ERP Correlates of Form and Rhyme Letter Tasks in Impaired Reading Children: A Critical Evaluation

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were obtained from 15 electrode sites in six average and six impaired reading children, 12 years of age, during visual letter discrimination tasks. Subjects responded to target letters with an enclosed area in the form task and to letters that rhymed with “e” in the rhyme task. Response accuracy was similar between the groups. Reaction time was relatively longer for the impaired group during the rhyme task. At lateral sites, condition differences were evident as greater negative shifts in the rhyme task than the form at 170 and 470 ms as well as a delayed late positivity for the rhyme. In terms of reading ability, the average readers’ ERPs were more negative than those of the impaired group at 270 and 450 ms. Interhemispheric variations were also seen between the groups, with the average readers more negative than the impaired readers at right hemisphere sites. Contrary to expectations, group differences in the ERP did not vary substantially as a function of condition, and task demands were evaluated in view of these findings.     

Representational masking and the attentional blink

After successful detection of a target item within a stream of rapidly displayed visual stimuli, subsequent detection of an additional target is impaired for roughly 500 ms. This impairment is known as the “attentional blink” (AB). Previous studies have found that if either the first (Tl; Raymond, Shapiro, & Arnell, 1992) or second target (T2; Giesbrecht & Di Lollo, 1998) is not followed by a mask, the AB impairment is significantly reduced. Whereas low-level perceptual factors have been found to influence the efficacy of masking in the AB (e.g., Seiffert & Di Lollo, 1997), the current experiment used a higher level (representational) manipulation, i.e., repetition blindness to reduce the efficacy of target masking in the AB. These findings contribute to the growing literature suggesting that masking plays more than a perceptual role in the AB phenomenon.     

Timing at the Start of Associative Learning

Some theories of associative learning imply that time plays a fundamental role in the acquisition process. Consistent with these theories, this paper presents evidence that the time from the onset of a conditioned stimulus (CS) until presentation of the unconditioned stimulus (US) is learned very rapidly at the start of training. We report two autoshaping studies and a study on aversive conditioning in goldfish in which we examine timing at the start of conditioning. We also review data from a number of other conditioning preparations, including fear-potentiated startle, appetitive conditioning in rats, and eyeblink conditioning in rabbits, that report conditioned response (CR) timing early in training. Acquisition speed and the very first expressions of conditioned responding often show sensitivity to the time of US presentation. In instances where temporal control is slowly expressed, it is likely due to performance factors, not to slow learning about time. In fact, the learning about time may be a necessary condition for associative learning.     

Children's social groups and intergroup prejudice: Assessing the influence and inhibition of social group norms

A simulation group study examined whether the effects of group norms on 7‐ and 9‐year‐old children's intergroup attitudes can be moderated by a contrary school norm. Children learnt that their school had an inclusion norm, were assigned to a group with an outgroup inclusion or exclusion norm, and indicated their ingroup and outgroup attitudes under teacher surveillance or not. Results revealed reduced outgroup liking when the group had an exclusion norm, but that the effect was moderated when the school had an inclusion norm, especially among the older children. The participants’ ingroup liking was also reduced, but teacher surveillance had no effect on attitudes. The findings are discussed in relation to possible strategies to moderate social group norm effects.     

Testing joint attention, imitation, and play as infancy precursors to language and theory of mind

Various theoretical accounts propose that an important developmental relation exists between joint attention, play, and imitation abilities, and later theory of mind ability. However, very little direct empirical evidence supports these claims for putative “precursor” theory of mind status. A small sample (N=13) of infants, for whom measures of play, joint attention, and imitation had been collected at 20 months of age, was followed-up longitudinally at 44 months and a battery of theory of mind measures was conducted. Language and IQ were measured at both timepoints. Imitation ability at 20 months was longitudinally associated with expressive, but not receptive, language ability at 44 months. In contrast, only the joint attention behaviours of gaze switches between an adult and an active toy and looking to an adult during an ambiguous goal detection task at 20 months were longitudinally associated with theory of mind ability at 44 months. It is argued that joint attention, play, and imitation, and language and theory of mind, might form part of a shared social–communicative representational system in infancy that becomes increasingly specialised and differentiated as development progresses.     

