Moulding environmental contexts to optimise neurodiverse executive function performance and development: A goodness-of-fit account

Executive functions (EFs) provide a top-down response to stimuli and events in pursuit of a goal. We argue that the extent to which an individual's environment is enriching and a good fit for them influences whether their performance at that moment is towards their upper- or lower-limit of EF ability. We outline the implications of this for interpreting measures of EF. We next argue that a child's sensitivity to the environment, and their caregivers' ability to modulate the environment to improve goodness-of-fit, influences the cumulative effects of the environment in shaping that child's actualised EF ability (the performance level shown in day-to-day situations), and thus their skill development. We therefore recommend that EF interventions be designed to improve children's actualised EF ability by improving their day-to-day environment, while simultaneously helping children modulate their physiological response to environmental challenges, and providing opportunities to practise EF skills in ecologically-valid contexts.     

The development and the extinction of hyperthermia induced by conditioned avoidance behavior in rats

Hyperthermia was observed at the end of each conditioning session in rats trained to avoid electric shocks by jumping on a platform. The temperature rise was also observed after the conditioned behavioral response was well established and was elicited even in the absence of shocks. There was no tendency for the hyperthermia to diminish over the course of nine extinction sessions.     

Validation of a Greek Sentence Repetition Task with Typically Developing Monolingual and Bilingual Children

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research - This study provides a preliminary validation of a Greek Sentence Repetition Task (SRT) with a sample of 110 monolingual and bilingual typically developing...     

Beyond Consistency: Contextual Dependency of Language Style in Monolog and Conversation

Language is highly dynamic: It unfolds over time, and we can use it to achieve a wide variety of communicative goals, from telling a story to trying to persuade another person. One aspect of language that has gained increasing popularity among researchers in the last several decades is the individual language style (LS) represented by an individual’s use of function words (e.g., pronouns, articles). Previous approaches to LS mostly focus on LS of one individual in isolation, paying less attention to the fact that language emerges from interaction with others. The aim of this paper is twofold: First, we integrate LS into a dynamical theoretical framework and present an innovative methodological approach. Second, this paper aims to address how interactive conversation—as an aspect of the communicative setting—changes an individual’s LS. We use recurrence quantification analysis to look at structure in patterns of LS in monologs and conversations of 118 participants. Our results showed that LS significantly differs from monolog to conversation, and post hoc analyses further revealed that the change in LS is greater for conflict than for friendly conversations. The difference between monologs and conversations is reflected more strongly in the dynamics (i.e., structure and complexity) of LS than the proportion of function words used. Theoretical implications and directions for future studies are discussed.