Sustainable antibullying program implementation: School profiles and predictors

We examined the sustainability of the KiVa antibullying program in Finland from its nationwide roll-out in 2009 to 2016. Using latent class analyses, we identified four different patterns of implementation. The persistent schools (43%) maintained a high likelihood of participation throughout the study period. The awakened (14%) had a decreasing trend during the first years, but then increased the likelihood of program participation. The tail-offs (20%) decreased in the likelihood of participating after the third year, and the drop-offs (23%) already after the first year. The findings suggest that many schools need support during the initial years to launch and maintain the implementation of evidence-based programs; yet a large proportion of schools manage to sustain the program implementation for several years. The logistic regression analyses showed that large schools persisted more likely than small schools. Lower initial level of victimization was also related to the sustainability of the program. Finally, persistent program participation was predicted by several school-level actions during the initial years of implementing the program. These results imply that the sustainability of evidence-based programs could be enhanced by supporting and guiding schools when setting up the program during the initial implementation.     

Selective reaching in macaques: evidence for action-centred attention

Animal Cognition - When a monkey selects a piece of food lying on the ground from among other viable objects in the near vicinity, only the desired item governs the particular pattern and direction...     

The attribution of intentionality: the role of skill and morality

The present study contributes to the discussion on the different components which constitute the intentionality concept about an undesired side effect, focusing on the morality and the skill. Two hundred and forty participants were asked to read a brief story about a car accident, in which it was explained the motivation of the high speed and objective and subjective skill of the agent to drive the car, and to fill in six questions about intentionality, objective risk, mental representation of risk, risk acceptance and blameworthiness for the outcome. The principal results showed that when the motivation is morally negative, people judge the side effect more intentional, also because they make more severe judgments about risk and blameworthiness. Moreover, when people are objectively proficient to perform the action (objective skill) the side effect is considered less risky and intentional and, in the case of a negative outcome, they are judged less severely than if they have a poor ability. Finally, a self-assessment of low skill to make the action (subjective skill) leads people to assess higher risks and, consequently, more intentionality for the side effect. The results are discussed on the basis of the literature about some specific components that make up the intentionality concept.     

My word! Interference from reading object names implies a role for competition during picture name retrieval

A related word prime has been found to interfere with picture naming after unrelated intervening trials (word-to-picture interference). Recently, Stroop-type picture-word interference effects have been interpreted in terms of a postlexical response exclusion process rather than a competitive lexical selection process. An experiment is reported that examines whether word-to-picture effects could reflect response exclusion mechanisms and, more generally, strategic processing of the word prime. Forty-eight volunteer university students named aloud sequences of semantically related (and unrelated) word primes and picture targets, separated by two unrelated filler stimuli. On half of the trials, participants were asked to count backwards in threes from a random number presented immediately after naming the prime word. They were also given a surprise recall test at the end of the naming block. Results for naming times and errors indicated a main effect of relatedness; semantic interference effects were not dependent on the unfilled gap following the word prime trial and were also not tied to episodic recall of prime words. The data indicate that slowed picture naming times are more likely to emerge from processes intrinsic to word prime naming rather than controlled processing and do not readily fit the postlexical response exclusion account. The results are considered in relation to two recent accounts of interference over unrelated trials, which refer to some form of competition at, or prior to, lexical access.     

Representational neglect for words as revealed by bisection tasks

In the present study, we showed that a representational disorder for words can dissociate from both representational neglect for objects and neglect dyslexia. This study involved 14 brain-damaged patients with left unilateral spatial neglect and a group of normal subjects. Patients were divided into four groups based on presence of left neglect dyslexia and representational neglect for non-verbal material, as evaluated by the Clock Drawing test. The patients were presented with bisection tasks for words and lines. The word bisection tasks (with words of five and seven letters) comprised the following: (1) representational bisection: the experimenter pronounced a word and then asked the patient to name the letter in the middle position; (2) visual bisection: same as (1) with stimuli presented visually; and (3) motor bisection: the patient was asked to cross out the letter in the middle position. The standard line bisection task was presented using lines of different length. Consistent with the literature, long lines were bisected to the right and short lines, rendered comparable in length to the words of the word bisection test, deviated to the left (crossover effect). Both patients and controls showed the same leftward bias on words in the visual and motor bisection conditions. A significant difference emerged between the groups only in the case of the representational bisection task, whereas the group exhibiting neglect dyslexia associated with representational neglect for objects showed a significant rightward bias, while the other three patient groups and the controls showed a leftward bisection bias. Neither the presence of neglect alone nor the presence of visual neglect dyslexia was sufficient to produce a specific disorder in mental imagery. These results demonstrate a specific representational neglect for words independent of both representational neglect and neglect dyslexia.