Spatial navigation is believed to be guided in part by reference to an internal map of the environment. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to test for a key aspect of a cognitive map: preservation of real-world distance relationships. University students were scanned while viewing photographs of familiar campus landmarks. fMRI response levels in the left hippocampus corresponded to real-world distances between landmarks shown on successive trials, indicating that this region considered closer landmarks to be more representationally similar and more distant landmarks to be more representationally distinct. In contrast, posterior visually responsive regions such as retrosplenial complex and the parahippocampal place area were sensitive to landmark repetition and encoded landmark identity in their multivoxel activity patterns but did not show a distance-related response. These data suggest the existence of a map-like representation in the human medial temporal lobe that encodes the coordinates of familiar locations in large-scale, real-world environments.

The type of formula fed to infants has an effect on their response to taste compounds in cereal before solid food introduction. This model system of research investigation sheds light on sources of individual differences in taste and perhaps cultural food preferences.

OBJECTIVE-The present experimental study was designed to determine how breast-feeding from a mother who smokes affects infants in the short-term. METHODS-Fifteenmother-infant dyads were tested on 2 days separated by 1 week. Mothers smoked (not in the presence of their infants) on one test day and refrained from smoking on the other. For the next 3.5 hours, infants breastfed on demand. Sleep and activity patterns were monitored by placing an actigraph on the infants' leg, and milk intake was determined by weighing the infants before and after each feeding. The nicotine content of the milk was measured to determine the dose of nicotine delivered to the infants. RESULTS-Althoughthere was no significant difference in breast milk intake, despite the taste changes in the milk, infants spent significantly less time sleeping during the hours immediately after their mothers smoked (53.4 minutes), compared with the session when their mothers abstained from smoking (84.5 minutes). This reduction was attributable to shortening of the longest sleep bout and reductions in the amounts of time spent in both active sleep and quiet sleep. With greater doses of nicotine delivered to the infant, less time was spent in active sleep.CONCLUSIONS-An acute episode of smoking by lactating mothers altered infants' sleep/wake patterning. Perhaps concerns that their milk would taste like cigarettes and their infants' sleep patterning would be disrupted would motivate lactating mothers to abstain from smoking and to breastfeed longer. Keywords breastfeeding; maternal smoking; nicotine; sleep More than 250 million women throughout the world inhale one of the most strongly addicting drugs. 1 Those who smoke tobacco while pregnant present a serious threat to their own health and their children's health. 2 These health threats continue after birth when infants are exposed passively to nicotine and other toxic constituents of cigarette smoke in ambient air, breast milk, or both. 2,3Although the amount of nicotine transferred into breast milk is more than double that transferred to maternal serum, 4 there is evidence that breastfeeding offers protection; the incidence of acute respiratory illness among infants whose mothers smoked was diminished for those who were breastfed, compared with formula fed. 5 Because the benefits of breastfeeding outweigh the risks of nicotine exposure, nicotine is no longer listed as a drug that is contraindicated during breastfeeding. 6 Although lactating women who smoke are

Human observers can recognize real-world visual scenes with great efficiency. Cortical regions such as the parahippocampal place area (PPA) and retrosplenial complex (RSC) have been implicated in scene recognition, but the specific representations supported by these regions are largely unknown. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging adaptation (fMRIa) and multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) to explore this issue, focusing on whether the PPA and RSC represent scenes in terms of general categories, or as specific scenic exemplars. Subjects were scanned while viewing images drawn from 10 outdoor scene categories in two scan runs and images of 10 familiar landmarks from their home college campus in two scan runs. Analyses of multi-voxel patterns revealed that the PPA and RSC encoded both category and landmark information, with a slight advantage for landmark coding in RSC. fMRIa, on the other hand, revealed a very different picture: both PPA and RSC adapted when landmark information was repeated, but category adaptation was only observed in a small subregion of the left PPA. These inconsistencies between the MVPA and fMRIa data suggests that these two techniques interrogate different aspects of the neuronal code. We propose three hypotheses about the mechanisms that might underlie adaptation and multi-voxel signals.

While psychology can be straightforwardly shown to be a science, many do not perceive it to be a scientific discipline. Although researchers have examined this phenomenon (e.g., Lilienfeld, 2011), they have yet to empirically identify the cognitive mechanisms that might be responsible for it. One possibility is that a dual-process account of cognition might explain the phenomenon;that is, while individuals may understand that psychology is a science, they may not implicitly associate psychology with science. The goal of this thesis is to explore this possibility. The participants completed a discrete free association task (Nelson et al., 2004) for academic disciplines that included the natural sciences and psychology. The results demonstrated that psychology was found to be conceptually different from science and the natural sciences.Moreover, the results suggest that science might be conceived of as the topics and objects of study rather than its methodologies. In addition, participants rated each discipline on a number of dimensions (e.g., difficulty, importance, and concreteness). The results demonstrated that, while psychology scored above the mean on the rating of scientific, the discipline scored below the mean on dimensions that significantly predicted the dimension scientific: difficulty and concreteness. Based on the results, suggestions are provided to assist in improving the perception of psychology as genuinely scientific.