Preschool children's control of action outcomes

Naturalistic goal‐directed behaviours require the engagement and maintenance of appropriate levels of cognitive control over relatively extended intervals of time. In two experiments, we examined preschool children's abilities to maintain top‐down control throughout the course of a sequential task. Both 3‐ and 5‐year‐olds demonstrated good abilities to access goals at the lowest level of the representational hierarchy. However, only 5‐year‐olds consistently aligned their response choices with goals at superordinate levels. These findings suggest that the ability to maintain top‐down control and adjust behavioural responses according to goals at multiple levels of abstraction undergoes a marked improvement throughout the preschool period. Results are discussed in relation to current accounts of cognitive control and the monitoring of conflict in sequential action.     

The Influence of Child-Directed Speech on Word Learning and Comprehension

This paper describes an investigation into the function of child-directed speech (CDS) across development. In the first experiment, 10–21-month-olds were presented with familiar words in CDS and trained on novel words in CDS or adult-directed speech (ADS). All children preferred the matching display for familiar words. However, only older toddlers in the CDS condition preferred the matching display for novel words. In Experiment 2, children 3–6 years of age were presented with a sentence comprehension task in CDS or ADS. Older children performed better overall than younger children with 5- and 6-year-olds performing above chance regardless of speech condition, while 3- and 4-year-olds only performed above chance when the sentences were presented in CDS. These findings provide support for the theory that CDS is most effective at the beginning of acquisition for particular constructions (e.g. vocabulary acquisition, syntactic comprehension) rather than at a particular age or for a particular task.     

Mentoring as a Mediator or Moderator of the Association between Racial Discrimination and Coping Efficacy in Urban,Low‐Income Latina/o Youth

The aim of this study was to examine the associations among mentoring relationship quality (i.e., relational and instrumental quality), racial discrimination and coping efficacy with racial discrimination. Three social support models were tested, including the stress buffering, support mobilization, and support deterioration models. Participants were 257 urban, low‐income Latina/o high school students, who completed surveys in both 9th and 10th grades. While controlling for gender and coping efficacy with discrimination in 9th grade, results supported the social support deterioration model. Specifically, there was a significant indirect effect of racial discrimination in 9th grade on coping efficacy in 10th grade through instrumental mentoring quality. As racial discrimination increased, mentoring quality decreased and then coping efficacy decreased. We also found that more racial discrimination in 9th grade was significantly associated with lower coping efficacy in 10th grade, and higher instrumental mentoring quality in 9th grade was significantly associated with higher coping efficacy in 10th grade, while controlling for gender and coping efficacy in 9th grade. Implications and recommendations for future research are discussed.     

Investigating the effectiveness of brief cognitive reappraisal training to reduce fear in adolescents

As adolescent anxiety is common and costly, identifying effective strategies to reduce symptoms is a priority. This study tested whether adolescents could learn to use cognitive reappraisal strategies to attenuate fear during extinction learning. Fifty-seven participants (12–15 years) viewed images of two neutral faces, one which was paired with a fearful expression and shrieking scream (conditioned threat stimulus) and the other that was never paired with the aversive outcome (conditioned safety stimulus) during fear acquisition. Before extinction, participants either received cognitive appraisal training, which explored alternative, benign meanings associated with the scream or a control activity. Self-reported fear ratings in the cognitive reappraisal group were significantly lower to both the conditioned threat and safety stimuli after extinction than the control group. These findings did not characterise fear-potentiated startle data. Potential reasons for the lack of consistency between measures are considered.     

Predicting Successful Responses to Emergencies: the Emergency Responsiveness Scale

People respond to disasters in a variety of ways. Some individuals respond to disasters or emergencies with panicked activity while others mobilize resources without panicking. In this article, we propose that the individual response to emergencies is determined by Emergency Responsiveness, the manner in which an individual appraises an emergency situation. We believe Emergency Responsiveness consists of four factors: Risk Taking, Experience with Emergencies, Emergency Anxiety, and Emergency Preparation. In Study One, each of the four subscales of Emergency Responsiveness correlated with personality traits in the hypothesized directions, providing evidence of construct validity. In Study Two, we establish criterion-related validity by demonstrating that a sample of first-responders scored significantly higher than a control sample on all four dimensions. Our results support our hypothesis that Emergency Responsiveness is a measurable individual difference. Implications for first responders and emergency services are discussed.     

