Answering Questions and Explaining Answers: A Study of Finnish-Speaking Children

This research explores, within the framework of Relevance Theory, how children’s ability to answer questions and explain their answers develops between the ages of 3 and 9 years. Two hundred and ten normally developing Finnish-speaking children participated in this study. The children were asked questions requiring processing of inferential meanings and routines, and were asked to explain their correct answers to elicit understanding about their awareness of how they had derived the answers from the context. The results indicated that the number of correct answers increased rapidly between the ages of 3 years and 4–5 years. Familiarity of context had a significant effect on young children’s ability to answer questions. Becoming aware of the information used in inferencing developed gradually over time between the ages of 3 and 9. Analysis of the children’s incorrect answers and explanations showed that, as children develop, their unsophisticated answer strategies diminish and they increasingly utilize context even in incorrect answers and explanations.     

An individual differences approach to the suggestibility of memory over time

We examined how certain personality traits might relate to the formation of suggestive memory over time. We hypothesised that compliance and trust relate to initial acceptance of misinformation as memory, whereas fantasy proneness might relate to integration of misinformation into memory after later intervals (relative to the time of exposure to misinformation). Participants watched an excerpt from a movie—the simulated eyewitness event. They next answered a recall test that included embedded misinformation about the movie. Participants then answered a yes/no recognition test. A week later, participants answered a second yes/no recognition test about the movie (each yes/no recognition test included different questions). Before both recognition tests, participants were warned about the misinformation shown during recall and were asked to base their answer on the movie excerpt only. After completing the second recognition test, participants answered questions from the Neuroticism Extroversion Openness Personality Inventory-3 (McCrae, Costa, & Martin, 2005) and Creative Experiences Questionnaire (Merckelbach, Horselenberg, & Muris, 2001). While compliance correlated with misinformation effects immediately after exposure to misinformation, fantasy-prone personality accounted for more of the variability in false recognition rates than compliance after a 1-week interval.     

辱虐管理与员工创造力：心理契约破坏和中庸思维的不同作用

近年来, 辱虐管理与员工创造力的关系受到越来越多研究者的关注。在以往研究的基础上, 本研究构建了一个有调节的中介作用模型, 以探讨中国文化情境下辱虐管理影响员工创造力的中介心理机制及边界条件。采用多阶段-多来源的策略, 以93名主管和369名员工为对象, 通过多水平结构方程建模技术对三阶段主管-员工配对调查所获取的数据进行分析, 结果表明：主管的辱虐管理行为会通过心理契约破坏的中介作用, 对员工创造力产生间接的消极影响; 但该负向的间接关系的强度对高中庸思维者而言较弱。本研究有助于揭示辱虐管理影响员工创造力的心理机制及边界条件, 研究结果对企业员工创造力及创新行为的管理实践也有一定启示。     

To watch or not to watch: Infants and toddlers in a brave new electronic world

For some time now, questions have been asked about the impact of television and video materials on the cognitive and social development of preschoolers and older children. More recently, these same questions have been asked in relation to the extensive exposure to these media that infants and toddlers are currently experiencing. To answer these questions, we review current research that explicitly targets these concerns and provide new insights into the role these media play in early development.     

Additivity pretraining and cue competition effects: developmental evidence for a reasoning-based account of causal learning

The effect of additivity pretraining on blocking has been taken as evidence for a reasoning account of human and animal causal learning. If inferential reasoning underpins this effect, then developmental differences in the magnitude of this effect in children would be expected. Experiment 1 examined cue competition effects in children's (4- to 5-year-olds and 6- to 7-year-olds) causal learning using a new paradigm analogous to the food allergy task used in studies of human adult causal learning. Blocking was stronger in the older than the younger children, and additivity pretraining only affected blocking in the older group. Unovershadowing was not affected by age or by pretraining. In experiment 2, levels of blocking were found to be correlated with the ability to answer questions that required children to reason about additivity. Our results support an inferential reasoning explanation of cue competition effects.     

