Influence of virtual reality training on the roadside crossing judgments of child pedestrians

The roadside crossing judgments of children aged 7, 9, and 11 years were assessed relative to controls before and after training with a computer-simulated traffic environment. Trained children crossed more quickly, and their estimated crossing times became better aligned with actual crossing times. They crossed more promptly, missed fewer safe opportunities to cross, accepted smaller traffic gaps without increasing the number of risky crossings, and showed better conceptual understanding of the factors to be considered when making crossing judgments. All age groups improved to the same extent, and there was no deterioration when children were retested 8 months later. The results are discussed in relation to theoretical arguments concerning the extent to which children's pedestrian judgments are amenable to training.     

Novel visual stimuli activate a population of neurons in the primate orbitofrontal cortex

Neurons were found in the rhesus macaque anterior orbitofrontal cortex that respond to novel but not to familiar visual stimuli. Some of these neurons responded to all novel stimuli, and others to only a subset (e.g., to novel faces). The neurons have no responses to familiar reward- or punishment-associated visual stimuli, nor to taste, olfactory or somatosensory inputs. The responses of the neurons typically habituated with repeated presentations of a novel stimulus, and five presentations each 1s was the median number for the response to reach half-maximal. The neurons did not respond to stimuli which had been novel and shown a few times on the previous day, indicating that the neurons were involved in long-term memory. The median latency of the neuronal responses was 120 ms. The median spontaneous firing rate was 1.3 spikes/s, and the median response to novel visual stimuli was 6.0 spikes/s. These findings indicate that the long-term memory for visual stimuli is information that is represented in a region of the primate anterior orbitofrontal cortex.     

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.     

Extending neuropsychological assessments into the primary mental ability space

A battery of 17 neuropsychological tests (including the CERAD battery) and 17 psychometric ability tests were administered to a sample of 499 participants of the Seattle Longitudinal study who had been given the psychometric ability tests seven and 14 years earlier. The neuropsychological tests were projected into a 5-factor psychometric ability space by means of extension analysis. The concurrent regressions of the neuropsychology tests on the psychometric ability tests were then used to estimate neuropsychology test scores from the psychometric ability tests administered in 1984, 1991 and 1998. Neuropsychologists then rated the study participants as either normal, suspect or cognitively impaired in 1998. Changes in estimated test scores were computed over seven and fourteen years. Significant odds ratios between normal and cognitively impaired groups were found for all neuropsychological tests over the proximal period and for most tests over the 14-year period. Similar findings occurred for the odds ratios between the normal and suspect groups for the most proximal 7-year changes.     

Category norms for 500 Spanish words in five semantic categories

This study presents a database of 500 words from five semantic categories: animals, body parts, furniture, clothing, and intelligence. Each category contains 100 words, and data on lexical availability, age of acquisition, imageability, typicality, concept familiarity, written word frequency, and word length in number of syllables are provided with each word. The full set of norms may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.     

A national survey of health care administrators' views on the importance of various chaplain roles

A random sample of hospital administrators throughout the United States was surveyed about their views on the importance of eleven chaplain roles and functions. The 494 respondents fell into three categories: (1) directors of pastoral care departments (N = 132); (2) administrators of hospitals that have a pastoral care department (N = 180); and (3) administrators of hospitals that do not have a pastoral care department (N = 182). All three groups considered all eleven roles to be relatively important, although administrators of hospitals that do not have a pastoral care department gave lower ratings, overall. Meeting the emotional needs of patients and relatives were seen as chaplains most important roles, whereas performing religious rituals and conducting religious services were seen as least important by all three groups. In all but a few instances, the level of importance that administrators assigned to the various roles were positively related to their ratings of their own religiousness and spirituality (r's = .11 to .26, p < .05).     

Measurement of Cruelty in Children: The Cruelty to Animals Inventory

Cruelty to animals may be a particularly pernicious aspect of problematic child development. Progress in understanding the development of the problem is limited due to the complex nature of cruelty as a construct, and limitations with current assessment measures. The Children and Animals Inventory (CAI) was developed as a brief self- and parent-report measure of F. R. Ascione's (1993) 9 parameters of cruelty. The CAI emerged as a reliable, stable, and readily utilized measure of cruelty using parent and child reports. Children (especially the older children) reported higher rates of cruelty than their parents and boys reported more cruelty than girls. Self- and parent-reports showed good convergence with independent observations of cruelty versus nurturance during free interactions with domestic animals. The results indicate that cruelty to animals can be reliably measured using brief child and parent report measures.     

Linguistic focus and good-enough representations: An application of the change-detection paradigm

A number of lines of study suggest that word meanings are not always fully exploited in comprehension. In two experiments, we used a text-change paradigm to study depth of semantic processing during reading. Participants were instructed to detect words that changed across two consecutive presentations of short texts. The results suggest that the full details of word meanings are not always incorporated into the interpretation and that the degree of semantic detail in the representation is a function of linguistic focus. The results provide evidence for the idea that representations are only good enough for the purpose at hand (Ferreira, Bailey, & Ferraro, 2002).