Toward an Ecological Theory of Rationality: Debunking the Hot Hand “Illusion”

This article explores the “hot hand illusion” from the perspective of ecological rationality. Monte Carlo simulations were used to test the sensitivity of typical tests for randomness to plausible constraints (e.g., Wald-Wolfowitz) on sequences of binary events (e.g., basketball shots). Most of the constraints were detected when sample sizes were large. However, when the range of improvement was limited to reflect natural performance bounds, these tests did not detect a success-dependent learning process. In addition, a series of experiments assessed people's ability to discriminate between random and constrained sequences of binary events. The result showed that in all cases human performance was better than chance, even for the constraints that were missed by the standard tests. The case is made that, as with perception, it is important to ground research on human cognition in the demands of adaptively responding to ecological constraints. In this context, it is suggested that a “bias” or “default” that assumes that nature is “structured” or “constrained” is a very rational approach for an adaptive system whose survival depends on assembling smart mechanisms to solve complex problems.     

Engagement Attentional Bias toward Value-Associated Stimuli

Recent evidence has shown that learning to associate the value of behavioral outcomes with specific stimuli (i.e., value learning/association) can induce attentional capture in a subsequent visual search task. Here we investigated the component of attentional bias toward value-associated stimuli in the dot-probe paradigm. In the training phase, participants learned to associate nonsense shape outlines with monetary wins or losses. The shapes were then used as cues in an explicit no feedback dot-probe task. Probe appeared at either the salient (congruent trial) or nonsalient location (incongruent trial). Results indicate attentional bias toward value-associated stimuli, futher more this attentional bias is driven by an engagement bias.     

Creating a Recovery Filled Weekend: The Moderating Effect of Occupation Type on the Relationship between Non-work Creative Activity and State of Feeling Recovered at Work

The activities workers engage in during their personal time are likely to influence whether workers return to work feeling reenergized, refreshed, and fully rested. Two longitudinal studies were conducted to examine the importance of nonwork creative activity during the weekend on workers’ state of feeling recovered at work on Monday. Job titles were coded using the Occupation Information Network (O*NET) to gain an objective indicator of each worker’s occupational requirements for creativity. As expected, the occupational requirements for creativity moderated the relationship between nonwork creative activity during the weekend and state of feeling recovered at work on Monday. Specifically, workers with low occupational requirements for creativity (e.g., cashier, security guard, nuclear equipment technician) are likely to benefit from nonwork creative activities, whereas workers with high occupational requirements for creativity (e.g., interior designer, architect) are not likely to benefit from nonwork creative activities. These results have important implications regarding the development of organizational efforts to educate workers about the benefits of nonwork creative activities.     

The relationship between three auditory inspection time tasks and general intelligence

Three inspection-time tasks measuring the amount of time required to discriminate differences in pitch, loudness and phase were administered alongside the Multidimensional Ability Battery and Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices to 75 undergraduate students. The auditory tasks were administered adaptively, and thresholds were estimated by fitting a logistic function to each set of data. After correcting for restriction of range the three thresholds intercorrelated significantly, and correlated between −0.33 and −0.68 with scores on the ability tests. A composite auditory inspection time score correlated between −0.35 and −0.42 with the ability measures (−0.50 to −0.54 after correction). Although strategy-use enhanced performance on the pitch inspection-time task, strategy use was unrelated to intelligence and did not mediate the correlation between inspection time and intelligence.     

Differential contributions of set-shifting and monitoring to dual-task interference

It is commonly argued that complex behaviour is regulated by a number of "executive functions", which work to coordinate the operation of disparate cognitive systems in the service of an overall goal. However, the identity, roles, and interactions of specific putative executive functions remain contentious, even within widely accepted tests of executive function. The authors present two experiments that use dual-task interference to provide further support for multiple distinct executive functions and to establish the differential contributions of those functions in two relatively complex executive tasks-random generation and the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test. Results are interpreted in terms of process models of the complex executive tasks.