Perceptions of Forgetfulness in Adulthood

Abstract

In two experiments, we examined younger and older participants’ appraisals of memory failures in fictitious characters portrayed as younger (in their 20’s to 30’s) or older (in their 60’s to 70’s) adults. Participants read vignettes where forgetful behavior had minor or more severe consequences for the target character (Experiment 1) or for the character and others in the social environment (Experiment 2). Participants rated potential causes of the forgetfulness and opinions concerning the target character’s cognitive health. In Experiment 1, an age-based double standard was observed, where both age groups rated ability as a cause of forgetting more often for older than younger characters. Ratings of forgetfulness as a sign of mental difficulty, need for memory training, and professional evaluation were also higher for older compared to younger characters. In Experiment 2, the Attribution Type by Target Age interaction effect was replicated. Ability and effort contributed to the significance of the interaction, confirming the reliability and generalizability of the age-based double standard. Forgetfulness was rated as a sign of mental difficulty more often for the older than younger characters, replicating Experiment 1. In both experiments, the consequences of the forgetting had a large impact on the attribution and opinion ratings for younger and older forgetful characters. These data suggest that people of all ages evaluate forgetful characters in light of situational outcomes as well as ageist presumptions of cognitive frailty in later life.     

Exploring tensions of using interpretative phenomenological analysis in a domain with conflicting cultural practices

ABSTRACT

The philosophical foundations of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA)—phenomenology, hermeneutics, and idiography—guide its practice and use. However, this foundation is often at odds with cultural practices of disciplines that value post-positivist perspectives emphasizing that reality can be objectively known. The conflict between the philosophical underpinnings of the methodology and the cultural practices of particular disciplines can serve to limit the use and acceptance of IPA. This article highlights ways researchers can use IPA even when the underlying tenets of that methodological approach may be in conflict with disciplinary norms. As such, we have set out to explore the tensions that accompany the choice to use IPA in the context of engineering education research within the United States. As a group of engineering education researchers, we drew upon collaborative inquiry to systematically examine our use of IPA. Our exploration of using IPA, as connected to everyday practice in a discipline that takes a postpositivist stance toward knowledge generation, provides examples for the use of IPA in tension with these disciplinary norms.     

Characterizing perceptual learning with external noise

Performance in perceptual tasks often improves with practice. This effect is known as ‘perceptual learning,’ and it has been the source of a great deal of interest and debate over the course of the last century. Here, we consider the effects of perceptual learning within the context of signal detection theory. According to signal detection theory, the improvements that take place with perceptual learning can be due to increases in internal signal strength or decreases in internal noise. We used a combination of psychophysical techniques (external noise masking and double-pass response consistency) that involve corrupting stimuli with externally added noise to discriminate between the effects of changes in signal and noise as observers learned to identify sets of unfamiliar visual patterns. Although practice reduced thresholds by as much as a factor of 14, internal noise remained virtually fixed throughout training, indicating learning served to predominantly increase the strength of the internal signal. We further examined the specific nature of the changes that took place in signal strength by correlating the externally added noise with observer’s decisions across trials (response classification). This technique allowed us to visualize some of the changes that took place in the linear templates used by the observers as learning occurred, as well as test the predictions of a linear template-matching model. Taken together, the results of our experiments offer important new theoretical constraints on models of perceptual learning.     

The social behaviours of inhibited children in and out of preschool

The goal of the present study was to explore the social behaviours of inhibited children in familiar social contexts, including: (1) free play with peers at preschool and (2) social activities at home and in the community. The initial participants were N =248 preschool children between the ages of 42 and 66 months. From this initial data, two smaller groups of inhibited (N =12) and uninhibited comparison (N =12) children were identified. These children were observed during free play at preschool and parents completed daily logs of children's social activities outside of school. Among the findings, inhibited children were observed to display more reticent (on looking, unoccupied) and anxious behaviours during free play preschool than uninhibited children. As well, inhibited children participated less in structured social activities outside school and were more likely to engage in dyadic play at home with a single friend as compared to their uninhibited counterparts.     

Modeling Serial Arguments in Close Relationships: The Serial Argument Process Model

Though an emerging research area, serial argumentation has yet to be cohesively explored from a theoretical lens. The current project thus extends and updates Trapp and Hoff’s (1985) original serial argument model by explicating and testing a theoretical process an individual goes through immediately before, during, and after a serial argument episode. Specifically, perceived resolvability, serial argument goal importance, conflict tactics, rumination, and motivation to achieve goals are examined across romantic and family relationships in the serial argument process model. The proposed paths emerged generally as predicted and the model fit the data. The serial argument process model thus allows for a preliminary theoretical depiction of a serial argument episode enacted in a variety of close relationship contexts.