Personal and Environmental Factors Predict Participation of Children With and Without Mild Developmental Disabilities

Enhancing participation in age-related activities is a key goal in the education and rehabilitation of children with diverse disabilities. The aim of this study was to explore a multidimensional and ecological model of participation for young children. Seventy eight children with mild developmental disabilities (MDD, such as motor and visual-motor difficulties), and 110 children without disabilities, between the ages 4 and 6 years old, participated in the study together with their parents. Data were collected using standardized assessments for child capacities and newly developed questionnaires for child participation and for human and physical environmental factors. Associations were found between personal and environmental factors and the participation dimensions amongst young children, thus supporting the validity of the proposed model of participation. Moreover, the study results outline different pathways for the participation of children with and without MDD. Child factors (e.g. process skills) were found to be crucial predictors of participation particularly for children with MDD, whereas human environmental factor (e.g. maternal self-efficacy beliefs) was associated with higher participation scores especially for children without disabilities. These findings may facilitate the development of effective intervention programs which focus on environmental factors as well as on child factors.     

Engagement in a Science Museum – The Role of Social Interactions

This qualitative research explores the interactions of elementary school students during free-choice activity with science museum exhibits. The study participants were 39 students, who visited a science museum on six occasions during a three-year-period (from 4^th to 6^th grades). Our study showed that most interactions around exhibits are social in nature. Within these social interactions, students mainly discuss the technicalities of operating the exhibits and rarely engage with their scientific content. On occasion, exhibits are no more than settings for social interactions that could equally occur, for example, in the schoolyard. The main implications of this study concern exhibit design and pedagogy. Because students find ways to create their own social interactions in museum settings, museum pedagogy should leverage this social interaction into cognitive engagement with the scientific content of exhibits.     

Orienting attention in visual working memory reduces interference from memory probes

Given a changing visual environment, and the limited capacity of visual working memory (VWM), the contents of VWM must be in constant flux. Using a change detection task, the authors show that VWM is subject to obligatory updating in the face of new information. Change detection performance is enhanced when the item that may change is retrospectively cued 1 s after memory encoding and 0.5 s before testing. The retro-cue benefit cannot be explained by memory decay or by a reduction in interference from other items held in VWM. Rather, orienting attention to a single memory item makes VWM more resistant to interference from the test probe. The authors conclude that the content of VWM is volatile unless it receives focused attention, and that the standard change detection task underestimates VWM capacity.     

Indirect assessment of visual working memory for simple and complex objects

Previous research has shown that visual search performance is modulated by the current contents in visual working memory (VWM), even when the contents of VWM are irrelevant to the search task. For example, visual search is faster when the target--rather than a distractor--is surrounded by a shape currently held in VWM. This study uses the modulation of visual search by VWM to investigate properties of VWM. Participants wereasked to remember the color or the shape of novel polygons whose "goodness" of figure varied according to Garner's (1962) rotation and reflection transformation principle. During the memory retention interval, participants searched for a tilted line among vertical lines embedded inside colored polygons. Search was faster when the target--rather than a distractor--was enclosed by the remembered polygons. The congruity effect diminished with increasing memory load and decreasing figure goodness. We conclude that congruity effects in visual search can indirectly assess VWM representation strength.     

A facilitative role for corticosterone in the acquisition of a spatial task under moderate stress

Emotionally charged experiences alter memory storage via the activation of hormonal systems. Previously, we have shown that compared with rats trained for a massed spatial learning task in the water maze in warm water (25°C), animals that were trained in cold water (19°C) performed better and showed higher levels of the stress hormone corticosterone. Here, we examined whether manipulating the levels of corticosterone can determine the strength of spatial information acquisition and retention. Rats were injected with metyrapone (25, 50, and 75 mg/kg, i.p.) or with corticosterone (10 and 25 mg/kg, i.p.) and trained in a massed spatial task in either cold (19°C) or warm (25°C) water. We found that whereas animals injected with vehicle performed well in the spatial task in cold water (moderate stress), rats injected with the intermediate metyrapone dose showed impairment in performance. Moreover, whereas animals injected with vehicle on average did not perform well in warm water (mild stress), rats injected with the lower corticosterone dose showed improvement in performance in warm water. These two mirror experiments of corticosterone blockade and enhancement strongly suggest that corticosterone is instrumental in the acquisition and retention of the spatial learning task.     

Patterns of Emotional Reactivity and Regulation in Children with Anxiety Disorders

Emotion dysregulation is believed to be a key factor in anxiety disorders. However, the empirical basis for this view is limited, particularly in children and adolescents. This study aimed to examine whether anxious children display negative emotional hyper-reactivity and deficits in emotion regulation, using a new task that presents ambiguous situations with potentially threatening meanings. Forty-nine children diagnosed with either generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety, or separation anxiety disorder, were compared with 42 non-anxious controls. Relative to controls, anxious children demonstrated (a) greater intensity and frequency of negative emotional responses, (b) deficits in using reappraisal in negative emotional situations and corresponding deficits in reappraisal self-efficacy, and (c) greater reliance on emotion regulation strategies that increase the risk of functional impairment, intense negative emotion, and low emotion regulation self-efficacy. Implications for the assessment and treatment of childhood anxiety are discussed.     

Online Gatekeepers of History: Yahoo! Answers Community Discussing Holocaust Denial

Scholarly attention has been directed to the spread and scope of online Q&A services, including the level of activity, types and messages and the social roles the members of these sites occupy. A content analysis was conducted of the answers supplied in response to questions aimed at identifying the reasons for Holocaust denial in Yahoo! Answers. The replies denoted the existence of two main opposing online socio-cultural roles adopted by these participants: online gatekeepers of history and online gatekeepers of pseudo-history. The activity levels of those filling these roles and the community’s approval of their answers were also assessed. Future avenues of research regarding these two roles are suggested.