According to some accounts, the bilingual advantage is most pronounced in the domain of executive attention rather than inhibition and should therefore be more easily detected in conflict adaptation paradigms than in simple interference paradigms. We tested this idea using two conflict adaptation paradigms, one that elicits a list-wide proportion-congruent effect and one that elicits an item-specific proportion-congruent effect. In both cases, the relevant finding is that congruency effects are reduced when the proportion of congruent to incongruent items is smaller. These effects are validated measures of proactive and reactive control, respectively, and are aspects of executive attention known to be associated with individual differences in working memory capacity. We reasoned that if bilingualism affects executive attention in a similar way as does working memory capacity, indices of proactive and reactive control should be comparably associated with continuous variation in language status and working memory capacity. In two experiments, we replicated previous findings that working memory capacity is associated with variation in congruency effects (suggesting greater reliance on proactive control). In contrast, language status had no consistent association with performance, save for a hint that bilingualism may be associated with greater reliance on reactive control. Thus, the bilingual advantage may exist, but not in proactive control or any other aspects of executive attention that have been proposed thus far. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
Spigelian hernia (SH) is a surgical rarity in children, which occurs through slit-like defects in the anterior abdominal wall adjacent to the semilunar line, the convexity lateral line which joins the nine ribs to the pubic tubercle and signs the limit between the muscular and aponeurotic portion of transversus abdominis muscle. As there are no specific symptoms and signs, the diagnosis is difficult, especially in children. We report a case of SH that comes to our observation: a 14-year-old girl presented recurrent abdominal pain associated to intermittent palpable mass in the paraumbilical region. Starting from our case report, we review the literature of pediatric SH from 2000 to 2013 and we describe the anatomy, etiology, clinical presentation, instrumental diagnosis, and surgical technique of pediatric SH.
Adapting attention flexibly is a fundamental ability of the human control system. In the color-word Stroop task, for example, congruency effects are typically smaller for colors and words that appear mainly in incongruent stimuli (mostly-incongruent items) than for colors and words that appear mainly in congruent stimuli (mostly-congruent items). At least part of this item-specific proportion-congruent (ISPC) effect is due to a process of reactive conflict adaptation that affords higher selectivity (i.e., more efficient selection of task-relevant information) when a specific stimulus is presented that is frequently associated in the experiment with conflicting task-irrelevant information. What is unclear, however, is whether, normally, this stimulus-specific adaptation is triggered by the task-relevant component, the task-irrelevant component, or both components of the stimulus. In two experiments, using modified color-word (Experiment 1) and spatial (Experiment 2) Stroop tasks that allowed task-relevant and task-irrelevant triggering processes to be dissociated, we found that the two processes have approximately equivalent impacts. Because these results were obtained in experiments imposing no limitations on the processes potentially contributing to the ISPC effect, these results challenge claims that the ISPC effect involves conflict-adaptation processes only in special situations. The ISPC effect may involve conflict-adaptation processes in most situations, with both task-relevant and task-irrelevant information triggering such processes.
Abstract In masked priming lexical decision tasks in alphabetic or syllabic script languages, latencies are longer when a word target is primed by a higher frequency neighbor (e.g., blue–BLUR) than when primed by an unrelated word of equivalent frequency (e.g., care–BLUR) – an “inhibitory neighbor priming effect.” In contrast, Zhou et al. (1999) demonstrated facilitatory orthographic neighbor priming for two-character Chinese words (e.g., 华丽–华贵). However, Zhou et al. did not control for relative prime-target frequency, which has been shown to be important in experiments when examining languages with other scripts. In the present Experiment 1 word neighbor primes (e.g., 容易-容貌) produced an inhibitory neighbor priming effect when the prime was higher frequency than the target, paralleling effects in other script languages. In further experiments, paralleling those in other script languages, two-character targets primed by nonword neighbors (容待-容貌) or single constituent characters matching the target in either position (容-容貌) showed significant facilitation. These results suggest that lexical activation/competition processes for two-character Chinese words are reasonably similar to those for words in alphabetic/syllabic script languages.
Three masked priming paradigms, the conventional masked priming lexical decision task (Forster & Davis, 1984), the sandwich priming task (Lupker & Davis, 2009) and the masked priming same-different task (Norris & Kinoshita, 2008) were used to investigate priming for a given target (e.g., JUDGE) from primes created by either adding a letter to the beginning of the target (e.g., zjudge) or replacing the target's initial letter (e.g., zudge).Virtually all models of orthographic coding that allow calculation of orthographic similarity measures predict that zjudge should be the better prime because zjudge contains all the letters in JUDGE in their correct order whereas zudge does not.Nonetheless, Adelman et al.'s (2014) megastudy data indicated no difference in the effectiveness of these two prime types.The present experiments provide additional support for the conclusion of no difference between these two prime types with the only observed difference being a small zudge prime advantage in Experiment 1b (sandwich priming).These results suggest that models of orthographic coding/word recognition may be well served by allowing inconsistent information (e.g., the "z" in both zjudge and zudge indicates that the presented prime is not JUDGE) to be given considerable weight during the orthographic coding/word recognition process.
Transposing two words in a sentence (e.g. "cat" and "was" in "the white cat was big") creates a sequence that is harder to classify as ungrammatical than control sequences (e.g. "the white was cat slowly"), suggesting that word position coding is noisy and can be affected by syntactic expectations. In the present research, this transposed-word effect was examined more closely using Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) formats which provided either clear temporal cues to word order but no spatial cues, or both types of cues. Compared to when all words were presented simultaneously, the two RSVP formats reduced the transposed-word effect to the same degree while having no parallel impact on another ungrammatical comparison condition involving no transposition. These results are discussed in the context of serial and parallel models of reading as well as models that propose a later processing stage for the locus of the transposed-word effect.
Theories of adaptive (and cognitive) control assume that selecting target information in the context of highly salient distractors depends on limited-capacity resources. Building on this assumption, theories of language-control associations propose that the opportunities afforded by bilingualism to engage such effortful selection, such as when speaking in a nondominant language, might improve domain-general adaptive control. The assumption that domain-general or language-specific selection is resource-demanding, however, has surprisingly little empirical support. Here, we tested that assumption by having unbalanced Italian-English bilinguals perform both an L1 Stroop task and an L2 picture-naming task simultaneously with an n-back task. Both tasks showed costs due to the load produced by the n-back task and distractor interference, with slower responses to incongruent (the word GREEN in the color red) and congruent stimuli (RED in red) than neutral ones (XXX in red) in the L1 Stroop task and to noncognate than cognate pictures (pictures with different/similar L1 and L2 names) in the L2 picture-naming task. However, neither task showed larger distractor interference with greater load, with Bayesian analyses favoring the absence of such interactions. These results suggest that domain-general and language-specific selection may occur reactively, i.e., only when the need arises, with no strong reliance on limited-capacity resources. Further, they invite a rethinking of both adaptive-control theories assuming resource-demanding selection and theories of language-control associations assuming that regularly engaging such selection would be conducive to domain-general benefits.
