Individual differences in children's mathematical competence are related to the intentional but not automatic processing of Arabic numerals

In recent years, there has been an increasing focus on the role played by basic numerical magnitude processing in the typical and atypical development of mathematical skills. In this context, tasks measuring both the intentional and automatic processing of numerical magnitude have been employed to characterize how children’s representation and processing of numerical magnitude changes over developmental time. To date, however, there has been little effort to differentiate between different measures of ‘number sense’. The aim of the present study was to examine the relationship between automatic and intentional measures of magnitude processing as well as their relationships to individual differences in children’s mathematical achievement. A group of 119 children in 1st and 2nd grade were tested on the physical size congruity paradigm (automatic processing) as well as the number comparison paradigm to measure the ratio effect (intentional processing). The results reveal that measures of intentional and automatic processing are uncorrelated with one another, suggesting that these tasks tap into different levels of numerical magnitude processing in children. Furthermore, while children’s performance on the number comparison paradigm was found to correlate with their mathematical achievement scores, no such correlations could be obtained for any of the measures typically derived from the physical size congruity task. These findings therefore suggest that different tasks measuring ‘number sense’ tap into different levels of numerical magnitude representation that may be unrelated to one another and have differential predictive power for individual differences in mathematical achievement.     

These pretzels are going to make me thirsty tomorrow: Differential development of hot and cool episodic foresight in early childhood?

The current study examined 3‐ and 7‐year‐olds' performance on two types of episodic foresight tasks: A task that required ‘cool’ reasoning processes about the use of objects in future situations and a task that required ‘hot’ processes to inhibit a salient current physiological state in order to reason accurately about a future state. Results revealed that 7‐year‐olds outperformed 3‐year‐olds on the episodic foresight task that involved cool processes, but did not show age differences in performance on the task that involved hot processes. In fact, both 3‐ and 7‐year‐olds performed equally poorly on the task that required predicting a future physiological state that was in conflict with their current state. Further, performance on the two tasks was unrelated. We discuss the results in terms of differing developmental trajectories for episodic foresight tasks that differentially rely on hot and cool processes and the universal difficulties humans have with predicting later outcomes that conflict with current motivational states.     

Concurrent Relations Between Perspective-Taking Skills,Desire Understanding,and Internal-State Vocabulary

Recent studies suggest that there appears to be a similar developmental sequence in the understanding of mental states in both internal-state language and in standard theory-of-mind tasks. These findings suggest possible developmental relations between children's ability to talk and think about the mind. Two experiments investigated the concurrent relations between internal-state vocabulary and theory-of-mind abilities in 30-month-old toddlers. In Experiment 1, children's internal-state language vocabulary was significantly and specifically related to their concurrent understanding of others' visual and emotional perspectives and was less strongly related to desire understanding. Experiment 2 replicated and extended these findings by examining the link between internal-state vocabulary and visual perspective-taking and comprehension of own versus other's desire, controlling for general verbal skills. Children with a more developed internal-state vocabulary performed better on perspective-taking tasks. These findings suggest that labeling and reasoning about mental states are related abilities at the early stages of theory-of-mind development.     

Longitudinal Development of Memory for Temporal Order in Early to Middle Childhood

Abstract

Existing studies examining the development of temporal order memory show that although young children perform above chance on some tasks assessing temporal order memory, there are significant age-related differences across childhood. Yet, the trajectory of children’s ability to retrieve temporal order remains unclear as existing conclusions are drawn from cross-sectional studies. The present study utilized an accelerated longitudinal design in order to characterize the developmental trajectory of temporal order memory in a sample of 200 healthy 4- to 8-year-old children. Specifically, two tasks commonly used in the literature were tested longitudinally: a primacy judgment task and an ordering task. Results revealed that, even after controlling for differences in IQ, linearly increasing trajectories characterized age-related change in performance for both tasks; however, change appeared greater for the temporal ordering task. Further, performance on the two tasks was positively related, suggesting shared underlying mechanisms. These findings provide a more thorough understanding of temporal order memory in early to middle childhood by characterizing the developmental trajectories of two commonly used tasks and have important implications for our understanding of children’s developing memory more broadly.     

The developmental trajectories of spatial skills in middle childhood

The multidimensional structure of spatial ability remains a debated issue. However, the developmental trajectories of spatial skills have yet to be investigated as a source of evidence within this debate. We tested the intrinsic versus extrinsic and static versus dynamic dimensions of the Uttal et al. (2013, Psychol. Bull., 139, 352) typology in relation to spatial development. Participants (N = 184) aged 6–11 completed spatial tasks chosen to measure these spatial dimensions. The results indicated that the developmental trajectories of intrinsic versus extrinsic skills differed significantly. Intrinsic skills improved more between 6 and 8 years, and 7 and 8 years, than extrinsic skills. Extrinsic skills increased more between 8 and 10 years than intrinsic skills. The trajectories of static versus dynamic skills did not differ significantly. The findings support the intrinsic versus extrinsic, but not the static versus dynamic dimension, of the Uttal et al. (2013, Psychol. Bull., 139, 352) typology.     

