Personal neglect-a disorder of body representation?

The cognitive mechanisms underlying personal neglect are not well known. One theory postulates that personal neglect is due to a disorder of contralesional body representation. In the present study, we have investigated whether personal neglect is best explained by impairments in the representation of the contralesional side of the body, in particular, or a dysfunction of the mental representation of the contralesional space in general. For this, 22 patients with right hemisphere cerebral lesions (7 with personal neglect, 15 without personal neglect) and 13 healthy controls have been studied using two experimental tasks measuring representation of the body and extrapersonal space. In the tasks, photographs of left and right hands as well as left and right rear-view mirrors presented from the front and the back had to be judged as left or right. Our results show that patients with personal neglect made more errors when asked to judge stimuli of left hands and left rear-view mirrors than either patients without personal neglect or healthy controls. Furthermore, regression analyses indicated that errors in interpreting left hands were the best predictor of personal neglect, while other variables such as extrapersonal neglect, somatosensory or motor impairments, or deficits in left extrapersonal space representation had no predictive value of personal neglect. These findings suggest that deficient body representation is the major mechanism underlying personal neglect.

Strategies of Representation, Relationship, and Resistance: British Women Travelers and Mormon Plural Wives, c. 1870-1890

During the 1870s and 1880s, several British women writers traveled by transcontinental railroad across the American West via Salt Lake City, Utah, the capital of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons. These women subsequently wrote books about their travels for a home audience with a taste for adventures in the American West, and particularly for accounts of Mormon plural marriage, which was sanctioned by the Church before 1890. "The plight of the Mormon woman," a prominent social reform and literary theme of the period, situated Mormon women at the center of popular representations of Utah during the second half of the nineteenth century. "The Mormon question" thus lends itself to an analysis of how a stereotyped subaltern group was represented by elite British travelers. These residents of western American territories, however, differed in important respects from the typical subaltern subjects discussed by Victorian travelers. These white, upwardly mobile, and articulate Mormon plural wives attempted to influence observers' representations of them through a variety of narrative strategies. Both British women travel writers and Mormon women wrote from the margins of power and credibility, and as interpreters of the Mormon scene were concerned to established their representational authority.

Party Size and Constituency Representation: Evidence from the 19th-Century U.S. House of Representatives

Research on congressional parties assumes, but has not directly shown, that party size affects individual members' calculations. Drawing on a key case from the nineteenth-century House the secession-driven Republican hegemony of 1861 this article explores the hypothesis that party voting not only declines but also becomes more strongly linked to constituency factors as relative party size increases. The analysis reveals that the jump in party size coincides with (1) a decrease in party voting among individual continuing members, (2) a strengthening association between some constituency factors and party voting, and (3) patterns of decline in individual party voting that are explained in part by constituency measures.

The effects of aging and musical experience on the representation of tonal hierarchies

Two experiments explored the representation of the tonal hierarchy in Western music among older (aged 60 to 80) and younger (aged 15 to 22) musicians and nonmusicians. A probe tone technique was used: 4 notes from the major triad were presented, followed by 1 note chosen from the 12 notes of the chromatic scale. Whereas musicians had a better sense of the tonal hierarchy than nonmusicians, older adults were no worse than younger adults in differentiating the notes according to musical principles. However, older adults were more prone than younger adults to classify the notes by frequency proximity (pitch height) when proximity was made more salient, as were nonmusicians compared with musicians. With notes having ambiguous pitch height, pitch height effects disappeared among older adults but not nonmusicians. Older adults seem to have internalized tonal structure, but they sometimes fail to inhibit less musically relevant information.

Understanding Economic Biases in Representation: Income, Resources, and Policy Representation in the 110th House

This article explores the extent, and possible causes, of income-based biases in representation of citizens by members of the 110th Congress. The author finds that the preferences of wealthier citizens are modestly but significantly better reflected in the choices of their congressional representatives than are the preferences of poorer citizens. More importantly, the author shows that education, political sophistication, political engagement, ethnicity, and other sociodemographic factors can explain only a small part of this representation gap. Biases in representation across income lines appear to be driven by income alone, or at least not by politically relevant factors correlated with income.