Obituaries: Martin Deutsch (1926-2002).

Reports the death of Martin Deutsch (1926-2002) and notes his contributions to the field of developmental psychology. Deutsch believed that environmental influences were critical for cognitive development during children's early years and that it was possible to design programs that would provide some of those experiences for children. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A Broad View of Intelligence: The Theory of Successful Intelligence.

This article reviews the theory of successful intelligence and attempts to construct-validate the theory of successful intelligence. It describes 4 distinct converging operations that have been used in these attempts. Two sets involve internal validation of the structure of the theory and 2 sets external validation of the theory with outside criteria. The internal validation operations involve information-processing (componential) analyses and both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. The external validation operations involve correlational analysis and analyses of instructional interventions based on the theory. The results are generally supportive of the theory and suggest that conventional conceptions of intelligence may be too narrow. The theory is of use in consulting because it broadens the scope of skills one looks for in seeking "intelligent" people for hiring, retention, and promotion and in assessing a person's ability to do his or her current job. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A hemispheric division of labor aids mental rotation.

In the present study, we investigated whether a hemispheric division of labor is most advantageous to performance when lateralized inputs place unequal resource demands on the left and right cerebral hemispheres. In each trial, participants decided whether 2 rotated letters, presented either in the same visual field (within-field trials) or in opposite visual fields (across-field trials), were both of normal orientation, or whether one was normal and the other was mirror-reversed. To discriminate a letter's orientation, one must rotate the letter to the upright position. Therefore, we manipulated whether the two letters imposed similar or dissimilar demands on cognitive resources by varying the number of degrees that each letter needed to be rotated to reach the upright position. As predicted, in 2 experiments we found that the across-field advantage increased as the number of degrees each letter needed to be rotated became more dissimilar. These findings support a current model of hemispheric interactions, which posits that an unequal hemispheric distribution of cognitive load allows the cerebral hemispheres to take the lead for different aspects of cognitive processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Multisensory exploration and object individuation in infancy.

Recent research indicates that by 4.5 months, infants use shape and size information as the basis for individuating objects but that it is not until 11.5 months that they use color information for this purpose. The present experiments investigated the extent to which infants' sensitivity to color information could be increased through select experiences. Five experiments were conducted with 10.5- and 9.5-month-olds. The results revealed that multimodal (visual and tactile), but not unimodal (visual only), exploration of the objects prior to the individuation task increased 10.5-month-olds' sensitivity to color differences. These results suggest that multisensory experience with objects facilitates infants' use of color information when individuating objects. In contrast, 9.5-month-olds did not benefit from the multisensory procedure; possible explanations for this finding are explored. Together, these results reveal how an everyday experience--combined visual and tactile exploration of objects--can promote infants' use of color information as the basis for individuating objects. More broadly, these results shed light on the nature of infants' object representations and the cognitive mechanisms that support infants' changing sensitivity to color differences. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Repetition Blindness Occurs in Nonwords.

Theorists have predicted that repetition blindness (RB) should be absent for nonwords because they do not activate preexisting mental types. The authors hypothesized that RB would be observed for nonwords because RB can occur at a sublexical level. Four experiments showed that RB is observed for word-nonword pairs (noon noof), orthographically similar nonwords (glome glame), and identical repetitions (plass plass). More RB was found for words than for nonwords. Prior researchers may have failed to find RB for nonwords because display conditions that allow 2 words to be reliably encoded are insufficient for nonwords, or because observers coped with low ability to encode nonwords by using guessing strategies that do not require creating a mental type or tokenizing it. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Performance variability is related to change in cognition: Evidence from the Victoria Longitudinal Study.

Performance variability across repeated task administrations may be an important indicator of age-related cognitive functioning. In the present investigation, the authors examined whether age differences and change in inconsistency were related to 6-year (3 occasion) cognitive change. Inconsistency scores were computed from 4 reaction time tasks performed by 446 older adults (54-89 years). Replicating previous cross-sectional results, greater inconsistency was observed for older participants even after controlling for differences in response speed. New longitudinal results demonstrated (a) associations between inconsistency at baseline measurement and 6-year change in cognitive performance; (b) longitudinal change in inconsistency; and (c) intraindividual covariation between 6-year change in inconsistency and 6-year change in level of cognitive function. These findings support the view that performance variability serves as a marker of cognitive aging. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Marcia K. Johnson: 2006 Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions.

Presents the citation to Marcia K. Johnson, who received the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions "for raising and illuminating fundamental questions about the cognitive and neural processes that constitute the subjective experience of mental life." A brief profile and a selected bibliography, as well as Johnson's award address, entitled Memory and Reality (see record 2006-21079-028), accompany the citation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

La capacité d'imitation à la naissance: Elle existe, mais que signifie-t-elle?

Much of the research on early imitations is restricted to the problem of their existence, without trying to describe them. The aim of this research is to analyze the principal characteristics of neonatal imitations in order to differentiate them from the later imitations. The behaviours of 16 neonates were filmed. A facial and a manual model were used. A detailed analysis of newborn behaviour revealed several features of early imitations: They were selective, quite exact, integrated, and occurred with short-time latencies. These results are interpreted within a cognitive framework. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Waveform design and high-resolution imaging of cognitive radar based on compressive sensing

We introduce the compressive sensing(CS) theory for waveform design of cognitive radar,and then propose an algorithm for the high-resolution radar signal waveform and its corresponding imaging method based on the sparse orthogonal frequency division multiplexing-linear frequency modulation(OFDM-LFM) signal.We first present the principle of spectrum synthesis and high-resolution imaging based on OFDM-LFM signals.Then,we propose the spectrum-sparse waveform design criterion and the reconstruction algorithm for a highresolution range profile(HRRP) based on CS.Based on this,we analyze in detail the relationship between the scattering characteristics of the target and the parameters of the designed signal,and we construct the feedback of the target characteristics on the waveforms.Therefore,the "cognitive" function of radar can be achieved by adaptively adjusting the waveform with the target characteristics.Simulations are given to validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.