Young children with autism show atypical brain responses to fearful versus neutral facial expressions of emotion

Evidence suggests that autism is associated with impaired emotion perception, but it is unknown how early such impairments are evident. Furthermore, most studies that have assessed emotion perception in children with autism have required verbal responses, making results difficult to interpret. This study utilized high-density event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate whether 3-4-year-old children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show differential brain activity to fear versus neutral facial expressions. It has been shown that normal infants as young as 7 months of age show differential brain responses to faces expressing different emotions. ERPs were recorded while children passively viewed photos of an unfamiliar woman posing a neutral and a prototypic fear expression. The sample consisted of 29 3-4-year-old children with ASD and 22 chronological age-matched children with typical development. Typically developing children exhibited a larger early negative component (N300) to the fear than to the neutral face. In contrast, children with ASD did not show the difference in amplitude of this early ERP component to the fear versus neutral face. For a later component, typically developing children exhibited a larger negative slow wave (NSW) to the fear than to the neutral face, whereas children with autism did not show a differential NSW to the two stimuli. In children with ASD, faster speed of early processing (i. e. N300 latency) of the fear face was associated with better performance on tasks assessing social attention (social orienting, joint attention and attention to distress). These data suggest that children with ASD, as young as 3 years of age, show a disordered pattern of neural responses to emotional stimuli.     

Nearby nature as a moderator of stress during childhood

The aim of this investigation is to study the relation between the amount of nature existing in children's daily environments and the way children deal with stressful events. Every day, children are exposed to situations that cause stress. Taking into account previous studies, it is thought that the greener the place where children spend their time, the better they cope with adversities. Thus, when comparing the stress level of children who are exposed to the same amount of adverse situations, the children who have more frequent daily contact with nature will show less stress than those who do not spend time in nature. This effect from nearby nature is called a buffering effect. The present study provides empirical evidence of the buffering effect caused by the existence of Nature in the residential and the school environment. Therefore, our results show that children who have more access to nature increase their resilience, showing a lower stress level than children whose contact with nature is less frequent.     

Neural processing of intentional biological motion in unaffected siblings of children with autism spectrum disorder: An fMRI study

Despite often showing behaviorally typical levels of social cognitive ability, unaffected siblings of children with autism spectrum disorder have been found to show similar functional and morphological deficits within brain regions associated with social processing. They have also been reported to show increased activation to biological motion in these same regions, such as the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), relative to both children with autism and control children. It has been suggested that this increased activation may represent a compensatory reorganization of these regions as a result of the highly heritable genetic influence of autism. However, the response patterns of unaffected siblings in the domain of action perception are unstudied, and the phenomenon of compensatory activation has not yet been replicated. The present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to determine the neural responses to intentional biological actions in 22 siblings of children with autism and 22 matched controls. The presented actions were either congruent or incongruent with the actor’s emotional cue. Prior studies reported that typically developing children and adults, but not children with autism, show increased activation to incongruent actions (relative to congruent), within the pSTS and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. We report that unaffected siblings did not show a compensatory response, or a preference for incongruent over congruent trials, in any brain region. Moreover, interaction analyses revealed a sub-region of the pSTS in which control children showed an incongruency preference to a significantly greater degree than siblings, which suggests a localized deficit in siblings. A sample of children with autism also did not show differential activation in the pSTS, providing further evidence that it is an area of selective disruption in children with autism and siblings. While reduced activation to both conditions was unique to the autism sample, lack of differentiation to incongruent and congruent intentional actions was common to both children with ASD and unaffected siblings.     

Neural processing of intentional biological motion in unaffected siblings of children with autism spectrum disorder: An fMRI study

Despite often showing behaviorally typical levels of social cognitive ability, unaffected siblings of children with autism spectrum disorder have been found to show similar functional and morphological deficits within brain regions associated with social processing. They have also been reported to show increased activation to biological motion in these same regions, such as the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), relative to both children with autism and control children. It has been suggested that this increased activation may represent a compensatory reorganization of these regions as a result of the highly heritable genetic influence of autism. However, the response patterns of unaffected siblings in the domain of action perception are unstudied, and the phenomenon of compensatory activation has not yet been replicated. The present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to determine the neural responses to intentional biological actions in 22 siblings of children with autism and 22 matched controls. The presented actions were either congruent or incongruent with the actor’s emotional cue. Prior studies reported that typically developing children and adults, but not children with autism, show increased activation to incongruent actions (relative to congruent), within the pSTS and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. We report that unaffected siblings did not show a compensatory response, or a preference for incongruent over congruent trials, in any brain region. Moreover, interaction analyses revealed a sub-region of the pSTS in which control children showed an incongruency preference to a significantly greater degree than siblings, which suggests a localized deficit in siblings. A sample of children with autism also did not show differential activation in the pSTS, providing further evidence that it is an area of selective disruption in children with autism and siblings. While reduced activation to both conditions was unique to the autism sample, lack of differentiation to incongruent and congruent intentional actions was common to both children with ASD and unaffected siblings.     

