Representations of odors in the rat orbitofrontal cortex change during and after learning.

Cells in the orbitofrontal cortex (OF) respond to odors and their associated rewards. To determine how these responses are acquired and maintained, the authors recorded single OF units in rats performing an odor discrimination task. Approximately 64% of all cells differentiated between rewarded and nonrewarded odors. These odor valence responses changed during learning in 26% of all cells, and these changes were positively correlated with improving performance, supporting the idea that the information provided by these cells is used in learning the task. However, changes in odor valence responses were also observed after learning, and included not only increases in odor discrimination, but also decreases or mixed increases and decreases. Thus, only some of the changes in firing reflected acquisition of the task. The results suggest that learning triggers a continuing reorganization of OF neural ensembles representing odors and their rewards. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Motivation in later life: Personal projects and well-being.

"Personal projects," as defined by B. R. Little (1983), were elicited from 600 community residents aged 70+, representing a broad range of health and illness. Factor analysis revealed 6 types of personal projects: activities of daily living, active recreation, other-oriented activities, intellectual activities, home planning, and spiritual/moral activities. Background factors and health were shown to affect the number and type of projects reported. Most indices of personal projects were associated with positive affect and valuation of life. Only 1 was associated with depression. This confirms the differential association of personal projects to positive but not negative affect. Personal projects are seen as part of an open motivational system in which social position, cognitive ability, health, and positive mental health are mutually interacting members. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The paramorphic representation of clinical judgment.

"This paper has been concerned with the manner in which information is utilized in decision making or in judgment situations. It is shown that mathematical models provide a way of describing mental processes which would otherwise be accessible only through introspection or electro-physiological techniques. A linear model and a configurational model are described, and illustrations furnished for each. Such models make possible the testing of hypotheses concerning method of combination, individual differences in judgment ability, effects of training, personality correlates, idiographic interpretation of case materials, etc." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Electroconvulsive shock: Conflict, competition, consolidation, and neuroanatomical functions.

Recent studies supporting conflicting interpretations of ECS effects were reviewed and related to limbic system seizure proneness, neuroanatomical response specificities, and the electrophysiological correlates of conditioning. The effects of ECS, viewed against such a perspective, appeared to be quite consistent, even though several nonunifying hypotheses are extant. (42 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Combining lexical, syntactic and prosodic cues for improved online dialog act tagging

Prosody is an important cue for identifying dialog acts. In this paper, we show that modeling the sequence of acoustic–prosodic values as n-gram features with a maximum entropy model for dialog act (DA) tagging can perform better than conventional approaches that use coarse representation of the prosodic contour through summative statistics of the prosodic contour. The proposed scheme for exploiting prosody results in an absolute improvement of 8.7% over the use of most other widely used representations of acoustic correlates of prosody. The proposed scheme is discriminative and exploits context in the form of lexical, syntactic and prosodic cues from preceding discourse segments. Such a decoding scheme facilitates online DA tagging and offers robustness in the decoding process, unlike greedy decoding schemes that can potentially propagate errors. Our approach is different from traditional DA systems that use the entire conversation for offline dialog act decoding with the aid of a discourse model. In contrast, we use only static features and approximate the previous dialog act tags in terms of lexical, syntactic and prosodic information extracted from previous utterances. Experiments on the Switchboard-DAMSL corpus, using only lexical, syntactic and prosodic cues from three previous utterances, yield a DA tagging accuracy of 72% compared to the best case scenario with accurate knowledge of previous DA tags (oracle), which results in 74% accuracy.     

Familiarization, Attention, and Recognition Memory in Infancy: An Event-Related Potential and Cortical Source Localization Study.

This study investigated the effects of familiarization and attention on event-related potential (ERP) correlates of recognition memory in infants. Infants 4.5, 6, or 7.5 months of age were either familiarized with 2 stimuli that were used during later testing or presented 2 stimuli that were not used later. Then, infants were presented with a recording of Sesame Street to elicit attention or inattention and presented with familiar and novel stimuli. A negative ERP component over the frontal and central electrodes (Nc) was larger in the preexposure familiarization group for novel- than for familiar-stimulus presentations, whereas the Nc did not differ for the group not receiving a familiarization exposure. Spatial independent components analysis of the electroencephelogram and "equivalent current dipole" analysis were used to examine putative cortical sources of the ERP components. The cortical source of Nc was located in areas of prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Predicting Alcohol Patterns in First-Year College Students Through Motivational Systems and Reasons for Drinking.

In the present study, a typological approach was used to identify patterns of alcohol use in a sample of 533 college freshmen students (     

Physical Attractiveness and Health in Western Societies: A Review.

Evidence from developed Western societies is reviewed for the claims that (a) physical attractiveness judgments are substantially based on body size and shape, symmetry, sex-typical hormonal markers, and other specific cues and (b) physical attractiveness and these cues substantially predict health. Among the cues that the authors review, only female waist-to-hip ratio and weight appear to predict both attractiveness and health in the claimed manner. Other posited cues--symmetry and sex-typical hormonal markers among them--failed to predict either attractiveness or health (or both) in either sex. The authors find that there is some indication that attractiveness has an overall relationship with health among women, but little indication that male attractiveness relates to male health. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Money Management After Acquired Brain Dysfunction: The Validity of Neuropsychological Assessment.

Objective: To study the money management ability of people with acquired brain dysfunction (ABD) and its relationship to neuropsychological test performance. Subjects or Other Participants: 35 people with ABD and 15 matched controls without ABD. Main Outcome Measures: Case managers completed an experimenter-designed Money Management Survey (MMS), a staff-rating measure of the client's money management abilities. Results: In addition to the problems identified by controls, the group with ABD had other difficulties such as not leaving money aside for essentials and using automatic teller machines. Neuropsychological assessment demonstrated a modest ability to predict the overall MMS, however, the prediction of specific behaviors (problematic impulsive spending and paying the bills or rent late) was more successful. Conclusion: These results provide support for the use of the MMS and indicate that people with ABD have greater problems with specific aspects of money management than do controls. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)