The Effects of Adult Suggestion and Child Consistency on Young Children's Reports1

The purpose of the present study was to contrast the effects of children's response consistency and adult leading questions in a structured memory interview. Children (N = 70) who viewed a 2‐min video clip were asked 3 questions (leading, misleading, and neutral) related to the video. Children's responses (assent vs. deny) were predicted by the type of question asked by the adult (neutral, leading, and misleading), but not by the previous response given by the child or the child's age in months. Specifically, children assented the least often to misleading questions. Accuracy was predicted by both question type and in the last question–answer pair, children's previous response accuracy. These findings are discussed with relation to interview dynamics.     

Response selection strategies and realism of confidence judgments

Two studies were conducted to examine how response selection strategy is related to confidence ratings and to performance on general knowledge questions. In both studies subjects were asked to answer 80 general knowledge questions and to rate their confidence in the correctness of the answer selected. A pilot study, in which subjects thought aloud while answering general knowledge questions, was carried out to identify different response selection strategies. In the first study, 40 subjects were asked to indicate which of four strategies (immediate recognition, inference, intuition, or guessing) they used for selecting an answer. In Study 2, think aloud reports from 20 subjects were coded into the same four strategies. The distribution of strategies differed between the studies, but there were very similar relations among strategy, confidence, and correctness of answer in the two studies. Response selection strategy was related to correctness of answer when confidence was partialed out. More specifically, immediate recognition was associated with higher proportion correct than with the other strategies. It was also found that ratings of how difficult the knowledge questions were to fellow students of the subjects were on a much more realistic level than the confidence ratings were. It is concluded that people could improve their confidence judgments by taking into account (a) how difficult a question is to other people, and (b) the response selection strategy used for answering the question.     

Striving for optimal relevance when answering questions

When people are asked "Do you have the time?" they can answer in a variety of ways, such as "It is almost 3", "Yeah, it is quarter past two", or more precisely as in "It is now 1:43". We present the results of four experiments that examined people's real-life answers to questions about the time. Our hypothesis, following previous research findings, was that people strive to make their answers optimally relevant for the addressee, which in many cases allows people to give rounded, and not exact, time responses. Moreover, analyses of the non-numeral words, hesitations, and latencies of people's verbal responses to time questions reveal important insights into the dynamics of speaking to achieve optimal relevance. People include discourse markers, hesitation marks, like "uh" and "um", and pauses when answering time questions to maximize the cognitive effects (e.g., a rounded answer is adequate) listeners can infer while minimizing the cognitive effort required to infer these effects. This research provides new empirical evidence on how relevance considerations shape collaborative language use.     

The effect of question repetition within interviews on young children's eyewitness recall

This study investigated the influence of question repetition and question type (answerable, unanswerable, or opinion seeking) on children's recall. A total of 136 children (5-, 7-, and 9-year-olds) watched a live 15-min presentation. One week later, the children were asked 20 questions that were repeated an additional two times within the interview. Accuracy of children's responses to unanswerable questions declined with repetition. Children were more likely to change a response to an unanswerable question than to an answerable question. Overall, children maintained the same answers to only three-quarters of the repeated questions. The most common pattern of change was for children to change their answer the second time a question was asked and then to maintain that answer when questioned again. The high percentage of changed answers within a single interview has important implications for forensic interviewing.     

Monitoring item and source information: Evidence for a negative generation effect in source memory

Item memory and source memory were assessed in a task that simulated a social conversation. Participants generated answers to questions or read statements presented by one of three sources (faces on a computer screen). Positive generation effects were observed for item memory. That is, participants remembered topics of conversation better if they were asked questions about the topics than if they simply read statements about topics. However, a negative generation effect occurred for source memory. That is, remembering the source of some information was disrupted if participants were required to answer questions pertaining to that information. These findings support the notion that item and source memory are mediated, as least in part, by different processes during encoding.     

What do children want to know about animals and artifacts? Domain-specific requests for information

Children's questions may reveal a great deal about the characteristics of objects they consider to be conceptually important. Thirty-two preschool children were given opportunities to ask questions about unfamiliar artifacts and animals. The children asked ambiguous questions such as "What is it?" about artifacts and animals alike. However, they were more likely to ask about the functions of artifacts, but about category membership, food choices, and typical locations of animals. They never asked questions about either artifacts or animals that would be considered inappropriate by adults. The results indicate that children hold different expectations about the types of information important for categorizing living and artifact kinds. Young children conceive of artifacts in terms of functions, but conceive of animals in terms of biologically appropriate characteristics. Such results speak to debates about the role of function in children's biological reasoning and to accounts of children's artifact concepts.     

