Expression of the emotions in the drawing of a man by the child from 5 to 11 years of age]

This study examines the development of children's ability to express emotions in their human figure drawing. Sixty children of 5, 8, and 11 years were asked to draw "a man," and then a "sad", "happy," "angry" and "surprised" man. Expressivity of the drawings was assessed by means of two procedures: a limited choice and a free labelling procedure. Emotionally expressive drawings were then evaluated in terms of the number and the type of graphic cues that were used to express emotion. It was found that children are able to depict happiness and sadness at 8, anger and surprise at 11. With age, children use increasingly numerous and complex graphic cues for each emotion (i.e., facial expression, body position, and contextual cues). Graphic cues for facial expression (e.g., concave mouth, curved eyebrows, wide opened eyes) share strong similarities with specific "action units" described by Ekman and Friesen (1978) in their Facial Action Coding System. Children's ability to depict emotion in their human figure drawing is discussed in relation to perceptual, conceptual, and graphic abilities.     

The kindergarten path effect revisited: children's use of context in processing structural ambiguities

Research with adults has shown that ambiguous spoken sentences are resolved efficiently, exploiting multiple cues--including referential context--to select the intended meaning. Paradoxically, children appear to be insensitive to referential cues when resolving ambiguous sentences, relying instead on statistical properties intrinsic to the language such as verb biases. The possibility that children's insensitivity to referential context may be an artifact of the experimental design used in previous work was explored with 60 4- to 11-year-olds. An act-out task was designed to discourage children from making incorrect pragmatic inferences and to prevent premature and ballistic responses by enforcing delayed actions. Performance on this task was compared directly with the standard act-out task used in previous studies. The results suggest that young children (5 years) do not use contextual information, even under conditions designed to maximize their use of such cues, but that adult-like processing is evident by approximately 8 years of age. These results support and extend previous findings by Trueswell and colleagues (Cognition (1999), Vol. 73, pp. 89-134) and are consistent with a constraint-based learning account of children's linguistic development.     

Props,not pictures,are worth a thousand words: verbal accessibility of early memories under different conditions of contextual support

When they are tested nonverbally, even young children demonstrate long-term recall. There have been few studies of whether early memories later are verbally accessible; the results of those that exist are mixed. Inconsistencies may be due to differences in the contextual cues provided at the time of recall. In two experiments, children 13–20 months were exposed to multi-step sequences and tested for nonverbal recall after 3–6 months. At age 3 years, they were tested verbally, under varying conditions of contextual support: in the original laboratory with event-related props versus at home with photographs of the props (Experiment 1), and at home with props (Experiment 2). Children younger than 20 months at initial experience of the events did not demonstrate verbal recall. Children who were 20 months at the initial exposure recalled verbally, as long as they had physical props as cues, regardless of whether testing took place at home or in the laboratory. This research informs the conditions under which memories from very early childhood later can be recalled verbally. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Form and function in children's understanding of ironic utterances

Children's use of contextual discrepancy and stressed intonation to interpret literal form and illocutionary function in the use of ironic utterances was examined in two experiments. First and third grade children (6 and 8 years of age, respectively) and college adults were read short stories consisting of an utterance by a speaker and contextual information that was either neutral or that biased an ironic or literal interpretation of the utterance. The intonation of the utterance was either stressed or unstressed. Questions were asked about the literal form of the utterance, and the speaker's attitude in using the utterance. The results suggest that evaluation of the literal form and inference to the speaker's intended use of an utterance are independent components of irony comprehension in children: that contextual discrepancy and intonation function differently in cueing these processes; and that children and adults differ both in accomplishing these processes and in the use of these cues.     

Misleading cues improve developmental assessment of working memory capacity: The color matching tasks

The theory of constructive operators was used as a framework to design two versions of a paradigm (color matching task, CMT) in which items are parametrically ordered in difficulty, and differ only contextually. Items in CMT-Balloon are facilitating, whereas items in CMT-Clown contain misleading cues. Participants of ages 7–14 years and adults (N = 149) were studied. We found significant model-predicted graded differences in performance between the facilitating and misleading tasks, across and within age groups, expressing age versus items’ demand interactions. Younger children were differentially affected by contextual cues. Even though both task versions were highly correlated with a well-established developmental measure of attentional capacity, CMT-Clown, which contained misleading cues, was a better measure of working memory capacity. These results show a need to estimate degree of misleadingness whenever performance levels in working memory or mental attention tasks are compared and interpreted. Developmental profiles of both tasks are discussed in terms of contextual differences and neoPiagetian stages of development.     

