Cognitive Science

Communication between parents and adolescents about adolescents' sexual behavior has been studied. However, the types of issues on which adolescents are willing to communicate with their parents have been scarcely discussed. A survey was conducted among a random sample of 1,204 junior high school students in Taipei. The survey probed into adolescents' communication with their parents as related to sex, including physical development, sexuality, choice of partner, frequency of dating, whom to date, and intimacy during dating. Analysis showed that physical development was the topic most often discussed. Talking about dating was discussed less than the other three topics. Moreover, girls were more likely to communicate with their parents than boys about all six issues.

A model is presented regarding associations between economic strain, support from spouse, and quality of parenting. The model was tested using a sample of 451 2-parent families, each of which included a seventh grader (age 12-13). Parent and adolescent reports, as well as observational ratings, were used as indicators of constructs. Analysis using structural equation modeling procedures indicated that level of spouse support was positively related to supportive parenting, whereas economic strain operated to undermine parental involvement. As posited, economic strain produced its effect through a direct relation with parenting and indirectly through its association with spouse support. These findings held for mothers and fathers, regardless of the gender of the child. Spouse support moderated the impact of economic strain on supportive parenting for mothers but not fathers. Possible explanations for this gender difference are presented.

ABSTRACT This article presents the evolution of Heinz Werner's thought on metaphor from 1919 until Symbol Formation (1963). Early on, he distinguished between the logical and the psychological approach to metaphor, where the former analyzes the conceptual con-flation produced by metaphor and the latter centers on the subjective experience of this incongruence. Starting with an inquiry into direct experience, he initially develops the notion of pneuma and later that of physiognomy. In Symbol Formation, Werner and Kaplan (1963) expand this distinction by introducing the concept of physiognomic and geometric properties of language in general. We argue that the holistic-developmental approach is deeply related to the vitalist and romantic traditions of the 19th century. We analyze three theories of metaphor after 1963: conceptual meta-phor, semiotic anthropology, and contextual approaches to metaphor. We argue that while the first of these follows the traditional logical–geometrical approach to language, the latter two may better reflect the spirit of Werner and Kaplan.

The functional organization of early visual areas seems to be largely determined during development. However, the organization of areas important for learning and memory, such as perirhinal cortex, may be modifiable in adults. To test this hypothesis, we recorded from pairs of neurons in perirhinal cortex of macaques while they viewed multiple complex stimuli. For novel stimuli, neuronal response preferences for pairs of nearby neurons and far-apart neurons were uncorrelated. However, after one day of experience with the stimuli, response preferences of nearby neurons became more similar. We conclude that specific visual experience induces development of clusters of perirhinal neurons with similar stimulus preferences.

Selective visual attention is subserved by selective neuronal synchronization, entailing precise orchestration among excitatory and inhibitory cells. We tentatively identified these as broad (BS) and narrow spiking (NS) cells and analyzed their synchronization to the local field potential in two macaque monkeys performing a selective visual attention task. Across cells, gamma phases scattered widely but were unaffected by stimulation or attention. During stimulation, NS cells lagged BS cells on average by ∼60° and gamma synchronized twice as strongly. Attention enhanced and reduced the gamma locking of strongly and weakly activated cells, respectively. During a prestimulus attentional cue period, BS cells showed weak gamma synchronization, while NS cells gamma-synchronized as strongly as with visual stimulation. These analyses reveal the cell-type-specific dynamics of the gamma cycle in macaque visual cortex and suggest that attention affects neurons differentially depending on cell type and activation level.

The aim of this work was to study the topographic distribution and the morphological behaviour of nerve growth factor (NGF) primed spleen cells injected into the lateral ventricles of developing rat brain. Serial coronal brain sections showed that these transplanted cells acquire phenotypical characteristics similar to those of mast cells (MCs) and that they enhance local neovascularization. These results, together with the observation that these cells are located in proximity to the hippocampus, a brain tissue which contains one of the highest levels of NGF, provide a model for studying the relationship between NGF and MC differentiation and secretion.

Empirical mode decomposition (EMD) has recently been introduced as a local and fully data-driven technique for the analysis of non-stationary time-series. It allows the frequency and amplitude of a time-series to be evaluated with excellent time resolution. In this article we consider the application of EMD to the analysis of neuronal activity in visual cortical area V4 of a macaque monkey performing a visual spatial attention task. We show that, by virtue of EMD, field potentials can be resolved into a sum of intrinsic components with different degrees of oscillatory content. Low-frequency components in single-trial recordings contribute to the average visual evoked potential (AVEP), whereas high-frequency components do not, but are identified as gamma-band (30-90 Hz) oscillations. The magnitude of time-varying gamma activity is shown to be enhanced when the monkey attends to a visual stimulus as compared to when it is not attending to the same stimulus. Comparison with Fourier analysis shows that EMD may offer better temporal and frequency resolution. These results support the idea that the magnitude of gamma activity reflects the modulation of V4 neurons by visual spatial attention. EMD, coupled with instantaneous frequency analysis, is demonstrated to be a useful technique for the analysis of neurobiological time-series.