Evaluation of the FASIKI traffic safety programme for parents of cycling children

The voluntary cycling test is an important milestone in traffic education in primary school. Cycling helps to develop traffic competences and traffic sense, it increases the mobility range of children and also improves sustainable mobility. On the other hand, data shows that beginning with school age more children have accidents due to cycling (Drott, Johansson, & Aström, 2008; Funk, 2013). The aim of the paper is to show that a measure that can be easily implemented in given structures could help to enhance safe cycling behaviour of children. The voluntary cycling test for ten-year-old children in Austria was complemented with a short traffic psychological intervention for parents called FASIKI. The main aim of the FASIKI programme is to promote a safe cycling performance for children. Therefore, the programme should show parents the average developmental status of their ten-year-old children, so that they can train them in an adequate way as far as age and competence level is concerned. From a traffic psychological point of view it is important for safe cycling behaviour that parents do not over- or underestimate the traffic competences of their children. The present study aimed to verify the effectiveness of the FASIKI programme using Kirkpatrick’s four level evaluation model. Based on a pre-post design, first changes in knowledge and attitudes of parents who attended the programme as well as the impact of the programme on the practical skills of their children in the voluntary cycling test were assessed. The results show positive effects of the FASIKI programme on both, parents’ knowledge and attitudes, and on children’s practical skills. Parental intentions to do cycling exercises with their children were strengthened. Finally, practical implications and policy recommendations concerning traffic safety for children are discussed.     

The role of incremental parsing in syntactically conditioned word learning

In a series of three experiments, we use children’s noun learning as a probe into their syntactic knowledge as well as their ability to deploy this knowledge, investigating how the predictions children make about upcoming syntactic structure change as their knowledge changes. In the first two experiments, we show that children display a developmental change in their ability to use a noun’s syntactic environment as a cue to its meaning. We argue that this pattern arises from children’s reliance on their knowledge of verbs’ subcategorization frame frequencies to guide parsing, coupled with an inability to revise incremental parsing decisions. We show that this analysis is consistent with the syntactic distributions in child-directed speech. In the third experiment, we show that the change arises from predictions based on verbs’ subcategorization frame frequencies.     

Do Young Children Really Learn Best From the use of Direct Address in Children’s Television?

A large body of research has considered children’s novel word learning from video; however, no known work has compared children’s novel word learning from an educational television show in which the character speaks directly to the child (participatory cues) and a show in which the child overhears two characters speaking to one another (third-party joint attention). Using two professionally produced videos that mimic contemporary children’s television shows, we conducted a 2-condition experiment (N = 73) to examine under which condition children were better able to learn a novel word. Results indicated a main effect of condition and age: children in the participatory cues condition and older children demonstrated greater word learning than children in the third-party joint attention condition and younger children. There was an interaction between age and condition, but only among children between the ages of 28.20 and 41.46 months. These findings demonstrate that the participatory cues model, typically used in children’s television programming, is a better model to use to promote children’s word learning. These findings run counter to a similar study that used stimulus videos that did not mimic a children’s program, finding that the third-party joint attention condition was more effective.     

Children and adults recall the names of highly familiar faces faster than semantic information

Adults find it harder to remember the names of familiar people than other biographical information such as occupation or nationality. It has been suggested that the opposite effect occurs in children ( Scanlan & Johnston, 1997 ). We failed to replicate the effects found by Scanlan and Johnston and instead found that children were slower to match a name than an occupation to a famous face (Experiment 1). In Experiments 2 and 3, however, we show a temporal advantage for names in both adults and children when highly familiar faces are used. This is the case for famous and personally known faces. These results show that the speed of name retrieval is influenced by familiarity in the same way in both children and adults and indicate that children do not represent knowledge for familiar people differently from adults. The implications of these results for current models of name retrieval difficulties are discussed.     

Young children care more about their reputation with ingroup members and potential reciprocators

Human cooperation depends on individuals caring about their reputation, and so they sometimes attempt to manage them strategically. Here we show that even 5‐year‐old children strategically manage their reputation. In an experimental setting, children shared significantly more resources with an anonymous recipient when (1) the child watching them could reciprocate later, and (2) the child watching them was an ingroup rather than an outgroup member (as established by minimal group markers). This study is not only the first to show that young children selectively invest in their reputation with specific individuals, but also the first to show that we care more about our reputation with ingroup than with outgroup members.     

