fusiform gyrus, approximately 120 ms), right middle frontal gyrus (approximately 176 ms), and precuneus (approximately 240 ms). At approximately 120 ms, the CS- elicited increased activation in the left insula and left middle frontal gyrus. These findings not only confirm a critical role of prefrontal, insular, and precuneus regions in aversive conditioning, but they also suggest that biologically and socially salient information modulates activation at early stages of the information processing flow, and thus furnish initial insight about how affect and social judgments operate.

Cognitive and anatomic double dissociation in the representation of concrete and abstract words in semantic variant and behavioral variant frontotemporal degeneration.

PubMed

Cousins, Katheryn A Q; York, Collin; Bauer, Laura; Grossman, Murray

2016-04-01

We examine the anatomic basis for abstract and concrete lexical representations in semantic memory by assessing patients with focal neurodegenerative disease. Prior evidence from healthy adult studies suggests that there may be an anatomical dissociation between abstract and concrete representations: abstract words more strongly activate the left inferior frontal gyrus relative to concrete words, while concrete words more strongly activate left anterior-inferior temporal regions. However, this double dissociation has not been directly examined. We test this dissociation in two patient groups with focal cortical atrophy in each of these regions, the behavioral variant of Frontotemporal Degeneration (bvFTD) and the semantic variant of Primary Progressive Aphasia (svPPA). We administered an associativity judgment task for abstract and concrete words, where subjects select which of two words is best associated with a given target word. Both bvFTD and svPPA patients were significantly impaired in their overall performance compared to controls. While controls treated concrete and abstract words equally, we found a category-specific double dissociation in patients' judgments: bvFTD patients showed a concreteness effect (CE), with significantly worse performance for abstract compared to concrete words, while svPPA patients showed reversal of the CE, with significantly worse performance for concrete over abstract words. Regression analyses also revealed an anatomic double dissociation: The CE is associated with inferior frontal atrophy in bvFTD, while reversal of the CE is associated with left anterior-inferior temporal atrophy in svPPA. These results support a cognitive and anatomic model of semantic memory organization where abstract and concrete representations are supported by dissociable neuroanatomic substrates. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

People can understand descriptions of motion without activating visual motion brain regions

PubMed Central

Dravida, Swethasri; Saxe, Rebecca; Bedny, Marina

2013-01-01

What is the relationship between our perceptual and linguistic neural representations of the same event? We approached this question by asking whether visual perception of motion and understanding linguistic depictions of motion rely on the same neural architecture. The same group of participants took part in two language tasks and one visual task. In task 1, participants made semantic similarity judgments with high motion (e.g., “to bounce”) and low motion (e.g., “to look”) words. In task 2, participants made plausibility judgments for passages describing movement (“A centaur hurled a spear … ”) or cognitive events (“A gentleman loved cheese …”). Task 3 was a visual motion localizer in which participants viewed animations of point-light walkers, randomly moving dots, and stationary dots changing in luminance. Based on the visual motion localizer we identified classic visual motion areas of the temporal (MT/MST and STS) and parietal cortex (inferior and superior parietal lobules). We find that these visual cortical areas are largely distinct from neural responses to linguistic depictions of motion. Motion words did not activate any part of the visual motion system. Motion passages produced a small response in the right superior parietal lobule, but none of the temporal motion regions. These results suggest that (1) as compared to words, rich language stimuli such as passages are more likely to evoke mental imagery and more likely to affect perceptual circuits and (2) effects of language on the visual system are more likely in secondary perceptual areas as compared to early sensory areas. We conclude that language and visual perception constitute distinct but interacting systems. PMID:24009592

Neural mechanism for judging the appropriateness of facial affect.

PubMed

Kim, Ji-Woong; Kim, Jae-Jin; Jeong, Bum Seok; Ki, Seon Wan; Im, Dong-Mi; Lee, Soo Jung; Lee, Hong Shick

2005-12-01

Questions regarding the appropriateness of facial expressions in particular situations arise ubiquitously in everyday social interactions. To determine the appropriateness of facial affect, first of all, we should represent our own or the other's emotional state as induced by the social situation. Then, based on these representations, we should infer the possible affective response of the other person. In this study, we identified the brain mechanism mediating special types of social evaluative judgments of facial affect in which the internal reference is related to theory of mind (ToM) processing. Many previous ToM studies have used non-emotional stimuli, but, because so much valuable social information is conveyed through nonverbal emotional channels, this investigation used emotionally salient visual materials to tap ToM. Fourteen right-handed healthy subjects volunteered for our study. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine brain activation during the judgmental task for the appropriateness of facial affects as opposed to gender matching tasks. We identified activation of a brain network, which includes both medial frontal cortex, left temporal pole, left inferior frontal gyrus, and left thalamus during the judgmental task for appropriateness of facial affect compared to the gender matching task. The results of this study suggest that the brain system involved in ToM plays a key role in judging the appropriateness of facial affect in an emotionally laden situation. In addition, our result supports that common neural substrates are involved in performing diverse kinds of ToM tasks irrespective of perceptual modalities and the emotional salience of test materials.

