On associations between computers and restaurants: Rapid learning of new associations on a conceptual implicit memory test

A novel event-based conceptual implicit memory test was designed to tap the development of new associations between objects and ad hoc categories. At study, participants were presented with a plausible story that linked an incongruous object (computer) with an ad hoc category (restaurant). At test, participants judged whether a given object was typically found in a restaurant. In Experiment 1, judgment time was significantly slower for the incongruous object (computer) when the story had previously linked the computer to the restaurant, relative to when it had not. Experiment 2 replicated this effect and ruled out the alternative interpretation that this interference effect was attributable to a general slowing of responses to all studied items. Unlike in prior studies, this demonstration of associative priming cannot be attributed to perceptual priming or to test awareness in memory-intact participants. The paradigm therefore offers a unique opportunity to study single-trial conceptual learning in memory-intact and memory-impaired populations.     

Emergence of joint attention: relationships between gaze following,social referencing,imitation, and naming in infancy

The authors investigated the extent to which the joint-attention behaviors of gaze following, social referencing, and object-directed imitation were related to each other and to infants' vocabulary development in a sample of 60 infants between the ages of 8 and 14 months. Joint-attention skills and vocabulary development were assessed in a laboratory setting. Split-half reliability analyses on the joint-attention measures indicated that the tasks reliably assessed infants' capabilities. In the main analysis, no significant correlations were found among the joint-attention behaviors except for a significant relationship between gaze following and the number of names in infants' productive vocabularies. The overall pattern of results did not replicate results of previous studies (e.g., M. Carpenter, K. Nagell, & M. Tomasello, 1998) that found relationships between various emerging joint-attention behaviors.     

Aging,memory load,and resource allocation during reading

To test the notion that aging brings an inability to self-initiate processing, the authors investigated the effects of memory load on online sentence understanding. Younger and older adults read a series of short passages with or without a simultaneous updating task, which would be expected to deplete resources by consuming memory capacity. Regression analyses of word-by-word reading times onto text variables within each condition were used to decompose reading times into resources allocated to the array of word-level and textbase-level processes needed for comprehension. Among neither the young nor the old were word-level processes disrupted by a simultaneous memory load. However, older readers showed relatively greater levels of resource allocation to conceptual integration than the younger adults when under load, regardless of working-memory span or task priority. These results suggest that the ability to self-initiate the allocation of processing resources during reading is preserved among older readers.     

Computerizing reading training: Evaluation of a latent semantic analysis space for science text

The effectiveness of a domain-specific latent semantic analysis (LSA) in assessing reading strategies was examined. Students were given self-explanation reading training (SERT) and asked to think aloud after each sentence in a science text. Novice and expert human raters and two LSA spaces (general reading, science) rated the similarity of each think-aloud protocol to benchmarks representing three different reading strategies (minimal, local, and global). The science LSA space correlated highly with human judgments, and more highly than did the general reading space. Also, cosines from the science LSA spaces can distinguish between different levels of semantic similarity, but may have trouble in distinguishing local processing protocols. Thus, a domain-specific LSA space is advantageous regardless of the size of the space. The results are discussedin the context of applying the science LSA to a computer-based version of SERT that gives online feedback based on LSA cosines.     

Interactions between presentation modality and encoding task in frequency judgements

In two experiments, presentation modality of a list of items and encoding task were varied, and subjects judged the frequency with which certain words had been presented in the list. In Experiment 1, auditory presentation led to higher judgements of frequency than did visual presentation when subjects counted the consonants in the words but not when they rated imageability or when they kept a running count of the number of presentations of each word. In Experiment 2, encoding questions about the rhyme or spelling patterns of target words produced opposite effects for auditory and visual items. The results are interpreted as indicating that cross-modal translation during encoding produces a bias towards higher-frequency judgements and may also produce better frequency discrimination.     

It does take a village: nonfamilial environments and children's behavior

Abstract - Family characteristics influence children's behavioral development, but so do variations in schools, neighborhoods, and communities. We documented extrafamilial environmental effects by fitting maximum likelihood models to questionnaire data collected from double dyads consisting of twins and their classmate controls. The classmate controls in each double dyad were genetic strangers living in separate households, but they shared school, neighborhood, and community environments with their yoked twin pair and with one another. At ages 11 to 12, the control classmates showed significant similarities in religious practices and smoking and drinking patterns, demonstrating that environmental influences outside the family affect children's behavioral development. Familial self-selection of residential neighborhoods may have contributed to these results, but direct effects of variation across communities, neighborhoods, and schools cannot be dismissed, and such effects warrant further study.     

End of Life Pediatric Research: What About the Ethics?

Clinical trials are required in order to develop new treatments and improve both patient life expectancy and quality of life. In this respect the last 10 years proved their efficiency. However clinical research shows one of the most difficult dilemmas from an ethical point of view. Patients included in clinical trials are submitted to known and unknown risks and hazards, but rarely benefit from the results. This is even more evident when clinical trials use children who are terminally ill. The core consideration becomes how far should we go with research when considering the child best interest.     

The consequences of effortful emotion regulation when processing distressing material: A comparison of suppression and acceptance

The present study investigated the consequences of different forms of emotion regulation. Eighty nine healthy participants viewed a distressing video of the aftermath of road traffic accidents under either suppression (of both felt and expressed affect), acceptance, or no-regulation control instructions and the immediate and longer-term consequences on emotion, mood, and memory were examined. Suppression (relative to control) led to reduced subjective experience of fear when viewing the video, but did not alter electrodermal (EDA) or heart rate (HR) response. Subsequently, suppression led to a less marked subjective emotional reaction to positive but not negative emotional images, reduced free recall memory of the video, and a greater likelihood of experiencing zero intrusions of the video's content. Acceptance (relative to control) had no impact when viewing the video, was associated with a less marked increase in EDA activity in the 5 min period immediately after viewing the video, a more marked HR deceleration and EDA response to both positive and negative images, and elevated negative affect at one week follow-up. These findings suggest, contrary to the current clinical zeitgeist, that emotion suppression can successfully lead to an ongoing down-regulation of emotion and memory, whereas acceptance may elevate subsequent emotionality.