Classical pattern recall tests and the prospective nature of expert performance

It is well established that experts are particularly adept at recalling and/or recognizing the key features of domain-relevant patterns. We compared the recall performance of expert and novice basketball players when viewing static and moving patterns. A novel method of analysis was used where the accuracy of the participants in recalling player positions was compared to actual player positions both at the final frame of pattern presentation and at 50 successive 40 ms increments thereafter. Experts encoded the locations of the players in both the static and moving patterns significantly further in advance of their actual finishing point than did nonexperts. Experts' use of an anticipatory encoding process, which was of a magnitude unmatched by nonexperts, suggests that many previous investigations may have underestimated the extent of the expert advantage in pattern recall.     

On the development of perfectionism in adolescence: Perceived parental expectations predict longitudinal increases in socially prescribed perfectionism

Adolescence is regarded a key period when individual differences in perfectionism develop. Yet, so far only a few longitudinal studies have investigated the development of perfectionism in adolescents. Using a longitudinal correlational design with 381 adolescents aged 15–19 years, the present study investigated whether perceived parental expectations and criticism predicted longitudinal increases in self-oriented and socially prescribed perfectionism over 7–9 months. Results showed that perceived parental expectations predicted longitudinal increases in socially prescribed perfectionism: Adolescents who perceived that their parents had high expectations of them at Time 1, showed increased socially prescribed perfectionism from Time 1 to Time 2 compared to adolescents who did not perceive their parents having such high expectations. No such effect was found for self-oriented perfectionism. The findings provide supportive evidence for the social expectations model of the development of perfectionism regarding socially prescribed perfectionism, but not self-oriented perfectionism. Implications of this finding for the understanding of the development of perfectionism and future studies are discussed.     

Diagnosis without treatment: responding to the War on Terror

The War on Terror has exposed deep problems within contemporary political practice. It has demonstrated the moral fragility of liberal democracy. Much critical literature on the topic is devoted to uncovering the sources of this fragility. In this paper, we accept the general thrust of much of this literature, but turn our attention to the practical upshot of the criticism. A common feature of the literature is that, when it comes to offering remedies of the problems it identifies, what is offered is ‘diagnosis without treatment’. The negation of a problem is regarded as a solution. For example, if the problem is that the USA is not acting as a good international citizen, the solution is that it begins to act as such. This is like a doctor diagnosing gout and recommending to the patient that they reduce the level of uric acid in their big toe. We argue that diagnosis without treatment is endemic in literature on the War on Terror and the ills of liberal democracy. We divide this literature into five categories and examine representative works in each. At the end of the paper, we describe what is required to avoid offering yet more diagnosis without treatment.     

Notes on a Journey From Symbols to Multifractals: A Tribute to Guy Van Orden

Rejecting traditional cognitive science put us in a bind. On the one hand, traditional cognitive science is our heritage; our curiosity about the big questions of cognition led us initially to invest in the conventional approaches. On the other hand, we eventually became dissatisfied with the fundamentals of traditional cognitive science. Rather than criticize from the sidelines, we struggled for a new way to address the same problems with a new explanatory framework. Guy Van Orden spurred us forward on 2 counts. First, his work inspired us to consider fractal scaling as a new framework for exploring change in cognitive structure. Second, his provocative contrast between pink and white noises as diagnostic of interactions and components, respectively, intrigued us. Our struggle for a new direction became a struggle to understand what Guy meant and how his ideas might translate within our research domains. Guy helped us to forge a perspective that would have surprised us before, namely, the perspective that cognitive and, more generally, biological structure reflects turbulent flows structured over many different scales with multifractal fluctuations.     

Towards the Development of a Conceptual Model of Expertise in Cricket Batting: A Grounded Theory Approach

Data from semi-structured interviews with 14 male expert cricket batsmen, coaches, and administrators were used to generate a conceptual model of expertise in this sport. In the model, a favorable socio-developmental environment (support, vast investment in creative and challenging play, sibling rivalry) provides the essential foundation for the development of positive psychological attributes (mental toughness, self-belief and confidence, ability to cope with adversity, adoption of individualized routines/rituals), technical skill mastery (optimal balance, speed of downswing, versatility of shot execution) and superior visual-perceptual skill. Intrinsic motivators (fun, enjoyment, challenge and achievement, desire to be the best, “love of the game”, camaraderie) are regarded as essential to continuation and progression along developmental pathways. Facets of contemporary society and its constraints on free play emerged as one of the major limitations to the future development of expertise. The model has immediate implications for coaching practice, developmental policy, and future research approaches to identifying and nurturing sports talent.     