Judging trustworthiness from faces: Emotion cues modulate trustworthiness judgments in young children

By adulthood, people judge trustworthiness from appearances rapidly and reliably. However, we know little about these judgments in children. This novel study investigates the developmental trajectory of explicit trust judgments from faces, and the contribution made by emotion cues across age groups. Five‐, 7‐, 10‐year‐olds, and adults rated the trustworthiness of trustworthy and untrustworthy faces with neutral expressions. The same participants also rated faces displaying overt happy and angry expressions, allowing us to investigate whether emotion cues modulate trustworthiness judgments similarly in children and adults. Results revealed that the ability to evaluate the trustworthiness of faces emerges in childhood, but may not be adult like until 10 years of age. Moreover, we show that emotion cues modulate trust judgments in young children, as well as adults. Anger cues diminished the appearance of trustworthiness for participants from 5 years of age and happy cues increased it, although this effect did not consistently emerge until later in childhood, that is, 10 years of age. These associations also extended to more subtle emotion cues present in neutral faces. Our results indicate that young children are sensitive to facial trustworthiness, and suggest that similar expression cues modulate these judgments in children and adults.     

A Computational Model of the Self‐Teaching Hypothesis Based on the Dual‐Route Cascaded Model of Reading

The self‐teaching hypothesis describes how children progress toward skilled sight‐word reading. It proposes that children do this via phonological recoding with assistance from contextual cues, to identify the target pronunciation for a novel letter string, and in so doing create an opportunity to self‐teach new orthographic knowledge. We present a new computational implementation of self‐teaching within the dual‐route cascaded (DRC) model of reading aloud, and we explore how decoding and contextual cues can work together to enable accurate self‐teaching under a variety of circumstances. The new model (ST‐DRC) uses DRC’s sublexical route and the interactivity between the lexical and sublexical routes to simulate phonological recoding. Known spoken words are activated in response to novel printed words, triggering an opportunity for orthographic learning, which is the basis for skilled sight‐word reading. ST‐DRC also includes new computational mechanisms for simulating how contextual information aids word identification, and it demonstrates how partial decoding and ambiguous context interact to achieve irregular‐word learning. Beyond modeling orthographic learning and self‐teaching, ST‐DRC’s performance suggests new avenues for empirical research on how difficult word classes such as homographs and potentiophones are learned.     

Age,skill, and contextual cuing in target detection

This study examined the extent to which structural regularities inherent in visual arrays help to guide target detection and reduce age-related differences in skilled visual search performance. The target-detection performance of medical laboratory technologists in 2 age groups (M = 24.3 years and M = 49.0 years) and age-matched novices was assessed using images of bacterial morphology taken from Gram's stain photomicrographs as targets and search arrays. For skilled observers, response times were longer for middle-aged adults than for young adults except when external location cues were available, or when contextual cues inherent in the array were available to guide target detection. These results demonstrate that contextual information aids the skilled search of middle-aged experts, and suggest that contextual cuing is 1 means by which middle-aged adults can circumvent the effects of normally age-deficient processes on performance in a skilled domain.     

The interference of a baseline with children's orientation judgement need not entirely mask their contextual responsiveness

Children below the age of seven are very influenced by the orientation of the external frame of reference when they attempt to lay down a stimulus to match that of a tilted target. If, however, the target be set upon a baseline the children seem unable to benefit from salient parallel alignment cues. By modifying the usual design it is shown that children can remain able to take their bearings from contextual alignment even when setting a pointer upon a baseline; but the effect is only revealed in a complex three-way interaction. Contextual sensitivity is thus not abolished, but masked; and its re-emergence is in an apparently anomalous form.     

Susceptibility to retroactive interference: The effect of context as a function of age and cognition

Previous studies have shown that contextual cues improve memory performance and reduce interference in younger adults. However, it is not clear whether middle-aged and older adults can also benefit from contextual cues, or if this ability diminishes with ageing and cognitive decline. In order to test this question, we tested 69 middle-aged adults (aged 30–50 years) and 65 older adults (aged 65–85). Participants completed a retroactive interference paradigm with or without contextual cues. Cognitive functioning of older adults was assessed using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, which is a sensitive and highly validated tool to detect cognitive decline in older age. The results showed that while middle-aged adults were able to benefit from context to improve recognition and reduce interference, older adults were not able to benefit from it. However, when we compared older adults with lower (<26) and higher (≥26) scores on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, we found that older adults with high cognitive functioning could benefit from context advantage at retrieval to improve recognition compared to those with lower cognitive functioning. Yet, similar to older adults with lower cognitive functioning, they could not benefit from context advantage at encoding and hence were still susceptible to interference.     

