Age of first onset major depression in Chinese Americans

Using data from the Chinese American Epidemiological Study, risk for experiencing an initial episode of major depression across the life course was examined. Data were collected on 1,747 U.S.-born and foreign-born Chinese Americans (ages 18-65 years). Results suggest that Chinese American women did not evidence higher risk than Chinese American men for experiencing a 1st major depressive episode. Risk for experiencing a 1st depressive episode decreased as length of residence in the United States increased. Although those who immigrated at younger ages evidenced greater overall risk, those who came at later ages were more likely to become depressed at or soon after arrival. Competing theories of acculturation-related risk are discussed and directions for future research are proposed.     

How is spatial context learning integrated over signal versus noise? A primacy effect in contextual cueing

Over repeated exposure to particular visual search displays, subjects are able to implicitly extract regularities that then make search more efficient-a phenomenon known as contextual cueing. Here we explore how the learning involved in contextual cueing is formed, maintained, and updated over experience. During an initial training phase, a group of signal first subjects searched through a series of predictive displays (where distractor locations were perfectly correlated with the target location), followed with no overt break by a series of unpredictive displays (where repeated contexts were uncorrelated with target locations). A second noise first group of subjects encountered the unpredictive displays followed by the predictive displays. Despite the fact that both groups had the same overall exposure to signal and noise, only the signal first group demonstrated subsequent contextual cueing. This primacy effect indicates that initial experience can result in hypotheses about regularities in displays-or the lack thereof-which then become resistant to updating. The absence of regularities in early stages of training even blocked observers from learning predictive regularities later on.     

汉语双字词的心理词典存储—来自发展性阅读障碍个案的证据

研究探讨了发展性阅读障碍个案S汉字命名过程选择性错误的产生机制。汉字命名、词汇判断和组词实验有三个主要发现,个案S在汉字命名过程中产生大量的选择性错误,选择性错误在复合词中发生的前后位置没有显著差异;S在词汇判断过程中,混淆词汇中两个词素的先后顺序;S对产生选择性错误的汉字组词的数量显著少于控制组,且其产生选择性错误的复合词的频率显著高于他组出的其他词汇频率。研究以Zhou&Marslen-Wilson(2000)的复合词的多水平平行结构心理词典模型为基础讨论了这些发现的理论意义,并着重分析了汉字命名过程中词素频率和词汇意义结构之间的交互作用。     

Does Standard Deviation Matter? Using “Standard Deviation” to Quantify Security of Multistage Testing

With the advent of web-based technology, online testing is becoming a mainstream mode in large-scale educational assessments. Most online tests are administered continuously in a testing window, which may post test security problems because examinees who take the test earlier may share information with those who take the test later. Researchers have proposed various statistical indices to assess the test security, and one most often used index is the average test-overlap rate, which was further generalized to the item pooling index (Chang & Zhang, 2002, 2003). These indices, however, are all defined as the means (that is, the expected proportion of common items among examinees) and they were originally proposed for computerized adaptive testing (CAT). Recently, multistage testing (MST) has become a popular alternative to CAT. The unique features of MST make it important to report not only the mean, but also the standard deviation (SD) of test overlap rate, as we advocate in this paper. The standard deviation of test overlap rate adds important information to the test security profile, because for the same mean, a large SD reflects that certain groups of examinees share more common items than other groups. In this study, we analytically derived the lower bounds of the SD under MST, with the results under CAT as a benchmark. It is shown that when the mean overlap rate is the same between MST and CAT, the SD of test overlap tends to be larger in MST. A simulation study was conducted to provide empirical evidence. We also compared the security of MST under the single-pool versus the multiple-pool designs; both analytical and simulation studies show that the non-overlapping multiple-pool design will slightly increase the security risk.     

A mixture hierarchical model for response times and response accuracy

In real testing, examinees may manifest different types of test‐taking behaviours. In this paper we focus on two types that appear to be among the more frequently occurring behaviours – solution behaviour and rapid guessing behaviour. Rapid guessing usually happens in high‐stakes tests when there is insufficient time, and in low‐stakes tests when there is lack of effort. These two qualitatively different test‐taking behaviours, if ignored, will lead to violation of the local independence assumption and, as a result, yield biased item/person parameter estimation. We propose a mixture hierarchical model to account for differences among item responses and response time patterns arising from these two behaviours. The model is also able to identify the specific behaviour an examinee engages in when answering an item. A Monte Carlo expectation maximization algorithm is proposed for model calibration. A simulation study shows that the new model yields more accurate item and person parameter estimates than a non‐mixture model when the data indeed come from two types of behaviour. The model also fits real, high‐stakes test data better than a non‐mixture model, and therefore the new model can better identify the underlying test‐taking behaviour an examinee engages in on a certain item.     

