The perception of the Müller-Lyer illusion has previously been explained as a result of visual low band-pass spatial filtering, although, in fact, the illusion persists in band-pass and high-pass filtered images without visible low-spatial frequencies. A new theoretical framework suggests that our perceptual experience about the global spatial structure of an image corresponds to the amplitude modulation (AM) component (or its magnitude, also called envelope) of its AM-FM (alternatively, AM-PM) decomposition. Because demodulation is an ill-posed problem with a non-unique solution, two different AM-FM demodulation algorithms were applied here to estimate the envelope of images of Müller-Lyer illusion: the global and exact Daugman and Downing (1995) AMPM algorithm and the local and quasi-invertible Maragos and Bovik (1995) DESA. The images used in our analysis include the classic configuration of illusion in a variety of spatial and spatial frequency content conditions. In all cases, including those of images for which visual low-pass spatial filtering would be ineffective, the envelope estimated by single-band amplitude demodulation has physical distortions in the direction of perceived illusion. It is not plausible that either algorithm could be implemented by the human visual system. It is shown that the proposed second order visual model of pre-attentive segregation of textures (or “back-pocket” model) could recover the image envelope and, thus, explain the perception of this illusion even in Müller-Lyer images lacking low spatial frequencies.

Priming of affective word evaluation by pictures of faces showing positive and negative emotional expressions was investigated in two experiments that used a double task procedure where participants were asked to respond to the prime or to the target on different trials. The experiments varied between-subjects the prime task assignment and the prime-target interval (SOA, stimulus onset asynchrony). Significant congruency effects (that is, faster word evaluation when prime and target had the same valence than when they were of opposite valence) were observed in both experiments. When the prime task oriented the subjects to an affectively irrelevant property of the faces (their gender), priming was observed at SOA 300 ms but not at SOA 1000 ms (Experiment 1). However, when the prime task assignment explicitly oriented the subjects to the valence of the face, priming was observed at both SOA durations (Experiment 2). These results show, first, that affective priming by pictures of facial emotion can be obtained even when the subject has an explicit goal to process a non-affective property of the prime. Second, sensitivity of the priming effect to SOA duration seems to depend on whether it is mediated by intentional or unintentional activation of the valence of the face prime.

Human experience of temporal durations exhibits a multi-regional structure, with more or less distinct boundaries, or horizons, on the scale of physical duration. The inner horizons are imposed by perceptual thresholds for simultaneity (≈ 3 ms) and temporal order (≈ 30 ms), and are determined by the dynamical properties of the neural substrate integrating sensory information. Related to the inner horizon of experienced time are perceptual or cognitive “moments.” Comparative data on autokinetic times suggest that these moments may be relatively invariant (≈ 102 ms) across a wide range of species. Extension of the “sensible present” (≈ 3 s) defines an intermediate horizon, beyond which the generic experience of duration develops. The domain of immediate duration experience is delimited by the ultimate outer horizon at about ≈102 s, as evidenced by analysis of duration reproduction experiments (reproducibility horizon), probably determined by relaxation times of “neural accumulators.” Beyond these phenomenal horizons, time is merely cognitively (re)constructed, not actually experienced or “perceived,” a fact that is frequently ignored by contemporary time perception research. The nyocentric organization of time experience shows an interesting analogy with the egocentric organization of space, suggesting that structures of subjective space and time are derived from active motion as a common experiential basis.

Almost 40 years ago I began what turned out to be a programme of research on the way in which experience can change the effectiveness of the events used as stimuli in standard associative learning procedures. In this personal history I will describe my early (failed) attempts to find evidence for the acquired distinctiveness of cues, and my conclusion that experience tends to reduce, not enhance the associability of stimuli. I then go on to describe my attempts to square this conclusion with the stubborn empirical fact that, in some circumstances, pretraining with (or preexposure to) stimuli, can facilitate subsequent discrimination between them. I describe experiments (conducted mostly with rats as the subjects) showing how some of these effects can be explained in associative terms. Others, however, seemed to demand an explanation in terms of a new learning process that modulates the effective salience of stimuli. I go on to describe attempts to specify the nature of this process, and (bringing the story up to date) to describe recent experiments investigating the effects of salience modulation in human perceptual learning.