When eye movements express memory for old and new scenes in the absence of awareness and independent of hippocampus

PubMed Central

Smith, Christine N.; Squire, Larry R.

2017-01-01

Eye movements can reflect memory. For example, participants make fewer fixations and sample fewer regions when viewing old versus new scenes (the repetition effect). It is unclear whether the repetition effect requires that participants have knowledge (awareness) of the old–new status of the scenes or if it can occur independent of knowledge about old–new status. It is also unclear whether the repetition effect is hippocampus-dependent or hippocampus-independent. A complication is that testing conscious memory for the scenes might interfere with the expression of unconscious (unaware), experience-dependent eye movements. In experiment 1, 75 volunteers freely viewed old and new scenes without knowledge that memory for the scenes would later be tested. Participants then made memory judgments and confidence judgments for each scene during a surprise recognition memory test. Participants exhibited the repetition effect regardless of the accuracy or confidence associated with their memory judgments (i.e., the repetition effect was independent of their awareness of the old–new status of each scene). In experiment 2, five memory-impaired patients with medial temporal lobe damage and six controls also viewed old and new scenes without expectation of memory testing. Both groups exhibited the repetition effect, even though the patients were impaired at recognizing which scenes were old and which were new. Thus, when participants viewed scenes without expectation of memory testing, eye movements associated with old and new scenes reflected unconscious, hippocampus-independent memory. These findings are consistent with the formulation that, when memory is expressed independent of awareness, memory is hippocampus-independent. PMID:28096499

Self-evaluation of decision-making: A general Bayesian framework for metacognitive computation.

PubMed

Fleming, Stephen M; Daw, Nathaniel D

2017-01-01

People are often aware of their mistakes, and report levels of confidence in their choices that correlate with objective performance. These metacognitive assessments of decision quality are important for the guidance of behavior, particularly when external feedback is absent or sporadic. However, a computational framework that accounts for both confidence and error detection is lacking. In addition, accounts of dissociations between performance and metacognition have often relied on ad hoc assumptions, precluding a unified account of intact and impaired self-evaluation. Here we present a general Bayesian framework in which self-evaluation is cast as a "second-order" inference on a coupled but distinct decision system, computationally equivalent to inferring the performance of another actor. Second-order computation may ensue whenever there is a separation between internal states supporting decisions and confidence estimates over space and/or time. We contrast second-order computation against simpler first-order models in which the same internal state supports both decisions and confidence estimates. Through simulations we show that second-order computation provides a unified account of different types of self-evaluation often considered in separate literatures, such as confidence and error detection, and generates novel predictions about the contribution of one's own actions to metacognitive judgments. In addition, the model provides insight into why subjects' metacognition may sometimes be better or worse than task performance. We suggest that second-order computation may underpin self-evaluative judgments across a range of domains. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

Kerins v. Hartley.

PubMed

1993-07-30

A California appellate court reversed a summary judgment order against a patient who claimed that she had suffered severe mental anguish and emotional distress upon learning that a surgeon who had previously operated on her had tested HIV positive. The patient, Kerins, had undergone surgery for a uterine tumor. Five days after performing this surgery, her surgeon, Dr. Gordon, learned that he had tested HIV positive. Approximately eighteen months later, Ms. Kerins discovered that Dr. Gordon was suffering from acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) when Dr. Gordon appeared on a television broadcast discussing AIDS discrimination. Within a day of the broadcast, Kerins was tested for the virus; within two weeks, she was notified that she had not been infected. The lower court had dismissed her complaint with a summary judgment order favoring the doctor and his associates. The appellate court reversed this order, stating that a patient could recover damages against a doctor for "the window of anxiety," the period between her discovery of the doctor's infection and notification of being free of the virus. Further, the court determined that, in this case, factual questions still existed concerning the severity of Kerins' emotional distress during this time and that these issues should be settled by a trial court.

Temporal cognition: Connecting subjective time to perception, attention, and memory.

PubMed

Matthews, William J; Meck, Warren H

2016-08-01

Time is a universal psychological dimension, but time perception has often been studied and discussed in relative isolation. Increasingly, researchers are searching for unifying principles and integrated models that link time perception to other domains. In this review, we survey the links between temporal cognition and other psychological processes. Specifically, we describe how subjective duration is affected by nontemporal stimulus properties (perception), the allocation of processing resources (attention), and past experience with the stimulus (memory). We show that many of these connections instantiate a "processing principle," according to which perceived time is positively related to perceptual vividity and the ease of extracting information from the stimulus. This empirical generalization generates testable predictions and provides a starting-point for integrated theoretical frameworks. By outlining some of the links between temporal cognition and other domains, and by providing a unifying principle for understanding these effects, we hope to encourage time-perception researchers to situate their work within broader theoretical frameworks, and that researchers from other fields will be inspired to apply their insights, techniques, and theorizing to improve our understanding of the representation and judgment of time. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

Influence of musical training on sensitivity to temporal fine structure.