Reasoning on social dilemmas varying in emotional saliency: an adult developmental perspective

The purpose of this study was to provide age-comparative evidence of social cognitive reasoning in adulthood, as mediated by the emotional saliency of tasks tapping postformal reasoning. Specifically, the tasks focused on the ability to resolve discrepant accounts of the same event sequence. It was assumed that less mature thinking may be more evident in reasoning contexts in which emotional factors play a major role. A postformal coding scheme was used to assess levels of reasoning in an interpersonal context. Tasks were administered to 60 subjects--adolescents and young and middle-aged adults. Measures of formal operations, ego level, and verbal ability were also administered. An interaction was found between age and degree of emotional saliency of the task for reasoning level. Specifically, adolescents performed less well on tasks higher in degree of emotional saliency. In addition, developmental differences in postformal reasoning as a function of age and ego level were found.     

Acquired ‘theory of mind'' impairments following stroke

The ability to attribute thoughts and feelings to self and others (‘theory of mind') has been hypothesised to have an innate neural basis and a dedicated cognitive mechanism. Evidence in favour of this proposal has come from autism; a brain-based developmental disorder which appears to be characterised by impaired theory of mind, despite sometimes good general reasoning skills/IQ. To date no case of specific acquired theory of mind impairment has been reported. The present study examined theory of mind in adults who had suffered right hemisphere stroke, a group known to show pragmatic and social difficulties. In one study using story materials and two using cartoons, patients' understanding of materials requiring attribution of mental states (e.g. ignorance, false belief) was significantly worse than their understanding of non-mental control materials. Data from healthy elderly subjects, and a small group of left hemisphere patients (who received the tasks in modified form), suggest that this impairment on mental state tasks is not a function of task difficulty. The findings support the notion of a dedicated cognitive system for theory of mind, and suggest a role for the healthy right hemisphere in the attribution of mental states.     

Do chimpanzees know what others can and cannot do? Reasoning about ‘capability’

Much recent comparative work has been devoted to exploring what nonhuman primates understand about physical causality. However, few laboratory experiments have attempted to test what nonhumans understand about what physical acts others are capable of performing. We tested seven chimpanzees’ ability to predict which of two human experimenters could deliver a tray containing a food reward. In the ‘floor’ condition, legs were required to push the tray toward the subject. In the ‘lap’ condition, arms were required to hand the tray to the subject. In Exp. 1, chimpanzees begged (by gesturing) to either an experimenter whose legs were not visible (LNV) or whose arms were not visible (ANV). Rather than flexibly altering their preferences between conditions, the chimpanzees preferred the ANV experimenter regardless of the task. In subsequent experiments, we manipulated various factors that might have controlled the chimpanzees’ preferences, such as (a) distance between experimenter and subject (Experiment 2), (b) amount of occlusion of experimenters’ body (Experiments 2 and 3), (c) contact with the food tray (Experiments 3 and 4) and (d) positioning of barriers that either impeded the movement of the limbs or not (Experiment 5). The chimpanzees’ performance was best explained by attention to cues such as perceived proximity, contact, and maximal occlusion of body that although highly predictive in certain tasks, were irrelevant in others. When the discriminative role of such cues was eliminated, performance fell to chance levels, indicating that chimpanzees do not spontaneously (or after considerable training) use limb visibility as a cue to predict the ability of a human to perform particular physical tasks. Thus, the current findings suggest a possible failure of causal reasoning in the context of reasoning about the use of the limbs to perform physical acts.     

Spatial reasoning in Tenejapan Mayans

Language communities differ in their stock of reference frames (coordinate systems for specifying locations and directions). English typically uses egocentrically-defined axes (e.g., “left–right”), especially when describing small-scale relationships. Other languages such as Tseltal Mayan prefer to use geocentrically-defined axes (e.g., “north–south”) and do not use any type of projective body-defined axes. It has been argued that the availability of specific frames of reference in language determines the availability or salience of the corresponding spatial concepts. In four experiments, we explored this hypothesis by testing Tseltal speakers’ spatial reasoning skills. Whereas most prior tasks in this domain were open-ended (allowing several correct solutions), the present tasks required a unique solution that favored adopting a frame-of-reference that was either congruent or incongruent with what is habitually lexicalized in the participants’ language. In these tasks, Tseltal speakers easily solved the language-incongruent problems, and performance was generally more robust for these than for the language-congruent problems that favored geocentrically-defined coordinates. We suggest that listeners’ probabilistic inferences when instruction is open to more than one interpretation account for why there are greater cross-linguistic differences in the solutions to open-ended spatial problems than to less ambiguous ones.     

