Self-Appropriation between Social Mourning and Individuation: a Qualitative Study on Psychosocial Transition among Jehovah’s Witnesses

Pastoral Psychology - Loss and its associated grief are important elements of many adverse life events. The focus of this study is centred on a particular form of mourning: the affliction derived...     

Working memory and updating processes in reading comprehension

In this study, we examine the relation between reading comprehension ability and success in working memory updating tasks. Groups of poor and good comprehenders, matched for logical reasoning ability, but different in reading comprehension ability, were administered various updating tasks in a series of experiments. In the first experiment, the participants were presented with lists of words, the length of which (4-10 words) was unknown beforehand, and were required to remember the last 4 words in each series. In this task, we found a decrease in performance that was related to longer series and poor reading ability. In the second experiment, we presented lists of nouns referring to items of different sizes, in a task that simulated the selection and updating of relevant information that occurs in the on-line comprehension process. The participants were required to remember a limited, predefined number of the smallest items presented. We found that poor comprehenders not only had a poorer memory, but also made a greater number of intrusion errors. In the third and fourth experiments, memory load (number of items to be selected) and suppression request (number of potentially relevant items) were manipulated within subjects. Increases in both memory load and suppression requests impaired performance. Furthermore, we found that poor comprehenders produced a greater number of intrusion errors, particularly when the suppression request was increased. Finally, in a fifth experiment, a request to specify the size of presented items was introduced. Poor comprehenders were able to select the appropriate items, although their recall was poorer. Altogether, the data show that working memory abilities, based on selecting and updating relevant information and avoiding intrusion errors, are related to reading comprehension.     

Adolescents’ inhibitory control: keep it cool or lose control

Inhibitory control (i.e., the ability to resist automatisms, temptations, distractions, or interference and to adapt to conflicting situations) is a determinant of cognitive and socio‐emotional development. In light of the discrepancies of previous findings on the development of inhibitory control in affectively charged contexts, two important issues need to be addressed. We need to determine (a) whether cool inhibitory control (in affectively neutral contexts) and hot inhibitory control (in affectively charged contexts) follow the same developmental pattern and (b) the degree of specificity of these two types of inhibitory control at different ages. Thus, in the present study, we investigated the developmental patterns of cool and hot inhibitory control and the degree of specificity of these abilities in children, adolescents and adults. Typically developing children, adolescents, and adults performed two Stroop‐like tasks: an affectively neutral one (Cool Stroop task) and an affectively charged one (Hot Stroop task). In the Cool Stroop task, the participants were asked to identify the ink color of the words independent of color that the words named; in the Hot Stroop task, the participants were asked to identify the emotional expression of a face independent of the emotion named by a simultaneously displayed written word. We found that cool inhibitory control abilities develop linearly with age, whereas hot inhibitory control abilities follow a quadratic developmental pattern, with adolescents displaying worse hot inhibitory control abilities than children and adults. In addition, cool and hot inhibitory control abilities were correlated in children but not in adolescents and adults. The present study suggests (a) that cool and hot inhibitory control abilities develop differently from childhood to adulthood – i.e., that cool inhibition follows a linear developmental pattern and hot inhibition follows an adolescent‐specific pattern – and (b) that they become progressively more domain‐specific with age.     

Cognitive and neuronal processes involved in sequential generation of general and specific mental images

Mental image generation is a complex process mediated by dynamically interrelated components, e.g. image generation and image enrichment of details. This study investigated the cognitive and neural correlates of sequential image generation. An event-related fMRI experiment was carried out in which general and specific images had to be generated sequentially in two different positions. Participants had to generate either a general image first and then a specific one or a specific image first and then a general one, in response to the same word-stimulus. Generation times showed that specific images took shorter to be produced if they had been preceded by the generation of a general image. The fMRI results showed that position of generation and type of image was associated with different patterns of neurofunctional change. When an image was generated as first, areas of activation were found in the parahippocampal, fusiform and occipital regions. These are areas associated with memory retrieval and visual processing. When an image was generated as second, significant activations were found in superior temporal and precuneus areas, brain structures that are involved in the storage of visual memory for object shapes and imagery, respectively. The generation of a general image was supported by frontal areas and by the precuneus. The generation of a specific image involved frontal and thalamic areas (structures associated with visual processing of details) and the posterior cingulate cortex. When shifting from a specific image to a general one, a higher level of activity was found in the middle frontal gyrus involved in global visuo-spatial processing, suggesting that the generation of specific images required the retrieval of an object’s global shape. Altogether, these data suggest that the sequential generation of different types of image is associated with discrete processes but also shares common cognitive and neural components.     

