Correlates of African American Men’s Sexual Schemas

Sexual schemas are cognitive representations of oneself as a sexual being and aid in the processing of sexually relevant information. We examined the relationship between sociosexuality (attitudes about casual sex), masculine ideology (attitudes toward traditional men and male roles), and cultural centrality (strength of identity with racial group) as significant psychosocial and sociocultural predictors in shaping young, heterosexual African American men's sexual schemas. A community sample (n=133) of men in a southeastern city of the United States completed quantitative self-report measures examining their attitudes and behavior related to casual sex, beliefs about masculinity, racial and cultural identity, and self-views of various sexual aspects of themselves. Results indicated that masculine ideology and cultural centrality were both positively related to men's sexual schemas. Cultural centrality explained 12 % of the variance in level of sexual schema, and had the strongest correlation of the predictor variables with sexual schema (r=.36). The need for more attention to the bidirectional relationships between masculinity, racial/cultural identity, and sexual schemas in prevention, intervention, and public health efforts for African American men is discussed

Sparse coding can predict primary visual cortex receptive field changes induced by abnormal visual input

Receptive fields acquired through unsupervised learning of sparse representations of natural scenes have similar properties to primary visual cortex (V1) simple cell receptive fields. However, what drives in vivo development of receptive fields remains controversial. The strongest evidence for the importance of sensory experience in visual development comes from receptive field changes in animals reared with abnormal visual input. However, most sparse coding accounts have considered only normal visual input and the development of monocular receptive fields. Here, we applied three sparse coding models to binocular receptive field development across six abnormal rearing conditions. In every condition, the changes in receptive field properties previously observed experimentally were matched to a similar and highly faithful degree by all the models, suggesting that early sensory development can indeed be understood in terms of an impetus towards sparsity. As previously predicted in the literature, we found that asymmetries in inter-ocular correlation across orientations lead to orientation-specific binocular receptive fields. Finally we used our models to design a novel stimulus that, if present during rearing, is predicted by the sparsity principle to lead robustly to radically abnormal receptive fields