Children's Testimony: A Review of Research on Memory for Past Experiences

This review of children's testimony focuses on research related to memory for past experiences. The aspects of the memory system that are involved in testimony are discussed and the development of autobiographical memory is examined. Relevant research findings are summarized in the context of an information-processing model of memory and the implications of this work for clinical practice are outlined. We conclude that (1) under certain conditions, even very young children can remember and report past experiences with some accuracy over very long periods of time; (2) substantial and significant developmental differences have been demonstrated in children's abilities to provide eyewitness testimony; (3) children can be influenced in a variety of ways to provide complete and elaborated reports of events that never occurred; and (4) even experts cannot always tell the difference between true and false reports.     

Components of events and processes

Rips and Estin (1998) provided evidence that mental events such as dreaming are more homogeneous than physical events such as checking out a book; that is, their parts are more difficult to distinguish. In their experiment, participants listed more distinctive properties for the parts of physical events than for the parts of mental events. However, the physicality of stimuli was confounded with temporal aspects. Mental stimuli tended to be processes, and physical stimuli, events. This study tested homogeneity with new stimuli separating out the factors of physicality and aspect. Consistently, both physicality and aspect had significant effects on the perceived homogeneity of activities, as measured by the number of listed parts, the number of distinctive properties of each part, and homogeneity ratings. The study shows that homogeneity is strongly influenced by aspect but that physicality remains a robust factor for homogeneity, even after taking aspect into account.     

The Emerging Role of Technology in Cognitive–Behavioral Therapy for Anxious Youth: A Review

Research documents the application of cognitive–behavioral therapy (CBT) with technology either as therapeutic adjuncts or stand-alone interventions. The literature evaluating the feasibility and efficacy of using technology with CBT for youth experiencing internalizing disorders is small though steadily emerging. Technological approaches offer cost-effective and efficient service to an increased number of anxious youth for whom a CBT treatment would be otherwise unavailable. The present article aims to review the use of two broad types of technology in CBT for anxious children and adolescents: computer- and internet-based CBT and mobile mental health applications (i.e., mobile phone, smartphone, and tablet technology). Within each section, we provide an overview of the advantages and general principles of each type of technology, and review evidence for the use of each type of technology along with examples of current applications. Finally, we discuss ethical issues, barriers, and future directions for the use of technology in facilitating dissemination of effective treatments.     

Impact of Caregiver Factors on Youth Service Utilization of Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in a Community Setting

Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT) is an increasingly available evidence-based therapy that targets the mental health symptoms of youth who have experienced trauma. Limited research has examined how to engage and retain families in TF-CBT services in community settings. Using a mixed-methods approach, the goal of this exploratory study was to identify caregiver factors that impact youth enrollment and completion of community-delivered TF-CBT. The study included 41 caretakers of youth referred to therapy at a local child advocacy center following a forensic assessment substantiating youth trauma exposure. Caregiver factors examined include caregiver demographics, trauma exposure, and mental health symptomology. Results from multivariate logistic regressions indicate that caregivers reporting more children residing in the household were significantly more likely to enroll youth in therapy (OR 2.27; 95 % CI 1.02, 5.03). Qualitative analyses further explicate that parents with personal trauma or therapy experiences expressed positive opinions regarding therapy services for youth, and were more likely to enroll in or complete services. Findings suggest that caregivers with personal traumatic experience and related symptomatology view therapy as important and are more committed to their child receiving therapy. Future research on service utilization is warranted and should explore offering parental psychoeducation or engagement strategies discussing therapy benefits to parents who have not experienced trauma and related mental health symptomatology.     