Working memory and intrusions of irrelevant information in a group of specific poor problem solvers

An important body of evidence has shown that reading comprehension ability is related to working memory and, in particular, to the success in Daneman and Carpenter's (1980) reading and listening span test. This research tested a similar hypothesis for arithmetic word problems, since, in order to maintain and process the information, they require working memory processes. A group of children possessing average vocabulary but poor arithmetic problem-solving skills was compared with a group of good problem solvers, matched for vocabulary, age, and socioeconomic status. Poor problem solvers presented lower recall and a greater number of intrusion errors in a series of tasks testing working memory and memory for problems. The results obtained over a series of six experimental phases, conducted during a 2-school-year period, offer evidence in favor of the hypotheses that groups of poor problem solvers may have poor performance in a working memory test requiring inhibition of irrelevant information (Hypothesis 1), but not in other short-term memory tests (Hypothesis 2), that this difficulty is related to poor recall of critical information and greater recall of to-be-inhibited information (Hypothesis 3), that poor problem solvers also have difficulty in remembering only relevant information included in arithmetic word problems (Hypothesis 4) despite the fact that they are able to identify relevant information (Hypothesis 5). The results show that problem-solving ability is related to the ability of reducing the memory accessibility of nontarget and irrelevant information.     

Asymmetric learning transfer between imagined viewer- and object-rotations: Evidence of a hierarchical organization of spatial reference frames

Neural resources subserving spatial processing in either egocentric or allocentric reference frames are, at least partly, dissociated. However, it is unclear whether these two types of representations are independent or whether they interact. We investigated this question using a learning transfer paradigm. The experiment and material were designed so that they could be used in a clinical setting. Here, we tested healthy subjects in an imagined viewer-rotation task and an imagined object-rotation task. The order of the tasks was counterbalanced across subjects. The results showed that subjects who did the viewer-rotation task first had fewer errors and shorter latencies of response in the object-rotation task, whereas subjects who did the object-rotation task first had little if any advantage in the viewer-rotation task. In other words, the results revealed an asymmetric learning transfer between tasks, which suggests that spatial representations are hierarchically organized. Specifically, the results indicate that the viewer-rotation task engaged allocentric representations and egocentric representations, whereas the object-rotation task engaged only egocentric representations.     

Increases in Intrusion Errors and Working Memory Deficit of Poor Comprehenders

This study tests the hypothesis that the ability to inhibit already processed and actually irrelevant information could influence performance in the listening span test (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980) and have a crucial role in reading comprehension. In two experiments, the listening span test and a new working memory test were given to two groups of young adults, poor and good comprehenders, matched for logical reasoning ability. In Experiment 1, the poor comprehenders had a significantly lower performance in the listening span test associated to a higher number of intrusions-that is, recalled words that, in spite of being in sentence form, were not placed in the last position. In Experiment 2, a new working memory test was devised in order to analyse more effectively the occurrence of intrusions. Subjects were required to listen to a growing series of strings of animal and non-animal words. Whilst listening, they had to detect when an animal word occurred, and at the end of each series they had to recall the last word of each string. The poor comprehenders obtained a significantly lower performance in the memory task and made a higher number of intrusions, particularly of animal words.     

Time-based prospective memory difficulties in children with ADHD and the role of time perception and working memory

Time-based prospective memory (PM) is the ability to remember to perform an intended action at a given time in the future. It is a competence that is crucial for effective performance in everyday life and may be one of the main causes of problems for individuals who have difficulty in planning and organizing their life, such as children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). This study systematically examines different aspects of time-based PM performance in a task that involves taking an action at a given future time in a group of 23 children with ADHD who were compared with a matched group of typically-developing (TD) children. The children were asked to watch a cartoon and then answer a questionnaire about its content (ongoing task). They were also asked to press a key every 2 minutes while watching the cartoon (PM task). The relationships of time perception and verbal working memory with PM performance were examined by administering appropriate tasks. The results showed that the children with ADHD were less accurate than the TD children in the PM task and exhibited less strategic time-monitoring behavior. Time perception was found to predict PM accuracy, whereas working memory was mainly involved in time-monitoring behavior, but this applied more to the TD group than to the ADHD group, suggesting that children with ADHD are less able to use their cognitive resources when meeting a PM request.