Perfectionistic concerns predict increases in adolescents’ anxiety symptoms: a three-wave longitudinal study

Background and Objectives: Although perfectionism has been proposed to be a risk factor for the development of anxiety, research on perfectionism and anxiety symptoms in adolescents is scarce and inconclusive. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether the two higher-order dimensions of perfectionism – perfectionistic strivings and perfectionistic concerns – predict the development and maintenance of anxiety symptoms. An additional aim of the present study was to examine potential reciprocal effects of anxiety symptoms predicting increases in perfectionism.

Design: The study used a longitudinal design with three waves spaced 4–5 months apart.

Methods: A non-clinical sample of 489 adolescents aged 12–19 years completed a paper-and-pencil questionnaire.

Results: As expected, results showed a positive effect from perfectionistic concerns to anxiety symptoms, but the effect was restricted to middle-to-late adolescents (16–19 years old): Perfectionistic concerns predicted longitudinal increases in adolescents’ anxiety symptoms, whereas perfectionistic strivings did not. Furthermore, anxiety symptoms did not predict increases in perfectionism.

Conclusions: Implications for the understanding of the relationship between perfectionism and anxiety symptoms are discussed.     

An implicit basis for the retention benefits of random practice

The cognitive effort explanations of contextual interference (CI) and implicit motor learning represent a paradox in which cognitive involvement is seen to be advantageous or disadvantageous for learning. The authors aimed to resolve this paradox by measuring cognitive effort and working memory dependence during low and high CI practice on two Australian Rules Football tasks (kicking and handball). Measures of cognitive effort included: kicking and handball outcome performance during acquisition and during a test of retention, performance on a probe reaction time task during a sample of acquisition trials, and self-reported levels of cognitive effort. Measures of implicit and explicit learning included kicking and handball performance during a secondary task transfer, and self-report verbal protocols (number of verbal rules and hypotheses reported). The results suggest that high CI may cause an implicit mode of learning, perhaps due to the interference caused by task switching. However, these findings are restricted to the more complex of the 2 tasks (kicking).     

Investigating the anticipatory nature of pattern perception in sport

The aim of the present study was to examine the anticipatory nature of pattern perception in sport by using static and moving basketball patterns across three different display types. Participants of differing skill levels were included in order to determine whether the effects would be moderated by the knowledge and experience of the observer in the same manner reported previously for simple images. The results from a pattern recognition task showed that both expert and recreational participants were more likely to anticipate the next likely state of a pattern when it was presented as a moving video, but only the experts appeared to have the depth of understanding required to elicit the same anticipatory encoding for patterns presented as schematic images. The results extend those reported in previous research and provide further evidence of an anticipatory encoding in pattern perception for images containing complex, interrelated patterns.     

Knowledge of the ordinal position of list items in pigeons

Ordinal knowledge is a fundamental aspect of advanced cognition. It is self-evident that humans represent ordinal knowledge, and over the past 20 years it has become clear that nonhuman primates share this ability. In contrast, evidence that nonprimate species represent ordinal knowledge is missing from the comparative literature. To address this issue, in the present experiment we trained pigeons on three 4-item lists and then tested them with derived lists in which, relative to the training lists, the ordinal position of the items was either maintained or changed. Similar to the findings with human and nonhuman primates, our pigeons performed markedly better on the maintained lists compared to the changed lists, and displayed errors consistent with the view that they used their knowledge of ordinal position to guide responding on the derived lists. These findings demonstrate that the ability to acquire ordinal knowledge is not unique to the primate lineage. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved).     

The focus of attention in working memory: evidence from a word updating task

Three experiments examined the cognitive costs of item switching within working memory with a novel word updating task, thereby extending previous research to the field of linguistic stimuli and linguistic-graphemic updating operations. In Experiments 1 and 2 costs for switching between working memory items were evident on the word level, and they increased with an increasing word set size (Experiment 2). In contrast, a surprisingly similar switch effect on the level of letters was not affected by word set size (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 showed that this effect is not simply based on the need for re-orienting visual spatial attention. To account for the overall picture of results, a recursive model of attentional foci is proposed. Moreover, individual working memory span appears to be associated with the accuracy of item switching, but not with its speed.