PubMed

Mishra, Srikanta K; Panda, Manasa R; Raj, Swapna

2015-04-01

The objective of this study was to extend the findings that temporal fine structure encoding is altered in musicians by examining sensitivity to temporal fine structure (TFS) in an alternative (non-Western) musician model that is rarely adopted--Indian classical music. The sensitivity to TFS was measured by the ability to discriminate two complex tones that differed in TFS but not in envelope repetition rate. Sixteen South Indian classical (Carnatic) musicians and 28 non-musicians with normal hearing participated in this study. Musicians have significantly lower relative frequency shift at threshold in the TFS task compared to non-musicians. A significant negative correlation was observed between years of musical experience and relative frequency shift at threshold in the TFS task. Test-retest repeatability of thresholds in the TFS tasks was similar for both musicians and non-musicians. The enhanced performance of the Carnatic-trained musicians suggests that the musician advantage for frequency and harmonicity discrimination is not restricted to training in Western classical music, on which much of the previous research on musical training has narrowly focused. The perceptual judgments obtained from non-musicians were as reliable as those of musicians.

Incorporating expert judgments in utility evaluation of bacteroidales qPCR assays for microbial source tracking in a drinking water source.

PubMed

Åström, Johan; Pettersson, Thomas J R; Reischer, Georg H; Norberg, Tommy; Hermansson, Malte

2015-02-03

Several assays for the detection of host-specific genetic markers of the order Bacteroidales have been developed and used for microbial source tracking (MST) in environmental waters. It is recognized that the source-sensitivity and source-specificity are unknown and variable when introducing these assays in new geographic regions, which reduces their reliability and use. A Bayesian approach was developed to incorporate expert judgments with regional assay sensitivity and specificity assessments in a utility evaluation of a human and a ruminant-specific qPCR assay for MST in a drinking water source. Water samples from Lake Rådasjön were analyzed for E. coli, intestinal enterococci and somatic coliphages through cultivation and for human (BacH) and ruminant-specific (BacR) markers through qPCR assays. Expert judgments were collected regarding the probability of human and ruminant fecal contamination based on fecal indicator organism data and subjective information. Using Bayes formula, the conditional probability of a true human or ruminant fecal contamination given the presence of BacH or BacR was determined stochastically from expert judgments and regional qPCR assay performance, using Beta distributions to represent uncertainties. A web-based computational tool was developed for the procedure, which provides a measure of confidence to findings of host-specific markers and demonstrates the information value from these assays.

Incorporating Expert Judgments in Utility Evaluation of Bacteroidales qPCR Assays for Microbial Source Tracking in a Drinking Water Source

PubMed Central

Åström, Johan; Pettersson, Thomas J. R.; Reischer, Georg H.; Norberg, Tommy; Hermansson, Malte

2017-01-01

Several assays for the detection of host-specific genetic markers of the order Bacteroidales have been developed and used for microbial source tracking (MST) in environmental waters. It is recognized that the source-sensitivity and source-specificity are unknown and variable when introducing these assays in new geographic regions, which reduces their reliability and use. A Bayesian approach was developed to incorporate expert judgments with regional assay sensitivity and specificity assessments in a utility evaluation of a human and a ruminant-specific qPCR assay for MST in a drinking water source. Water samples from Lake Rådasjön were analyzed for E. coli, intestinal enterococci and somatic coliphages through cultivation and for human (BacH) and ruminant-specific (BacR) markers through qPCR assays. Expert judgments were collected regarding the probability of human and ruminant fecal contamination based on fecal indicator organism data and subjective information. Using Bayes formula, the conditional probability of a true human or ruminant fecal contamination given the presence of BacH or BacR was determined stochastically from expert judgments and regional qPCR assay performance, using Beta distributions to represent uncertainties. A web-based computational tool was developed for the procedure, which provides a measure of confidence to findings of host-specific markers and demonstrates the information value from these assays. PMID:25545113

Flexible retrospective selection of temporal resolution in real-time speech MRI using a golden-ratio spiral view order.

PubMed

Kim, Yoon-Chul; Narayanan, Shrikanth S; Nayak, Krishna S

2011-05-01

In speech production research using real-time magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), the analysis of articulatory dynamics is performed retrospectively. A flexible selection of temporal resolution is highly desirable because of natural variations in speech rate and variations in the speed of different articulators. The purpose of the study is to demonstrate a first application of golden-ratio spiral temporal view order to real-time speech MRI and investigate its performance by comparison with conventional bit-reversed temporal view order. Golden-ratio view order proved to be more effective at capturing the dynamics of rapid tongue tip motion. A method for automated blockwise selection of temporal resolution is presented that enables the synthesis of a single video from multiple temporal resolution videos and potentially facilitates subsequent vocal tract shape analysis. Copyright © 2010 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

Working Memory for Serial Order Is Dysfunctional in Adults With a History of Developmental Dyscalculia: Evidence From Behavioral and Neuroimaging Data.

PubMed

Attout, Lucie; Salmon, Eric; Majerus, Steve

2015-01-01

Recent studies suggest that order working memory (WM) may be specifically associated with numerical abilities. This study explored behavioral performance and neural networks associated with verbal WM in adults with a history of developmental dyscalculia (DD). The DD group performed significantly poorer but with the same precision than the control group in order WM tasks and showed a lower activation of the right middle frontal gyrus during the order WM and the alphabetical order judgment tasks. This study suggests a persistent impairment in order WM in adults with DD, characterized by more general difficulties in controlled activation of order information.