Evaluative conditioning is best defined as an effect, that is, as a change in the valence of a stimulus that results from pairing the stimulus with another stimulus. This definition has several advantages that are made explicit in this paper. One of the advantages is that it clarifies that evaluative conditioning can be due to multiple processes. Therefore, the conditions under which evaluative conditioning is observed can depend on the processes that underlie a particular manifestation of evaluative conditioning. This could explain why there are so many conflicting results about the conditions under which evaluative conditioning can be found. Future research should adopt a meta-conditional approach that focuses not only on whether a certain condition is crucial for obtaining evaluative conditioning but should also examine when a certain condition is crucial.

Research shows abnormal function of the pre-frontal cortex in Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). This cortex is involved in the control of executive functions related to planning and execution of goal-oriented strategies, working memory, inhibitions, cognitive flexibility, and selective attention. Selective attention involves focus on the target stimulus, ignoring competing distractions. The Stroop Test (Stroop, 1935) is usually used to evaluate selective attention. This study investigated whether children with ADHD could exhibit modified performance in the Stroop Test. Using a computerized version of this test (Capovilla, Montiel, Macedo, & Charin, 2005), the study compared the reaction times (RTs) of 62 Brazilian children, between 8 and 12 years of age, 31 of whom were diagnosed with ADHD and sent to psychiatric clinics, and 31 without ADHD studying in regular schools. All children with ADHD satisfied the criteria of the DSM-IV-TR and were evaluated with the Conners Abbreviated Questionnaire (Goyette, Conners, & Ulrich, 1978), completed by parents and teachers. The results revealed that children with ADHD exhibit greater interference in RT than children without ADHD. This corroborated the hypothesis that children with ADHD exhibit a deficit in selective attention, consisting in augmented RTs, as measured by the Computerized Stroop Test.

The paper presents the current state of the art of research identifying the neurophysiological and neuroanatomical substrates of private speech, both in typical and clinical (or atypical) populations. First, it briefly describes the evolution of private speech research, which goes from classic traditions as the naturalistic and referential paradigms to the neurocognitive approach. An overview of the neurophysiological (e.g., event-related potentials or ERPs) and neuroimaging techniques (e.g., functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI) is also presented. The next three sections review empirical works about the neurocognitive basis of private speech, across three groups of techniques: ERPs; fMRI/MRI; and other neuroimaging techniques (positron emission tomography [PET], magnetoencephalogram [MEG], and repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation [rTMS]). Such neurocognitive research analyzes the neural activity of individuals during a variety of task settings, including spontaneous and instructed overt and inner private speech use, subvocal verbalizations, and silent and overt reading. The fifth section focuses on electrophysiological and neuroimaging studies of private speech in atypical populations, for example: schizophrenia, pure alexia, hearing impairment, blindness, social phobia, alexithymia, Parkinson, and multiple sclerosis. The neurocognitive study of the various forms of private speech appears to be very promising in the understanding of these pathologies. Lastly, the advances and new challenges in the field are discussed.

The main aim of this work was to look for cognitive biases in human inference of causal relationships in order to emphasize the psychological processes that modulate causal learning. From the effect of the judgment frequency, this work presents subsequent research on cue competition (overshadowing, blocking, and super-conditioning effects) showing that the strength of prior beliefs and new evidence based upon covariation computation contributes additively to predict causal judgments, whereas the balance between the reliability of both, beliefs and covariation knowledge, modulates their relative weight. New findings also showed “inattentional blindness” for negative or preventative causal relationships but not for positive or generative ones, due to failure in codifying and retrieving the necessary information for its computation. Overall results unveil the need of three hierarchical levels of a whole architecture for human causal learning: the lower one, responsible for codifying the events during the task; the second one, computing the retrieved information; finally, the higher level, integrating this evidence with previous causal knowledge. In summary, whereas current theoretical frameworks on causal inference and decision-making usually focused either on causal beliefs or covariation information, the present work shows how both are required to be able to explain the complexity and flexibility involved in human causal learning.

This study was designed to assess the effects of four reading-training procedures for children with reading disabilities (RD) in a transparent orthography, with the aim of examining the effects of different spelling-to-sound units in computer speech-based reading. We selected a sample of 83 Spanish children aged between 7 years 1 month and 10 years 6 months (M = 105.2, SD = 7.8) whose pseudoword reading performance was below the 25th percentile and IQ > 90. The participants were randomly assigned to five groups: (a) the whole-word training group (WW) (n = 17), (b) the syllable training group (S)(n = 16), (c) the onset-rime training group (OR) (n = 17), (d) the phoneme training group (P) (n = 15), and (e) the untrained control group (n = 18). Children were pre- and post-tested in word recognition, reading comprehension, phonological awareness, and orthographic and phonological tasks. The results indicate that experimental groups who participated in the phoneme and syllable conditions improved their word recognition in comparison with the control group. In addition, dyslexics who participated in the phoneme, syllable, and onset-rime conditions made a greater number of requests during computer-based word reading under conditions that required extensive phonological computation (low frequency words and long words). Reading time, however, was greater for long words in the phoneme group during computer-based reading. These results suggest the importance of training phonological processes in improving word decoding in children with dyslexia who learn in a consistent orthography.