Altering student responses through changes in teacher verbal behavior

Two experiments were conducted in a junior-high special-education class of eight pupils in an inner-city school. In the first experiment, the teacher doubled the number of words used by the pupils in answering questions by altering the type of questions asked. In the second experiment, the number of words used by students and the percentage of answers given in complete sentences, increased from less than 5% to approximately 90% when the teacher instructed the pupils to answer in complete sentences and asked another pupil to answer using a sentence if the first one did not do so. In both experiments, a brief return to baseline conditions brought a return to low levels of verbal responding. An analysis of which pupils were called on by the teacher, teacher praise, and in the second experiment the types of questions asked, indicated that these variables were not responsible for the increases in verbal responding.     

Conditional reasoning, representation, and empirical evidence on a concrete task

This study examined interactions between empirical data, internal representations, and reasoning performance on a conditional reasoning task using a concrete apparatus. Subjects were asked an initial series of questions in order to determine the pattern of inferences they made after simple exposure to the apparatus. They were subsequently shown two different experimental manipulations designed to provide data about the internal structure of the apparatus without giving information about specific inferences. Some subjects did change their reasoning in response to the new data, although most remained stable throughout the experiment. These results are consistent with the idea that reasoning may require generation of an internal representation of a problem space. It was also concluded that the relation between reasoning and empirical evidence cannot be understood without supposing that evidence is often interpreted by subjects according to their reasoning patterns.     

Common attitudes about the effect of positive and negative mood on task related motivation]

Several theories on emotion and mood have stressed the close relationship between emotion and motivation. However, assumptions on mood contingent motivations have mainly been studied in the field of social behavior, and there are only few studies concerned with mood contingent task motivations, an area in which nit is possible to distinguish between two motivational sets, the deliberative and the implemented mind set. Assuming that positive mood is associated with a stronger task-oriented deliberative mind set, and that negative mood is associated with a stronger self-oriented deliberative mind set, and that implemented mind set should be intrinsically task-oriented during positive mood and instrumentally task-oriented during negative mood. The present paper is concerned with these assumptions from a subjective perspective: The respondents were asked about their lay perceptions of mood influences (positive, elated versus negative, sad mood) on task related motivations. In study I the respondents (N = 40) were asked about their deliberative mind sets during positive versus negative mood and about their general perceptions of mood influences on performance. In study II the respondents (N = 58) were requested to imagine situations which elicit positive, negative or neutral mood, and then to answer questions on deliberative and implemented mind sets during these states; they also hat to answer a general question about mood influences on task performance. Both quantitative and qualitative measures are used in these studies. The findings support the above general notions, and they additionally show that in the respondents' opinions negative mood effects are more variable than positive mood effects; further, that there are quite a few individual differences in assumed mood effects on task-related motivation.     

Narrative organisation at encoding facilitated children's long-term episodic memory

This study examined the effect of narrative organisation at encoding on long-term episodic memory in a sample of five- to seven-year-old children (N = 113). At an initial interview, children were asked to narrate a story from a picture book. Six months later, they were interviewed again and asked to recall the story and answer a series of direct questions about the story. Children who initially encoded more information in narrative and produced more complete, complex, cohesive and coherent narratives remembered the story in greater detail and accuracy following the six-month interval, independent of age and verbal skills. The relation between narrative organisation and memory was consistent across culture and gender. These findings provide new insight into the critical role of narrative in episodic memory.     

Interviewing children and adults: the effect of question format on the tendency to speculate

In formal interviews it is important that interviewees indicate when they do not know the answer, rather than speculate. In this study we investigated whether question format affected the tendency to speculate. One hundred and twenty‐eight 5‐ to 9‐year‐olds, and 23 adults, were told two short stories, and were then asked questions about the stories. Half of the questions were answerable based on the information provided; the other half were not answerable. Within these categories, half of the questions were closed questions (i.e. only required a yes/no response), and half were wh‐questions (i.e. requested particular details to be provided). All participants performed at ceiling with the answerable questions. With the unanswerable questions, there was an effect of format. The majority of children and adults correctly indicated that they did not know the answer when asked unanswerable wh‐questions. However, the majority of children, and just over one‐fifth of adults, provided a response (i.e. ‘yes’ or ‘no’) to the closed unanswerable questions. The implications for interviews, particularly within a forensic context, are discussed. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Probabilistic reasoning,affirmative bias and belief in precognitive dreams

