Incidental learning in a multisensory environment across childhood

Multisensory information has been shown to modulate attention in infants and facilitate learning in adults, by enhancing the amodal properties of a stimulus. However, it remains unclear whether this translates to learning in a multisensory environment across middle childhood, and particularly in the case of incidental learning. One hundred and eighty‐one children aged between 6 and 10 years participated in this study using a novel Multisensory Attention Learning Task (MALT). Participants were asked to respond to the presence of a target stimulus whilst ignoring distractors. Correct target selection resulted in the movement of the target exemplar to either the upper left or right screen quadrant, according to category membership. Category membership was defined either by visual‐only, auditory‐only or multisensory information. As early as 6 years of age, children demonstrated greater performance on the incidental categorization task following exposure to multisensory audiovisual cues compared to unisensory information. These findings provide important insight into the use of multisensory information in learning, and particularly on incidental category learning. Implications for the deployment of multisensory learning tasks within education across development will be discussed.     

Maintaining perceived control with unemployment facilitates future adjustment

Unemployment is a major challenge to individuals' development. An important personal resource to ameliorate the negative impact of unemployment may be perceived control, a general-purpose belief system. Little is known, however, about how perceived control itself changes with the experience of unemployment and what the antecedents, correlates, and consequences of such change in perceived control are in different ages. We use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (N = 413 who experienced unemployment and N = 413 case-matched controls; time period of data collection: 1994–1996) to examine whether perceived control changes with unemployment, explore the role of socio-demographic, psychosocial and health factors in moderating such change, and investigate whether levels of perceived control prior to unemployment and unemployment-related change in perceived control predict unemployment-related outcomes up to five years following. Results indicated that, on average, perceived control remained relatively stable with unemployment, and that younger and older workers did not differ in this regard. However, there were sizeable individual differences in change in perceived control, with women and those with fewer years of education experiencing greater unemployment-related declines in perceived control. Lower levels of perceived control prior to unemployment and steeper unemployment-related decrements in perceived control were each associated with a higher risk of remaining unemployed in the 12 months immediately following unemployment. Steeper unemployment-related declines in perceived control also predicted lower life satisfaction up to five years following. We discuss possible pathways by which perceived control may facilitate adjustment to unemployment, consider the role of perceived control for better understanding the dynamics of unemployment, and suggest routes for further more process-oriented inquiry.     

Development of the Friendships and Social Skills Test (FASST): A Parent Report Measure

This paper describes the initial development of the Friendships and Social Skills Test (FASST), a clinically oriented 25-item parent report measure of child peer relationships and social skills in a community (N = 423) and clinical sample (N = 159) of elementary school age children. Confirmatory factor analyses supported five factors measuring pro-social skills, negative peer directed behavior, friendship interactions, peer victimization, and the level of concern expressed about a child’s social functioning. Internal consistency and test–retest reliability of the FASST factors predominately ranged from moderate to very good. Validity was supported through higher scores in at-risk and clinical groups compared to children in the community and through correlations with an existing measure of social skills and emotional and behavioral functioning. Cross-informant validity was supported by correlations with teacher-report. Moreover, the scales measuring negative social behaviors and pro-social skills predicted changes in peer victimization and concern expressed about the child over a 1-year duration. By assessing positive and negative aspects of peer-directed behaviors and relationships the FASST has the potential to facilitate the identification and treatment of childhood social deficits in mental health settings.     

Fake religions,politics and ironic fandom: the Church of the SubGenius,Zontar and American televangelism

This paper challenges recent arguments that the Church of the SubGenius (COSG) is a ‘real’ religious organization, in that it purportedly provides a path to spiritual enlightenment. Besides downplaying the COSG’s comedic aspects, these essentialist approaches have largely ignored its historical development within the American ‘alternative’ underground of the 1980s and early-1990s. Drawing on interviews and the analysis of participatory media, this paper examines the COSG alongside Zontar, a stridently political zine named in honour of a B-movie monster that its founders claimed to worship. It is demonstrated that these interrelated, intentionally ‘fake’ religions emerged in the context of a turbulent American culture war, and confronted a conservative evangelicalism perceived to be a political threat. While the founders of the COSG and Zontar accordingly attacked and satirised politically engaged television preachers such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, their approaches to certain less explicitly political televangelists can be considered examples of ironic fandom, shot through with flashes of genuine admiration. In all of these activities, the founders of these fake faiths participated in a cultural discussion about authentic Christianity in America – playful religious work more indicative of the COSG’s cultural significance than its alleged status as an ‘authentic’ religion.     

