Reliability and generalizability of an acted-out false belief task in 3-year-olds

The current study tested the reliability and generalizability of a narrative act-out false belief task held to reveal Theory of Mind (ToM) competence at 3 years of age, before children pass verbal standard false belief tasks (the “Duplo task”; Rubio-Fernández & Geurts, 2013, Psychological Science). We conducted the task across two labs with methodologically improved matched control conditions. Further, we administered an analogue intensionality version to assess the scope of ToM competence in the Duplo task. 72 3-year-olds participated in a Duplo change-of-location task, a Duplo intensionality task, and half of them in a matched verbal standard change-of-location task, receiving either false belief or matched true belief scenarios. Children performed at chance in the false belief Duplo location change and intensionality tasks as well as in the standard false belief task. There were no differences to the standard task, and performance correlated across all three false belief tasks, revealing a rather unified competence and no task advantage. In the true belief conditions of both Duplo tasks, children performed at ceiling and significantly different from the false belief conditions, while they were at chance in the true belief condition of the standard task. The latter indicates that a pragmatic advantage of the Duplo task compared to the standard task holds only for the true belief scenarios. Our study shows that the Duplo task measures the same ToM competence as the standard task and rejects a notion of earlier false belief understanding on the group level in 3-year-old children.     

Development of gender discrimination: Role of stereotypic and counterstereotypic gender cues

Toddlers (41 girls and 35 boys) between 18 and 37 months old were given four gender discrimination tasks, each consisting of 6 pairs of color drawings. Three tasks depicted pairs of preschool girls and boys holding either sex-typical toys (stereotypic cues), sex-atypical toys (counterstereotypic cues), or no toys. The fourth task paired pictures of female-typed and male-typed toys. For each pair, subjects were asked to point to either the girl (girls' toy) or boy (boys' toy). Gender discrimination increased with age. Young children performed at chance level on all tasks. Older children made fewer correct choices on the Toy Alone task than on the tasks depicting children. Performance generally was unaffected by stereotyping or counterstereotyping of gender cues. Sex differences were minimal.Portions of this paper were presented at the meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Baltimore, MD, April 1987.     

Adolescents' expectancies of success,self-evaluations,and attributions about performance on spatial and verbal tasks

The present study examined the expectancies of success, evaluations of performance, and achievement-related attributions that high school students made about verbal and spatial tasks that typically show sex differences. Although no sex differences were found in task performance, boys expected to do better than girls on both the spatial and verbal tasks. After completing the task, the girls continued to evaluate their performance more negatively than did boys on the spatial tasks. On spatial tasks girls also attributed to themselves less ability and saw the tasks as being more difficult than did boys. The results suggest that there are generalized, rather than task-specific, sex differences in achievement expectancies, evaluations, and attributions. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for sex-related differences in cognitive functioning and subsequent achievement behaviors.The authors gratefully acknowledge support from the Judith Offer Fund and from the Spencer Foundation.     

Content variations and performance on formal operational tasks by gender,social class and ability1

The role of task content, gender, social class and cognitive ability in performance on two formal operational tasks is explored in this paper. The participants were 110 Icelandic 12-year-olds, early and late developers, males and females from all socio-economic groups. Two tasks of variable isolation (the pendulum and three content versions of the “plant” problem) and two measures of volume conservation (three traditional tasks and three tasks formally identical whose content was pictorial social play) were presented individually in a school setting. The results suggest that content variations have differential consequences for the performance of early and late developers at age 12. Both the nature of logical competence and task content affect solutions, as suggested by Overton and collaborators in 1987. Some social class and gender differences were observed on two Piagetian tasks (pendulum and volume), which was reduced by changing the task content in the case of social class but not in that of gender. As the gender difference in volume conservation was not reflected ins chool achievement nor on other cognitive tasks it was interpreted as a gender bias. The findings are discussed in view of recent literature on the development of cognitive theory with increased emphasis on context and meaning in a post-structural intellectual climate.     