Social Emotions in Children's Human Figure Drawings: Drawing Shame,Pride and Jealousy

The study examines children's ability to convey social – as opposed to basic – emotions in their human figure drawings. One hundred children aged 4‐, 6‐ and 8‐years were asked to draw a person experiencing shame, pride, jealousy, happiness, sadness and fear as well as a baseline figure ‘feeling nothing’. Drawings were rated in terms of (i) overall emotional expressiveness and (ii) variety and types (face, body/posture and context) of graphic cues used to convey emotion. The effect of age on overall expressiveness and use of these graphic cues was also investigated. The results showed that drawings depicting social emotions were rated as less expressive and presented fewer graphic cues than those conveying basic emotions. Children's developing ability to depict pride, shame and jealousy was largely driven by an increased use of contextual cues in their human figure drawings. As regards the effect of age, it was found that 6‐ and 8‐years old produced more expressive drawings containing a larger range of graphic cues than the 4‐year olds. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The time windows of the sense of agency

The sense of agency depends on some internal cues that derive from action control, as well as external cues like contextual information and prior information (degree of contingency between an action and is effect). We assessed whether external agency cues are combined with internal agency cues to affect the sense of agency. In two experiments participants performed a movement (button press) that elicited, after a varying delay, an effect (ball appearing on a screen), and reported their sense of agency over the effect (full, partial or no-agency) while internal cues (premotor information) and external cues (contextual and prior information) were manipulated. We assessed the effect of agency cues on the delays at which the sense of agency varied. The delays were increased with premotor signals but were decreased with contextual information. These findings favour a model of integration of internal and external agency cues over time.     

Children's understanding of drivers' intentions

To become more skilled as pedestrians, children need to acquire a view of the traffic environment as one in which road users are active agents with different intentions and objectives. This paper describes a simulation study designed to explore children's understanding of drivers' intentions. It also investigated the effect of training children's sensitivity, through peer discussion and adult guidance, to the cues by which drivers signal their intentions. Results confirmed that children's ability to accurately predict drivers' intentions improves with age and that sensitizing children through training to the options for action available to drivers when signalling a manoeuvre improves their accuracy in predicting drivers' intentions. Training was also found to shift children's focus from contextual infrastructural features of the traffic environment (e.g. traffic signals, stop signs) by which to judge drivers' likely intentions to the explicit cues that drivers use to signal their imminent actions (e.g. slowing down, moving into the kerb). Training on the simulation was also shown to transfer to practical decision making at the roadside.     

Deontic and epistemic reasoning in children

It is widely accepted that adults show an advantage for deontic over epistemic reasoning. Two published studies (Cummins, 1996b; Harris and Núñez, 1996, Experiment 4) found evidence of this “deontic advantage” in preschool-aged children and are frequently cited as evidence that preschoolers show the same deontic advantage as adults. However, neither study has been replicated, and it is not clear from either study that preschoolers were showing the deontic advantage under the same conditions as adults. The current research investigated these issues. Experiment 1 attempted to replicate both Cummins’s and Harris and Núñez’s studies with 3- and 4-year-olds (N = 56), replicating the former with 4-year-olds and the latter with both 3- and 4-year-olds. Experiment 2 modified Cummins’s task to remove the contextual differences between conditions, making it more similar to adult tasks, finding that 4-year-olds (n = 16) show no evidence of the deontic advantage when no authority figure is present in the deontic condition, whereas both 7-year-olds (n = 16) and adults (n = 28) do. Experiment 3 removed the authority figure from the deontic condition in Harris and Núñez’s task, again finding that 3- and 4-year-olds (N = 28) show no evidence of the deontic advantage under these conditions. These results suggest that for preschoolers, the deontic advantage is reliant on particular contextual cues such as the presence of an authority figure, in the deontic condition. By 7 years of age, however, children are reasoning like adults and show evidence of the advantage when no such contextual cues are present.     

