Cognitive competencies and aggressive behavior: A developmental study

A number of studies have demonstrated that increased socially related cognitive skills are associated with decreases in aggressive behavior. However, the link between aggression and intelligence or academic skills is less evident. While some research indicates that poor academic performance is related to aggression, it is unclear which components of intellectual ability and performance are critical to the management of aggressive behaviors. In two independent longitudinal studies of elementary school-age children, the relationship among several aspects of cognitive competence and several aspects of aggressive behavior were examined. The results of the first study showed that aggressive behavior observed in kindergarten children was more closely related to academic performance in the first and second grades than to general cognitive ability (IQ). The results of the second study, a comprehensive three-year investigation of upper elementary school-age children, indicated that teachers' assessments of aggression and parents' ratings of cruelty were consistent over time for boys, but not for girls. The intercorrelations among aggression measures within each of the three years also revealed stable sex differences. Boys identified as aggressive in the classroom were more likely to be perceived as aggressive, cruel, and/or delinquent at home, but for girls, there was little correlation between aggression at school and in the home. The analyses relating measures of cognitive functioning to indices of aggressive behavior made clear the importance of discriminating among various facets of these psychological constructs. IQ had a negligible relationship with aggression and a weak inverse relationship to delinquency. An overall index of cognitive functioning was a somewhat more consistent negative correlate of aggression, cruelty, and delinquency, especially for boys. A similar pattern was found for the correlates of academic performance. Academic disability was strongly related to delinquency in boys, and to a lesser degree to aggression in boys. Of the several cognitively related factors that were explored, Low Need Achievement manifested the strongest and most consistent relationships with the different facets of aggression and antisocial behavior, especially in boys. The implications of these results for psychological interventions in the school are discussed.     

Orthographic-morphemic factors in reading: A developmental study

Children from grades 3, 5 and 7, and adults were given a lexical decision task to investigate the development of the use of a lexical access and storage code: the Basic Orthographic Syllabic Structure (BOSS; Taft, 1979). This structure approximates the base morpheme of a word and comprises the initial vowel-plus-consonant unit of a word (e.g., RUD is the BOSS of RUDE, MAD the BOSS of MADE). Stimuli were letter-strings, equally divided into three word and three nonword conditions. BOSS was manipulated in word and nonword conditions and compared to words of same or higher frequency or nonwords. All nonword decisions took longer than word decisions, suggesting an age-invariant exhaustive lexical search. Relatively larger word/nonword differences for younger children were attributed to different bases of lexical distinctions. The availability of a BOSS-based lexical file was apparent at all ages although utilization of a BOSS-mediated code seems to emerge gradually.     

Cognitive processing and motor execution in the lexical decision task: a developmental study

We investigated lexical decision making in children and adults by analyzing spatiotemporal characteristics of responses involving a hand movement. Children’s and adults’ movement trajectories were assessed in three tasks: a lexical decision task (LDT), a pointing task that involved minimal cognitive processing, and a symbol task requiring a simple binary decision. Cognitive interference on motor performance was quantified by analyzing movement characteristics in the LDT and symbol task relative to the pointing task. Across age groups, movements in the LDT were less smooth, slower, and more strongly curved to the opposite response option, and these interference effects decreased steadily with age. Older children showed stronger interference effects than did adults, even though their reaction times were similar to adults’ performance. No comparable effects were found in the symbol task, indicating that task characteristics such as response mapping and decision selection alone are not able to explain the developmental differences observed in the LDT. Our results indicate substantial overlap between cognitive processing and motor execution in the LDT in children that is not captured by computational models of visual word recognition and cognitive development.     

Cardiac-somatic changes during a simple reaction time task: A developmental study

The relationship during a simple reaction time task between heart rate and four measures of task irrelevant somatic activity was evaluated in four age groups of children, i.e., 4-, 5-, 8-, and 10-year-olds and young adults, in order to evaluate further a hypothesized coupling of cardiac and somatic activity. At all age levels, phasic decreases in both heart rate and somatic activity coincident with performance were found with the magnitude of the effect increasing with age only on three somatic measures. However, tonic levels of both heart rate and somatic activity decreased with age. Performance on the reaction task was found to be inversely related to the age-related phasic somatic effects as well as age-related tonic heart rate and somatic activity.     

