Children and adults both see ‘pirates’ in ‘parties’: letter‐position effects for developing readers and skilled adult readers

Developing readers often make anagrammatical errors (e.g. misreading pirates as parties), suggesting they use letter position flexibly during word recognition. However, while it is widely assumed that the occurrence of these errors decreases with increases in reading skill, empirical evidence to support this distinction is lacking. Accordingly, we compared the performance of developing child readers (aged 8–10 years) against the end‐state performance of skilled adult readers in a timed naming task, employing anagrams used previously in this area of research. Moreover, to explore the use of letter position by developing readers and skilled adult readers more fully, we used anagrams which, to form another word, required letter transpositions over only interior letter positions, or both interior and exterior letter positions. The patterns of effects across these two anagram types for the two groups of readers were very similar. In particular, both groups showed similarly slowed response times (and developing readers increased errors) for anagrams requiring only interior letter transpositions but not for anagrams that required exterior letter transpositions. This similarity in the naming performance of developing readers and skilled adult readers suggests that the end‐state skilled use of letter position is established earlier during reading development than is widely assumed.     

Visual perception of direction when voluntary saccades occur: II. Relation of visual direction of a fixation target extinguished before a saccade to a subsequent test flash presented before the saccade

Previously reported experiments demonstrated changes in the relation of visual direction to retinal locus for stimulation during voluntary saccades as compared to this relation before saccade initiation. The quantitative features of these results led to the prediction, confirmed in the present experiments, that there are shifts in visual direction for stimulation presented before the saccade itself. In the present report, monotonically increasing shifts were mapped with stimuli presented as early as 240 msec before the saccade up to the saccade itself. Such shifts cannot be accounted for readily by “inflowing” processes, and while “outflowing” processes seem to be implicated, their quantitative characteristics would need to be considerably different from those required by classical outflow theories.     

The relationship of appraisal and coping to chronic illness adjustment

There is evidence that adaptation to chronic illness may be affected by psychological factors, especially how patients appraise and cope with the stress of their illness. The purpose of the present study was to examine the relationship of stress appraisal and coping responses to multiple behavioral indices of illness adjustment among patients with diverse chronic medical conditions. One hundred and one patients admitted to a multidisciplinary medicine/psychiatry unit completed measures of functional impairment, depression, symptom severity, and the Ways of Coping Checklist--Revised. Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that emotion-focused coping was positively related to poor psychosocial adjustment and depression after controlling for physician rated disease severity. Appraising chronic illness as holding one back predicted greater emotion-focused coping responses and poorer adjustment to illness. The use of problem-focused coping strategies was generally unrelated to illness adjustment. These findings suggest the presence of an emotion-focused coping triad consisting of wishful thinking, self blame, and avoidance, all of which appear to be maladaptive strategies when coping with chronic medical conditions. Implications for coping skills training and the need for longitudinal research is discussed.     

Age differences in visual and kinesthetic short-term memory

30 elderly subjects were matched with 30 young subjects and tested on a kinesthetic short-term memory task which required the replication of criterion moves after a variable retention interval under conditions of either rest, differing interpolated movement tasks, or mental activity. A visual control condition was used. Differing interference and temporal decrements were observed. Both old and young subjects differed significantly between sighted and blindfold conditions; however, there was no difference between the performance of the old and the young in the blindfold (kinesthetic) condition. These findings were discussed with respect to practical implications for the retraining of old subjects on certain motor tasks.     

Non-dominance,third person and non-action Newcomb problems,and metatickles

It is plausible that Newcomb problems in which causal maximizers and evidential maximizers would do different things would not be possible for ideal maximizers who are attentive to metatickles. An objection to Eells's first argument for this makes welcome a second. Against it I argue that even ideal evidential and causal maximizers would do different things in some non-dominance Newcomb problems; and that they would hope for different things in some third-person and non-action problems, which is relevant if a good theory of rational choices of acts should fit smoothly into a good theory of rational desires for facts.This paper elaborates on Section V of Sobel. forthcoming.     

A common representational system governed by Weber's law: nonverbal numerical similarity judgments in 6-year-olds and rhesus macaques

This study compared nonverbal numerical processing in 6-year-olds with that in nonhuman animals using a numerical bisection task. In the study, 16 children were trained on a delayed match-to-sample paradigm to match exemplars of two anchor numerosities. Children were then required to indicate whether a sample intermediate to the anchor values was closer to the small anchor value or the large anchor value. For two sets of anchor values with the same ratio, the probability of choosing the larger anchor value increased systematically with sample number, and the psychometric functions superimposed when plotted on a logarithmic scale. The psychometric functions produced by the children also superimposed with the psychometric functions produced by rhesus monkeys in an analogous previous experiment. These examples of superimposition demonstrate that nonverbal number representations, even in children who have acquired the verbal counting system, are modulated by Weber's law.     

Internet access and use among homeless and indigent drug users in Long Beach, California.

There has been a growing interest in using the Internet to access a variety of populations for prevention education and health care. It is not clear that this is viable for homeless and other marginalized populations. The purpose of this study was to describe Internet access and use among a sample of homeless and indigent drug users. A brief questionnaire was developed to assess computer ownership, use, email, and Internet access and use. Participants were recruited through a community-based human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) prevention program. 265 participants completed the questionnaire. While 55% had ever used a computer in their lifetime, only 25% had ever owned a computer, 24% had ever had their own email account, 33% had access to a working computer in the last 30 days, 10% had sent or received email in the last 30 days, and 19% had surfed or accessed information on the Internet in the last 30 days. Logistic regression predicting lifetime use of a computer showed predictive factors of having completed high school (Odds Ratio [OR] = 4.5; 95% Confidence Interval [CI] = 2.41, 8.38) and number of days used amphetamines in the last 30 days, per 5 days of use (OR = 1.64; 95% CI = 1.18, 2.27). Inversely related were age, per 5 years of age (OR = 0.78; 95% CI = 0.65, 0.93) and number of days used marijuana in the last 30 days, per 5 days of use (OR = 0.97; 95% CI = 0.76, 0.99). Very low access and usage suggest that Internet-based public health education models be reexamined for this population. The association with amphetamine use may indicate a facilitating effect of amphetamine by heightening awareness and increasing wakefulness.