3～5岁儿童基于声音线索的情绪知觉

研究从言语的韵律和语义两条线索出发,试图探讨学前儿童基于声音线索情绪知觉的发展特点.实验一中,124名3～5岁儿童对男、女性用5种不同情绪(高兴、生气、害怕、难过和中性)的声音表达的中性语义句子进行了情绪类型上的判断.3～5岁儿童基于声音韵律线索情绪知觉能力随着年龄的增长不断提高,主要表现在生气、害怕和中性情绪上.不同情绪类型识别的发展轨迹不完全相同,总体来说,高兴的声音韵律最容易识别,而害怕是最难识别的.当韵律和语义线索冲突时,学前儿童更多地依赖韵律线索来判断说话者的情绪状态.被试对女性用声音表达的情绪更敏感.     

The relation between language and cognition in 3- to 9-year-olds: the acquisition of grammatical gender in French

The French language has a grammatical gender system in which all nouns are assigned either a masculine or a feminine gender. Nouns provide two types of gender cues that can potentially guide gender attribution: morphophonological cues carried by endings and semantic cues (natural gender). The first goal of this study was to describe the acquisition of the probabilistic system based on phonological oppositions on word endings by French-speaking children. The second goal was to explore the extent to which this system affects categorization. In the study, 3- to 9-year-olds assigned gender categorization to invented nouns whose endings were typically masculine, typically feminine, or neutral. Two response conditions were used. In the determiner condition, children indicated the gender class by orally providing the determiner un or une marked for gender. In the picture condition, responses were given by pointing to the picture of a Martian-like female or male person that would be best called by each spoken pseudoword. Results indicated that as young as 3 years, children associated the determiner corresponding to the ending bias at greater than chance levels. Ending-consistent performance increased from 3 to 9 years of age. Moreover, from 4 years of age onward, sensitivity to endings affected categorization. Starting at that age, pictures were selected according to endings at greater than chance levels. This effect also increased with age. The discussion deals with the mechanisms of language acquisition and the relation between language and cognition.     

Speaker bias in children's evaluation of the external consistency of statements

The hypothesis of this study is that an assumption of speaker credibility affects children's judgments of the external consistency of statements. In two experiments, first and third grade children (6 and 8 years of age, respectively) and college adults were read short paragraphs containing contradictory information from a contextual source and a speaker. The contextual source was described as either authoritative or nonauthoritative and discredited. The speaker was either an adult or child. Thus the contextual source was either more or less reliable than the speaker. Subjects were asked to affirm or contradict the speaker's statement, and to choose either the source or the speaker as most believable. The results showed that adult responses varied with the contextual source alone, while the responses of the first graders varied primarily with the speaker's age. The responses of the third graders varied with both factors. The results suggest young children can assess the external consistency of statements but frequently do not because of their assumptions about speakers and other performance factors.     

How children know the relevant properties for generalizing object names

Young children’s novel word extensions indicate that their animal categories, like those of adults, are characterized by multiple similarities among instances; whereas their artifact categories, again like those of adults, are characterized more simply by commonalities among instances in shape. Three experiments shed light on the nature and development of a mechanism that enables children to organize novel lexical categories differently for different kinds of objects. Experiment 1 shows that, by adult judgments, animals and artifacts present different category organizations. Experiment 2 shows relations between both age and the number of nouns young children have acquired, and children’s kind‐specific generalizations of newly learned nouns. Experiment 3 is a training study in which even younger children show an ability to learn and then generalize highly abstract relations between different contextual cues and different category structures; and importantly, to learn more than one set of such relations at a time. Together, these three findings indicate one way in which children are able to rapidly and accurately form lexical categories that parallel those of adults in their language community.     

Look Here! The Development of Attentional Orienting to Symbolic Cues

Although much research has examined the development of orienting to social directional cues (e.g., eye gaze), little is known about the development of orienting to nonsocial directional cues, such as arrows. Arrow cues have been used in numerous studies as a means to study attentional orienting, but the development of children's understanding of such cues has not previously been examined. It remains unclear to what extent the social nature of a cue is important for directing attention; further, it is unknown whether symbolic understanding is necessary for young children to be cued by symbols such as arrows. The present investigation explored when and how arrows cue children's attention. Our results suggest that children younger than 5 years of age orient their attention using the perceptual properties of arrows, and it is not until sometime after 5 years of age that children use the conceptual meaning of arrows to orient their attention. Understanding of the directional meaning of arrows may develop through both exogenous and endogenous orienting; we discuss possible contributions of the compression-based and selection-based learning systems.