Impact of End-of-Life Circumstances on the Adjustment of Bereaved Siblings of Children Who Died from Cancer

The aim of this study was to examine the impact of end-of-life (EoL) circumstances on grief and internalizing symptoms among bereaved siblings. Bereaved families (N?=?88) were recruited from three sites 3–12 months (M?=?11.57, SD?=?3.48) after their child’s death from cancer. One sibling per family aged 8–17 years (M?=?12.41, SD?=?2.64) was randomly selected to participate. Families completed measures of siblings’ grief and internalizing symptoms, as well as a structured interview about circumstances surrounding the death. Mother and sibling reports of EoL circumstances were generally concordant, except there was a discrepancy between mothers and children about whether or not children expected their sibling’s death (t(75)?=?1.52, p?=?.018). Mother reports of sibling internalizing symptoms were above the normative mean (t(83)?=?4.44, p?≤?.001 (M?=?56.01?±?12.48), with 39% (n?=?33) in the borderline/clinical range. Sibling opportunity to say goodbye was associated with greater grief-related growth (t(79)?=?? 1.95, p?=?.05). Presence at the death and wishing they had done something differently were both associated with greater grief (t(80)?=?? 2.08, p?=?.04 and t(80)?=?? 2.24, p?=?.028, respectively) and grief-related growth (t(80)?=?? 2.01, p?=?.048 and t(80)?=?? 2.31, p?=?.024, respectively). However, findings were primarily unique to sibling report, with few mother-reported effects. The adjustment of bereaved siblings may be affected by certain modifiable circumstances surrounding the death of their brother or sister. A proportion of bereaved siblings had elevated internalizing symptoms irrespective of circumstances at EoL. Further work is needed to understand predictors of adjustment among bereaved siblings to provide better support and optimize their outcomes.

     

Is the map in our head oriented north?

We examined how a highly familiar environmental space--one's city of residence--is represented in memory. Twenty-six participants faced a photo-realistic virtual model of their hometown and completed a task in which they pointed to familiar target locations from various orientations. Each participant's performance was most accurate when he or she was facing north, and errors increased as participants' deviation from a north-facing orientation increased. Pointing errors and latencies were not related to the distance between participants' initial locations and the target locations. Our results are inconsistent with accounts of orientation-free memory and with theories assuming that the storage of spatial knowledge depends on local reference frames. Although participants recognized familiar local views in their initial locations, their strategy for pointing relied on a single, north-oriented reference frame that was likely acquired from maps rather than experience from daily exploration. Even though participants had spent significantly more time navigating the city than looking at maps, their pointing behavior seemed to rely on a north-oriented mental map.     

Assessing the Incidence and Perceptions of Sexual Harassment Behaviors Among American Undergraduates

A nine-item scale of sexual harassment behaviors was developed and tested in a two-study sequence. In the first study, male and female college students with job experience rated the frequency with which they experienced these behaviors from both supervisors and co-workers. Revisions were made on the basis of these results, and the revised scale was administered to a different yet similar sample to measure the perceptions of each behavior as sexual harassment. Results of both studies showed a significant difference for the ratings of supervisor and co-worker behaviors.     

Functional equivalence of spatial images from touch and vision: evidence from spatial updating in blind and sighted individuals

This research examined whether visual and haptic map learning yield functionally equivalent spatial images in working memory, as evidenced by similar encoding bias and updating performance. In 3 experiments, participants learned 4-point routes either by seeing or feeling the maps. At test, blindfolded participants made spatial judgments about the maps from imagined perspectives that were either aligned or misaligned with the maps as represented in working memory. Results from Experiments 1 and 2 revealed a highly similar pattern of latencies and errors between visual and haptic conditions. These findings extend the well-known alignment biases for visual map learning to haptic map learning, provide further evidence of haptic updating, and most important, show that learning from the 2 modalities yields very similar performance across all conditions. Experiment 3 found the same encoding biases and updating performance with blind individuals, demonstrating that functional equivalence cannot be due to visual recoding and is consistent with an amodal hypothesis of spatial images.     

A dynamical approach to speech categorization: Two routes to learning

Learning to perceive a non-native speech sound reliably is a specific instance of the more general issue of category learning. Here we take a dynamical approach that provides a theoretically motivated way to understand individual differences in the process of learning to perceive new speech sounds. Fundamental to this approach is the focus on the initial categorization and discrimination abilities of individual perceivers and how these structure the form of learning over time. Two distinct patterns of learning were observed that were predictable based on initial perceptual abilities. In one pattern, subjects became more attuned to small acoustic distinctions between stimuli and could use that sensitivity to label tokens reliably. In the second pattern, subjects became less attuned to within-category acoustic distinctions, suggesting cognitive restructuring. Finally, we present a dynamical model that incorporates both modes of category learning, and also allows for failure to learn.