The effects of physical work,mental work,and quantity on children’s time perception

Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics - An experiment was conducted to examine the effects of work and quantity cues on children’s time perception. Ninety-seven children in kindergarten...     

The effects of gender-typed labels on children’s performance

The present study examined the effect of gender-typed labeling of a task on the performance of children. A total of 72 boys and girls aged 11, 13 and 16 years took part in the study. The same measure of performance—a perceptual motor task—was used across all conditions. Two main dimensions were investigated: first, the effect of of directly labeling the task as gender appropriate or inappropriate; second, the effect of the instruction to role-enact a person competent at the task labeled gender appropriate or inappropriate. The results indicate that children of all ages studied perform better at the task labeled gender appropriate rather than inappropriate. Children also perform better when role-acting competence at a gender-typed labeled task than under conventional testing procedures. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

Sad or fearful? The influence of body posture on adults’ and children’s perception of facial displays of emotion

The current research investigated the influence of body posture on adults' and children's perception of facial displays of emotion. In each of two experiments, participants categorized facial expressions that were presented on a body posture that was congruent (e.g., a sad face on a body posing sadness) or incongruent (e.g., a sad face on a body posing fear). Adults and 8-year-olds made more errors and had longer reaction times on incongruent trials than on congruent trials when judging sad versus fearful facial expressions, an effect that was larger in 8-year-olds. The congruency effect was reduced when faces and bodies were misaligned, providing some evidence for holistic processing. Neither adults nor 8-year-olds were affected by congruency when judging sad versus happy expressions. Evidence that congruency effects vary with age and with similarity of emotional expressions is consistent with dimensional theories and "emotional seed" models of emotion perception.     

The influence of culture on children’s immediate and delayed retrieval

Culture shapes children’s memories. However, scant attention has been given to the influence of culture on specific memory stages. Thus, we conducted two controlled experiments to examine cultural differences in memory recall at immediate and delayed retrieval phases. In Studies 1 and 2 (n = 217), 7- to 10-year-old Chinese and Euro-Canadian children watched a story involving both social- and individual-focused scenarios. Participants then recalled the story immediately afterwards (Study 1) and 5–7 days later (Studies 1 and 2). Findings reveal that Chinese children accurately reported more details from the social-focused events than did their Euro-Canadian counterparts in the immediate interview, and this result was replicated after a delay in both studies. Moreover, as expected, within-country comparisons showed that Euro-Canadian children had better memory for individual- than for social-focused events in both studies. Chinese children, however, showed better memory for social- than for individual-focused events only in the immediate interview in Study 1; their delayed retrieval was not affected by event focus. These findings reveal that cultural variations in memory are evident in both immediate and delayed retrieval. Implications for future research are discussed.     

The effects of gendered information in stories on preschool children’s development of gender stereotypes

Social-cognitive theory posits that children learn gender stereotypes through gendered information. The present study examined whether children learn new gender stereotypes from stories when unknown words are linked to a gendered protagonist or context information. In Experiment 1, 40 3- to 6-year-old preschoolers were read stories with either a gendered protagonist embedded within a non-gendered context, or a non-gendered protagonist embedded within a gendered context. In Experiment 2, the same sample of children were read stories with the protagonist and the context displaying congruent or incongruent gender information. Each story featured an unknown activity linked with the stereotypical content. Both experiments indicate that the children rated the activity according to both the gender of the context and of the protagonist; however, the effect of the latter was stronger. In addition, children showed higher interest in the unknown activity if the protagonist’s gender matched their own sex. Thus, gender information in stories influences how children perceive unknown words.     

The effects of arm length,size of angle,and spatial separation on Morinaga’s illusion

The effects of arm length, spatial separation between angles, size of angle, and practice on the degree of misalignment in a modified version of Morinaga’s illusion were assessed. Size of angle was manipulated between subjects (n=15/group), whereas arm length, spatial separation, and practice were varied within subjects. Results showed: (1) that as the length of the arm increased, the degree of illusion decreased; (2) that as spatial separation increased, the degree of illusion increased; and (3) an interaction between size of angle and practice. The results were related to Day et al.’s (1982) assimilation theory of Morinaga’s illusion.     

The effects of sex and “masculinity” on person- and space-related perception

A study was conducted to investigate the influence of both sex and sex role upon the perceptual salience of person- and space-related information. It was found that the salience of person-related information was higher for females than males. High-masculinity males found person-related information less salient than any other combined sex and sex-role group. Most importantly, the salience of person-related information was higher for persons who conformed less to their appropriate sex role than those who strongly conformed to their sex role. No sex or sex-role differences were found in the spatial salience measure.     

The effects of problem content,instructions, and verbalization procedure on Wason’s selection task

This study examined various hypotheses for facilitation on Wason’s four-card selection task by means of a factorial experiment. The factors were memory cuing vs. nonmemory cuing content, violation vs. true-false instructions, and verbalization procedure. The results indicated that memory cuing content may be a necessary and sufficient condition for facilitation, but that the amount of facilitation is affected by the type of instructions. Verbalization procedure had no effects, but this may have been due to the subjects’ failure to comply completely with the various verbalization instructions. An explanation of the results that assumes that content and instructions determine the cognitive processing load of the task and hence the solution strategies employed is considered.     