10 CFR 50.102 - Commission order for operation after revocation.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-01-01

... Section 50.102 Energy NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION DOMESTIC LICENSING OF PRODUCTION AND UTILIZATION... program of the Department requires continued operation of a production or utilization facility, the... be operated for a period of time as, in the judgment of the Commission, the public convenience and...

Fostering Critical Thinking in Physical Education Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lodewyk, Ken R.

2009-01-01

Critical thinking is essentially "better thinking." When students think critically they consider complex information from numerous sources and perspectives in order to make a reasonable judgment that they can justify. It has been associated with academic qualities such as decision-making, creativity, reasoning, problem-solving, debating,…

Assessing the Social Influence of Television: A Social Cognition Perspective on Cultivation Effects.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Shrum, L. J.

1995-01-01

Uses an information-processing perspective to illustrate how television viewing may affect social judgements. Posits heuristic processing as a mechanism that can explain why heavier television viewing results in higher first-order cultivation judgments (those requiring estimates of set size). (SR)

Implicit Social Scaling from an Institutional Perspective

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

D'Epifanio, Giulio

2009-01-01

The methodological question concerns constructing a cardinal social index, in order to assess performances of social agents, taking into account implicit political judgments. Based on the formal structure of a Choquet's expected utility, index construction demands quantification of levels of a meaningful ordinal indicator of overall performance.…

Exploratory Movement Generates Higher-Order Information That Is Sufficient for Accurate Perception of Scaled Egocentric Distance

PubMed Central

Mantel, Bruno; Stoffregen, Thomas A.; Campbell, Alain; Bardy, Benoît G.

2015-01-01

Body movement influences the structure of multiple forms of ambient energy, including optics and gravito-inertial force. Some researchers have argued that egocentric distance is derived from inferential integration of visual and non-visual stimulation. We suggest that accurate information about egocentric distance exists in perceptual stimulation as higher-order patterns that extend across optics and inertia. We formalize a pattern that specifies the egocentric distance of a stationary object across higher-order relations between optics and inertia. This higher-order parameter is created by self-generated movement of the perceiver in inertial space relative to the illuminated environment. For this reason, we placed minimal restrictions on the exploratory movements of our participants. We asked whether humans can detect and use the information available in this higher-order pattern. Participants judged whether a virtual object was within reach. We manipulated relations between body movement and the ambient structure of optics and inertia. Judgments were precise and accurate when the higher-order optical-inertial parameter was available. When only optic flow was available, judgments were poor. Our results reveal that participants perceived egocentric distance from the higher-order, optical-inertial consequences of their own exploratory activity. Analysis of participants’ movement trajectories revealed that self-selected movements were complex, and tended to optimize availability of the optical-inertial pattern that specifies egocentric distance. We argue that accurate information about egocentric distance exists in higher-order patterns of ambient energy, that self-generated movement can generate these higher-order patterns, and that these patterns can be detected and used to support perception of egocentric distance that is precise and accurate. PMID:25856410

Subjective scaling of mental workload in a multi-task environment

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Daryanian, B.

1982-01-01

Those factors in a multi-task environment that contribute to the operators' "sense" of mental workload were identified. The subjective judgment as conscious experience of mental effort was decided to be the appropriate method of measurement. Thurstone's law of comparative judgment was employed in order to construct interval scales of subjective mental workload from paired comparisons data. An experimental paradigm (Simulated Multi-Task Decision-Making Environment) was employed to represent the ideal experimentally controlled environment in which human operators were asked to "attend" to different cases of Tulga's decision making tasks. Through various statistical analyses it was found that, in general, a lower number of tasks-to-be-processed per unit time (a condition associated with longer interarrival times), results in a lower mental workload, a higher consistency of judgments within a subject, a higher degree of agreement among the subjects, and larger distances between the cases on the Thurstone scale of subjective mental workload. The effects of various control variables and their interactions, and the different characteristics of the subjects on the variation of subjective mental workload are demonstrated.

Effect of congenital blindness on the semantic representation of some everyday concepts.

PubMed

Connolly, Andrew C; Gleitman, Lila R; Thompson-Schill, Sharon L

2007-05-15

This study explores how the lack of first-hand experience with color, as a result of congenital blindness, affects implicit judgments about "higher-order" concepts, such as "fruits and vegetables" (FV), but not others, such as "household items" (HHI). We demonstrate how the differential diagnosticity of color across our test categories interacts with visual experience to produce, in effect, a category-specific difference in implicit similarity. Implicit pair-wise similarity judgments were collected by using an odd-man-out triad task. Pair-wise similarities for both FV and for HHI were derived from this task and were compared by using cluster analysis and regression analyses. Color was found to be a significant component in the structure of implicit similarity for FV for sighted participants but not for blind participants; and this pattern remained even when the analysis was restricted to blind participants who had good explicit color knowledge of the stimulus items. There was also no evidence that either subject group used color knowledge in making decisions about HHI, nor was there an indication of any qualitative differences between blind and sighted subjects' judgments on HHI.

