Five views of a secret: does cognition change during middle adulthood?

This study examined five aspects of change (or stability) in cognitive abilities in middle adulthood across a 12-year period. Data come from the Interdisciplinary Study on Adult Development. The sample consisted of N = 346 adults (43.8 years on average, 48.6% female). In total, 11 cognitive tests were administered to assess fluid and crystallized intelligence, memory, and processing speed. In a first series of analyses, strong measurement invariance was established. Subsequently, structural stability, differential stability, stability of divergence, absolute stability, and the generality of changes were examined. Factor covariances were shown to be equal across time, implying structural stability. Stability coefficients were around .90 for fluid and crystallized intelligence, and speed, indicating high, yet not perfect differential stability. The coefficient for memory was .58. Only in processing speed the variance increased across time, indicating heterogeneity in interindividual development. Significant mean-level changes emerged, with an increase in crystallized intelligence and decline in the other three abilities. A number of correlations among changes in cognitive abilities were significant, implying that cognitive change

The Election of a Lesbian Mayor in a Religiously Conservative City: The Case of Houston, Texas

The American South in general remains a pocket of predominantly conservative Baptist and Evangelical Christian hegemony. Metropolitan areas display more diversity and pluralism as a result of foreign and domestic migration into the region, changes in religious affiliation, an increasing population choosing no religious affiliation, and the growing influence of popular culture on religious participation. These forces act within a paradigm of neosecularization in which personal conscience exerts more influence than religious authority. Houston, Texas, within the context of the South, serves as the case study that demonstrates the temporal and spatial changes to Houston’s religious and political landscape and the manner in which these changes influence voter behavior. In 2009, Houston, home to a large, active Christian community, became the first major U.S. city to elect an openly homosexual mayor. The changes in Houston’s religious landscape, changes in attitudes toward gays and lesbians, and the varying degrees of voter participation among religious groups across the city illustrate the unpredictability of religion as an influence on voter behavior in local elections

Saccade control in natural images is shaped by the information visible at fixation: evidence from asymmetric gaze-contingent windows

When people view images, their saccades are predominantly horizontal and show a positively skewed distribution of amplitudes. How are these patterns affected by the information close to fixation and the features in the periphery? We recorded saccades while observers encoded a set of scenes with a gaze-contingent window at fixation: Features inside a rectangular (Experiment 1) or elliptical (Experiment 2) window were intact; peripheral background was masked completely or blurred. When the window was asymmetric, with more information preserved either horizontally or vertically, saccades tended to follow the information within the window, rather than exploring unseen regions, which runs counter to the idea that saccades function to maximize information gain on each fixation. Window shape also affected fixation and amplitude distributions, but horizontal windows had less of an impact. The findings suggest that saccades follow the features currently being processed and that normal vision samples these features from a horizontally elongated region