Predicting Substance Use Patterns Among Rural Adults: The Roles of Mothers,Fathers, and Parenthood

This study examined the role of parenthood and parental influences on substance use patterns for 710 stimulant users age 18–61 living in the rural Midwest and Mid‐south U.S. Longitudinal growth analyses showed that a maternal history of drug use was associated with increased baseline drug use severity, lesser declines in severity, and greater plateau of drug use severity over time. Parental conflict was associated with lesser declines in drug use severity, and drug use severity declined more steeply for participants who were themselves parents. Participants with two parents having a history of alcohol use had a greater baseline severity of alcohol use, with paternal history of drug use associated with lower baseline alcohol use severity. These findings demonstrate the importance of identifying parental influences in evaluating adult substance use, and point to the inclusion of parents in efforts to prevent and treat substance use disorders.     

Sex differences in ADHD trajectories across childhood and adolescence

Previous studies have hinted at sex differences in developmental trajectories in ADHD symptoms; however, little is known about the nature or cause of these differences and their implications for clinical practice. We used growth mixture modelling in a community‐ascertained cohort of n = 1,571 participants to study sex differences in ADHD symptom developmental trajectories across the elementary and secondary school years. Participants were measured at ages 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 15. We found that females were more likely to show large symptom increases in early adolescence while males were more likely to show elevated symptoms from childhood. For both males and females, early adolescence represented a period of vulnerability characterized by relatively sudden symptom increases. Females affected by hyperactivity/impulsivity may be more likely to be excluded from diagnosis due to current age of onset criteria. More attention should be paid to early adolescence as a period of risk for hyperactivity/impulsivity symptom onset or worsening.     

The Irreducibility of Iterated to Single Revision

After a number of decades of research into the dynamics of rational belief, the belief revision theory community remains split on the appropriate handling of sequences of changes in view, the issue of so-called iterated revision. It has long been suggested that the matter is at least partly settled by facts pertaining to the results of various single revisions of one’s initial state of belief. Recent work has pushed this thesis further, offering various strong principles that ultimately result in a wholesale reduction of iterated to one-shot revision. The present paper offers grounds to hold that these principles should be significantly weakened and that the reductionist thesis should ultimately be rejected. Furthermore, the considerations provided suggest a close connection between the logic of iterated belief change and the logic of evidential relevance.     

Form follows function: Learning about function helps children learn about shape

Object functions help young children to organize new artifact categories. However, the scope of their influence is unknown. We explore whether functions highlight property dimensions that are relevant to artifact categories in general. Specifically, using a longitudinal training procedure, we assessed whether experience with functions highlights shape as important for categorization. Seventeen-month-olds were provided experience with novel categories of similarly shaped objects. In Study 1, the function group learned about the objects’ shape-based functions; a control group did not. In Study 2, 17-month-olds were trained on the same categories, but the objects’ shapes and functions were no longer causally related. Only the function group in Study 1 subsequently used shape reliably when categorizing novel objects. These results suggest that function is instrumental in establishing a ‘shape bias’ in early categorization and that it does so via conceptually based processes.     

Effective brain connectivity in children with reading difficulties during phonological processing

Using Dynamic Causal Modeling (DCM) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we examined effective connectivity between three left hemisphere brain regions (inferior frontal gyrus, inferior parietal lobule, fusiform gyrus) and bilateral medial frontal gyrus in 12 children with reading difficulties (M age=12.4, range: 8.11-14.10) and 12 control children (M age=12.3, range: 8.9-14.11) during rhyming judgments to visually presented words. More difficult conflicting trials either had similar orthography but different phonology (e.g. pint-mint) or similar phonology but different orthography (e.g. jazz-has). Easier non-conflicting trials had similar orthography and phonology (e.g. dime-lime) or different orthography and phonology (e.g. staff-gain). The modulatory effect from left fusiform gyrus to left inferior parietal lobule was stronger in controls than in children with reading difficulties only for conflicting trials. Modulatory effects from left fusiform gyrus and left inferior parietal lobule to left inferior frontal gyrus were stronger for conflicting trials than for non-conflicting trials only in control children but not in children with reading difficulties. Modulatory effects from left inferior frontal gyrus to inferior parietal lobule, from medial frontal gyrus to left inferior parietal lobule, and from left inferior parietal lobule to medial frontal gyrus were positively correlated with reading skill only in control children. These findings suggest that children with reading difficulties have deficits in integrating orthography and phonology utilizing left inferior parietal lobule, and in engaging phonological rehearsal/segmentation utilizing left inferior frontal gyrus possibly through the indirect pathway connecting posterior to anterior language processing regions, especially when the orthographic and phonological information is conflicting.     