Separation anxiety disorder in a sample of children of divorce

Anxiety in children through separation from parents is one of the most frequent psychological problems in the infantile population. Children of divorce are more vulnerable to suffer this disorder due to the abrupt separation from one of the parents after the break-up, which they may experience as a traumatic event that predisposes them to react anxiously in daily separations. The purpose of this study is to examine the presence of symptoms of separation anxiety and general anxiety in a Spanish sample of 95 students of ages between 8 and 12 years. They were compared to a group of children of similar ages and sex whose parents are not divorced. The results show that children of divorce present higher levels of separation anxiety than the children whose parents remain together. Moreover, they show significant levels of generalized anxiety, but similar to that of the other group of children (undivorced parents). The clinical implications of these findings are discussed, emphasizing the importance of cooperation and frequent contact of the children with both parents to promote their security and autonomy.     

When the alternative would have been better: counterfactual reasoning and the emergence of regret

Counterfactual reasoning about how events could have turned out better is associated with the feeling of regret. However, developmental studies show a discrepancy between the onset of counterfactual reasoning (at 3 years) and the feeling of regret (at 6 years). In four experiments we explored possible reasons. Experiment 1 (3- to 6-year-old children) and Experiment 2 (adult control) show that even when regret is assessed more directly than in previous studies (e.g., Amsel & Smalley, 2000) only adults but not children regret their decision. Experiment 3 (3- to 14-year-old children) suggests that double-questioning--asking children how happy they are with what they got before and after they had seen what they could have got--creates false positive indications of regret in the youngest children and that--when controlling for false positives--regret is not evident before 9 years. However, children before this age make a difference between attractive (three candies) and less attractive (one candy) items (Experiment 4; 6- to 8-year-old children). Taken together, this suggests that before 9 years of age children base their judgements solely on what they got without taking into account what they could have got.     

不同认知风格11岁儿童内隐序列学习的差异

首先对143名11岁儿童进行认知风格测验,从中选取反省型和冲动型认知风格儿童各30名,采用序列学习研究范式,对其内隐学习进行了实验研究,结果表明:(1)虽然冲动型儿童序列学习的反应时显著低于反省型儿童,但采用“比例测量法”的方差分析两组被试无显著差异。(2)采用“对立法”对包含和排除的生成成绩进行方差分析,无论反省型儿童还是冲动型儿童,其包含和排除成绩均没有显著差异,而且成绩均在几率水平以下。说明两种认知风格儿童的序列学习没有差异,且都具有内隐性。     

Young children seek out biased information about social groups

Understanding the origins of prejudice necessitates exploring the ways in which children participate in the construction of biased representations of social groups. We investigate whether young children actively seek out information that supports and extends their initial intergroup biases. In Studies 1 and 2, we show that children choose to hear a story that contains positive information about their own group and negative information about another group rather than a story that contains negative information about their own group and positive information about the other group. In a third study, we show that children choose to present biased information to others, thus demonstrating that the effects of information selection can start to propagate through social networks. In Studies 4 and 5, we further investigate the nature of children's selective information seeking and show that children prefer ingroup‐favouring information to other types of biased information and even to balanced, unbiased information. Together, this work shows that children are not merely passively recipients of social information; they play an active role in the creation and transmission of intergroup attitudes.     

When the alternative would have been better: Counterfactual reasoning and the emergence of regret

Counterfactual reasoning about how events could have turned out better is associated with the feeling of regret. However, developmental studies show a discrepancy between the onset of counterfactual reasoning (at 3 years) and the feeling of regret (at 6 years). In four experiments we explored possible reasons. Experiment 1 (3- to 6-year-old children) and Experiment 2 (adult control) show that even when regret is assessed more directly than in previous studies (e.g., Amsel & Smalley, 2000) only adults but not children regret their decision. Experiment 3 (3- to 14-year-old children) suggests that double-questioning—asking children how happy they are with what they got before and after they had seen what they could have got—creates false positive indications of regret in the youngest children and that—when controlling for false positives—regret is not evident before 9 years. However, children before this age make a difference between attractive (three candies) and less attractive (one candy) items (Experiment 4; 6- to 8-year-old children). Taken together, this suggests that before 9 years of age children base their judgements solely on what they got without taking into account what they could have got.     

Draw It again Sam: the effect of drawing on children's suggestibility and source monitoring ability

Preschool children (aged 3 to 6 years) participated in a magic show. Later, the children were given repeated true and false reminders about the show. Half the children were asked to draw these true and false reminders (drawing condition) and half the children were asked questions about the reminders but not to draw them (question condition). Later, children in the drawing condition had better recall of true reminders than children in the question group; however, children in the drawing group also recalled more false reminders than children in the question group. Finally, although children in the drawing group had better memory of the source of the reminders than children in the question group, both groups equally reported that the false reminders actually happened.     