Generating a taxonomy of spatially cued attention for visual discrimination: Effects of judgment precision and set size on attention

PubMed Central

Hetley, Richard; Dosher, Barbara Anne; Lu, Zhong-Lin

2014-01-01

Attention precues improve the performance of perceptual tasks in many but not all circumstances. These spatial attention effects may depend upon display set size or workload, and have been variously attributed to external noise filtering, stimulus enhancement, contrast gain, or response gain, or to uncertainty or other decision effects. In this study, we document systematically different effects of spatial attention in low- and high-precision judgments, with and without external noise, and in different set sizes in order to contribute to the development of a taxonomy of spatial attention. An elaborated perceptual template model (ePTM) provides an integrated account of a complex set of effects of spatial attention with just two attention factors: a set-size dependent exclusion or filtering of external noise and a narrowing of the perceptual template to focus on the signal stimulus. These results are related to the previous literature by classifying the judgment precision and presence of external noise masks in those experiments, suggesting a taxonomy of spatially cued attention in discrimination accuracy. PMID:24939234

Critical thinking in physics education

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sadidi, Farahnaz

2016-07-01

We agree that training the next generation of leaders of the society, who have the ability to think critically and form a better judgment is an important goal. It is a long-standing concern of Educators and a long-term desire of teachers to establish a method in order to teach to think critically. To this end, many questions arise on three central aspects: the definition, the evaluation and the design of the course: What is Critical Thinking? How can we define Critical Thinking? How can we evaluate Critical Thinking? Therefore, we want to implement Critical Thinking in physics education. How can we teach for Critical Thinking in physics? What should the course syllabus and materials be? We present examples from classical physics and give perspectives for astro-particle physics. The main aim of this paper is to answer the questions and provide teachers with the opportunity to change their classroom to an active one, in which students are encouraged to ask questions and learn to reach a good judgment. Key words: Critical Thinking, evaluation, judgment, design of the course.

Processing fluency affects subjective claims of recollection.

PubMed

Kurilla, Bran P; Westerman, Deanne L

2008-01-01

Previous studies that have used the remember-know paradigm to investigate subjective awareness in memory have shown that fluency manipulations have an impact on "know" responses but not on "remember" responses (e.g., Rajaram, 1993), a finding typically accounted for by invoking inferential processing in judgments of familiarity but not of recollection. However, in light of several researchers' criticisms of this procedure, as well as findings documenting the influence of processing fluency on various subjective judgments, the present study was conducted in order to investigate whether judgments of recollection might also be subject to inferential processes and not solely the product of conscious retrieval. When the standard remember-know procedure was used (Experiment 1), manipulations of perceptual fluency increased "know" responses but had no effect on "remember" responses, replicating previous findings. However, when an independent ratings method was employed (Higham & Vokey, 2004), manipulations of perceptual fluency (Experiment 2) and conceptual fluency (Experiment 3) reliably increased claims of both familiarity and recollection, suggesting that the conclusion that fluency affects only "know" responses may be an artifact of the standard remember-know procedure.

Generating a taxonomy of spatially cued attention for visual discrimination: effects of judgment precision and set size on attention.

PubMed

Hetley, Richard; Dosher, Barbara Anne; Lu, Zhong-Lin

2014-11-01

Attention precues improve the performance of perceptual tasks in many but not all circumstances. These spatial attention effects may depend upon display set size or workload, and have been variously attributed to external noise filtering, stimulus enhancement, contrast gain, or response gain, or to uncertainty or other decision effects. In this study, we document systematically different effects of spatial attention in low- and high-precision judgments, with and without external noise, and in different set sizes in order to contribute to the development of a taxonomy of spatial attention. An elaborated perceptual template model (ePTM) provides an integrated account of a complex set of effects of spatial attention with just two attention factors: a set-size dependent exclusion or filtering of external noise and a narrowing of the perceptual template to focus on the signal stimulus. These results are related to the previous literature by classifying the judgment precision and presence of external noise masks in those experiments, suggesting a taxonomy of spatially cued attention in discrimination accuracy.

Reading words and other people: a comparison of exception word, familiar face and affect processing in the left and right temporal variants of primary progressive aphasia

PubMed Central

Binney, Richard J.; Henry, Maya L.; Babiak, Miranda; Pressman, Peter S.; Santos-Santos, Miguel A.; Narvid, Jared; Mandelli, Maria Luisa; Strain, Paul J.; Miller, Bruce L.; Rankin, Katherine P.; Rosen, Howard J.; Gorno-Tempini, Maria Luisa

