Time-dependent forgetting in visual short-term memory

ABSTRACT

Whether visual short-term memory can be lost over an unfilled delay, in line with time-dependent forgetting, is controversial and prior work has yielded mixed results. The present study explored time-dependent forgetting in visual short-term memory in relation to other factors. In three experiments, participants compared single target and probe objects over a 2 s or 10 s retention interval. The objects across trials were either similar or dissimilar (Experiment 1) and had to be remembered in the presence of an additional distractor (Experiment 2) or under conditions where the amount of time separating trials varied (Experiment 3). In all experiments, the retention interval manipulation made the biggest contribution to performance, with accuracy decreasing as the retention interval was lengthened from 2 s to 10 s. These results pose problems for interference and temporal distinctiveness models of memory but are compatible with temporal forgetting mechanisms such as decay.     

Sustaining churchgoing young Anglicans in England and Wales: Assessing influence of the home

ABSTRACT

Responding to the problem facing the Church of England, as identified by the Church Growth Research Programme, regarding sustaining churchgoing young Anglicans, and also responding to the Renewal and Reform agenda to address this problem, the present study discusses the roles of three agencies in delivering effective Christian education and Christian formation: local churches, local schools, and the home. Building on a fruitful stream of research within Australia and the UK, the present study drew on two samples of young Anglicans: 2,019 9- to 11-year-old students attending church primary schools in Wales, and 2,323 13- to 15-year-old students attending church secondary schools mainly in England. The data demonstrated that young Anglicans who practised their Anglican identity by attending church did so primarily because their parents were Anglican churchgoers. Moreover, young Anglican churchgoers were most likely to keep going to church if their churchgoing parents (especially mother) talked with them about their faith. The implications from these findings, for an Anglican Church strategy for ministry among children and young people, is that alongside resourcing local churches and promoting deeply Christian schools, it may also be wise for the Church to invest in the education and formation of churchgoing Anglican parents.     

The Gender Congruence and Life Satisfaction Scale (GCLS): Development and validation of a scale to measure outcomes from transgender health services

Background: It is vital that the treatment offered at transgender health services can be evaluated to ensure a high quality of care. However, the tools currently used to evaluate treatment at transgender health services are limited by mainly focusing on mental health or because they have been developed for binary transgender people only. This study therefore aimed to develop and validate a tool that addresses these limitations. The Gender Congruence and Life Satisfaction Scale (GCLS) was developed through reviewing the literature, conducting interviews with transgender people, and holding discussions with experts working in transgender healthcare. An initial pool of items was developed and feedback on these was obtained. The tool was then validated.

Method: For the validation of the tool, a total of 789 participants (451 transgender [171 transgender females, 147 transgender males, 133 people identifying as non-binary], and 338 cisgender [254 females, 84 males]) were recruited from the United Kingdom to test the factor structure and validity of the GCLS.

Results: Exploratory factor analysis retained 38 items which formed seven subscales (psychological functioning; genitalia; social gender role recognition; physical and emotional intimacy; chest; other secondary sex characteristics; and life satisfaction). These seven subscales were found to have good internal consistency and convergent validity. The GCLS was also found to be capable of discriminating between groups (e.g., people who have and have not undergone gender affirming medical interventions). Transgender and cisgender subscale norms are provided for the GCLS.

Conclusion: The GCLS is a suitable tool to use with the transgender population to measure health-related outcomes for both clinical and research purposes.     

Confirmatory reinforcement learning changes with age during adolescence

Understanding how learning changes during human development has been one of the long-standing objectives of developmental science. Recently, advances in computational biology have demonstrated that humans display a bias when learning to navigate novel environments through rewards and punishments: they learn more from outcomes that confirm their expectations than from outcomes that disconfirm them. Here, we ask whether confirmatory learning is stable across development, or whether it might be attenuated in developmental stages in which exploration is beneficial, such as in adolescence. In a reinforcement learning (RL) task, 77 participants aged 11–32 years (four men, mean age = 16.26) attempted to maximize monetary rewards by repeatedly sampling different pairs of novel options, which varied in their reward/punishment probabilities. Mixed-effect models showed an age-related increase in accuracy as long as learning contingencies remained stable across trials, but less so when they reversed halfway through the trials. Age was also associated with a greater tendency to stay with an option that had just delivered a reward, more than to switch away from an option that had just delivered a punishment. At the computational level, a confirmation model provided increasingly better fit with age. This model showed that age differences are captured by decreases in noise or exploration, rather than in the magnitude of the confirmation bias. These findings provide new insights into how learning changes during development and could help better tailor learning environments to people of different ages.

Research Highlights

• Reinforcement learning shows age-related improvement during adolescence, but more in stable learning environments compared with volatile learning environments.
• People tend to stay with an option after a win more than they shift from an option after a loss, and this asymmetry increases with age during adolescence.
• Computationally, these changes are captured by a developing confirmatory learning style, in which people learn more from outcomes that confirm rather than disconfirm their choices.
• Age-related differences in confirmatory learning are explained by decreases in stochasticity, rather than changes in the magnitude of the confirmation bias.

     

Does colour preference have a role in colour term acquisition?

A developmental association exists between colour preference and emerging colour term acquisition in young children. Colour preference might influence colour term acquisition by directing attention towards or away from a particular colour, making it more or less memorable. To investigate the role that colour preference may have in the acquisition of colour terms, experimental tasks of colour preference, discrimination, attention, memory, and new colour term learning, were given to three groups of participants (preschool children; primary school children; and adults). Each task utilized the same colour stimuli, which were four computer‐simulated colours, matched perceptually to four different Munsell chips, drawn from the same colour category. Three colours varied systematically from an anchor colour (10PB 4/8) only in saturation (10PB 4/4), luminance (10PB 6/8), or hue (5P 4/8). Results showed that within‐category colour preferences emerged with age, and that when established within individuals, most preferred colours were named significantly more accurately than least preferred colours, although this association did not appear to be mediated directly by attention or memory. Rather, perceptual saliency was shown to have a mediating role, to some extent, in determining the relationship between colour preference and the cognitive processing of colour.     

Complex Demonstratives

Philosophical Studies -     

UNDERSTANDING FEMALE SPORT ATTRITION IN A STEREOTYPICAL MALE SPORT WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF ECCLES'S EXPECTANCY–VALUE MODEL

An empirical research study based upon the expectancy–value model of Eccles and colleagues (1983) investigated the effect of gender-role orientations on psychological dimensions of female athletes' sport participation and the likelihood of their continued participation in a stereotypical masculine activity. The model ( Eccles et al., 1983 ) posits that gender-role orientation is linked to the intention to persist or discontinue sport participation, which is acted upon indirectly through mediation by two motivational variables: an individual's perceived competence and the perceived value of the activity. Three models were compared to test this mediation hypothesis with 333 female adolescent handball players in a prospective study. Results from structural equation modeling showed that a fully mediated model fit the data. The masculinity orientation positively predicted value for and perceived competence in handball, whereas the femininity orientation negatively predicted perceived competence. In addition, the two motivational variables negatively predicted intention to drop out. Finally, such intentions are the more proximal predictors of actual dropout.