The drive revisited: Mastery and satisfaction

Starting from the theory of the libido and the notions of the experience of satisfaction and the drive for mastery introduced by Freud, the author revisits the notion of the drive by proposing the following model: the drive takes shape in the combination of two currents of libidinal cathexis, one which takes the paths of the ‘apparatus for obtaining mastery’ (the sense‐organs, motricity, etc.) and strives to appropriate the object, and the other which cathects the erotogenic zones and the experience of satisfaction that is experienced through stimulation in contact with the object. The result of this combination of cathexes constitutes a ‘representation’, the subsequent evocation of which makes it possible to tolerate for a certain period of time the absence of a satisfying object. On the basis of this conception, the author distinguishes the representations proper, vehicles of satisfaction, from imagos and traumatic images which give rise to excitation that does not link up with the paths taken by the drives. This model makes it possible to conciliate the points of view of the advocates of ‘object‐seeking’ and of those who give precedence to the search for pleasure, and, further, to renew our understanding of object‐relations, which can then be approached from the angle of their relations to infantile sexuality. Destructiveness is considered in terms of “mastery madness” and not in terms of the late Freudian hypothesis of the death drive.     

The use of probabilistic lexicality cues for word segmentation in Chinese reading

In an eye-tracking experiment we examined whether Chinese readers were sensitive to information concerning how often a Chinese character appears as a single-character word versus the first character in a two-character word, and whether readers use this information to segment words and adjust the amount of parafoveal processing of subsequent characters during reading. Participants read sentences containing a two-character target word with its first character more or less likely to be a single-character word. The boundary paradigm was used. The boundary appeared between the first character and the second character of the target word, and we manipulated whether readers saw an identity or a pseudocharacter preview of the second character of the target. Linear mixed-effects models revealed reduced preview benefit from the second character when the first character was more likely to be a single-character word. This suggests that Chinese readers use probabilistic combinatorial information about the likelihood of a Chinese character being single-character word or a two-character word online to modulate the extent of parafoveal processing.     

A perceptual-economy account for the inverted-optimal viewing position effect

In reading, fixation durations are longer when the eyes fall near the center of words than when fixation occurs toward the words' ends-the inverted-optimal viewing position (I-OVP) effect. This study assessed whether the I-OVP effect was based on the fixation position in the word or the fixation position in the visual stimulus. In Experiments 1-3, words were presented at variable locations within longer strings of symbols. On trials with short fixation durations, there were effects of fixation position in the string. When long fixations were made, there were effects of fixation position in the word. In Experiment 4, an I-OVP effect was found for meaningless number strings, and its strength depended on the task's processing demands. The findings show that (a) the I-OVP effect is unrelated to orthographic informativeness and (b) the eyes are not constrained to spend more time at the center of visual stimuli. These results support a perceptual-economy account: Fixations are held longer when the eyes are estimated to be at locations in words/stimuli in which greater amounts of information are anticipated. Implications for eye movements in reading are discussed.     

Well-being affects changes in perceptual speed in advanced old age: longitudinal evidence for a dynamic link

This study examined competing hypotheses about dynamic cross-domain associations between perceptual speed and well-being in advanced old age. We applied the bivariate dual change score model (J. J. McArdle & F. Hamagami, 2001) to 13-year incomplete longitudinal data from the Berlin Aging Study (P. B. Baltes & K. U. Mayer, 1999; N=516, 70-103 years at T1, M=85 years). Reports of well-being were found to influence subsequent decline in perceptual speed (time lags of 2 years). No evidence was found for a directed effect in the other direction. None of the potential covariates examined (initial health constraints, personality, and social participation) accounted for these differential lead-lag associations. Our results suggest that well-being is not only a consequence of but also a source for successful aging. The discussion focuses on conceptual implications and methodological considerations.     

On the role of passion in performance

The present paper reports two studies designed to test the Dualistic Model of Passion with regard to performance attainment in two fields of expertise. Results from both studies supported the Passion Model. Harmonious passion was shown to be a positive source of activity investment in that it directly predicted deliberate practice (Study 1) and positively predicted mastery goals which in turn positively predicted deliberate practice (Study 2). In turn, deliberate practice had a direct positive impact on performance attainment. Obsessive passion was shown to be a mixed source of activity investment. While it directly predicted deliberate practice (Study 1) and directly predicted mastery goals (which predicted deliberate practice), it also predicted performance-avoidance and performance-approach goals, with the former having a tendency to facilitate performance directly, and the latter to directly negatively impact on performance attainment (Study 2). Finally, harmonious passion was also positively related to subjective well-being (SWB) in both studies, while obsessive passion was either unrelated (Study 1) or negatively related to SWB (Study 2). The conceptual and applied implications of the differential influences of harmonious and obsessive passion in performance are discussed.