2016-01-01

Semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA) typically presents with left-hemisphere predominant rostral temporal lobe atrophy and the most significant complaints within the language domain. Less frequently, patients present with right-hemisphere predominant temporal atrophy coupled with marked impairments in processing of famous faces and emotions. Few studies have objectively compared these patient groups in both domains and therefore it is unclear to what extent the syndromes overlap. Clinically diagnosed svPPA patients were characterized as left- (n= 21) or right-predominant (n = 12) using imaging and compared along with 14 healthy controls. Regarding language, our primary focus was upon two hallmark features of svPPA; confrontation naming and surface dyslexia. Both groups exhibited naming deficits and surface dyslexia although the impairments were more severe in the left-predominant group. Familiarity judgments on famous faces and affect processing were more profoundly impaired in the right-predominant group. Our findings suggest that the two syndromes overlap significantly but that early cases at the tail ends of the continuum constitute a challenge for current clinical criteria. Correlational neuroimaging analyses implicated a mid portion of the left lateral temporal lobe in exception word reading impairments in line with proposals that this region is an interface between phonology and semantic knowledge. PMID:27389800

Altered Neural Correlate of the Self-Agency Experience in First-Episode Schizophrenia-Spectrum Patients: An fMRI Study

PubMed Central

Spaniel, Filip; Tintera, Jaroslav; Rydlo, Jan; Ibrahim, Ibrahim; Kasparek, Tomas; Horacek, Jiri; Zaytseva, Yuliya; Matejka, Martin; Fialova, Marketa; Slovakova, Andrea; Mikolas, Pavol; Melicher, Tomas; Görnerova, Natalie; Höschl, Cyril; Hajek, Tomas

2016-01-01

Background: The phenomenology of the clinical symptoms indicates that disturbance of the sense of self be a core marker of schizophrenia. Aims: To compare neural activity related to the self/other-agency judgment in patients with first-episode schizophrenia-spectrum disorders (FES, n = 35) and healthy controls (HC, n = 35). Method: A functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) using motor task with temporal distortion of the visual feedback was employed. A task-related functional connectivity was analyzed with the use of independent component analysis (ICA). Results: (1) During self-agency experience, FES showed a deficit in cortical activation in medial frontal gyrus (BA 10) and posterior cingulate gyrus, (BA 31; P < .05, Family-Wise Error [FWE] corrected). (2) Pooled-sample task-related ICA revealed that the self/other-agency judgment was dependent upon anti-correlated default mode and central-executive networks (DMN/CEN) dynamic switching. This antagonistic mechanism was substantially impaired in FES during the task. Discussion: During self-agency experience, FES demonstrate deficit in engagement of cortical midline structures along with substantial attenuation of anti-correlated DMN/CEN activity underlying normal self/other-agency discriminative processes. PMID:26685867

Empathy as a neuropsychological heuristic in social decision-making.

PubMed

Ramsøy, Thomas Zoëga; Skov, Martin; Macoveanu, Julian; Siebner, Hartwig R; Fosgaard, Toke Reinholt

2015-04-01

Decision-making in social dilemmas is suggested to rely on three factors: the valuation of a choice option, the relative judgment of two or more choice alternatives, and individual factors affecting the ease at which judgments and decisions are made. Here, we test whether empathy-an individual's relative ability to understand others' thoughts, emotions, and intentions-acts as an individual factor that alleviates conflict resolution in social decision-making. We test this by using a framed, iterated prisoners' dilemma (PD) game in two settings. In a behavioral experiment, we find that individual differences in empathic ability (the Empathy Quotient, EQ) were related to lower response times in the PD game, suggesting that empathy is related to faster social choices, independent of whether they choose to cooperate or defect. In a subsequent neuroimaging experiment, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we find that EQ is positively related to individual differences in the engagement of brain structures implemented in mentalizing, including the precuneus, superior temporal sulcus, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. These results suggest that empathy is related to the individual difference in the engagement of mentalizing in social dilemmas and that this is related to the efficiency of decision-making in social dilemmas.

It takes biking to learn: Physical activity improves learning a second language.

PubMed

Liu, Fengqin; Sulpizio, Simone; Kornpetpanee, Suchada; Job, Remo

2017-01-01

Recent studies have shown that concurrent physical activity enhances learning a completely unfamiliar L2 vocabulary as compared to learning it in a static condition. In this paper we report a study whose aim is twofold: to test for possible positive effects of physical activity when L2 learning has already reached some level of proficiency, and to test whether the assumed better performance when engaged in physical activity is limited to the linguistic level probed at training (i.e. L2 vocabulary tested by means of a Word-Picture Verification task), or whether it extends also to the sentence level (which was tested by means of a Sentence Semantic Judgment Task). The results show that Chinese speakers with basic knowledge of English benefited from physical activity while learning a set of new words. Furthermore, their better performance emerged also at the sentential level, as shown by their performance in a Semantic Judgment task. Finally, an interesting temporal asymmetry between the lexical and the sentential level emerges, with the difference between the experimental and control group emerging from the 1st testing session at the lexical level but after several weeks at the sentential level.