Relationship between conjugate lateral eye movements, brain organization, and cognitive style

The relationship between individual differences in conjugate lateral eye movements (CLEMs) and inferential reasoning was investigated in two experiments. Subjects were given inference tasks in sentence and pictorial form and were later tested for recognition of correct inferences as well as literal recognition of the acquisition items. In Experiment 2, for example, subjects were given logical syllogisms during acquisition. Theoretically, right-eye movement/left-hemispheric (REM/LH) subjects should have excelled at this highly logical task but no significant differences between eye-movement groups were found. However, support for previous research showing the moderating effects of gender on hemispheric activation (measured by CLEMs) and hemispheric competence came from the memory data of Experiment 2. These data indicated that male REM/LH subjects recognized more acquisition sentences than the other eye movement/gender groups. It was suggested CLEMs and other measures of hemispheric activation and competence, coupled with data collected using complex cognitive tasks, can eventually lead to explanatory brain models of cognitive processing.     

Kindergarteners' Narrative Competence Across Tasks and Time

The authors investigated children's narrative competence by analyzing the development of the reciprocal relationship between storytelling and story retelling performances over a school year through a cross-lagged panel design. The participants in this study were 170 Italian kindergarten pupils (M age = 4.98 ± 0.31 years). Children were asked to produce oral narratives in two different tasks: a storytelling and a story retelling task. Narrative competence was assessed in terms of structure and coherence. The cross-lagged panel analyses showed that both storytelling and story retelling tasks are stable constructs, but they differ in the emphasis on coherence. Data confirmed the pivotal role played by storytelling as a task, and structure as a component in fostering the development of children's narrative competence. Overall, results from this study suggest that storytelling and story retelling are tasks that involve interrelated but not overlapping processes, and trigger different aspects of narrative competence.     

Conformity as a function of task generalization and relative competence

Subject correctness and group agreement were varied for college subjects engaged in a light discrimination task. On another task, employing multiple-choice questions about Canada, the dependent variable of conformity was assessed to examine generalization of relative competence formed on the light discrimination task. It was seen that (1) relative competence was seen to mediate conformity for a specific task (Canadian Knowledge Inventory), but did not generalize across tasks (i.e. from the light discrimination task to the Canadian Knowledge Inventory); (2) with respect to the Canadian Knowledge Inventory, subjects who perceived themselves as more competent than the group did not conform as much as those who either perceived themselves as less competent than or as competent as the group; (3) the experimental manipulations did not affect conformity, further supporting the findings that perceived competence does not generalize across classes of tasks; (4) females conformed more than males: and (5) nonsuspicious subjects conformed more than suspicious subjects.     

Antecedents and consequences of mothers' autonomy support: an experimental investigation.

This study examined the effects of contextual and individual differences on mothers' autonomy support versus control on homeworklike tasks. Sixty mothers and their third-grade children worked on map and poem tasks, with mothers in either an ego-involving (high pressure) or a non-ego-involving (low pressure) condition. Later, children worked on similar tasks themselves. Mothers in the high-pressure condition were more controlling on the poem task. For the map task, mothers who came in with controlling styles and received the high-pressure manipulation were most controlling. Children whose mothers interacted in a more controlling manner wrote less creative poems when alone. Results suggest the importance of context, children's competence levels, and mothers' styles in determining levels of autonomy support.     

How do mothers know? infants' chronological age or infants' performance as determinants of adaptation in maternal instruction?

In the present study a longitudinal disign was adopted to determine development as compared to age-related changes in maternal task instruction to children in their second year. The interactions of 12 mother-infant pairs doing simple tasks (tower building, form sorting), were video-recorded at bimonthly intervals between the infants' 14th and 22nd month. Relative frequency of infants' task attempts was chosen as an indicator of the competence to pursue complex action intentions—an essential component of action competence. For purpose of analysis the age of the infants was cross-tabulated with the rate of infants' task attempts as potential predictors for maternal efforts to motivate the child. The analysis was performed using log-linear modeling and contrasting a development-centered with an age-centered model. The development-centered model assumes that the effect of infant's age is restricted to its influence on infant's current performance rate which, in turn, affects kind and rate of maternal attempts to elicit task action in the child, and the differential effect of tasks. The development-centered model was shown to be superior to the age-centered model. Implications of the results are discussed with regard to the current debate on substituting chronological age as an independent variable by psychologically significant developmental variables.     