Informed Consent in Emergency Research: A Contradiction in Terms

Improving the treatment of life threatening emergency illness or disease requires that new or novel therapies be assessed in clinical trials. As most subjects for these trials will be incapacitated there is some controversy about they might best protected whilst still allowing research to continue. Recent European and UK clinical trials legislation, which has effectively stopped research into emergency conditions, is discussed. Possible changes to these regulations are proposed.     

Neural correlates of mapping from phonology to orthography in children performing an auditory spelling task

Age-related differences (9- to 15-year-olds) in the neural correlates of mapping from phonology to orthography were examined with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Participants were asked to determine if two spoken words had the same spelling for the rime (corresponding letters after the first consonant or consonant cluster). Some of the word pairs had conflicting orthography and phonology (e.g. jazz-has, pint-mint) whereas other pairs had non-conflicting information (e.g. press-list, gate-hate) (see Table 1). There were age-related increases in activation for lexical processing (across conflicting and non-conflicting conditions) in left inferior parietal lobule, suggesting that older children have a more elaborated system for mapping between phonology and orthography that includes connections at different grain sizes (e.g. phonemes, onset-rimes, syllables). In addition, we found that the conflicting conditions had lower accuracy, slower reaction time and greater activation in left inferior frontal gyrus as compared to non-conflicting conditions. Higher accuracy was also correlated with greater activation in left inferior frontal gyrus for the most difficult conflicting condition (e.g. jazz-has). The finding of both a conflict effect and a correlation with accuracy in left inferior frontal gyrus suggests that this region may be involved in resolving the conflict between orthographic and phonological representations.     

Stress reduces attention to irrelevant information: Evidence from the Stroop task

Stroop interference can be reduced by stress, and this has been taken as evidence that stress decreases the attention paid to irrelevant information, a theory known as ‘Easterbrook’s hypothesis’. This contradicts more recent theories, which state that attentional control deteriorates in stress. Fifty-five participants undertook a Stroop task under high stress (loud white noise) and low stress conditions. Attention to the irrelevant word information was assessed by manipulating the proportion of congruent trials (e.g. the word RED in the colour red); it is known that Stroop interference increases when many such trials are presented. This effect was reduced when participants were stressed, which is evidence that stress does indeed reduce attention to irrelevant information. This pattern of results was not present in participants with low working memory spans, presumably because these participants had less attentional control. These findings highlight an important weakness in contemporary theories of cognition in stress.     

The development of specialized brain systems in reading and oral-language.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to examine differences between children (9-12 years) and adults (21-31 years) in the distribution of brain activation during word processing. Orthographic, phonologic, semantic and syntactic tasks were used in both the auditory and visual modalities. Our two principal results were consistent with the hypothesis that development is characterized by increasing specialization. Our first analysis compared activation in children versus adults separately for each modality. Adults showed more activation than children in the unimodal visual areas of middle temporal gyrus and fusiform gyrus for processing written word forms and in the unimodal auditory areas of superior temporal gyrus for processing spoken word forms. Children showed more activation than adults for written word forms in posterior heteromodal regions (Wernicke's area), presumably for the integration of orthographic and phonologic word forms. Our second analysis compared activation in the visual versus auditory modality separately for children and adults. Children showed primarily overlap of activation in brain regions for the visual and auditory tasks. Adults showed selective activation in the unimodal auditory areas of superior temporal gyrus when processing spoken word forms and selective activation in the unimodal visual areas of middle temporal gyrus and fusiform gyrus when processing written word forms.