Frequency,characteristics and functions of future‐oriented thoughts in daily life

Despite the growing interest in future‐oriented cognition in various areas of psychology, there is still little empirical data regarding the occurrence and nature of future‐oriented thoughts in daily life. In this study, participants recorded future‐oriented thoughts occurring in natural settings and rated their characteristics and functions. The results show that future‐oriented thoughts occur frequently in daily life and can take different representational formats (more or less abstract), embrace various thematic contents (e.g. work, relationships) and serve a range of functions (e.g. action planning, decision making). The functions and characteristics of thoughts differed according to their temporal distance, with thoughts referring to the near future being more specific and serving action planning to a greater extent than thoughts concerning the far future. The characteristics of future thoughts were also related to affective content, with positive thoughts being more frequent, more specific, and associated with more visual images than negative thoughts. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Order or disorder? Impaired Hebb learning in dyslexia

The present study offers an integrative account proposing that dyslexia and its various associated cognitive impairments reflect an underlying deficit in the long-term learning of serial-order information, here operationalized as Hebb repetition learning. In nondyslexic individuals, improved immediate serial recall is typically observed when one particular sequence of items is repeated across an experimental session, a phenomenon known as the Hebb repetition effect. Starting from the critical observation that individuals with dyslexia seem to be selectively impaired in cognitive tasks that involve processing of serial order, the present study is the first to test and confirm the hypothesis that the Hebb repetition effect is affected in dyslexia, even for nonverbal modalities. We present a theoretical framework in which the Hebb repetition effect is assumed to be a laboratory analogue of naturalistic word learning, on the basis of which we argue that dyslexia is characterized by an impairment of serial-order learning that affects language learning and processing.     

Can Creativity Beat Death? A Review and Evidence on the Existential Anxiety Buffering Functions of Creative Achievement

The relationship between creativity and symbolic immortality had been long acknowledged by scholars. In a review of the literature, we found 12 papers that empirically examined the relationship between creativity and mortality awareness using a Terror Management Theory paradigm, overall supporting the notion that creativity plays an important role in the management of existential concerns. Also, a mini meta‐analysis of the impact of death awareness on creativity resulted in a small‐medium weighted mean effect. We examined the existential anxiety buffering functions of creative achievement as assessed by the Creative Achievement Questionnaire in a sample of 108 students. It was found that at high, but not low, levels of creative goals, creative achievement was associated with lower death‐thought accessibility under mortality salience in comparison to controls. To our knowledge, this is the first empirical report of the anxiety buffering functions of creative achievement among people for whom creativity constitutes a central part of their cultural worldview. The current findings support the notion that creative achievement may be an avenue for symbolic immortality, particularly among individuals who value creativity. Implications for understanding death‐related creativity motivations and their impact on individuals and society and for the promotion of creative achievement and creative motivation are discussed.     

The effect of ageing on the recollection of emotional and neutral pictures

This study investigated age-related differences in recognition memory for emotional and neutral pictures. Younger and older participants were asked to rate pictures according to their emotional valence, arousal, and visual complexity. Two weeks later they had to recognise these pictures and the states of awareness associated with memory were assessed with the "remember/know/guess" paradigm. We found that, although the influence of emotion on recognition accuracy (as assessed by d') was similar in both age groups, the tendency for positive and negative pictures to create a rich recollective experience was weaker in older adults. In addition, "remember" responses were more often based on a recollection of emotional reactions in older than in younger participants. We suggest that the elderly tend to focus on their feelings when confronted with emotional pictures, which could have impaired their memory for the contextual information associated with these stimuli.     

Adults' age-related differences in adaptivity of strategy choices: evidence from computational estimation

Four experiments document adults' age-related changes in computational estimation performance and in adaptivity of strategy choices (i.e., the ability to choose the most precise strategy on each trial). Young and older adults were asked to provide estimates of 2-by-2-digit multiplication problems (e.g., 43 x 78) under varying conditions of speed and accuracy emphasis. The main findings showed that (a) older adults provided less accurate estimates and took more time to estimate, especially on the most difficult problems or when using harder strategies; (b) young and older adults had similar strategy preferences; and (c) older adults chose estimation strategies less adaptively than young adults. Implications of these findings for understanding strategic changes during adulthood in a wide variety of cognitive domains are discussed.     

Non‐adjacent Dependencies Processing in Human and Non‐human Primates

Human and non‐human primates share the ability to extract adjacent dependencies and, under certain conditions, non‐adjacent dependencies (i.e., predictive relationships between elements that are separated by one or several intervening elements in a sequence). In this study, we explore the online extraction dynamics of non‐adjacent dependencies in humans and baboons using a serial reaction time task. Participants had to produce three‐target sequences containing deterministic relationships between the first and last target locations. In Experiment 1, participants from the two species could extract these non‐adjacent dependencies, but humans required less exposure than baboons. In Experiment 2, the data show for the first time in a non‐human primate species the successful generalization of sequential non‐adjacent dependencies over novel intervening items. These findings provide new evidence to further constrain current theories about the nature and the evolutionary origins of the learning mechanisms allowing the extraction of non‐adjacent dependencies.     