Rats given the combination of unrestricted access to an activity wheel and restricted access to food can lose weight to the extent that they will die unless removed from these conditions. Although this has been known for forty years, why this happens has remained unclear. The phenomenon is paradoxical in that one might expect such rats to eat more as their weight decreases, but in fact they eat less than resting controls. This lecture first examines some of the factors than influence whether self-starvation will occur, such as age, time of food access, type of food and ambient temperature. It then compares competing explanations such as circadian adaptation, thermo-regulation and food aversion learning. As so often in psychology, it turns out that self-starvation results from a combination of many separate factors. The general implications of this research are examined, including whether it provides a useful animal model for human anorexia nervosa.

This report examines the structure of similarities underlying the lexicon of personality-trait description, when “similarity” is defined and measured in terms of (a) semantic judgment and (b) covariance in actual use. A lexicon of 60 trait adjectives was examined, using several procedures for collecting semantic judgments. Similarity data of both kinds were analyzed with multidimensional scaling (MDS) to provide a parsimonious representation of underlying structure. The convergence between semantic judgments and covariance within trait-attribution data was substantial; both kinds of data evinced the same structure when collected for subsets of adjectives. Canonical correlation was employed to find the number of dimensions shared across MDS solutions. Interpretation of the results was facilitated by individual-differences MDS, which can select an optimal set of underlying dimensions, and at the same time accommodate the differences between data sets that arise when data-collection procedures differ in the relative emphasis they place upon those dimensions. We interpret the small number and shared nature of the dimensions by arguing that the lexicon's structure relates to trait perception rather than personality structure per se, even when probed with trait-attribution covariance.

The world we perceive is delayed in relation to its flowing content, as well as the outcome of our actions on the world in relation to the moment we decide to act. This mosaic of different latencies permeating both perception and action has to be taken into account critically in order for us to cope with the temporal challenges constantly imposed by the environment. Fundamental notions, such as the sense of agency and causality, depend on the temporal relationship of events occurring in well-defined windows of time. Here, we offer a broad, yet abridged, historical view of some thought-provoking issues concerning the time of perception and action. From the pioneering work of Wundt, Titchener, and Libet to recent findings and ideas related to the employment of visual illusions as psychophysical probes (such as the flash-lag effect), we have tried to expose some problems inherent to the act of measuring the time of both perception and action, and devise possible solutions as well.

Auditory perception of the depth of space is based mainly on spectral and amplitude changes of sound waves originating from the sound source and reaching the listener. The perceptive illusion of movement of an auditory image caused by changes in amplitude and/or frequency of the signal tone emanating from an immobile loudspeaker was studied. Analysis of data obtained from the participants revealed the diapason of combinations of amplitude and frequency changes for which the movement direction was perceived similarly by all participants, despite significantly different movement assessment criteria. Additional auditory and visual information of the conditions of radial movement (near or far fields) determined listeners' interpretation of changes in the signal parameters. The data obtained about the perception of approach and withdrawal models are evidence of the fact that the principal cues of the perception of the distance of immobile sound sources manifests similarly to that of an auditory image moving along a radial axis.

The article represents an empirical study of paternity as a male personality development factor in men. Consensus is emerging that responsible fatherhood entitles the father to establish paternity, be present in the child's life, share economic support, and be personally involved in the child's life in collaboration with the mother. Literature reviews on fatherhood yield numerous empirical studies of specific fatherhood behaviors, whereas theory and the “bigger picture” have been notably insufficient. In the present article, problems of fatherhood in modern society, methodological problems of studying fathering, and cultural specifics of fatherhood are discussed. In addition, in order to aid further study of the phenomenon, the theoretically developed and experimentally approved model of the structure of paternity and the description of a specially developed training for fathers are presented. A principal finding of this report is that fatherhood is socially determined and influenced by contextual forces within the family and the community. The absence of a father-figure is detrimental to child personality development. At the same time, fatherhood can be a factor of male personality development of the father.