Resource utilization in mixed-sex dyads: The influence of adult presence and task type

This study explores the effects of context on cross-sex dominance. An emerging finding in the sex differences literature is that boys are often more successful than girls at influencing members of the other gender. As a result, boys tend to get more than their share of a scarce resource in mixed-sex situations. Because the presence of adults inhibits just those strategies that boys use successfully when dominating girls, we hypothesize that the presence of an adult will reduce or eliminate the sex difference in access to a scarce resource. This should be particularly true for tasks in which boys' strategies are most likely to be effective. To test this hypothesis, dominance (as evidenced by asymmetry in gaining access to a scarce resource) was measured while 48 boy-girl pairs, ranging in age from 42 to 60 months, negotiated turn taking at a movie viewer in either the presence or absence of an adult (adult location factor) in a situation that either did or did not require the cooperation of the second child in order to see cartoons (task type factor). For the cooperative task, neither sex significantly dominated the other in either the presence or absence of the adult. In contrast, for the competitive task, boys dominated in the absence of the adult. When the adult was present, however, boys and girls shared more equally. An examination of the strategies children used in the competitive task indicated that boys were inhibited in the adult's presence, dropping their rate of demands and giving girls longer turns. Implications for gender segregation and for sex differences in seeking proximity to adults are discussed.Portions of this paper were presented at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development in Baltimore, Maryland, April 1987. This research was supported, in part, by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship. The authors are grateful for the cooperation of the directors, staffs, parents, and children of the preschools that participated in the study; Bing School, Convenant Presbyterian Preschool, Menlo Park Presbyterian Nursery School, Buttons 'N Bows Preschool, Community Preschool, and Foothill College Child Care Center. We are also inebted to Carolyn Johnson, Robert McClure, Ennis Blount, Paul Endo, and Lara Helms for serving as experimenters, and to Colleen Kerrigan, Kathryn Shade, Diane Walters, Deborah Haley, Ira Lit, and Caroline Collins for their work in coding the data. Finally, we would like to thank Ellen Markman for reading and commenting on an earlier draft of the paper, and Mary Parpal, whose helpful comments and other contributions are greatly appreciated.     

Integrating fundamental movement skills in late childhood

The study examined how children of different ages integrate fundamental movement skills, such as running and throwing, and whether their developmental status was related to the combination of these skills. Thirty children were divided into three groups (G1 = 6-year-olds, G2 = 9-year-olds, and G3 = 12-year-olds) and filmed performing three tasks: running, overarm throwing, and the combined task. Patterns were identified and described, and the efficiency of integration was calculated (distance differences of the ball thrown in two tasks, overarm throwing and combined task). Differences in integration were related to age: the 6-year-olds were less efficient in combining the two skills than the 9- and 12-year-olds. These differences may be indicative of a phase of integrating fundamental movement skills in the developmental sequence. This developmental status, particularly throwing, seems to be related to the competence to integrate skills, which suggests that fundamental movement skills may be developmental modules.     

Development: Compared to what?: Contrast effects in age-comparative paradigms

Recent controversies about judgment competence of preschool and adolescent children are considered as being a possible product of contrast effects. That is, perceived abilities of children of a given age group may depend on the ages of the other subjects in the experiment. An experiment was done to test the possibility of contrast effects in age-comparative experiments. One group of subjects read about three experimental tasks in which 6-year-old children performed better than 4-year-olds. A second group read about 6-year-olds performing worse than 8-year-olds on the same tasks. Performance levels of 6-year-olds were the same on the two forms. For each task subjects rated the competence of each of the two age groups on the task and predicted the performance of the two groups on a related task. Undergraduate subjects' competence ratings and predictions were higher for 6-year-olds when compared to 4-year-olds than when compared to 8-year-olds. Psychology graduate students showed the same contrast effect for predictions but not for competence ratings. The results are discussed in terms of potential biases in age-comparative methods in developmental psychology.     

