An experimental, observational investigation of children's responses to peer provocation: developmental and gender differences in middle childhood.

The primary goal of this research was to use an experimental, observational method to study the development of anger expression during middle childhood. Eight-, 10-, and 12-year-old girls and boys (N = 382) were observed during a laboratory play session that was provoking in two ways: Participants lost a computer game they were playing for a desirable prize, and their play partner was a same-age, same-gender confederate actor who taunted them. Children's responses to the provoking play sessions--facial expressions, verbalizations, and gestures--were reliably coded.

Age differences in accuracy and choosing in eyewitness identification and face recognition.

Studies of aging and face recognition show age-related increases in false recognitions of new faces. To explore implications of this false alarm effect, we had young and senior adults perform (1) three eye-witness identification tasks, using both target present and target absent lineups, and (2) and old/new recognition task in which a study list of faces was followed by a test including old and new faces, along with conjunctions of old faces. Compared with the young, seniors had lower accuracy and higher choosing rates on the lineups, and they also falsely recognized more new faces on the recognition test.

A moving cast shadow diminishes the Pulfrich phenomenon.

It is demonstrated that the presence of a moving cast shadow diminishes the Pulfrich phenomenon. This complements previous work by Kersten, Knill, Mamassian, and Bülthoff [1996 Nature (London) 379 31] indicating that visible cast shadows can override monocularly based cues to the perceived trajectory of a moving object. The present finding with the Pulfrich phenomenon indicates the effectiveness of shadows for overriding binocularly based cues to the perceived trajectory of a moving object.

Pitches of concurrent vowels.

When two vowels are presented simultaneously, listeners can report their phonemic identities more accurately if their fundamental frequencies (F0's) are different rather than the same. If the F0 difference (delta F0) is large, listeners hear two vowels on different pitches; if the delta F0 is small the vowels are identified less accurately and they do not evoke different pitches. The present study used a matching task to obtain judgments of the pitches evoked by "double vowels" created from pairwise combinations of steady-state synthetic vowels /i/, /a/, /u/, /ae/, and /[symbol: see text]/.

Can we learn from the clinically significant face processing deficits, prosopagnosia and Capgras delusion?

This review describes two clinically significant face processing deficits, prosopagnosia and Capgras delusion, and provides new knowledge about the face recognition process by a convergence of empirical findings. These empirical findings are structured around two questions that are reviewed from the perspectives of the two deficits. First is the question of hemispheric specificity, which inquires into the degree of each hemisphere's contribution to the face recognition process.

Mothers' lexicon of internal state words in speech to children with Down syndrome and to nonhandicapped children at mealtime.

This study examines internal state words in mothers' speech to children with Down syndrome, and the relation between the use of internal state words and the children's levels of social-adaptive, communicative, and linguistic functioning. Results indicate qualitative differences in mothers' use of internal state words to children with children Down syndrome, compared with a sample of maternal speech to nonhandicapped children who were matched on the Vineland scales for their level of adaptive functioning. Differences include use of fewer internal state words overall to children with Down syndrome, and different kinds of internal state words: more words referring to physiological states, and fewer words referring either to affect or to cognition.

Characterization of the Pf3 single-strand DNA binding protein by circular dichroism spectroscopy.

We have used circular dichroism (CD) spectroscopy and gel electrophoresis to characterize the single-strand DNA binding protein (ssDBP) of the bacteriophage Pf3 and its complexes with Pf3 DNA and various DNA and RNA homopolymers. The secondary structure of Pf3 ssDBP had < 1% alpha-helix and therefore was probably a beta-sheet structure like the fd gene 5 protein (g5p). From CD titrations, the binding stoichiometry of Pf3 ssDBP was two nucleotides per protein monomer (n = 2) for complexes formed with all of the nucleic acids except poly[r(U)], for which n = 3 (in a buffer of 10 mM Tris-HCl and 70 mM NaCl, pH 8.