Cognitive deficits in developmental disorders

The existence of specific developmental disorders such as dyslexia and autism raises interesting issues about the structure of the normally developing mind. In these disorders distinct cognitive deficits can explain a range of behavioural impairments and have the potential to be linked to specific brain abnormalities. One possibility is that there are specific mechanisms dedicated to particular types of information processing. These mechanisms may function independently of more general information processing systems and may have a distinct anatomical basis in the brain.     

Cognitive gender differences: A developmental perspective

This article reviews the developmental literature on cognitive gender differences and compares past and present trends in gender differences, by age, from the standardizations of the Wechsler Intelligence Scales (1949–1981) and the California Achievement Tests (CAT; 1956–1985). Consistent with prior research, decreases in gender differences were found for adolescents. For children, gender differences were small or nonexistent in the Wechsler and CAT norms from 1949–1985. For adults, notable gender differences were often found on the subtests of the Wechsler scales, and have remained relatively constant over the past generation.I would like to thank Donald Ross Green for providing me with Clark's (1958) paper.     

Health-risk behaviors and suicidal ideation: a preliminary study of cognitive and developmental factors

Various theorists have suggested that unhealthy behaviors such as cigarette smoking and problem drinking may be subtle forms of suicidality. Consistent with this view, prior research has shown an association between health risk behaviors and suicidal ideation. In the present study we examined relationships among suicidal ideation, health-related attitudes and behaviors, and adverse childhood events. We hypothesized that unhealthy attitudes, perhaps shaped by adverse childhood events, would help explain the association between suicidal phenomena and unhealthy behaviors. Three-hundred eighteen college students completed surveys covering health risk behaviors, depression, suicidal ideation, and health-related attitudes. Results supported the hypothesized associations among these variables. However, contrary to our hypotheses, the association between suicidal ideation and health-compromising behaviors was limited largely to substance-related behaviors. Moreover, the association between suicidal ideation and health-related attitudes was mediated by depression. Adverse childhood events were associated with health-related attitudes, but this relationship was mediated by depression. These results are less suggestive of the notion of unhealthy behaviors as subtle suicidality than a model in which suicidality associates specifically with psychopathological states such as depression and substance abuse. Implications for treatment and prevention programs are discussed.     

A developmental study of factors influencing discrimination transfer

Reversal and non-reversal shifts were studied in rural Mexican children ranging in age from 4–10 years. Experimental variations within each group were arranged to provide for evaluation of the influence of temporal pairing and the presence of common attributes in different discriminanda on transfer. Under some presentation conditions, all of the groups studied manifested independent learning of subproblems which are ordinarily thought of as constituting a single problem by experimenters. The contributions of the various experimental factors change with age in ways that are consistent with a general “single-unit to mediational” formulation, but the details of the mediational behavior are not fully describable by any currently formulated theory.     

Auditory attention switching: a developmental study

The developmental course of the ability to rapidly allocate attention was studied using a dichotic listening task with 8-year old, 11-year old and college age subjects. In this task, subjects were instructed to listen to one ear for predescribed targets and then were later signaled (on some trials) to switch their attention to the other ear. Reorientation was assessed by comparing the pattern of subjects' omission and intrusion errors on trials following a command to switch ears with the pattern of errors on no-switch trials. Older subjects were better able to reallocate their attention in accordance with task demands, with the greatest gains in performance occurring between ages 8 and 11. This developmental change appears to be generally continuous and quantitative in nature. Since successful performance of this task requires flexibility in subjects' ability to control their focus of attention, these results support the hypothesis that the basis of the developmental improvement in the ability to ignore irrelevant information is linked to the ability to use active attentional strategies.     

