Assessing aggression in adolescent romantic relationships: can we do it better?

Almost all research on aggression in adolescent romantic relationships makes use of 1-time, retrospective assessment methods. In the present research, the authors compared data on the experience of adolescent relationship aggression (physical aggression and threatening behavior) collected from 125 high school students via 2 methods: (a) a 1-time, 2-month retrospective assessment and (b) a cumulative method based on four 2-week retrospective assessments, each spaced 2 weeks apart. For the cumulative method, data from the 4 assessments were aggregated to cover the same time period as the single, 2-month retrospective assessment. A greater proportion of the sample (48.0%) reported experiencing physical aggression using the cumulative method compared with the single, 2-month retrospective method (27.0%). The prevalence of threatening behavior was also higher using the cumulative method (48.8% vs. 24.8%). Adolescent trauma and anxiety symptoms correlated more strongly with physical aggression data derived from the cumulative method than from the 1-time assessment method.     

Epidemiological Measurement of Children's and Adolescents' Exposure to Community Violence: Working with the Current State of the Science

A number of measures have been used in epidemiological studies of children's exposure to community violence, yet the quality of these instruments is not uniformly good. This paper undertakes a systematic review of the most commonly used (or most promising) self-report or interview-administered instruments, with regard to their conceptual bases and psychometric properties. Based on the review, recommendations are made for working with the current state of the science in order to move the field forward. A key recommendation is for sounder conceptualization of work in the field and greater transparency in the reporting of research, in order to facilitate the comparability of studies.     

Developmental parallels in understanding minds and bodies

A recent article by Onishi and Baillargeon presents evidence that 15-month-old infants attribute false beliefs (FBs) to other people. If correct, it lends dramatic new support to the idea that mental state concepts ("theory of mind") emerge from a specialized neurocognitive mechanism that matures during the second year of life. But it also raises new puzzles concerning the FB task--puzzles that have intriguing parallels in results from infants' reasoning about solid bodies.     

Processing demands in belief‐desire reasoning: inhibition or general difficulty?

Most 4-year-olds can predict the behavior of a person who wants an object but is mistaken about its location. More difficult is predicting behavior when the person is mistaken about location and wants to avoid the object. We tested between two explanations for children's difficulties with avoidance false belief: the Selection Processing model of inhibitory processing and a General Difficulty account. Children were presented with a false belief task and a control task, in which belief attribution was as difficult as in the false belief task. Predicting behavior in light of the character's desire to avoid the object added more difficulty in the false belief task. This finding is consistent with the Selection Processing model, but not with the General Difficulty account.     

Cognitive compensations for blindness in children: an investigation using odour naming

Historically, blindness has been associated with compensation for the loss of vision by the other senses. However, research to date has focused on perceptual compensations, largely ignoring possible cognitive compensations. We explored the notion that cognitive skills of blind children may facilitate performance in apparently perceptual tasks, by investigating the cognitive factors related to naming a familiar odour. Eighty-three children participated in olfactory and cognitive tasks (thirty-two early-blind, five late-blind, fourteen low-vision, and thirty-two sighted). In the olfactory tasks, the early-blind children performed significantly better than the sighted children on the odour-naming task but not on the odour-sensitivity task. From the cognitive tasks, scores on a nonvisualisable word-pairs task and a sound-word-pairs task were significantly higher for early-blind children and were highly correlated with odour-naming score. The early-blind children outperformed the sighted controls on a task of directed attention. The groups did not differ on memory for a story or for visualisable word pairs. The results suggest that blind children enjoy an advantage in tasks that assess nonvisual memory for paired associates and directed attention, and that superiority on these tasks facilitates performance in the odour-naming task. Other data suggest that sighted children rely on visualisation as a strategy to aid their performance on the cognitive tasks, and are disadvantaged when these strategies cannot be utilised.     

Core mechanisms in "theory of mind"

Our ability to understand the thoughts and feelings of other people does not initially develop as a theory but as a mechanism. The "theory of mind" mechanism (ToMM) is part of the core architecture of the human brain, and is specialized for learning about mental states. Impaired development of this mechanism can have drastic effects on social learning, seen most strikingly in the autistic spectrum disorders. ToMM kick-starts belief-desire attribution but effective reasoning about belief contents depends on a process of selection by inhibition. This selection process (SP) develops slowly through the preschool period and well beyond. By modeling the ToMM-SP as mechanisms of selective attention, we have uncovered new empirical phenomena. We propose that early "theory of mind" is a modular-heuristic process of domain-specific learning.     

The clinical efficacy and safety of galantamine in the treatment of Alzheimer's disease

Alzheimer's disease is a progressive, neurodegenerative condition characterized by deficits in cognition, inability to perform activities of daily living, and alterations in behavior. Galantamine hydrobromide is the newest acetylcholinesterase inhibitor (AChEI) approved in the United States for the treatment of mild-to-moderate AD. The safety and efficacy of galantamine has been demonstrated in multiple randomized, Phase III trials of >2,600 patients with mild-to-moderate AD. Studies have found that galantamine improved or maintained performance in all domains of AD (cognition, function, behavior, and caregiver burden) in the short term and slowed the decline in performance or maintained baseline performance through 12 months. The dual mechanism of action may make galantamine a reasonable treatment option for both newly diagnosed patients and patients who have not benefitted from or have poorly tolerated current therapy.     

Computational approaches to the development of perceptual expertise

Dog experts, ornithologists, radiologists and other specialists are noted for their remarkable abilities at categorizing, identifying and recognizing objects within their domain of expertise. A complete understanding of the development of perceptual expertise requires a combination of thorough empirical research and carefully articulated computational theories that formalize specific hypotheses about the acquisition of expertise. A comprehensive computational theory of the development of perceptual expertise remains elusive, but we can look to existing computational models from the object-recognition, perceptual-categorization, automaticity and related literatures for possible starting points. Arguably, hypotheses about the development of perceptual expertise should first be explored within the context of existing computational models of visual object understanding before considering the creation of highly modularized adaptations for particular domains of perceptual expertise.     

Congruency effects between auditory and tactile motion: Extending the phenomenon of cross-modal dynamic capture

Behavioral studies of multisensory integration in motion perception have focused on the particular case of visual and auditory signals. Here, we addressed a new case: audition and touch. In Experiment 1, we tested the effects of an apparent motion stream presented in an irrelevant modality (audition or touch) on the perception of apparent motion streams in the other modality (touch or audition, respectively). We found significant congruency effects (lower performance when the direction of motion in the irrelevant modality was incongruent with the direction of the target) for the two possible modality combinations. This congruency effect was asymmetrical, with tactile motion distractors having a stronger influence on auditory motion perception than vice versa. In Experiment 2, we used auditory motion targets and tactile motion distractors while participants adopted one of two possible postures: arms uncrossed or arms crossed. The effects of tactile motion on auditory motion judgments were replicated in the arms-uncrossed posture, but they dissipated in the arms-crossed posture. The implications of these results are discussed in light of current findings regarding the representation of tactile and auditory space.