The effects of driving environment complexity and dual tasking on drivers’ mental workload and eye blink behavior

The goal of the present study was to assess the effectiveness of eye blink behavior in measuring drivers’ mental workload. Previous research has shown that when mental workload increases with the primary task difficulty, blink frequency drops. On the opposite, the number of blinks increases when a cognitive secondary task has to be performed concurrently. However, the combined effects of the primary task difficulty and dual-tasking on blink rate have not been investigated. The present study was thus designed to vary systematically both the primary driving task and the cognitive secondary task demand to examine their combined effects on blink rate. The driving task was manipulated by varying the complexity of a simulated driving environment. The cognitive load was manipulated using a concurrent simple reaction time task or a complex calculation task. The results confirmed that eye blink frequency was a sensitive measure to elicit increased mental workload level coming from the driving environment. They also confirmed that blink rate increased with the introduction of a cognitive secondary task while blink duration was not affected. However, eye blink behavior did not provide a clear mental workload signature when driving task demands and dual-task conditions were varied simultaneously. The overall picture goes against the suitability of eye blink behavior to monitor drivers’ states at least when external and internal demands interact.     

Family socio-economic status and children’s executive function: The moderating effects of parental subjective socio-economic status and children’s subjective social mobility

Family socio-economic status (SES) is significantly related to disparities in children’s executive function. Children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds perform worse on executive function tasks than their peers from high-SES families. The protective factors in the relationship between SES and executive function have not been sufficiently investigated, especially from the perspective of parents’ and children’s perceptions and expectations regarding SES. Therefore, this study aimed to examine whether parental subjective SES and children’s subjective social mobility separately moderated the relationship between family SES and children’s executive function among 885 participants aged 9–13 years. The results showed that family SES was positively related to the three components of executive function (cognitive flexibility, inhibitory control, and working memory). Moreover, the relationship between SES and cognitive flexibility was weak among the children with a high level of subjective social mobility or those whose parents had high levels of subjective SES. Among children from families with economic hardship, subjective social mobility is a potential protective factor mitigating the negative effects of low family SES on their cognitive flexibility.     

The impact of informant gender on children’s endorsement of scientific and non-scientific information

By roughly 6 years of age, children acquire the stereotype that men are more competent than women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), potentially leading to greater trust in scientific information provided by men. This study tested whether 3- to 8-year-old children differentially endorsed conflicting information about science and toys presented by male and female informants depicted as a ‘man’ and ‘woman’ (Exp1) or ‘scientists’ (Exp2). Children were expected to endorse toy testimony from gender-matched informants; thus, the key question concerned endorsement of science testimony. In Exp1 (N = 149), boys and girls showed a same-gender informant preference for toy testimony; however, girls endorsed the male informant's testimony more for science than for toys – but only when tested by a male experimenter. In Exp2 (N = 264), boys and girls showed a same-gender preference, irrespective of content. Findings suggest that STEM-related gender stereotypes might lead girls to trust scientific information presented by men over women in certain contexts.     

The impact of emotional expressions on children’s trust judgments

Research on the development of selective trust has shown that young children do not indiscriminately trust all potential informants. They are likely to seek and endorse information from individuals who have proven competent or benign in the past. However, research on trust among adults raises the possibility that children might also be influenced by the emotions expressed by potential informants. In particular, they might trust individuals expressing more positive emotion. Indeed, young children’s trust in particular informants based on their past behaviour might be undermined by their currently expressed emotions. To examine this possibility, we tested the selective trust of fifty 4- and 5-year-olds in two steps. We first confirmed that children are likely to invest more trust in individuals expressing more positive emotion. We then showed that even if children have already formed an impression of two potential informants based on their behavioural record, their choices about whose claims to trust are markedly influenced by the degree of positive emotion currently expressed by the two informants. By implication, the facial emotions expressed by potential informants can undermine young children’s selective trust based on the behavioural record of those informants.     

The effect of yellow light onset time on older and younger drivers’ perception response time (PRT) and intersection behavior

To understand why older drivers are over-represented in intersection crashes, this study sought to describe the intersection performance of older and younger drivers when traffic lights changed from green to yellow at the last second. Using a moderate-fidelity driving simulator, time to stop line (TSL) at yellow onset was manipulated as drivers approached intersections at 70 km/h (42 mph). Seventy-seven participants, approximately balanced for gender and age group, volunteered from the age categories of 18 to 24, 25 to 35, 55 to 64, and 65+. Driver decisions to stop or go were predicted using a logistic regression model with time to stop line as the single significant predictor. There were no age differences in perception response time (PRT). Older drivers approached intersections at a lower velocity and stopped more accurately than younger drivers. For those drivers who chose to go through the yellow light, speed profiles across the intersection and intersection clearance indicate that older drivers are more likely to be in the intersection when the light changed to red. A PRT of 1.0 s for yellow signal phasing was sufficient for all age groups.     

