Predictability influences stopping and response control

Using a continuous tracking task, the authors examined whether stopping is resistant to expectancies as well as whether it is a representative measure of response control. Participants controlled the speed of a moving marker by continuously adjusting their response force. Participants stopped their ongoing tracking in response to auditory signals on 25%, 50%, 75%, or 100% of trials. Stopping was contrasted with accelerating, in which participants accelerated the marker in response to the signals. In Experiment 1, on each trial participants either stopped or accelerated, allowing a trade-off between the two. In Experiments 2 and 3, participants only stopped or only accelerated, thus decreasing the likelihood of a trade-off. When a trade-off was possible, stopping was resistant to expectancies. However, with little or no trade-off, expectancies influenced stopping and accelerating similarly. These findings contrast with the established view that stopping is insensitive to expectancies. In addition, when trade-offs are prevented, these results confirm that stopping is representative of other response adjustment measures.     

Getting over "the problem of other minds": communication in context

Theories of communication often assume that communication has a single, essential form or telos, the culmination of a one-track developmental process where precursors eventually give rise to the real thing. At one time, this essence of communication was identified with linguistic competence, whereas now it is largely defined in terms of "Theory of Mind." But the fundamental problem with "Theory of Mind" is the very problem it pretends to solve: "the problem of other minds."That problem, as formulated, is insoluble, even with the aid of theory or innate modules. In this article, we reject the superficial depth psychology of "Theory of Mind" in favour of a breadth psychology based on context.     

Alive communication

The purpose of this paper is to propose a theoretical model, based on a dynamic systems perspective and the metaphor of aliveness in communication. Traditional concepts and methods for the study of communication are relatively static and based on the metaphor of signal and response. These traditional methods lend themselves to relatively simplified measures of frequencies and durations, sequences and co-occurrences: a model of objectified communication. The concept of alive communication focuses on the dynamically changing aspects of communication using three related components: coregulation, ordinary variability, and innovation. Like living organisms, alive communication develops over time as it forms dynamically stable patterns. Aliveness can be applied to communication at any age, in any species, between species, in any form including time-delayed practices using written symbols, and with non-living objects. The model provides a tool for evaluating the "life-likeness" of communication with animate and inanimate objects and robotic devices, and for assessing and treating communicative difficulties--in which aliveness is missing--within and between dyads/families.     

Psychological Health and Attitude Toward Christianity Among Protestant and Catholic Sixth-Form Pupils in Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland remains both one of the more religiously active and also one of the most religiously divided countries in Europe. In this context 1,093 sixth-form pupils attending Protestant schools and 1,266 sixth-form pupils attending Catholic schools (aged between 16 and 19 years) completed the abbreviated Eysenck Personality Questionnaire Revised (EPQR-A), as a measure of psychological health, alongside the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christainity (FSAC). The findings demonstrated that a positive attitude toward Christianity was associated with neither higher nor lower neuroticism scores, but was associated in both religious communities with lower psychoticism scores. There is no evidence, therefore, to associate a positive view of Christianity with poorer levels of psychological health among adolescents in Northern Ireland, and some evidence to associate a positive view of Christianity with better levels of psychological health.     

In sight, out of mind: the role of eye movements in the rapid resumption of visual search

Three experiments investigated the role of eye movements in the rapid resumption of an interrupted search. Passive monitoring of eye position in Experiment 1 showed that rapid resumption was associated with a short distance between the eye and the target on the next-to-last look before target detection. Experiments 2 and 3 used two different methods for presenting the target to the point of eye fixation on some trials. If eye position alone is predictive, rapid resumption should increase when the target is near fixation. The results showed that gaze-contingent targets increased overall search success, but that the proportion of rapid responses decreased dramatically. We conclude that rather than depending on a high-quality single look at a search target, rapid resumption of search depends on two glances; a first glance in which a hypothesis is formed, and a second glance in which the hypothesis is confirmed.     

