Incidental learning in a multisensory environment across childhood

Multisensory information has been shown to modulate attention in infants and facilitate learning in adults, by enhancing the amodal properties of a stimulus. However, it remains unclear whether this translates to learning in a multisensory environment across middle childhood, and particularly in the case of incidental learning. One hundred and eighty‐one children aged between 6 and 10 years participated in this study using a novel Multisensory Attention Learning Task (MALT). Participants were asked to respond to the presence of a target stimulus whilst ignoring distractors. Correct target selection resulted in the movement of the target exemplar to either the upper left or right screen quadrant, according to category membership. Category membership was defined either by visual‐only, auditory‐only or multisensory information. As early as 6 years of age, children demonstrated greater performance on the incidental categorization task following exposure to multisensory audiovisual cues compared to unisensory information. These findings provide important insight into the use of multisensory information in learning, and particularly on incidental category learning. Implications for the deployment of multisensory learning tasks within education across development will be discussed.     

The best time to acquire new skills: age-related differences in implicit sequence learning across the human lifespan

Implicit skill learning underlies obtaining not only motor, but also cognitive and social skills through the life of an individual. Yet, the ontogenetic changes in humans' implicit learning abilities have not yet been characterized, and, thus, their role in acquiring new knowledge efficiently during development is unknown. We investigated such learning across the lifespan, between 4 and 85 years of age with an implicit probabilistic sequence learning task, and we found that the difference in implicitly learning high- vs. low-probability events--measured by raw reaction time (RT)--exhibited a rapid decrement around age of 12. Accuracy and z-transformed data showed partially different developmental curves, suggesting a re-evaluation of analysis methods in developmental research. The decrement in raw RT differences supports an extension of the traditional two-stage lifespan skill acquisition model: in addition to a decline above the age 60 reported in earlier studies, sensitivity to raw probabilities and, therefore, acquiring new skills is significantly more effective until early adolescence than later in life. These results suggest that due to developmental changes in early adolescence, implicit skill learning processes undergo a marked shift in weighting raw probabilities vs. more complex interpretations of events, which, with appropriate timing, prove to be an optimal strategy for human skill learning.     

Verbal learning across the lifespan: an analysis of the components of the learning curve

Previous studies on the acquisition process of verbal material, conducted separately on child and adult populations, reveal that the lifespan is characterized by an inverted-U performance curve with similar achievements at its two poles. To clarify the acquisition mechanism across the entire lifespan, the learning curve for the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test was reproduced for participants aged 8–91. The study utilized typical trial summary scores and a more refined analysis of trial-by-trial single-word recalls, including omissions (missed words that were previously recalled), additions (recalled words previously missed), and touched words (a count for the first recall time only, for each word during the five learning trial). A clear age effect was shown for the number of words recalled – symmetrically increases during childhood and decreases in adulthood. Similarly, increased turnover of words omitted and added characterized both incremental and decremental age differences. Measurement patterns differed for the age segments on the two sides of the lifespan, despite the similar total number of words recalled by the two sides. Acquisition pattern in children was characterized by a higher number of touched words and higher turnover than for adult groups. In contrast, older adults achieved fewer touched words and lower turnover than the child groups. This study shows that it is possible to reach the same quantitative results via different cognitive processes. The results are interpreted in terms of specific mechanisms of maturational characteristics.     

Moral objectivism across the lifespan

We report the results of two studies that examine folk metaethical judgments about the objectivity of morality. We found that participants attributed almost as much objectivity to ethical statements as they did to statements of physical fact and significantly more objectivity to ethical statements than to statements about preferences or tastes. In both studies, younger participants attributed less objectivity to ethical statements than older participants. Females were observed to attribute slightly less objectivity to ethical statements than males, and we found important interactions between attributions of objectivity and other factors, such as how strong participants’ moral opinions were and how much disagreement about the issue they perceived to exist within society. We believe our results have significant implications for debates about the nature of folk morality and about the nature of morality in general.     