The role of entrenchment in children’s and adults’ performance on grammaticality judgment tasks

Between the ages of 3 and 7 years, children have been observed to produce verb argument structure overgeneralization errors (e.g., Don’t giggle me; Bowerman, 1982, 1988; Pinker, 1989). A number of recent studies have begun to find evidence that the precise distributional properties of the input may provide an important part of the explanation for why children retreat from overgeneralization errors (Brooks & Tomasello, 1999; Brooks, Tomasello, Dodson, & Lewis, 1999). The current study evaluates the role of entrenchment (Braine & Brooks, 1995) in constraining argument structure overgeneralization errors using a grammaticality judgment task. The 5-year-olds, 8-year-olds, and adults were presented with examples of argument structure errors containing high and low frequency verbs matched for semantic class and asked to indicate whether, or the extent to which they found the sentences to be grammatical. The data show that across all groups, sentences with argument structure errors containing low frequency verbs were judged to be significantly more grammatical than those containing high frequency verbs. These findings provide further support for the entrenchment hypothesis and suggest that verb frequency plays an important and continuing role in determining a speaker’s choice of verb argument structure.     

The impact of emotional faces on younger and older adults’ attentional blink

ABSTRACT

The attentional blink (AB) is the impaired ability to detect a second target (T2) when it follows shortly after the first (T1) among distractors in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP). Given questions about the automaticity of age differences in emotion processing, the current study examined whether emotion cues differentially impact the AB elicited in older and younger adults. Twenty-two younger (18–22 years) and 22 older adult participants (62–78 years) reported on the emotional content of target face stimulus pairs embedded in a RSVP of scrambled-face distractor images. Target pairs included photo-realistic faces of angry, happy, and neutral expressions. The order of emotional and neutral stimuli as T1 or T2 and the degree of temporal separation within the RSVP systematically varied. Target detection accuracy was used to operationalise the AB. Although older adults displayed a larger AB than younger adults, no age differences emerged in the impact of emotion on the AB. Angry T1 faces increased the AB of both age groups. Neither emotional T2 attenuated the AB. Negative facial expressions held the attention of younger and older adults in a comparable manner, exacerbating the AB and supporting a negativity bias instead of a positivity effect in older adults.     

U.S. television programming’s effects on aggressive behavior of children and adolescents

Discussions about the effects of television violence often fail to clearly define the nature of the effect and of the televised material. This article reviews the various facets of the issue and of the research that deals with them, focusing on one specific aspect that is often regarded as most crucial in public discussions and among researchers: the effect of actually televised entertainment programs on the aggressive behavior of children and adolescents. There is little research on that aspect of the issue and, in contrast to laboratory experiments on media violence, it does not show significant television effects. However, none of the existing studies reflect the changes in home entertainment available now as a result of cable television and VCRs and their possible effects on viewers.     

Developmental changes in the structural complexity of children’s riddles

Riddles were collected from 156 boys and girls from Years 1 to 6 (six- to twelve-year-olds) of a large, middle-class school. The riddles were scored on nine measures of structural complexity based on the presence of incongruity or linguistic devices in the question and answer of the riddle. The number of riddles increased from Year 1 to Year 5 and then declined slightly in Year 6. Grade differences were found for five of the nine complexity measures, and girls tended to tell riddles with greater total complexity than boys. Production data are compared with the preference data from other studies, and grade changes in riddle structure and content are discussed in terms of a search for novelty which finally leads to the more flexible structure of the joke.     

Differences in children’s thinking and learning during attentional focus instruction

Considerable evidence supports the motor learning advantage associated with an external focus of attention; however, very few studies have investigated attentional focus effects with children despite individual functional constraints that have the potential to impact use of instructional content. Thus, the purpose of this study was to determine the effect of attentional focus instruction on motor learning in children. Participants (n = 42) aged 9–11 years were randomly assigned to one of three gender-stratified groups: (1) control, (2) internal focus, or (3) external focus. Following initial instructions and task demonstration, participants performed 100 modified free throws over two days while receiving additional cues respective to their attentional focus condition and returned approximately 48 h later to perform 20 additional free throws. Results revealed no significant learning differences between groups. However, responses to retrospective verbal reports suggest that the use of external focus content during practice may have contributed to some participants’ superior performance in retention. Future research should continue to examine attentional focus effects across a variety of ages and incorporate retrospective verbal reports in order to examine children’s thoughts during attentional focus instruction.     

Elementary school children’s attentional biases in physical and numerical space

Numbers are conceptualized spatially along a horizontal mental line. This view is supported by mounting evidence from healthy adults and patients with unilateral spatial neglect. Little is known about children's representation of numbers with respect to space. This study investigated elementary school children's directional biases in physical and numerical space to better understand the relation between space and number. We also examined the nature of spatial organization in numerical space. In two separate tasks, children (n = 57) were asked to bisect a physical line and verbally estimate the midpoint of number pairs. In general, results indicated leftward biases in both tasks, but the degree of deviation did not correlate between the tasks. In the number bisection task, leftward bias (underestimating the midpoint) increased as a function of numerical magnitude and interval between number pairs. In contrast, a rightward deviation was found for smaller number pairs. These findings suggest that different underlying spatial attentional mechanisms might be directed in physical and numerical space in young school children, which would be integrated in adulthood.