Expectancy of success on sex-linked tasks

College subjects undertook nine cognitive tasks with different perceived sex linkages, stating their expectancy of success prior to each task and attributing causality for their perceived performance following each task. As hypothesized, two components were present in the overall sex difference in expectancy of success, even when differences in actual task performance were statistically controlled. One component was attributable to a general tendency of females to state lower expectancies; the other was a function of the accord between the perceived sex linkage of the task and the subject's sex. The attribution data suggest that females tend to be more external for success and more internal for failure than males.The research reported here was partially supported by Grant #10692 from the Research Foundation of the City University of New York. The assistance of Bruce Eisman in testing subjects and of Rudy Lorber in data analysis is gratefully acknowledged.     

Expectations and Realizations: The Role of Expectancies in Achievement Settings

High expectancies of success are widely assumed to have positive effects on performance in achievement situations. However, previous investigations have tended to ignore task difficulty or assume that expectancies affect performance in a linear fashion. In two investigations, we found that (a) expectancies were more closely related to performance at difficult tasks than easy tasks and (b) low expectancies produced the poorest levels of performance, but moderate and high expectancies were equally advantageous. The practical, methodological, and theoretical implications of these findings are considered.This research was supported by a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation (SBR-8958211) to Jonathon D. Brown, and a National Science Foundation graduate fellowship to Margaret A. Marshall.     

Phonological memory in bilinguals and monolinguals

In the present study, we examined the effects of lexical-semantic knowledge and of difficulty level on phonological memory performance by monolingual adult English speakers and bilingual adult Korean?CEnglish speakers. The monolingual English speakers were more proficient in English than the bilingual speakers. All participants were tested on a range of phonological memory tasks in English. We manipulated the degree to which the phonological memory tasks involved lexical-semantic knowledge of English (word-span task, digit-span task, and nonword repetition task), as well as the difficulty level of the tasks. Results revealed that on the word-span task (highest level of lexical-semantic knowledge), monolinguals outperformed bilinguals at the easier levels of the task but bilinguals outperformed monolinguals at the more difficult levels of the task. For the digit-span and nonword repetition tasks, monolinguals outperformed bilinguals at the easier levels of the tasks, but the differences between the two groups vanished with the increase in the difficulty levels. Together, these results suggest that proficiency-based differences between monolingual and bilingual phonological memory performance depend on the degree to which the tasks rely on lexical-semantic knowledge and the difficulty level of the task.     

Controlled Social Interaction Tasks to Measure Self-Perceptions: No Evidence of Positive Illusions in Boys with ADHD

Studies have suggested that children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) possess a Positive Illusory Bias (PIB) where they have higher self-perceptions of competence than more objective measures of their competence. However, recent research calls into question the primary methodology of these studies, that is, difference scores. This study investigated the PIB in boys with ADHD within the social domain using a novel methodology that refrains from using difference scores. Eighty-one 8- to 12-year-old boys with and without ADHD completed social interaction tasks where their actual social performance was made comparable, allowing for tests of between-group differences in self-perceptions that do not rely on difference scores. In addition, to examine whether clarity of social feedback moderates the presence of the PIB, the social tasks presented unclear, clear positive, or clear negative feedback. Boys rated how well they performed in each social interaction task, and these ratings were compared between ADHD and non-ADHD groups. Compared to the non-ADHD group, boys with ADHD did not show a PIB in their ratings of performance on the social tasks. There also was no moderation of boys’ ratings by type of feedback received. In contrast, when the PIB was calculated using difference scores based on child and parent ratings of child competence, boys with ADHD showed a PIB compared to boys without ADHD. These findings call attention to the need to re-examine the phenomenon of the PIB using methodologies outside of difference scores.     