We investigated the effect of microstimulation of the superficial layers of the superior colliculus (SC) on the performance of animals in a peripheral detection paradigm while maintaining fixation. In a matching-to-sample paradigm, a sample stimulus was presented at one location followed by a brief test stimulus at that (relevant) location and a distractor at another (irrelevant) location. While maintaining fixation, the monkey indicated whether the sample and the test stimulus matched, ignoring the distractor. The relevant and irrelevant locations were switched from trial to trial. Cells in the superficial layers of SC gave enhanced responses when the attended test stimulus was inside the receptive field compared with when the (physically identical) distractor was inside the field. These effects were found only in an "automatic" attentional cueing paradigm, in which a peripheral stimulus explicitly cued the animal as to the relevant location in the receptive field. No attentional effects were found with block of trials. The transient enhancement to the attended stimulus was observed at the onset and not at the offset of the stimulus. Electrical stimulation at the site corresponding to the irrelevant distractor location in the SC causes it to gain control over attention, causing impaired performance of the task at the relevant location. Stimulation at unattended sites without the presence of a distractor stimulus causes little or no impairment in performance. The effect of stimulation decays with successive stimulations. The animals learn to ignore the stimulation unless the parameters of the task are varied.

The specific size and retinal location of an object are readily perceived, yet recognition of an object's identity is hardly affected by transformations of its size or location. To explore how such stimulus transformations are treated by known mechanisms for visual short-term memory in inferior temporal (IT) cortex, IT cells were recorded in monkeys performing a delayed matching-to-sample task. The stimuli were pictures of complex objects, and the monkeys ignored differences in size and retinal location when matching the test items to the sample held in memory. The sensory information communicated by cells was assessed in their responses to the sample stimuli, and mnemonic information was assessed in their responses to the test stimuli. In the sensory domain, the ordering of relative stimulus preferences for nearly all cells was invariant over changes in size or location; however, some cells nonetheless preferred stimuli of a given size or location. In the mnemonic domain, the responses of many cells were modulated according to whether the test stimulus matched the sample held in memory, and these memory effects were invariant over the relative sizes and locations of the stimuli. Thus, IT neuronal populations may mediate not only the recognition and memory of object identity, which are invariant over size and location, but also the perception of the transformations themselves.

What neural mechanisms underlie the ability to attend to a complex object in the presence of competing overlapping stimuli? We evaluated whether object-based attention might involve pattern-specific feedback to early visual areas to selectively enhance the set of low-level features corresponding to the attended object. Using fMRI and multivariate pattern analysis, we found that activity patterns in early visual areas (V1-V4) are strongly biased in favor of the attended object. Activity patterns evoked by single faces and single houses reliably predicted which of the 2 overlapping stimulus types was being attended with high accuracy (80-90% correct). Superior knowledge of upright objects led to improved attentional selection in early areas. Across individual blocks, the strength of the attentional bias signal in early visual areas was highly predictive of the modulations found in high-level object areas, implying that pattern-specific attentional filtering at early sites can determine the quality of object-specific signals that reach higher level visual areas. Through computational modeling, we show how feedback of an average template to V1-like units can improve discrimination of exemplars belonging to the attended category. Our findings provide a mechanistic account of how feedback to early visual areas can contribute to the attentional selection of complex objects.

Many objects in natural visual scenes compete for attention. To identify the neural mechanisms necessary for visual attention, we made restricted lesions, affecting different quadrants of the visual field but leaving one quadrant intact, in extrastriate cortical areas V4 and TEO of two monkeys. Monkeys were trained to discriminate the orientation of a target grating surrounded by distracters. As distracter contrast increased, performance deteriorated in quadrants affected by V4 and TEO lesions, but not in the normal quadrant. Performance in affected quadrants was restored by increasing the contrast of the target relative to distracters. Thus, without V4 and TEO, visual attention is 'captured' by strong stimuli, regardless of their behavioral relevance.

European Database Multiple Sclerosis (EDMUS) is a standardized tool which allows the collection of clinical, biological, radiological and therapeutic data on multiple sclerosis (MS). A descriptive analysis of 199 patients was done using EDMUS (version 2.2). Most data agreed with previous published results, except a low 0.4 sex ratio. At the beginning of MS, 42 p. 100 of MS patients developed pyramidal and sensory involvements and 14 p. 100 retrobulbar optic neuritis. Optic neuritis was the most frequent initial symptom of relapsing-remitting MS (25.9 p. 100) but not in the chronic progressive form (5.5 p, 100; p < 0.01). Surprisingly, relapsing-remitting form occurred more frequently whereas the secondary progressive form was diagnosed less. The concordances between the three disability scales, EGS (EDMUS Grading Scale), EDSS (Expanded Disability Status Score) and AI (Hauser Ambulation Index) were correct. In clinical practice, EDMUS is user-friendly and rapid. The lack of radiological data and the necessary quantification of only one disability scale, EGS may be too restrictive. The analysis of most of clinical data is possible by using integrated selection within the software, but sometimes needs more complex procedures.