Individual differences in mature readers in reading, spelling, and grapheme-phoneme conversion

Individual differences in word recognition, spelling, verbal reasoning, frequency of print exposure, phonological skills, Gestalt processing and semantic processing were examined in 110 university undergraduates. Most reading and phonological tasks involved making sequences of lexical decisions through lists of common stimuli within set time limits. The test measures were percentages correct adjusting for chance. The main findings were as follows: First, there is a substantial “Matthew effect” in that good readers were also good at spelling, good at handling the meaning of words, and appeared to have had the most print exposure. Second, phonological skills appear to be independent of lexical skills. Furthermore, within these phonological skills there appear to be two components, one that is automatic, and one that is more of a conscious operation.     

Individual differences in mature readers in reading,spelling, and grapheme-phoneme conversion

Individual differences in word recognition, spelling, verbal reasoning, frequency of print exposure, phonological skills, Gestalt processing and semantic processing were examined in 110 university undergraduates. Most reading and phonological tasks involved making sequences of lexical decisions through lists of common stimuli within set time limits. The test measures were percentages correct adjusting for chance. The main findings were as follows: First, there is a substantial “Matthew effect” in that good readers were also good at spelling, good at handling the meaning of words, and appeared to have had the most print exposure. Second, phonological skills appear to be independent of lexical skills. Furthermore, within these phonological skills there appear to be two components, one that is automatic, and one that is more of a conscious operation.     

Factors and processes in children's transitive deductions

Transitive tasks are important for understanding how children develop socio-cognitively. However, developmental research has been restricted largely to questions surrounding maturation. We asked 6-, 7- and 8-year-olds (N?=?117) to solve a composite of five different transitive tasks. Tasks included conditions asking about item-C (associated with the marked relation) in addition to the usual case of asking only about item-A (associated with the unmarked relation). Here, children found resolving item-C much easier than resolving item-A, a finding running counter to long-standing assumptions about transitive reasoning. Considering gender perhaps for the first time, boys exhibited higher transitive scores than girls overall. Finally, analysing in the context of one recent and well-specified theory of spatial transitive reasoning, we generated the prediction that reporting the full series should be easier than deducing any one item from that series. This prediction was not upheld. We discuss amendments necessary to accommodate all our earlier findings.     

The link between preschoolers' executive function and theory of mind and the role of epistemic states

The aim of this study was to assess the specific relation between 3- to 6-year-olds’ performance on a task measuring executive function (EF), the Dimensional Change Card Sort task (DCCS), and different developmental attainments in their theory of mind (ToM) by employing a battery of scaled ToM tasks that were comparable in task format and task demands. In addition, individual differences on the temperamental dimensions emotionality, activity, sociability, and shyness were assessed by parental rating. The main findings show that children’s (N = 195) performance on the DCCS related to their overall performance on the ToM scale but that this relation was specific to those ToM tasks that tap children’s understanding of epistemic states such as knowledge access, diverse beliefs, and false beliefs regarding content and location. The relation between children’s EF and overall ToM performance remained significant after controlling for age, sentence comprehension, child temperament, and parental education. Individual differences in child activity showed consistent negative relation to EF and ToM abilities. The findings point to a differential involvement of the various EF components in reasoning about different mental concepts.     

Do people automatically track others’ beliefs? Evidence from a continuous measure

Recent findings suggest that tracking others’ beliefs is not always effortful and slow, but may rely on a fast and implicit system. An untested prediction of the automatic belief tracking account is that own and others’ beliefs should be activated in parallel. We tested this prediction measuring continuous movement trajectories in a task that required deciding between two possible object locations. We independently manipulated whether participants’ belief about the object location was true or false and whether an onlooker’s belief about the object location was true or false. Manipulating whether or not the agent’s belief was ever task relevant allowed us to compare performance in an explicit and implicit version of the same task. Movement parameters revealed an influence of the onlooker’s irrelevant belief in the implicit version of the task. This provides evidence for parallel activation of own and others’ beliefs.     

Children's counterfactual inferences about long and short causal chains

Recent findings on counterfactual reasoning in children have led to the claim that children's developing capacities in the domain of ‘theory of mind’ might reflect the emergence of the ability to engage in counterfactual thinking over the preschool period (e.g. Riggs, Peterson, Robinson & Mitchell, 1998 ). In the study reported here, groups of 3- and 4-year old children were presented with stories describing causal chains of several events, and asked counterfactual thinking tasks involving changes to different points in the chain. The ability to draw successful counterfactual inferences depended strongly on the inferential length of the problem, and the age of the children; while 3-year-olds performed above chance on short inference counterfactuals, they performed below chance on problems involving longer inference chains. Four-year-old children were above chance on all problems. Moreover, it was found that while success on longer chain inference problems was significantly correlated with the ability to pass tests of standard false belief, there was no such relationship for short inference problems, which were significantly easier than false belief problems. These results are discussed in terms of the developmental relationships between causal knowledge, counterfactual thinking and calculating the contents of mental states.     

