This study aimed to examine differences in influence between online news (e.g., New York Times) and social networking sites (e.g., Facebook and Twitter) on attitudes in political campaigns. In a web-based experiment, campaign, polls and election between two fictitious candidates were simulated. Participants’ explicit and implicit attitudes as well as voting behavior were assessed using self-report items and the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The results reveal that information emanating from online news had a significant influence on explicit and implicit attitudes while that of social networking sites did not. Overall, negative items had a stronger impact than positive ones, more so in online news compared to social networking sites. Negative information from either type of media was more likely to change participants’ explicit attitudes in a negative direction and as a consequence also change their vote. Practical implications of the findings and limitations of the study are discussed.
The aim of the present study was to investigate the extent to which personality traits, after controlling for general intelligence, predict academic performance in different school subjects. Upper secondary school students in Sweden (N=315) completed the Wonderlic IQ test (Wonderlic, 1992) and the IPIP-NEO-PI test (Goldberg, 1999). A series of hierarchical structural equation models showed that general intelligence, Conscientiousness, Extraversion and Neuroticism were significantly linked to overall academic performance. There were also different findings for a lower level of personality traits, e.g. different personality traits were associated with different subjects. The findings are discussed with regard to previous results on personality traits as determinants of academic performance in different school subjects and the fact that lower level traits may facilitate achievement in particular subjects.
The group Parkinson Inside Out is composed of health professionals and academic researchers who have been diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease. In our discussions we try to make use of both our inside perspective as patients, and our outside perspective as professionals. In this paper, we apply the two perspectives to the Impulse Control Disorders. These impulsive behaviour patterns are thought to be relatively uncommon side effects of some of the medication used in dopamine replacement therapy. The phenomenon is usually described as relatively rare (< 15%), and mainly confined to patients with special vulnerabilities. In contrast, we propose that having some problems with controlling impulses is a very common experience for patients undergoing dopamine replacement therapy. They result from difficulties in decision making engendered by variations in dopamine accessibility in the reward centre of the brain. Only in a minority do the consequences grow to the damaging proportions of a disorder, but most patients are probably affected to some degree. Seeing, and measuring, decision difficulties as a continuous dimension, rather than as a discrete category, brings increased possibilities for early detection and continuous monitoring. With reliable measures of the propensity for impulsive decision making, it may become possible to both reap the benefits and avoid the dangers of the dopamine agonists. We point to ways of empirically testing our continuity hypothesis.
Lucas, Voss, and Paller sympathize with our intentions but disagree with our findings. They argue that a relation between frequency and conceptual priming may have been obscured by methodological details in our second experiment, therefore failing to complete a bridge between conceptual priming and FN400 with name frequency as the mediator. However, renewed inspections of our experiment and a new additional experiment, designed to meet the objections, fail to find any role for name frequency in conceptual priming and therefore re-establish the dissociation of priming and the FN400. On closer inspection, our differing views seem to derive from different interpretations of the term “concept.”
This study addressed the question whether the second language (L2) of bilinguals can access conceptual memory as directly as their first language (L1). Swedish undergraduates, with English as their second language, performed two tasks in both L1 and L2. Exp. 1 used a picture-name verification task, where pictures induced automatic semantic priming. Exp. 2 used a category-exemplar verification task, where pictures induced strategic priming. The primary measure was reduction of the N400 amplitude in the ERP. Experiment 1 showed a fronto-central priming effect that did not differ between L1 and L2 in amplitude, topographical distribution, or peak latency. Experiment 2 showed a different, centro-parietal priming effect that was similar in amplitude between L1 and L2, but differed in peak latency, and lateral distribution. The study indicates that L2 provides direct automatic access to conceptual memory, although strategic use may recruit partly different neuronal resources in L2 than in L1.
Visual regional CBF (rCBF) responses were measured in 10 healthy male subjects before and after an ethanol dose of 1 g/kg body weight. This dose induces well-established cerebral vasodilatation. However, significant bilateral occipital increases were found in both conditions. Apparently, the coupling between neuronal activity and rCBF is preserved following ethanol. The occipital and posterior parietal flow increases were, however, larger on the right than the left side in the sober state. During inebriation the asymmetry disappeared, possibly representing a more undifferentiated processing of visual information. We propose that ethanol causes a reduced inhibition of the left posterior cortex and a reduction of right-hemisphere information processing.
Introduction: Spatial working memory is susceptible to impairment early on in Parkinson’s disease (PD). Later on, the wearing off phenomenon of motor function during dopaminergic treatment seems to carry over into working memory.
Aim: To initialize development of a test capable of capturing the variation in spatial working memory within a patient’s daily functioning.
Methods: The test consisted of 192 instances of n-back, yes/no tasks, with correctness and latency of response automatically recorded. We collected data from two persons, one PD patient and one healthy control, relatively evenly sampled regarding time-of-day. The patient took levodopa once every three hours and performed tests on 70 occasions (the healthy control on 33 occasions). A frequency band containing period lengths from 2 to 4 hours was defined as the region of interest in regard to the medication cycle. The resulting time series were digitally band-pass filtered allowing only the relevant frequencies to pass. Reasoning that filtering would preserve essential information if the time series were periodic, but eradicate it if they were not, we used as our primary outcome measure the correlations between filtered and unfiltered data.
Results: Correlations between the pass-band relating to the levodopa intake schedule and the full data were positive and significantly larger for the patient than for the control. These differences applied to both latency and accuracy.
Conclusion: This supports the hypothesis that the test is able to detect levodopa-dependent variations in spatial working memory.