The implications of using Hemoglobin A1C for diagnosing Diabetes Mellitus

PubMed Central

Malkani, Samir; Mordes, John P

2011-01-01

Until 2010 the diagnosis of diabetes mellitus was based solely on glucose concentration, but American Diabetes Association (ADA) recommendations now include a new criterion: hemoglobin A1C ≥6.5%. Because this change may have significant implications for diabetes diagnosis, we conducted a comprehensive literature review including peer-reviewed articles not referenced in the ADA report. We conclude that A1C and plasma glucose tests are frequently discordant for diagnosing diabetes. A1C ≥6.5% identifies fewer individuals as having diabetes than glucose-based criteria. Convenience of A1C test might increase the number of patients diagnosed, but this is unproven. Diagnostic cut-points for both glucose and A1C are based on consensus judgments regarding optimal sensitivity and specificity for the complications of hyperglycemia. A1C may not accurately reflect levels of glycemia in some situations, but in comparison with glucose measurements, it has greater analytic stability and less temporal variability. When choosing a diagnostic test for diabetes, the limitations of each choice must be understood. Clinical judgment and consideration of patient preference are required to appropriately select among the diagnostic alternatives. PMID:21531226

Restoration process of the need for autonomy: the early alarm stage.

PubMed

Radel, Rémi; Pelletier, Luc G; Sarrazin, Philippe; Milyavskaya, Marina

2011-11-01

Autonomy is described by self-determination theory as a basic psychological need, essential for individuals' well-being. While basic needs are generally thought to induce a restorative response when thwarted, evidence for such a process is lacking for autonomy. To date, most evidence indicates that autonomy deprivation leads to disaffection of this need in favor of other motives. A temporal model based on the general adaptation syndrome was adapted to reconcile this seeming contradiction. Specifically, it is hypothesized that an early alarm response aimed at restoring the satisfaction of the need for autonomy should precede the later relinquishment and compensation of this need that would result from a prolonged deprivation. Three studies provide support for this model by showing the existence of the immediate autonomy restorative response. Using a controlling situation to manipulate autonomy deprivation, the authors demonstrate in Experiments 1 and 2 that a controlling context leads to enhanced accessibility and an approach bias for autonomy-related stimuli. Experiment 3 indicates that the urge to restore autonomy can also affect personal judgment, leading individuals to make more independent judgments, exercising a nonreactive form of autonomy. Integration of this model within self-determination theory is discussed.

It takes biking to learn: Physical activity improves learning a second language.

PubMed Central

Liu, Fengqin; Sulpizio, Simone; Kornpetpanee, Suchada; Job, Remo

2017-01-01

Recent studies have shown that concurrent physical activity enhances learning a completely unfamiliar L2 vocabulary as compared to learning it in a static condition. In this paper we report a study whose aim is twofold: to test for possible positive effects of physical activity when L2 learning has already reached some level of proficiency, and to test whether the assumed better performance when engaged in physical activity is limited to the linguistic level probed at training (i.e. L2 vocabulary tested by means of a Word-Picture Verification task), or whether it extends also to the sentence level (which was tested by means of a Sentence Semantic Judgment Task). The results show that Chinese speakers with basic knowledge of English benefited from physical activity while learning a set of new words. Furthermore, their better performance emerged also at the sentential level, as shown by their performance in a Semantic Judgment task. Finally, an interesting temporal asymmetry between the lexical and the sentential level emerges, with the difference between the experimental and control group emerging from the 1st testing session at the lexical level but after several weeks at the sentential level. PMID:28542333

Filling the blanks in temporal intervals: the type of filling influences perceived duration and discrimination performance

PubMed Central

Horr, Ninja K.; Di Luca, Massimiliano

2015-01-01

In this work we investigate how judgments of perceived duration are influenced by the properties of the signals that define the intervals. Participants compared two auditory intervals that could be any combination of the following four types: intervals filled with continuous tones (filled intervals), intervals filled with regularly-timed short tones (isochronous intervals), intervals filled with irregularly-timed short tones (anisochronous intervals), and intervals demarcated by two short tones (empty intervals). Results indicate that the type of intervals to be compared affects discrimination performance and induces distortions in perceived duration. In particular, we find that duration judgments are most precise when comparing two isochronous and two continuous intervals, while the comparison of two anisochronous intervals leads to the worst performance. Moreover, we determined that the magnitude of the distortions in perceived duration (an effect akin to the filled duration illusion) is higher for tone sequences (no matter whether isochronous or anisochronous) than for continuous tones. Further analysis of how duration distortions depend on the type of filling suggests that distortions are not only due to the perceived duration of the two individual intervals, but they may also be due to the comparison of two different filling types. PMID:25717310

Explaining Moral Behavior.

PubMed

Osman, Magda; Wiegmann, Alex

2017-03-01

In this review we make a simple theoretical argument which is that for theory development, computational modeling, and general frameworks for understanding moral psychology researchers should build on domain-general principles from reasoning, judgment, and decision-making research. Our approach is radical with respect to typical models that exist in moral psychology that tend to propose complex innate moral grammars and even evolutionarily guided moral principles. In support of our argument we show that by using a simple value-based decision model we can capture a range of core moral behaviors. Crucially, the argument we propose is that moral situations per se do not require anything specialized or different from other situations in which we have to make decisions, inferences, and judgments in order to figure out how to act.

5 CFR 1653.21 - Definitions.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-01-01

... emotionally abusing a child means any legal claim perfected through a final enforceable judgment which is based in whole or in part upon the physical, sexual, or emotional abuse of a child, whether or not that... THRIFT SAVINGS PLAN ACCOUNTS Child Abuse Court Orders § 1653.21 Definitions. (a) Definitions generally...