Decision‐making competence: External validation through an individual‐differences approach

This study asks to what extent (a) individuals show consistent performance differences across typical behavioral decision‐making tasks, and (b) how those differences correlate with plausible real‐world correlates of good decision making. Seven tasks, chosen to span the domain of decision‐making skills, were administered to participants in an ongoing longitudinal study providing extensive social, psychological, and behavioral measures. Performance scores on individual tasks generally showed small, positive inter‐task correlations. An aggregate measure of decision‐making competence (DMC) was appropriately correlated with plausible sources, concomitants, and outcomes of good decision making, suggesting the underlying construct's external validity. Higher DMC scores were associated with more intact social environments, more constructive cognitive styles, and fewer ‘maladaptive’ risk behaviors. In each case, DMC adds to the predictive validity of general measures of cognitive ability. These results suggest that poor decision making on common laboratory tasks is related to real‐world antecedents and consequences of poor decision making. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Sex differences in the relationship of height to children's actual and attributed social and cognitive competencies

In three studies, the relationship of children's height to both (a) adults' attributions regarding the children and (b) preschoolers' social and cognitive competencies were examined. Sex differences were consistent with stereotypic conceptions. In the first two studies, mothers of preschool children rated photographs of toddlers varying in height on a variety of social and cognitive abilities. The mothers also assigned punishment to the children for hypothetical transgressions. In Experiment 1, mothers rated the large boys as more competent than the average-sized and small boys (even when effects of mothers' perceptions of the children's ages were covaried). In Experiment 2, involving female stimuli, mothers rated small girls as being less able (especially less independent) than average-sized or tall girls. While the effect of height on mothers' attributions was still evident when the effects of perceived age of the children were covaried, the pattern of results was less clear. Mothers assigned more punishment to tall girls (but not tall boys) than to small girls regardless of perceptions of age. In Experiment 3, height was associated with boys', but not girls', competence on tasks of logical ability and boys' sociometric nominations of whom they prefer to play with (significant for girls, marginally significant for boys). Height was not highly correlated with peers' perceptions of competence. The implications of the research for the socialization process are discussed.The authors wish to express their gratitude to the parents, teachers, and children at the Child Study Laboratory, Students' Child Center, Palo Alto Preschools, and Tempe Preschool. The authors would also like to thank Michael Gunzelman, Michelle White, Julie Mankowski, Marsha Kaplan, and Melissa Rook for their able assistance in data collection.     

预知任务转换的内源性准备和外源性调节

采用ERP探究在预知条件下任务转换的神经机制。使用“任务转换”实验范式,以汉字（名词/动词）或数字（奇数/偶数）的归类为任务。被试执行任务重复（AA,BB,…）或在两个任务间转换（AB,BA,…）,每个任务序列为连续的两个任务（任务1,任务2）。结果发现,任务1中,在刺激呈现后300ms左右,数、词的转换序列与重复序列出现显著差异;在中央区,320ms左右,任务1中转换序列比重复序列、任务2中转换任务比重复任务都产生一个更为负走向的波。这些结果表明,在预知条件下,简单任务转换的内源性准备可能开始于任务1呈现后300ms左右;内源性准备和外源性调节可能都反映了认知冲突过程,此认知冲突可能是转换代价的主要来源     

Defining task-set reconfiguration: The case of reference point switching

Some researchers argue that task switching involves task-set reconfiguration-that is, changing the existing task set to perform a different task. Although this idea is intriguing, it is often unclear what is reconfigured and which processes are involved in reconfiguration. We addressed these issues by defining task sets, identifying differences between them, and obtaining evidence that was diagnostic of reconfiguration. In two experiments, subjects performed relative judgment tasks that involved comparing a target with a reference point that repeated or switched across trials. The task was the same on every trial, but the task set was not, because a task-set parameter-the reference point-had to be changed. Target-reference point distance effects that changed with the reference point provided diagnostic evidence that reconfiguration occurred, and this reconfiguration led to switch costs. We discuss how our approach can be generalized to define reconfiguration more clearly in other task-switching situations. nt|mis|This research was supported by Grants BCS 0133202 and BCS 0446806 from the National Science Foundation to G.D.L.