Three hundred and eighty‐six participants were interviewed about their experience of dreams that seem to predict an event in the future, and their belief about whether such dreams can be explained naturally or paranormally. For those without university education, participants who had had a dream that seemed to predict the future (termed experiencers) and believers in paranormal explanations for such dreams (termed believers) made more errors on a probabilistic reasoning task about a lottery. Contrary to the chance baseline shift hypothesis experiencers and believers did not give lower estimates than non‐experiencers and non‐believers for the frequency with which others would answer three simple personal questions affirmatively. However, they were more likely to answer the three simple personal questions affirmatively about themselves than were non‐experiencers and non‐believers, which suggests an affirmative bias. This affirmative bias either affects paranormal experience and belief, or is a confound in the methods used in assessing experience and belief. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Stability in the metamemory realism of eyewitness confidence judgments

The stability of eyewitness confidence judgments over time in regard to their reported memory and accuracy of these judgments is of interest in forensic contexts because witnesses are often interviewed many times. The present study investigated the stability of the confidence judgments of memory reports of a witnessed event and of the accuracy of these judgments over three occasions, each separated by 1 week. Three age groups were studied: younger children (8–9 years), older children (10–11 years), and adults (19–31 years). A total of 93 participants viewed a short film clip and were asked to answer directed two-alternative forced-choice questions about the film clip and to confidence judge each answer. Different questions about details in the film clip were used on each of the three test occasions. Confidence as such did not exhibit stability over time on an individual basis. However, the difference between confidence and proportion correct did exhibit stability across time, in terms of both over/underconfidence and calibration. With respect to age, the adults and older children exhibited more stability than the younger children for calibration. Furthermore, some support for instability was found with respect to the difference between the average confidence level for correct and incorrect answers (slope). Unexpectedly, however, the younger children’s slope was found to be more stable than the adults. Compared to the previous research, the present study’s use of more advanced statistical methods provides a more nuanced understanding of the stability of confidence judgments in the eyewitness reports of children and adults.     

Differences in the justification of choices in moral dilemmas: effects of gender, time pressure and dilemma seriousness

The effects on moral reasoning of gender, time pressure and seriousness of the issue at hand were investigated. In Experiment 1, 72 university students were presented with moral dilemmas and asked what actions the actors involved should take and to justify this. Women were found to be more care-oriented in their reasoning than men, supporting Gilligan's moral judgment model. Both time pressure and consideration of non-serious as opposed to serious moral dilemmas led to an increase in a justice orientation compared with a care orientation in moral judgments. In Experiment 2, a similar task was given to 80 persons of mixed age and profession, and the participants' moral reasoning was coded in terms of its being either duty-orientated (duty, obligations, rights) or consequence-oriented (effects on others). Men were found to be more duty-oriented than women, and time pressure to lead to a greater incidence of duty orientation.     

Developmental Patterns of Eyewitness Responses to Repeated and Increasingly Suggestive Questions

Kindergarten, Grade 2, Grade 4, and adult subjects viewed a brief video of two children arguing about the use of a bicycle. One week later subjects were asked for their free recall of the events in the video followed by sets of hierarchically arranged, increasingly suggestive questions that suggested a correct (positive-leading), an incorrect (misleading), or no specific (unbiased-leading) answer, with the final level of questioning for each item being a three-alternative multiple-choice question. Correct free recall varied with age, with the kindergarten and Grade 2 children generally following the lead of the first-level questions more so than the older subjects. Older children were as accurate as adults in responding to questions about the central items, but not so for noncentral items. Developmental differences were found in responses to repeated suggestive questioning, with kindergarten children following misleading questions and changing answers more often than older subjects. On the final, multiple-choice questions, kindergarten children were able to provide the correct answer as often as they had to the initial questions, despite intervening errors. Findings are discussed in terms of the type of questions presented, the repetition factors, and the opportunities for subjects changing their answers in response to subsequent questions about the same item.