Why Do Young Children Look so Smart and Older Children Look so Dumb on True Belief Control Tasks? An Investigation of Pragmatic Performance Factors

ABSTRACT

When do children acquire a meta-representational Theory of Mind? False Belief (FB) tasks have become the litmus test to answer this question. In such tasks, subjects must ascribe a non-veridical belief to another agent and predict/explain her actions accordingly. Empirically, children pass explicit verbal versions of FB tasks from around age 4. The standard interpretation of this finding is that children at this age have acquired a solid capacity for meta-representation. New research with true belief (TB) control tasks, however, presents a puzzling phenomenon: While 3-year-olds pass these tasks but fail FB tasks, children from age 4 begin to show the reverse performance (passing FB but failing TB). Competence deficit accounts claim that these findings jeopardize the standard interpretation; they show that children may use simple heuristics rather than true meta-representation and that the original FB findings may thus have been false positives. Pragmatic performance limitation accounts, in contrast, claim that these findings do not document any conceptual limitations, but merely reflect children’s confusion in light of the task pragmatics. In the present study, the two accounts were tested against each other in seven experiments with 4- to 7-year-old children. Pragmatic tasks factors of TB tests were systematically modified. Results show that children’s difficulty with TB tasks indeed disappeared after some such modifications. This clearly speaks against competence limitation accounts and corroborates the standard interpretation of FB and related Theory of Mind tasks.     

Imitation of body postures and hand movements in children with specific language impairment

Within the domain-general theory of language impairment, this study examined body posture and hand movement imitation in children with specific language impairment (SLI) and in their age-matched peers. Participants included 40 children with SLI (5 years 3 months to 6 years 10 months of age) and 40 children with typical language development (5 years 3 months to 6 years 7 months of age). Five tests were used to examine imitation and its underlying cognitive and motor skills such as kinesthesia, working memory, and gross motor coordination. It was hypothesized that children with SLI show a weakness in imitation of body postures and that this deficit is not equally influenced by the underlying cognitive and motor skills. There was a group effect in each cognitive and motor task, but only gross motor coordination proved to be a strong predictor of imitation in children with SLI. In contrast, hand movement imitation was strongly predicted by performance in the Kinesthesia task in typically developing children. Thus, the findings show not only that children with SLI performed more poorly on the imitation tasks than their typically developing peers but also that the groups’ performances showed qualitative differences. The results of the current study provide additional support to the view that the weaknesses in children with SLI are not limited to the verbal domain.     

The impact of social relationships on Ugandan children’s sharing decisions

Recent studies provided evidence for an impact of social relations on preschool children’s sharing behavior. Children have been shown to be more generous towards friends than nonfriends or strangers. As evidence comes largely from studies with western children, little is known about cross-cultural differences and commonalities in this pattern. Here, we show that preschool and elementary school aged Ugandan children show high levels of generosity independent of the social relationships with the recipient. This finding points to societal differences in early sharing. The results are discussed in terms of a formative impact of cultural traditions on the early development of sharing in the preschool years.     

Children’s On-line Processing of Scrambling in Japanese

This study investigates the on-line processing of scrambled sentences in Japanese by preschool children and adults using a combination of self-paced listening and speeded picture selection tasks. The effects of a filler-gap dependency, reversibility, and case markers were examined. The results show that both children and adults had difficulty in comprehending scrambled sentences when they were provided as reversible sentences. The reversibility effect was significant for children, whereas the interaction of reversibility and a filler-gap dependency was significant for adults. However, this does not indicate that children’s parsing is fundamentally different from that of adults. For those children who processed the nominative and accusative case markers equally fast, the reactivation of the dislocated constituent was observed in the gap position. These results suggest that children’s processing is basically the same as adults’ in that their sentence processing is incremental and they parse a gap to form a filler-gap dependency.     

促进被拒绝和被忽视幼儿的同伴交往的三种训练法

本研究在测查了4-6岁幼儿在幼儿园的社交地位的基础上,对筛选出的被拒绝和被忽视幼儿进行干预训练,探讨行为训练、认知训练和情感训练对不同类型的同伴交往不良幼儿干预的有效性,并对被拒绝型和被忽视型幼儿同伴交往不良的可能成因做了分析。结果表明:行为训练法、认知训练法、情感训练法都可以促进同伴交往水平,三种方法之间的效果无显著差异。对被拒绝儿童采用认知训练法效果较好,对被忽视儿童采用行为训练法更好。从4岁到6岁,行为训练法的效果逐渐减弱、而认知和情感训练法的效果则逐渐提高。