Making things better and learning a lesson: experiencing wisdom across the lifespan

Autobiographical memory narratives concerning times in which individuals said, thought, or did something wise were collected from adolescents and young and old adults. This "wisdom of experience" procedure is shown to be a valid means of studying experienced wisdom in everyday lives across the life span. Results show that all age groups use experienced wisdom to transform negative to positive life situations and are equally likely to link these experienced wisdom events to larger temporal life periods. Young and older adults also relate wisdom experiences to the life story by explaining how they are connected to later life consequences or to the direction that their life has taken. Unlike adolescents, older and, especially, young adults report having learned lessons about themselves or having gained a life philosophy from the wisdom-related event. Thus, the wisdom-of-experience procedure highlights both similarities and differences in the life span manifestation of experienced wisdom.     

Procedural learning across the lifespan: A systematic review with implications for atypical development

This systematic review aimed to investigate procedural learning across the lifespan in typical and atypical development. Procedural learning is essential for the development of everyday skills, including language and communication skills. Although procedural learning efficiency has been extensively studied, there is no consensus yet on potential procedural learning changes during development and ageing. Currently, three conflicting models regarding this trajectory exist: (1) a model of age invariance; (2a) a model with a peak in young adulthood; and (2b) a model with a plateau in childhood followed by a decline. The aims of this study were (1) to investigate this debate on procedural learning across the lifespan by systematically reviewing evidence for each model from studies using the serial reaction time task; and (2) to review procedural learning in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and specific language impairment (SLI), two developmental disorders characterized by deficits in communication skills, in the light of these models. Our findings on typical development strongly support a model of age-related changes (Model 2a or 2b) and show that mixed findings regarding the developmental trajectory during childhood can be explained by methodological differences across studies. Applying these conclusions to systematic reviews of studies of ASD and SLI makes it clear that there is a strong need for the inclusion of multiple age groups in these clinical studies to model procedural learning in atypical development. Clinical implications of the findings are discussed. Future research should focus on the role of declarative learning in both typical and atypical development.     

Metacognition of agency across the lifespan

Metacognitions of agency were investigated using a computer task in which X’s and O’s streamed from the top of a computer screen, and the participants moved the mouse to get the cursor to touch the X’s and avoid the O’s. After each 15 s trial, participants made judgments of agency and judgments of performance. Objective control was either undistorted, or distorted by (1) Turbulence (i.e., random noise), (2) a Lag between the mouse and cursor movements (of 250 or 500 ms), or (3) ‘Magic,’ (i.e., an increased radius around the X’s for which credit was given). In Experiment 1, college students’ judgments of agency showed that they were sensitive to all three manipulations. They also indicated that they felt more in control in the Lag conditions, where there was a rule on which they could potentially capitalize, than in the matched Turbulence conditions. In Experiment 2, older adults were also sensitive to all three manipulations, but less so than the college students. They were not sensitive to the difference between the Lag and Turbulence manipulations. Finally, in Experiment 3, 8–10 year-old children were sensitive to their loss of control equally in the Lag and Turbulence conditions. However, when performance was artificially improved, in the Magic condition, children took full credit and showed no evidence that they realized that the results were due to an external variable. Together, these findings suggest that people’s metacognition of agency changes in important ways across the lifespan.     

Effects of stress across the lifespan

Stress is a known precipitant for metabolic and neurological diseases, with sensitive periods identified across the developmental continuum from conception to old age. However, the effects of stress may vary depending on the point or points along the developmental trajectory when adversity strikes. Past research has emphasized the consequences of stress on fully developed physiological systems in the brain and periphery, but more recent studies have explored the impact of stress on systems at different stages of maturation, with differential effects being revealed. This review provides an overview of the diverse effects of stress at critical developmental stages and the potential outcomes that may be associated with experiencing environmental adversity during ontogeny.     