Remembering – but not knowing – disturbs the relational bindings newly established in short-term/working memory: an age-group comparison

The aim of this study was to highlight that episodic memory and working memory compete for the same resource, which would be diminished in aging. Using the remember/know paradigm, we compared the interference related to the retrieval of words on the parallel processing of preestablished relational bindings (Shifting condition) or newly established relational bindings (Updating condition). Within each age-group, participants had comparable performances in remembering across recognition conditions. However, the results showed that only updating activity was impaired after a remember response was given in the younger group. This specific interaction between updating and remembering – but not knowing – tends to indicate that both working memory and episodic memory rely on the ability to establish contextualized representations. In the older group, the performance in updating activity was impaired regardless of the kind of the competing retrieval. Limitations in terms of interference hypothesis and limited resource hypothesis are discussed.     

Are belief‐based justifications associated with metalinguistic awareness? A cross‐sectional study in school‐age children

Previous research has consistently demonstrated that false‐belief (FB) understanding correlates with and predicts metalinguistic ability in preschoolers. Surprisingly, however, there is scant evidence on the question of whether this relation persists at later ages. The present cross‐sectional study sought to fill this gap by examining the association between FB understanding, belief‐based justifications and metalinguistic awareness. A sample of 150 children primary‐school children between 8 and 11 years of age were administered a test of receptive language, a second‐order theory‐of‐mind task and a comprehensive metalinguistic battery. The results of correlational and regression analyses showed that explicit metalinguistic awareness (in particular, performance in the Ambiguity and Phonemic Segmentation subtests) was significantly predicted by children's belief‐based responses to the justification question in the theory of mind task but only for children with small receptive vocabularies; in contrast, FB understanding made no independent contribution (either alone or in interaction with other measures). These findings complement and advance existing data by showing that, in school‐age children, the association between the 2 domains involves more mature, verbally explicit levels of FB understanding and metalinguistic awareness.

Highlights

• We examined the relation between metalinguistic awareness and theory‐of‐mind in primary‐school children.
• Metalinguistic awareness was associated to belief‐based justifications, but only for children with small vocabulary.
• In school‐age children the ability to provide verbal justifications plays a key role in the relation between theory‐of‐mind and metalinguistic awareness.

     

The effect of ageing on recollection: the role of the binding updating process

The aim of this study was to highlight the underlying process responsible for the age-related deficit in recollection. Through two experiments using the Remember-Know-Guess procedure (Gardiner, J. M., & Richardson-Klavehn, A. [2000]. Remembering and knowing. In The Oxford handbook of memory (pp. 229–244). New York, NY: Oxford University Press) in recognition, we manipulated the opportunity to update bindings between target items and their encoding context, in young and older adults. In the first experiment we impaired the binding updating process during the encoding of items, while in the second we supported this process. The results indicated that the “Remember” responses in the younger group were specifically reduced by the impairment of the binding updating process (Exp. 1), suggesting that this ability is useful for them to encode a specific episode. Conversely, only the “Remember” responses in the older group were improved in accuracy by supporting the binding updating process (Exp. 2), suggesting that their weakness in this ability is the source of their failure to improve the accuracy of their memories. The overall results support the hypothesis that the age-related decline in episodic memory is partly due to a greater vulnerability to interference on bindings, impairing the ability to update content-context bindings as and when events occur.     

A Longitudinal Study of Predictors of Housing Stability,Housing Quality,and Mental Health Functioning Among Single Homeless Individuals Staying in Emergency Shelters

The current study examined risk and resilience factors at multiple levels that affect homeless individuals' ability to exit homelessness and achieve housing stability. It also examined the relationship between housing status, housing quality and mental health functioning. The methodology is a longitudinal study of single homeless individuals staying in emergency shelters in a medium‐sized Canadian city who were followed for a 2 year period. Data were collected from participants at a baseline interview when they were homeless and at a 2‐year follow‐up. There were 329 participants interviewed at baseline and 197 (59.9%) participants interviewed at follow‐up. Results from a structural equation modelling analysis found that having interpersonal and community resources were predictive of achieving housing stability. Specifically, having a larger social support network, access to subsidized housing, and greater income was related to achieving housing stability. On the other hand, having a substance use problem was a risk factor associated with a failure to achieving housing stability. Being female, feeling personally empowered, having housing that is perceived of being of higher quality were directly predictive of mental health functioning at follow‐up. Findings are discussed in the context of previous research and their policy implications.