The Opposites Task: Using General Rules to Test Cognitive Flexibility in Preschoolers

Executive functions play an important role in cognitive development, and during the preschool years especially, children's performance is limited in tasks that demand flexibility in their behavior. We asked whether preschoolers would exhibit limitations when they are required to apply a general rule in the context of novel stimuli on every trial (the “opposites” task). Two types of inhibitory processing were measured: response interference (resistance to interference from a competing response) and proactive interference (resistance to interference from a previously relevant rule). Group data show 3-year-olds have difficulty inhibiting prepotent tendencies under these conditions, whereas 5-year-olds’ accuracy is near ceiling in the task.     

The Great Sustainability Challenge: How Visitor Studies Can Save Cultural Institutions in the 21st Century

ABSTRACT

Sustainability will be the great challenge for many cultural institutions in the first quarter of the 21st Century. Changing patterns of government, corporate, and individual support, new demographics, and new ways of creating, preserving, and sharing information are all challenging the sustainability of museums and other cultural institutions. In 2001 a meeting of science museum leaders in Bristol identified 3 distinct but interacting dimensions to sustainability: financial, intellectual, and social. Financial crises are the most obvious threats to the survival of institutions, but intellectual and social weaknesses can be equally dangerous and can make a temporary financial problem fatal. Visitor studies have the potential to provide crucial understandings that cultural institutions will need to build new, more sustainable models than the ones which served the previous century.     

Trauma Survivors' Emotional Distress and Barriers to Early Psychological Intervention in an Inner-City Acute Surgical Trauma Service

Fifty-five predominantly low-income ethnic minority patients were interviewed and screened for early signs of psychological distress following traumatic injury. A free, brief intervention and transportation were offered to patients who evidenced psychiatric symptoms. Over half of participants reported psychiatric symptoms, but none accepted the free intervention. This study examined reasons participants remained reluctant to engage in services despite elimination of common barriers. Results highlight the importance of perceptual barriers over structural barriers in engaging patients in psychological interventions following a traumatic event.     

View combination: a generalization mechanism for visual recognition

We examined whether view combination mechanisms shown to underlie object and scene recognition can integrate visual information across views that have little or no three-dimensional information at either the object or scene level. In three experiments, people learned four “views” of a two dimensional visual array derived from a three-dimensional scene. In Experiments 1 and 2, the stimuli were arrays of colored rectangles that preserved the relative sizes, distances, and angles among objects in the original scene, as well as the original occlusion relations. Participants recognized a novel central view more efficiently than any of the Trained views, which in turn were recognized more efficiently than equidistant novel views. Experiment 2 eliminated presentation frequency as an explanation for this effect. Experiment 3 used colored dots that preserved only identity and relative location information, which resulted in a weaker effect, though still one that was inconsistent with both part-based and normalization accounts of recognition. We argue that, for recognition processes to function so effectively with such minimalist stimuli, view combination must be a very general and fundamental mechanism, potentially enabling both visual recognition and categorization.     

Are we aware of our ability to forget? Metacognitive predictions of directed forgetting

It is often important to accurately predict not only what information we will later remember, but also what information we are likely to forget. The present research examined these abilities in the context of item-method directed forgetting, to determine whether people are aware of their strategic control of remembering and forgetting, as well as what cues are used when making metacognitive judgments. Participants studied words, each of which was followed by a cue to remember (R) or forget (F) the word for an upcoming test, and also made predictions of how likely they would be to later recall each word. When asked to recall all of the words, regardless of cue, both recall and predicted recall were fairly sensitive to the R or F instructions, despite some overconfidence. A similar and stronger pattern was found when words were assigned positive or negative point values as cues to remember or forget. These findings suggest that item-based cues to remember or forget information can be successfully utilized when making metacognitive judgments, and that people are fairly aware of the control they have over both remembering and forgetting information.     

The role of locomotor posture and experience on handedness and footedness in infancy

This research examined the development of handedness and footedness in infancy. We measured footedness by documenting the limb infants used to "lead-out" as they crawled or walked down a path several times. We measured handedness by documenting the hand infants used to reach for a goal at the end of each trial. Study 1 showed that locomotor skill affects limb lateralization preferences and that most 13-month-old infants demonstrated a side preference for reaching and leading out "in the moment." Study 2 longitudinally examined the developmental trajectories of handedness and footedness as they related to locomotor posture and experience. The findings suggest high variability in the developmental trajectory of footedness, with frequent fluctuation between side preferences. The developmental trajectory of handedness was more stable over the transition between locomotor milestones. The transition between crawling and walking decreased the proportion of infants demonstrating side preferences for leading out and the onset of walking decreased the proportion of infants demonstrating side preferences for reaching. These findings demonstrate the importance of making behavioral observations at multiple time scales to understand underlying developmental trajectories, specifically the stability or instability of the motor system associated with the acquisition of new motor abilities.     

Children's memory for the times of events from the past years

This study tested 8–12‐year‐olds' ability to localize in time parent‐reported events from four time intervals ranging from 6 months to 4 years ago. Memory for content was very accurate, and children's time estimates showed substantial agreement with the times provided by their parents. Accuracy of year judgments declined with retention interval, with the greatest change occurring between the 1–2‐year and 2–3‐year intervals. Season, month and time of day accuracy were much more stable over time. There were significant improvements with age in performance on measures of conventional time knowledge, and this performance was correlated with the accuracy of time estimates on the long time scales, controlling for age and general cognitive ability. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Acquiring ownership and the attribution of responsibility

How is ownership established over non-owned things? We suggest that people may view ownership as a kind of credit given to agents responsible for making possession of a non-owned object possible. On this view, judgments about the establishment of ownership depend on attributions of responsibility. We report three experiments showing that people’s judgments about the establishment of ownership are influenced by an agent’s intent and control in bringing about an outcome, factors that also affect attributions of responsibility. These findings demonstrate that people do not just consider who was first to possess an object in judging who owns it, and are broadly consistent with the view that ownership is acquired through labor. The findings also suggest that rather than exclusively being the product of social conventions, judgments about the establishment of ownership over non-owned things also depend on the psychological processes underlying the attribution of responsibility.     

Culture and accountability in negotiation: Recognizing the importance of in-group relations

We extend Gelfand and Realo’s (1999) argument that accountability motivates negotiators from relationally-focused cultures to use a more pro-relationship approach during negotiations. Our research shows that the effect they predict is found only when the other negotiating partner is an in-group member. Specifically, in two studies involving participants from China (a relationally-focused culture) and the US (a less relationally-focused culture), we found that only when negotiating with an in-group member are Chinese participants under high accountability more likely to use a pro-relationship approach than those under low accountability. Consequently, the differences between Chinese and American participants in the use of a pro-relationship approach occur only when they negotiate with an in-group member under high accountability. The strong attention to relationships, however, results in higher fixed-pie perceptions and lower joint gains. The implications of our findings for theory and practice are discussed.