Two samples of university students completed self-report measures of chronic procrastination and either self-concept variables (Sample 1, n = 233) or self-presentational styles (Sample 2, n = 210). Results indicated that procrastination was significantly related to a self-concept of oneself as dominated by issues related to task performance, and to self-presentation strategies that reflected a person as continually justifying and excusing task delays and being “needy” of others' approval. It seems that men and women procrastinate in order to improve their social standing by making their accomplishments seem greater than they really are.

Twelve healthy subjects underwent investigation of averaged (electroencephalogram) EEG potentials during preparation for motor activity and in the latent period (LP) of visually evoked saccades by presentation of stimuli using Posner's (1980) design of “cost-benefit.” It has been shown that covert spatial attention orientation leads to an increase in amplitude and decrease in latency of presaccadic initiation potential peaks within the saccadic latent period (LP) (P-100, N –50). Processes of covert orientation of attention during the interstimulus interval period of anticipation of the target stimulus correlate with the increase of slow negativity of fronto-parietal-temporal localization. Spatial-temporal changes of presaccadic potentials are evidence of the fact that orientation of attention during motor preparation and saccadic initiation is reflected in intensification of fronto-parietal networks of saccadic control and attention, activating the fronto-medio-thalamic and thalamo-parietal modulating systems.

In this study, the incidence of the degree of abstraction in solving addition and subtraction problems with the unknown in the first term and in the result is analyzed. Ninety-six students from first grade to fourth grade in Primary Education (24 students per grade) solved arithmetic problems with objects, drawings, algorithms, and verbal problems. The participants were interviewed individually and all sessions were video-taped. The results indicate a different developmental pattern in achievement for each school grade depending on the levels of abstraction. The influence of the level of abstraction was significant, especially in first graders, and even more so in second graders, that is, at the developmental stage in which they start to learn these arithmetic tasks. Direct modeling strategies are observed more frequently at the concrete and pictorial level, counting strategies occur at all levels of abstraction, whereas numerical fact strategies are found at higher levels of abstraction.

This study focuses on the cognitive components of general environmental attitudes. Taking as a starting point the scale of Thompson and Barton (1994) to identify ecocentric and anthropocentric motives in environmental conservation, the beliefs that guide attitudes in the person-environment relationship are analyzed. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to contrast the tripartite structure of these beliefs—based on egoistic, socioaltruistic, and biospheric aspects—with a two-dimensional structure that confronts ecocentric and anthropocentric orientations. The results obtained from two samples, a student sample (n = 212) and a sample from the general population of Madrid (n = 205), indicate the existence of a three-dimensional structure of environmental beliefs: an anthropocentric dimension based on the instrumental value of the environment for human beings, a biospheric dimension that values the environment for its own sake, and, lastly, an egobiocentric dimension that values the human being within nature as a whole.

The goal of this work was to analyze the social representations that women of three different age groups had about aging, rejuvenating, and methods of rejuvenation. The research was performed in São Paulo between 2004 and 2005. The participants of this research were three groups of women of different ages: 19 to 24 years, 25 to 35 years, and over 60 years. The data were collected by the focus group technique. Data was analyzed using the lexical analysis software ALCESTE 4.5. The main results show a social representation of aging centered on losses and gains. The subjects appraised the possibility of using rejuvenating methods only when it was extremely necessary, because of the health risks that most of them involve. The three groups agreed about natural methods of rejuvenating instead of resorting to invasive methods.

This work analyzes the possibility that the differences in the performance of men and women in dynamic spatial tasks such as the Spatial Orientation Dynamic Test-Revised (SODT-R; Santacreu & Rubio, 1998), obtained in previous works, are due to cognitive style (Reflexivity-Impulsivity) or to the speed-accuracy tradeoff (SATO) that the participants implement. If these differences are due to cognitive style, they would be independent of intelligence, whereas if they are due to SATO, they may be associated with intelligence. In this work, 1652 participants, 984 men and 668 women, ages between 18 and 55 years, were assessed. In addition to the SODT-R, the “Test de Razonamiento Analítico, Secuencial e Inductivo” (TRASI [Analytical, Sequential, and Inductive Reasoning Test]; Rubio & Santacreu, 2003) was administered as a measure of general intelligence. Impulsivity scores (Zi) of Salkind and Wright (1977) were used to analyze reflexivity-impulsivity and SATO. The results obtained indicate that (a) four performance groups can be identified: Fast-accurate, Slow-inaccurate, Impulsive, and Reflexive. The first two groups solve the task as a function of a competence variable and the last two as a function of a personality variable; (b) performance differences should be attributed to SATO; (c) SATO differs depending on sex and intelligence level.