Publics in the Making: Mediating Different Methods of Engagement and the Publics These Construct

The potential for public engagement to democratise science has come under increasing scrutiny amid concerns that conflicting motivations have led to confusion about what engagement means to those who mediate science and publics. This raises important yet relatively unexplored questions regarding how publics are constituted by different forms of engagement used by intermediary scholars and other actors. It is possible to identify at least two possible ‘rationalities of mediation’ that mobilise different versions of the public and the roles they are assumed to play, as ‘citizens’ or ‘users’, in discussions around technology. However, combinations of rationalities are found in practice and these have significant implications for the ‘new’ scientific democracy.     

Neural and behavioral measures of error-related cognitive control predict daily coping with stress

This study tested the hypothesis that individual differences in cognitive control can predict individual differences in emotion regulation. Participants completed color-word and emotional Stroop tasks while an electroencephalogram was recorded, and then they reported daily stressful events, affect, and coping for 14 days. Greater posterror slowing in the emotional Stroop task predicted greater negative affect in response to stressors and less use of task-focused coping as daily stressors increased. Participants whose neural activity best distinguished errors from correct responses tended to show less stress reactivity in daily self-reports. Finally, depression levels predicted daily affect and coping independent of cognitive control variables. The results offer qualified support for an integrated conception of cognitive and emotional self-regulation.     

Emotional Expressiveness during Peer Conflicts: A Predictor of Social Maladjustment among High-Risk Preschoolers

Preschool boys' emotional displays during conflicts with mixed-sex peers were related to individual differences in peer sociometric status and teacher ratings of disruptive behavior. Participants were 60 4- to 5-year old boys from low-income families who were videotaped with a small group of classmates in a Head Start preschool classroom. Conflicts were identified and emotional displays were coded from videotape. Results indicated that conflicts were more negative in emotional tone at the end than at the beginning of the year. Furthermore, children tended to mirror each others' emotional displays at the end but not the beginning of the preschool year. In addition, gleeful taunting, a form of emotional aggression, more strongly predicted negative peer nominations and teacher ratings than anger, suggesting that anger may be a more socially accepted form of emotional expression during conflicts among preschool-age children. Implications and directions for future research and interventions are discussed.     

Reversing how to think about ambiguous figure reversals: spontaneous alternating by uninformed observers

Ambiguous figures are a special class of images that can give rise to multiple interpretations. Traditionally, switching between the possible interpretations of an ambiguous figure, or reversing one's interpretation, has been attributed either to top-down or to bottom-up processes (e.g. attributed to having knowledge of the nature of the ambiguity, or to a form of neuronal fatigue). Here we present evidence that is incompatible with both forms of explanations. Observers aged 5-9 years can reverse ambiguous figures when uninformed about the ambiguity, negating purely top-down explanations. Further, those children who make these 'spontaneous' reversals are more likely to succeed on a high-order theory-of-mind task, negating purely bottom-up explanations.     

Remembering the past and imagining the future: a role for nonvisual imagery in the everyday cognition of blind and sighted people

Images can be generated in all sensory modalities. Nevertheless, research on the everyday use of mental imagery, for example in autobiographical memory tasks, has suggested that it is only visual images that facilitate memory retrieval (e.g., Williams, Healy, & Ellis, 1999). If this is the case, individuals born without sight may be forced to rely more on verbal encoding (Goddard & Pring, 2001). This paper explores the presence and everyday role of nonvisual sensory imagery in 16 individuals with and 16 without sight. Using a cue word paradigm, contrary to previous research, Experiment 1 suggested that for both blind and sighted people, nonvisual imageries have a significant role to play in the generation of autobiographical memories. These results were reinforced by similar findings in Experiment 2, which used the same cue word method to explore the role of visual and nonvisual (auditory) imagery when generating future events. The results refute the claim that "useful" imagery in everyday tasks is exclusively visual.     

Psychosocial stages and the accessibility of autobiographical memories across the life cycle

Older adults recalled memories from each decade of life. Memories were classified in terms of the psychosocial stages to which their content corresponded. For the majority of memories it was found that age at encoding corresponded to when specific psychosocial stages would have been most likely to have occurred. In a second experiment older adults recalled memories to cues drawn from psychosocial stages and the same pattern of findings was observed. These findings demonstrate that the goals of the self play a major role in both the encoding and accessibility of autobiographical memories, and they also provide support for Erikson's psychosocial theory of development (1950, 1997).     

A theory of causal learning in children: causal maps and Bayes nets

The authors outline a cognitive and computational account of causal learning in children. They propose that children use specialized cognitive systems that allow them to recover an accurate "causal map" of the world: an abstract, coherent, learned representation of the causal relations among events. This kind of knowledge can be perspicuously understood in terms of the formalism of directed graphical causal models, or Bayes nets. Children's causal learning and inference may involve computations similar to those for learning causal Bayes nets and for predicting with them. Experimental results suggest that 2- to 4-year-old children construct new causal maps and that their learning is consistent with the Bayes net formalism.     

Describing the Acquisition of Determiners in English: A Growth Modeling Approach

This paper, based on naturalistic data, describes the acquisitional course and use of the articles a and the in young English-speaking children (18-61 months), with special emphasis on the role of individual variation. A growth modeling approach to the data reveals that children's individual acquisition schedules are similar in trend, but vary in the rate at which they omit determiners at a given point of time. This picture suggests that an analysis that presumes homogeneous development will seriously misrepresent the fluctuations between and within individuals. Interestingly, this variation does not reflect a variation in children's abilities to use determiners correctly-irrespective of the rate in which they used determiners, children seldom used determiners incorrectly. The analysis also reveals that children's optional omission of determiners in obligatory contexts, beginning at 18 months of age, gradually decreases on average by 3-4% a month until 36 months of age, and thereafter plunges by a factor of 10 to an average of 0.3% per month. At 36 month of age the majority of children use determiners at a near-mastery level (Brown, 1973). These findings provide a useful framework for theorizing about possible mechanisms underlying the nature of early language development pre- and post-36 months of age.     

The role of coding time in estimating and interpreting growth curve models

The coding of time in growth curve models has important implications for the interpretation of the resulting model that are sometimes not transparent. The authors develop a general framework that includes predictors of growth curve components to illustrate how parameter estimates and their standard errors are exactly determined as a function of receding time in growth curve models. Linear and quadratic growth model examples are provided, and the interpretation of estimates given a particular coding of time is illustrated. How and why the precision and statistical power of predictors of lower order growth curve components changes over time is illustrated and discussed. Recommendations include coding time to produce readily interpretable estimates and graphing lower order effects across time with appropriate confidence intervals to help illustrate and understand the growth process.