Contextual cueing of visual attention

Visual context information constrains what to expect and where to look, facilitating search for and recognition of objects embedded in complex displays. This article reviews a new paradigm called contextual cueing, which presents well-defined, novel visual contexts and aims to understand how contextual information is learned and how it guides the deployment of visual attention. In addition, the contextual cueing task is well suited to the study of the neural substrate of contextual learning. For example, amnesic patients with hippocampal damage are impaired in their learning of novel contextual information, even though learning in the contextual cueing task does not appear to rely on conscious retrieval of contextual memory traces. We argue that contextual information is important because it embodies invariant properties of the visual environment such as stable spatial layout information as well as object covariation information. Sensitivity to these statistical regularities allows us to interact more effectively with the visual world.     

A New Online Calibration Method for Multidimensional Computerized Adaptive Testing

Multidimensional-Method A (M-Method A) has been proposed as an efficient and effective online calibration method for multidimensional computerized adaptive testing (MCAT) (Chen & Xin, Paper presented at the 78th Meeting of the Psychometric Society, Arnhem, The Netherlands, 2013). However, a key assumption of M-Method A is that it treats person parameter estimates as their true values, thus this method might yield erroneous item calibration when person parameter estimates contain non-ignorable measurement errors. To improve the performance of M-Method A, this paper proposes a new MCAT online calibration method, namely, the full functional MLE-M-Method A (FFMLE-M-Method A). This new method combines the full functional MLE (Jones & Jin in Psychometrika 59:59–75, 1994; Stefanski & Carroll in Annals of Statistics 13:1335–1351, 1985) with the original M-Method A in an effort to correct for the estimation error of ability vector that might otherwise adversely affect the precision of item calibration. Two correction schemes are also proposed when implementing the new method. A simulation study was conducted to show that the new method generated more accurate item parameter estimation than the original M-Method A in almost all conditions.     

Developmental consequences of behavioral inhibition: a model in rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta)

In children, behavioral inhibition is characterized by a disposition to withdraw in the presence of strangers and novel situations. Later in life, behavioral inhibition can result in an increased risk for anxiety and depression and a decrease in social behavior. We selected rhesus monkeys that, during infancy, showed evidence of behavioral inhibition in response to separation, and contrasted them with non‐inhibited peers. To understand the development of behavioral inhibition at juvenile age, we collected behavioral data in response to relocation; in response to a human intruder challenge; and in naturalistic outdoor field corrals. At 4 years of age (young adulthood), we again collected behavioral data in the outdoor field corrals to understand the adult social consequences of behavioral inhibition. We also included sex, dominance rank, and number of available kin in our analyses. Finally, to understand the consistency in behavior in behaviorally inhibited animals, we conducted exploratory analyses contrasting behaviorally inhibited animals that showed high vs. low durations of non‐social behaviors as adults. At juvenile age, behaviorally inhibited animals continued to show behavioral differences in the novel testing room and during the human intruder challenge, generally showing evidence of greater anxiety and emotionality compared to non‐inhibited controls. In their outdoor corrals, behaviorally inhibited juveniles spent more time alone and less time in proximity and grooming with mother and other adult females. In young adulthood, we found that behavioral inhibition was not related to time spent alone. We did find that duration of time alone in adulthood was related to time alone exhibited as juveniles; sex, dominance rank, or the number of kin were not influential in adult non‐social duration, either as main effects or as moderators. Finally, exploratory analyses revealed that behaviorally inhibited females that were more sociable (less time spent alone) as adults had spent more time grooming as juveniles, suggesting that high‐quality social interaction at a young age might mitigate the social consequences of behavioral inhibition. Overall, we believe that the many similarities with the human data that we found suggest that this monkey model of naturally occurring behavioral inhibition can be valuable for understanding social development.