Slower rates of prism adaptation but intact aftereffects in patients with early to mid-stage Parkinson's disease.

There is currently mixed evidence on the effect of Parkinson's disease on motor adaptation. Some studies report that patients display adaptation comparable to age-matched controls, while others report a complete inability to adapt to novel sensory perturbations. Here, early to mid-stage Parkinson's patients were recruited to perform a prism adaptation task. When compared to controls, patients showed slower rates of initial adaptation but intact aftereffects. These results support the suggestion that patients with early to mid-stage Parkinson's disease display intact adaptation driven by sensory prediction errors, as shown by the intact aftereffect. But impaired facilitation of performance through cognitive strategies informed by task error, as shown by the impaired initial adaptation. These results support recent studies that suggest that patients with Parkinson's disease retain the ability to perform visuomotor adaptation, but display altered use of cognitive strategies to aid performance and generalises these previous findings to the classical prism adaptation task.

Positive wellbeing and resilience following adolescent victimisation: An exploration into protective factors across development.

Background: Not all victims of bullying go on to develop problems with their mental health. To understand factors that may confer resilience, many have explored the moderating role of protective factors in relation to mental illness. No study to date, however, has considered moderators of adult wellbeing following victimisation. We explore 14 protective factors and test whether these promote good adult wellbeing in addition to prevent mental illness following victimisation. In doing so, we aimed to understand how positive mental health and resilience can be promoted. Methods: Data were derived from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. Participants were assessed for wellbeing and depressive symptoms at age 23, as well as victimisation in adolescence, and protective factors across development. Protective factors were categorised into individual-, family- and peer-level, and included factors like social skills, perceived school competence, and relationships with family and peers. The moderating role of the protective factors were examined using interactive regression models. Results: Perceived scholastic competence was the only factor that mitigated some of the negative effects of victimisation. Individuals with higher perceptions of scholastic competence had higher wellbeing in adulthood than victims with lower perceptions of competence. No protective factors positively moderated life satisfaction or the risk of depressive symptoms; although findings suggest that friendships in late adolescence may be protective for individuals exposed to less frequent victimisation. Conclusions: Our study is the first to explore a wide range of protective factors in predicting adult wellbeing following victimisation. We identify factors involved specifically in supporting wellbeing but not in reducing the risk of depression. Findings suggest that interventions aimed at increasing perceptions of scholastic competence in childhood may help to support more positive wellbeing in adulthood.

Putting your money where your self is: Connecting dimensions of closeness and theories of personal identity.

Studying personal identity, the continuity and sameness of persons across lifetimes, is notoriously difficult and competing conceptualizations exist within philosophy and psychology. Personal reidentification, linking persons between points in time is a fundamental step in allocating merit and blame and assigning rights and privileges. Based on Nozick's (1981) closest continuer theory we develop a theoretical framework that explicitly invites a meaningful empirical approach and offers a constructive, integrative solution to current disputes about appropriate experiments. Following Nozick, reidentification involves judging continuers on a metric of continuity and choosing the continuer with the highest acceptable value on this metric. We explore both the metric and its implications for personal identity. Since James (1890), academic theories have variously attributed personal identity to the continuity of memories, psychology, bodies, social networks, and possessions. In our experiments, we measure how participants (N = 1, 525) weighted the relative contributions of these five dimensions in hypothetical fission accidents, in which a person was split into two continuers. Participants allocated compensation money (Study 1) or adjudicated inheritance claims (Study 2) and reidentified the original person. Most decided based on the continuity of memory, personality, and psychology, with some consideration given to the body and social relations. Importantly, many participants identified the original with both continuers simultaneously, violating the transitivity of identity relations. We discuss the findings and their relevance for philosophy and psychology and place our approach within the current theoretical and empirical landscape.

The relationship between endowment and ownership effects in memory across cultures.

An object one owns is typically more highly valued than an equivalent object owned by another person. This endowment effect has been attributed to the aversion of loss of one's possessions (through selling), or the added value of an item due to self-association (through owning). To date, investigation of these mechanisms has been hampered by the between-subjects methodology traditionally employed to measure endowment. Over two experiments, we report a novel within-subjects method for measuring an endowment bias. In these studies, Western participants showed enhanced valuation of owned items, whereas East-Asian participants did not. This endowment bias also correlated with the ownership effect in memory (a measure of self-referential processing) in Western, but not East-Asian participants. Our results suggest that the endowment effect is partly predicated on the same factors that influence the ownership effect and that this commonality is likely linked to conceptions of ownership specifically, and self-concept more generally.

Divided attention selectively impairs memory for self-relevant information.

Information that is relevant to oneself tends to be remembered more than information that relates to other people, but the role of attention in eliciting this "self-reference effect" is unclear. In the present study, we assessed the importance of attention in self-referential encoding using an ownership paradigm, which required participants to encode items under conditions of imagined ownership by themselves or by another person. Previous work has established that this paradigm elicits a robust self-reference effect, with more "self-owned" items being remembered than "other-owned" items. Access to attentional resources was manipulated using divided-attention tasks at encoding. A significant self-reference effect emerged under full-attention conditions and was related to an increase in episodic recollection for self-owned items, but dividing attention eliminated this memory advantage. These findings are discussed in relation to the nature of self-referential cognition and the importance of attentional resources at encoding in the manifestation of the self-reference effect in memory.

Attention orienting effects of hesitations in speech: evidence from ERPs.

Filled-pause disfluencies such as um and er affect listeners' comprehension, possibly mediated by attentional mechanisms (J. E. Fox Tree, 2001). However, there is little direct evidence that hesitations affect attention. The current study used an acoustic manipulation of continuous speech to induce event-related potential components associated with attention (mismatch negativity [MMN] and P300) during the comprehension of fluent and disfluent utterances. In fluent cases, infrequently occurring acoustically manipulated target words gave rise to typical MMN and P300 components when compared to nonmanipulated controls. In disfluent cases, where targets were preceded by natural sounding hesitations culminating in the filled pause er, an MMN (reflecting a detection of deviance) was still apparent for manipulated words, but there was little evidence of a subsequent P300. This suggests that attention was not reoriented to deviant words in disfluent cases. A subsequent recognition test showed that nonmanipulated words were more likely to be remembered if they had been preceded by a hesitation. Taken together, these results strongly implicate attention in an account of disfluency processing: Hesitations orient listeners' attention, with consequences for the immediate processing and later representation of an utterance.