Mechanisms of attention: a developmental study

A model of selective attention is proposed which contains a number of properties. First, stimuli which are irrelevant to the subjects' task can be analyzed to semantic levels automatically, and such stimuli can produce intrusion/interference effects. Second, two mechanisms by which selection is achieved are habituation to, and inhibition of, these irrelevant stimuli. A series of studies demonstrates that both the ability to process automatically irrelevant stimuli and the habituation mechanisms of attention are observable by Grade 2, whereas the inhibitory mechanism is not always evident at this stage. It is suggested that the greater distractability of children in certain situations may be due in part to the underutilization of this inhibitory mechanism. We further propose that children may be able to employ inhibitory mechanisms in more familiar perceptual-motor tasks.     

A developmental study of reactions to frustration among Scheduled Caste Indians

Administered the Indian adaptation of the Rosenzweig P-F Study to 144 Scheduled Caste (SC) adolescent and 158 young adult male Indians. The results show that SC adolescents scored significantly higher on ego-defensive (ED) and extragressive (EA) and lower on need-persistive (NP), introgressive (IA) and imgressive (MA) reactions as compared to the Non-Scheduled caste (Non-SC) adolescents while there was no significant difference on any reaction among SC and Non-SC young adults. SC adolescents scored higher on NP and lower on obstacle-dominance (OD) reaction as compared to the SC young adults. Non-SC young adults were higher on EA, ED, and OD and lower on IA and NP as compared to those of adolescents. The pattern of reactions was ED-EA-NP-IA-MA-OD among adolescents and ED-EA-IA-NP-MA-OD among young adults of both the castes.     

Movement control in a reciprocal tapping task: a developmental study

A cross-sectional approach was used to replicate and examine developmental flexibility in eye-hand relationships during alternate tapping performance. A group of 68 male subjects, 34 younger (mean 75.6 months) and 34 older (mean 128.9 months) practiced 12 5-sec trials of alternate tapping in one of three accuracy conditions. Trials 2 and 11 were filmed to determine the eye movement index (EMI), a fraction relating eye movements (numerator) to alternate taps (denominator). Fractional EMI values close to 1 were labelled discontinuity and values closer to 0 (1/N) continuity. Accuracy variation tested the flexibility of EMI for developmental change, revealing that EMIs for older subjects were more continuous than for younger subjects at trial 11, but not at trial 2. Level of EMI was related to age and condition, while change in EMI due to practice was related to age. The data showed EMI strategy flexibility increased with age, and that faster tapping was afforded by less direct visual monitoring of the hand.     

Episodic temporal generalization: a developmental study.

Groups of 5-year-olds, 10-year-olds, and adults completed either an episodic temporal generalization task, in which no stimuli were repeated, or a repeated standard temporal generalization task, in which there was a fixed standard that was repeated on every trial. Significant developmental improvements were found on both tasks. In both tasks, gradients of performance over two different stimulus ranges superimposed well when plotted on the same relative scale. Performance was similar for the adults and 10-year-olds across tasks, but the 5-year-olds performed better on the repeated standard task. These findings suggest that perceptual processes are a source of scalar variability in timing, and that there are developmental changes in levels of such variability.     

fMRI of developmental stuttering: a pilot study

The purpose of this investigation was to explore the feasibility of fMRI in the study of developmental stuttering. Speech contrasts (loud versus silent reading) and language contrasts (reading of semantically meaningful text versus nonsense words) of six developmental stutterers and six nonstutterers were compared using a commercial 1 Tesla MR-Scanner (Siemens Expert). Results indicate that mapping cortical function in persons who stutter is indeed feasible, even with a 1TMR-system. Compared to normals the stutterers seemed to employ different and particularly less differentiated auditory and motor feedback strategies in speech. They apparently rely on auditory processing and on cerebellar contribution as much during silent reading as during reading aloud. Moreover, they showed a greater involvement of the right hemisphere in language processing, activating not only the typical language areas on the left but also and with equal magnitude the right side homologues of these areas. In spite of the promising results, at present several practical problems such as possible movement artifacts and possible masking through scanner noise still hamper a more straightforward use of fMRI in the study of developmental stuttering.     

Interposition and size constancy: a developmental study

27 children (mean age 6.7 yr.) and 84 adults (mean age 26.3 yr.) were asked to judge the sizes of human figures in photographs. Half the cards contained interpositional depth cues while the other half did not. Both groups of subjects showed better size constancy with interposition present than without it.