Young children's performance on the balance scale: the influence of relational complexity

Three experiments investigated the effect of complexity on children's understanding of a beam balance. In nonconflict problems, weights or distances varied, while the other was held constant. In conflict items, both weight and distance varied, and items were of three kinds: weight dominant, distance dominant, or balance (in which neither was dominant). In Experiment 1, 2-year-old children succeeded on nonconflict-weight and nonconflict-distance problems. This result was replicated in Experiment 2, but performance on conflict items did not exceed chance. In Experiment 3, 3- and 4-year-olds succeeded on all except conflict balance problems, while 5- and 6-year-olds succeeded on all problem types. The results were interpreted in terms of relational complexity theory. Children aged 2 to 4 years succeeded on problems that entailed binary relations, but 5- and 6-year-olds also succeeded on problems that entailed ternary relations. Ternary relations tasks from other domains--transitivity and class inclusion--accounted for 93% of the age-related variance in balance scale scores.     

Chemical death

Corporate Killing: Bhopals Will Happen, by Tara Jones, London: Free Association Books, 1988, 336 pages, pb £9.95.

Bhopal: The Lessons of a Tragedy, by Sanjoy Hazarika, London: Penguin, 1987, 230 pages, pb £4.50.

Introduction to Toxicology, by J. A. Timbrell, London: Taylor and Francis, 1989, 155 pages (large format), pb £9.95.     

Social suggestibility to central and peripheral misinformation

This study used a laboratory-based paradigm to investigate social influences on participants’ susceptibility to misleading suggestions. Participants viewed a video clip of an action sequence with one or more peers, and then were required to discuss the event with the co-witness or with the group of co-witnesses. During the discussion a confederate, posing as a peer, presented misinformation about central and peripheral features of the co-witnessed event. Results indicated that participants were more susceptible to misleading suggestions during one-on-one discussions than during group discussions. In addition, participants were susceptible to misleading suggestions about central features of the witnessed event, although to a lesser extent than they were susceptible to misleading suggestions about peripheral features.     

Perceptual load does not modulate auditory distractor processing

In vision, it is well established that the perceptual load of a relevant task determines the extent to which irrelevant distractors are processed. Much less research has addressed the effects of perceptual load within hearing. Here, we provide an extensive test using two different perceptual load manipulations, measuring distractor processing through response competition and awareness report. Across four experiments, we consistently failed to find support for the role of perceptual load in auditory selective attention. We therefore propose that the auditory system – although able to selectively focus processing on a relevant stream of sounds – is likely to have surplus capacity to process auditory information from other streams, regardless of the perceptual load in the attended stream. This accords well with the notion of the auditory modality acting as an ‘early-warning’ system as detection of changes in the auditory scene is crucial even when the perceptual demands of the relevant task are high.     

Ear-catching? Real-world distractibility scores predict susceptibility to auditory attentional capture

Although many of the everyday distractions that we encounter are auditory, most research on distractor processing to date has focused on the visual domain. A common measure of everyday distractibility is the Cognitive Failures Questionnaire (CFQ; Broadbent, Cooper, FitzGerald, & Parkes British Journal of Clinical Psychology 21: 1–16, 1982), which has previously been successfully linked with performance on controlled visual-attention tasks (e.g., Forster & Lavie Psychological Science 18: 377–381, 2007; Kanai, Dong, Bahrami, & Rees Journal of Neuroscience 31: 6620–6626, 2011; Tipper & Baylis Personality and Individual Differences 8: 667–675, 1987), such that high scorers tend to display greater distractor interference than do low scorers. We examined whether the same relationship would hold in hearing. Participants performed an auditory attentional-capture task, by responding to a target sound while ignoring an irrelevant singleton distractor (presented on half of the trials). We found that CFQ score successfully predicted distractor interference, since participants who reported being more distractible in everyday life produced more errors in the presence of the irrelevant singleton than did low scorers on the CFQ. This finding is the first to demonstrate a relationship between auditory distractor interference and everyday distractibility, and it confirms that performance on this type of laboratory-based attentional-capture task can successfully be related to behavior outside the laboratory.     

Integrating fundamental movement skills in late childhood

The study examined how children of different ages integrate fundamental movement skills, such as running and throwing, and whether their developmental status was related to the combination of these skills. Thirty children were divided into three groups (G1 = 6-year-olds, G2 = 9-year-olds, and G3 = 12-year-olds) and filmed performing three tasks: running, overarm throwing, and the combined task. Patterns were identified and described, and the efficiency of integration was calculated (distance differences of the ball thrown in two tasks, overarm throwing and combined task). Differences in integration were related to age: the 6-year-olds were less efficient in combining the two skills than the 9- and 12-year-olds. These differences may be indicative of a phase of integrating fundamental movement skills in the developmental sequence. This developmental status, particularly throwing, seems to be related to the competence to integrate skills, which suggests that fundamental movement skills may be developmental modules.     

Cognitive influences on health symptoms from acute chemical exposure.

Symptom reports, perceived adverse health effects, and public health concerns are increasingly precipitated by the perception of chemical odors. This study examined the interaction between health cognitions, odor perception, and symptom reports. A group of 180 healthy men and women were exposed to 1 of 3 ambient odors, normatively rated as healthful (methyl salicylate, or wintergreen), harmful (butanol or alcohol), and ambiguous (isobomyl acetate, or balsam), after receiving 1 of 3 odorant characterizations (harmful, healthful, and neutral). Individuals given a harmful bias reported significantly more health symptoms following exposure and more intense odor and irritation during exposure than did those given a neutral or healthful bias. The overall pattern of results suggests that many of the health-related effects of exposure to odorants are mediated not by a direct agency of odors but by cognitive variables, such as mental models of the relationship between environmental odors and health.     

Management Consulting: Planning,Entry, Performance

The counseling profession has much in common with that of organizational consulting. The authors provide an overview of consulting practices that those in counseling might find useful should they decide to investigate the promise of organizational consulting. Included are aspects of market research, gauging competition, and target markets. They also consider promotion, networking, and elements of consulting performance. Last, they provide an extensive overview of relevant associations and materials of potential value to the prospective consultant.