Representational and executive selection resources in 'theory of mind': evidence from compromised belief-desire reasoning in old age

Effective belief-desire reasoning requires both specialized representational capacities-the capacity to represent the mental states as such-as well as executive selection processes for accurate performance on tasks requiring the prediction and explanation of the actions of social agents. Compromised belief-desire reasoning in a given population may reflect failures in either or both of these systems. We report evidence supporting this two-process model from belief-desire reasoning tasks conducted with younger and older adult populations. When task inferential complexity is held constant, neither group showed specific difficulty with reasoning about mental state content as compared with non-mental state content. However, manipulations that systematically increase executive performance demands within belief-desire reasoning caused systematic decreases in task performance in both older and younger adult groups. Moreover, the effect of increasing executive demands was disproportionately greater in the older group. Regression analysis indicated that measures of processing speed and inhibition contributed most to explaining variance in accuracy and response times in the belief-desire reasoning tasks. These results are consistent with the idea that compromised belief-desire reasoning in old age is likely the result of age-related decline in executive selection skills that supplement core mental state representational abilities, rather than as a result of failures in the representational system itself.     

Longitudinal Analysis of Associations between 3-D Mental Rotation and Mathematics Reasoning Skills during Middle School: Across and within Genders

ABSTRACT

The development of math reasoning and 3-d mental rotation skills are intertwined. However, it is currently not understood how these cognitive processes develop and interact longitudinally at the within-person level – either within or across genders. In this study, 553 students (52% girls) were assessed from fifth to seventh grades on 3-d mental rotation spatial skills (assessed each fall) and numerical and algebraic math reasoning skills (assessed each spring). Boys outperformed girls on mental rotation tests across all three grades, and on fifth and seventh grade math reasoning tests. Consistent with the literature on between-person comparisons, there was a positive correlation between mental rotation and math reasoning skills in the full sample and for both genders. A random intercept cross-lagged panel model was used to control for these confounding group-level differences in order to isolate within-person associations between earlier and later performance. Initially in fifth grade, math reasoning predicted subsequent sixth grade mental rotation skills. By seventh grade, more advanced mental rotation skills were associated with subsequent math reasoning skills while math reasoning skills were no longer predictive of mental rotation skills. An examination of gender differences revealed that this pattern was driven by boys while girls experienced less within-person change. These findings suggest that boys may initially rely in part on their math reasoning skills to solve 3-d mental rotation tasks. However, as their 3-d mental rotation skills mature, they begin to primarily depend upon these developing spatial skills to solve math reasoning problems rather than the reverse.     

Social Problem-Solving Skills in Children with Traumatic Brain Injury: Long-Term Outcomes and Prediction of Social Competence

The effects of childhood traumatic brain injury (TBI) on social problem-solving were examined in 35 children with severe TBI, 40 children with moderate TBI, and 46 children with orthopedic injuries (OI). The children were recruited prospectively following injuries that occurred between 6 and 12 years of age. They were followed longitudinally, and ranged from 9 to 18 years of age at the time of the current study, which occurred on average 4 years post injury. They were administered a semi-structured interview used in previous research on social problem-solving to assess the developmental level of their responses to hypothetical dilemmas involving social conflict. Children in the severe TBI group defined the social dilemmas and generated alternative strategies to solve those dilemmas at the same developmental level as did children in the OI group. However, they articulated lower-level strategies as the best way to solve the dilemmas and used lower-level reasoning to evaluate the effectiveness of the strategies. After controlling for group membership, race, socioeconomic status, IQ, and age, children's social problem-solving, and particularly the developmental level of their preferred strategies for resolving conflicts, predicted parents ratings of children's social skills, peer relationships, aggressive behavior, and academic performance. The findings indicate that children with severe TBI demonstrate selective, long-term deficits in their social problem-solving skills that may help to account for their poor social and academic outcomes.     

“如果P,那么Q,……?”─—儿童充分条件假言演绎推理能力发展初探

以日常生活事件为内容的三套测验题探查了9－15岁儿童充分条件假言推理能力的发展。研究发现被试有关能力的发展可以区分出三种不同水平；儿童对充分条件假言推理规则的掌握没有固定的难易顺序，这取决于课题任务的性质和主体思维发展水平。研究还探查了发展的个体内部差异和个体之间的差异以及影响差异的各种内外因素。