Exploring the Impact of Mental Workload on Rater-Based Assessments

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tavares, Walter; Eva, Kevin W.

2013-01-01

When appraising the performance of others, assessors must acquire relevant information and process it in a meaningful way in order to translate it effectively into ratings, comments, or judgments about how well the performance meets appropriate standards. Rater-based assessment strategies in health professional education, including scale and…

5 CFR 1653.21 - Definitions.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-01-01

... emotionally abusing a child means any legal claim perfected through a final enforceable judgment which is based in whole or in part upon the physical, sexual, or emotional abuse of a child, whether or not that... THRIFT SAVINGS PLAN ACCOUNTS Child Abuse Court Orders § 1653.21 Definitions. (a) Definitions generally...

5 CFR 1653.21 - Definitions.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-01-01

... emotionally abusing a child means any legal claim perfected through a final enforceable judgment which is based in whole or in part upon the physical, sexual, or emotional abuse of a child, whether or not that... THRIFT SAVINGS PLAN ACCOUNTS Child Abuse Court Orders § 1653.21 Definitions. (a) Definitions generally...

5 CFR 1653.21 - Definitions.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-01-01

... emotionally abusing a child means any legal claim perfected through a final enforceable judgment which is based in whole or in part upon the physical, sexual, or emotional abuse of a child, whether or not that... THRIFT SAVINGS PLAN ACCOUNTS Child Abuse Court Orders § 1653.21 Definitions. (a) Definitions generally...

5 CFR 1653.21 - Definitions.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-01-01

... emotionally abusing a child means any legal claim perfected through a final enforceable judgment which is based in whole or in part upon the physical, sexual, or emotional abuse of a child, whether or not that... THRIFT SAVINGS PLAN ACCOUNTS Child Abuse Court Orders § 1653.21 Definitions. (a) Definitions generally...

Moral Complexity in Middle Childhood: Children's Evaluations of Necessary Harm

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jambon, Marc; Smetana, Judith G.

2014-01-01

We assessed 5-to 11-year-olds' (N = 76) judgments of straightforward moral transgressions (prototypical harm) as well as their evaluations of complex, hypothetical scenarios in which an actor transgresses in order to prevent injury (necessary harm). The nature of the actor's transgression (psychological or physical harm) varied across…

28 CFR 26.2 - Proposed Judgment and Order.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-07-01

... of a lethal substance or substances in a quantity sufficient to cause death; (3) The sentence shall... 26.2 Judicial Administration DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE DEATH SENTENCES PROCEDURES Implementation of Death... (4) The prisoner under sentence of death shall be committed to the custody of the Attorney General or...

78 FR 27431 - Jose G. Zavaleta, M.D.; Decision and Order

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2013-05-10

... subpenas, and that ``[a] party is entitled to present his case or defense by oral or documentary evidence... default judgment where ``[t]estimonial and documentary evidence was presented ex parte in the [trial... documentary evidence. [Transcript (``Tr.'') Volume I]. After the hearing, both parties submitted Proposed...

Role of Social Performance in Predicting Learning Problems: Prediction of Risk Using Logistic Regression Analysis

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Del Prette, Zilda Aparecida Pereira; Prette, Almir Del; De Oliveira, Lael Almeida; Gresham, Frank M.; Vance, Michael J.

2012-01-01

Social skills are specific behaviors that individuals exhibit in order to successfully complete social tasks whereas social competence represents judgments by significant others that these social tasks have been successfully accomplished. The present investigation identified the best sociobehavioral predictors obtained from different raters…

Arrows of time in early childhood.

PubMed

Friedman, William J

2003-01-01

Three studies with 149 children were conducted to provide information about development of the perception of temporally unidirectional transformations, such as dropping blocks or breaking a cookie. Children 3.5 through 6.5 years of age compared forward and backward videotapes of events or made individual judgments of what would happen if the actions were attempted. Even children 3.5 to 4.5 years of age recognized the anomaly of backward versions of gravity and separation events. In addition, relatively few children predicted impossible transformations in the prediction task. The results show that young children, like adults, are sensitive to the unidirectional nature of varied transformations.

A case of musical anhedonia due to right putaminal hemorrhage: a disconnection syndrome between the auditory cortex and insula.

PubMed

Satoh, Masayuki; Kato, Natsuko; Tabei, Ken-Ichi; Nakano, Chizuru; Abe, Makiko; Fujita, Risa; Kida, Hirotaka; Tomimoto, Hidekazu; Kondo, Kiyohiko

2016-12-01

A 63-year-old, right-handed professional chorus conductor developed right putaminal hemorrhage, and became unable to experience emotion while listening to music. Two years later, neurological examination revealed slight left hemiparesis. Neuromusicological assessments revealed impaired judgment of "musical sense," and the inability to discriminate the sound of chords in pure intervals from those in equal temperament. Brain MRI and tractography identified the old hemorrhagic lesion in the right putamen and impaired fiber connectivity between the right insula and superior temporal lobe. These findings suggest that musical anhedonia might be caused by a disconnection between the insula and auditory cortex.