Metacognitive errors in change detection: missing the gap between lab and life

Studies of change detection suggest that people tend to overestimate their ability to detect visual changes. In a recent laboratory study of change detection and human intention, Beck et al., found that individuals have an inadequate understanding that intention can improve change detection performance and that its importance increases with scene complexity. We note that these findings may be specific to unfamiliar situations such as those generated routinely in studies of change detection. In two questionnaire studies, we demonstrate that when participants consider real world scenarios such as driving, people are well aware that the intention to detect changes improves detection performance, especially in complex scenes. We suggest several reasons why change detection findings like Beck et al.'s do not generalize to real world situations. More broadly, we suggest a possible way to bridge the gap between lab and life.     

Illusions of competence and overestimation of associative memory for identical items: Evidence from judgments of learning

The relation between subjects’ predicted and actual memory performance is a central issue in the domain of metacognition. In the present study, we examined the influence of item similarity and associative strength on judgments of learning (JOLs) in a cued recall task. We hypothesized that encoding fluency would cause a foresight bias, so that subjects would overestimate recall of identical pairs (scale-scale), as compared with strong associates (weight-scale) or unrelated pairs (mask-scale). In Experiment 1, JOLs for identical word pairs were higher than those for related and unrelated pairs, but later recall of identical pairs was lower than recall of related pairs. In Experiment 2, the effect of encoding fluency (inferred from self-paced study time) was examined, and a similar pattern of results was obtained, with subjects spending the least amount of time studying identical pairs. We conclude that overconfidence for identical pairs reflects an assessment of item similarity when JOLs are made, despite associative strength being a better predictor of later retrieval.     

Aging family caregivers: policies and practices

This review examines later life family support for adults with developmental disabilities from a life course perspective that takes into account social trends and changes in service patterns and in attitudes of families. Key issues addressed include: (1) trends affecting family caregiving, (2) health and social outcomes of life-long caregiving, (3) support needs of families, (4) family support policies and practices, and (5) recommendations for a research and policy agenda. Research examining outcomes of life-long caregiving has shown that most families adapt well to having a family member with disabilities. However, some families are at risk for poorer physical and mental health outcomes. These include cultural minorities and families of adults with behavioral challenges. Caregiving does seem to have a negative impact on maternal employment and family income as mothers often give up or cut back on employment to care for a child with developmental disabilities, who is more likely to continue living in the family home throughout adulthood than other adult children. Federal and state initiatives are addressing issues of family support through both the developmental disabilities and aging service systems.     

Individuation of pairs of objects in infancy

Looking-time studies examined whether 11-month-old infants can individuate two pairs of objects using only shape information. In order to test individuation, the object pairs were presented sequentially. Infants were familiarized either with the sequential pairs, disk-triangle/disk-triangle (XY/XY), whose shapes differed within but not across pairs, or with the sequential pairs, disk-disk/triangle-triangle (XX/YY), whose shapes differed across but not within pairs. The XY/XY presentation looked to adults like a single pair of objects presented repeatedly, whereas the XX/YY presentation looked like different pairs of objects. Following familiarization to these displays, infants were given a series of test trials in which the screen was removed, revealing two pairs of objects in one of two outcomes, XYXY or XXYY. On the first test trial, infants familiarized with the identical pairs (XY/XY) apparently expected a single pair to be revealed because they looked longer than infants familiarized with the distinct pairs (XX/YY). Infants who had seen the distinct pairs apparently expected a double pair outcome. A second experiment showed outcomes of a single XY pair. This outcome is unexpected for XX/YY-familiarized infants but expected for XY/XY-familiarized infants, the reverse of Experiment 1. This time looking times were longer for XX/YY infants. Eleven-month-olds appear to be able to represent not just individual objects but also pairs of objects. These results suggest that if they can group the objects into sets, infants may be able to track more objects than their numerosity limit or available working memory slots would normally allow. We suggest possible small exact numerosity representations that would allow tracking of such sets.