The effects of extraneous speech on visual vigilance performance of children

First-grade males performed a 30-min visual vigilance task under 5 conditions of auditory background stimulation. The 5 conditions consisted of (1) continuous conversation, in which subjects listened to a tape of conversation spliced so that there were no intervals of silence lasting longer than 3 sec; (2) continuous reverse, in which subjects heard the continuous conversation tape played in reverse; (3) intermittent conversation, in which subjects heard alternating segments of conversation and silence; (4) intermittent reverse, in which subjects heard alternating segments of reverse conversation and silence; and (5) silence control. Compared with silence or continuous stimulation, intermittent stimulation produced better detection regardless of whether or not it was meaningful. High achievers made more correct detections than low achievers, but only in the second and third time periods. Few subjects made errors of commission.     

Behavior of narcotics-addicted newborns.

The behavior of narcotics-addicted and nonaddicted newborns on the first 2 days of life was assessed with the Brazelton Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale. In addition to classic signs of narcotics abstinence, addicted infants were less able to be maintained in an alert state and less able to orient to auditory and visual stimuli. These deficits were especially pronounced at 48 hours of age. Addicted infants were as capable of self-quieting and responding to soothing intervention as normal neonates, although they were substantially more irritable. These characteristics and addicted infants' greater resistance to cuddling are discussed in terms of their potential impact on early infant-care-giver interaction.     

Adjacency matrix concepts for the analysis of the interconnection of networks

A mathematical theory is developed for an imagined device termed a “junctor”. A junctor could be used to interconnect two n-terminal networks giving rise to another n-terminal network. Actually a junctor is itself a simple network with three banks of n-terminals internally connected in some fashion by perfectly conducting wires. Adjacency matrices are formulated to analyze various junctors and their current flows. The main problem treated concerns conditions which would ensure that the junctor operation is associative.     

Theory for incompressible fluid turbulence

The functional integral representation for the space-time Hopf characteristic functional associated with boundary-free incompressible fluid turbulence is evaluated accurately to order R^-2, where R is the dimensionless Reynolds number in the theory. This work extends the results obtained previously for C-dominant turbulence to the regime of experimentally accessible large Reynolds numbers. We obtain a characteristic functional of non-Gaussian form as an asymptotically exact solution to the theory for large values of R. Two-point and three-point velocity correlation tensors of physical interest are derived from the characteristic functional.