Anxiety-linked expectancy bias across the adult lifespan

Anxiety is characterised by a negative expectancy bias, such that anxious individuals report negatively distorted expectations about the future. Contrary to anxiety, ageing is characterised by a positivity effect, such that ageing is associated with a tendency to attend to and remember positive information, relative to negative information. The current study integrates these literatures to examine anxiety- and age-linked biases when thinking about the future. Participants (N=1,109) completed a procedure that involved reading valenced scenarios (positive, negative, or ambiguous) and then rating the likelihood of future valenced events occurring. Results suggest that ageing and anxiety have independent and opposing effects. Heightened anxiety was associated with a reduced expectancy for positive events, regardless of the scenarios’ current emotional valence, whereas increased age was associated with an inflated expectancy for positive events, which was strongest when individuals were processing socially relevant or negative scenarios.     

Implicit health associations across the adult lifespan

Objective: Explicit reports of one’s health self-concept (e.g. rate your overall health) are commonly used in research and clinical practice. These measures predict important health outcomes, but rely on conscious introspection so may not fully capture the different components of the health self-concept (e.g. more automatic components) that relate to actual health. This study examined the health-implicit association test (health-IAT), and how it may add to our prediction of health from self-reports.

Design: 1004 participants (ages 18–85) completed this web-based study with the health-IAT (assessing self-healthy implicit associations) and explicit assessments of health.

Main outcome measures: Self-reported measures of physical functioning.

Results: The health-IAT was valid and reliable. Older age was correlated with stronger self-healthy implicit associations. Although the health-IAT did not incrementally predict self-reported markers of physical functioning when only controlling for explicit health self-concept, it was an incremental predictor once age was entered for all four models tested.

Conclusions: The health-IAT appears to be a valid and reliable new measure that assesses implicit self-concept relating to physical health. Results reveal the potential value of assessing implicit health self-concept in both research and practice, especially when taking into account age.     

The distribution of autobiographical memories across the lifespan

Words were used to cue autobiographical memories from 20- and 70-year-old subjects. Both groups showed a decrease in memories from the childhood years and a power-function retention function for their most recent 10 years. Older subjects also had an increase in the number of memories from the ages 10 to 30. These results held for individual subjects as well as grouped data and held when either 124 or 921 memories were cued. Reaction times to produce memories were constant across decades except for childhood where they were longer.     

Incidental learning of real-world regularities

The large literature on incidental learning relies almost exclusively on laboratory experiments. Whenever researchers have attempted to demonstrate incidental learning of real-world regularities, they have typically failed to show learning. For example, it is well established that people do not learn regularities in everyday objects, such as the left-right orientation of faces on coins, despite a very large exposure to them. In this report, we examine this apparent contradiction. We argue that most studies exploring real-life incidental learning use tests that are not as sensitive to low-confidence information as those traditionally used in laboratory tasks. Using more sensitive measures, we show that it is possible to learn regularities from British and Japanese cultural life as a direct result of exposure to these regularities. Further, confidence measures suggest that although the information may be acquired incidentally, it can be expressed with and without concomitant awareness of that knowledge.     

Incidental learning of event frequency

Two experiments studied the effect of intentionality of learning on memory for the frequency of occurrence of words on a list. Subjects who learned the items intentionally in preparation for an unspecified memory test remembered frequency as accurately as did those who studied specifically for a frequency-estimation test. Both groups recalled frequency information more accurately than did a group that learned the words incidentally. These results. along with a review of the literature. suggest that there is no strong evidence for the automatic encoding of frequency information.     

Incidental cue learning in rats

Continuity theories of discrimination learning appear to say that animals learn equally about all cues impinging upon their receptors; noncontinuity theories that they learn about only one cue at a time. Experiment I showed that neither of these positions is correct: rats trained to attend to one cue learned less about a subsequently introduced incidental cue than rats given no such pretraining; but attention to one cue did not totally prevent learning about the other. A second experiment established that if rats are trained with one cue, and a second cue is then also made relevant, the amount learned about this second cue varies directly with (a) the abruptness with which it is introduced, and (b) the difficulty of the original discrimination.