Immigrant acculturation attitudes and host country identification

This study assessed the efficacy of a model predicting the host country identification of members of immigrant groups. The model proposed that host country identification is primarily determined by the positivity of the immigrants' acculturation attitude towards living according to the standards and values of the host country, followed by the degree of acceptance by members of the dominant cultural group, the success immigrants experience in the new country, and the extent to which they choose to live within their ethnic environment rather than the wider society. The study included 602 adult immigrants from a number of countries (Vietnam, People's Republic of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Sri Lanka, and New Zealand), which varied in their cultural similarity to the host country, Australia. Results from a multiple regression analysis of participants' questionnaire responses revealed good support for the model. As expected, acculturation attitude towards Australia was the strongest predictor of host country identification, followed by acceptance by Australians, while extent of ethnic involvement was a significant negative predictor. The results also revealed ethnic identification as a significant positive predictor of host country identification. The importance of the relationship between acculturation attitudes and identification is discussed, together with immigrants' identification processes towards their ethnic group and the host country. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Clinical interpretation: The hermeneutics of medicine

I argue that clinical medicine can best be understood not as a purified science but as a hermeneutical enterprise: that is, as involved with the interpretation of texts. The literary critic reading a novel, the judge asked to apply a law, must arrive at a coherent reading of their respective texts. Similarly, the physician interprets the text of the ill person: clinical signs and symptoms are read to ferret out their meaning, the underlying disease. However, I suggest that the hermeneutics of medicine is rendered uniquely complex by its wide variety of textual forms. I discuss four in turn: the experiential text of illness as lived out by the patient; the narrative text constituted during history-taking; the physical text of the patient's body as objectively examined; the instrumental text constructed by diagnostic technologies. I further suggest that certain flaws in modern medicine arise from its refusal of a hermeneutic self-understanding. In seeking to escape all interpretive subjectivity, medicine has threatened to expunge its primary subject — the living, experiencing patient.     

Effects of midterm integration on state and trait anxiety in black and white elementary school children

This study investigated the effects of stress associated with school integration on state and trait anxiety for 637 Black and White fourth- fifth- and sixth-grade children. A court-ordered integration plan resulted in the transfer of children from all-White and all-Black schools into integrated schools 2 months before the end of the school year. The State-Trait Anxiety Inventory for Children (STAIC) was administered 1 week prior to the transfer and 6 weeks following transfer. Females who were transferred had higher state anxiety scores than nontransferred females, but there were no differences for males. Transferred Black and White children did not differ in state anxiety, but transferred Blacks were higher in trait anxiety than transferred Whites.     

The Bursts and Lulls of Multimodal Interaction: Temporal Distributions of Behavior Reveal Differences Between Verbal and Non‐Verbal Communication

Recent studies of naturalistic face‐to‐face communication have demonstrated coordination patterns such as the temporal matching of verbal and non‐verbal behavior, which provides evidence for the proposal that verbal and non‐verbal communicative control derives from one system. In this study, we argue that the observed relationship between verbal and non‐verbal behaviors depends on the level of analysis. In a reanalysis of a corpus of naturalistic multimodal communication (Louwerse, Dale, Bard, & Jeuniaux, 2012 ), we focus on measuring the temporal patterns of specific communicative behaviors in terms of their burstiness. We examined burstiness estimates across different roles of the speaker and different communicative modalities. We observed more burstiness for verbal versus non‐verbal channels, and for more versus less informative language subchannels. Using this new method for analyzing temporal patterns in communicative behaviors, we show that there is a complex relationship between verbal and non‐verbal channels. We propose a “temporal heterogeneity” hypothesis to explain how the language system adapts to the demands of dialog.     

A test of two methods of arithmetic fluency training and implications for educational practice

Children are exposed to multiple training tasks that are intended to support acquisition of basic arithmetic skills. Surprisingly, there is a scarcity of experimental research that directly compares the efficacy of those tasks, raising the possibility that children may be spending critical instructional time on tasks that are not effective. We conducted an experiment with 1st through 6th grade children comparing two arithmetic training tasks that are widely used: answer production training and fact triangle training. Results show that answer production training produces substantial fluency gains, whereas fact triangle training does not. Further, we show that, despite theoretical considerations that suggest otherwise, fact triangle training does not produce more flexibly applicable learning. Implications for memory representation, arithmetic fluency training, and broader educational strategy are discussed.