Ability of dyslexic and control teenagers to sustain attention and inhibit responses

Dyslexia and attentional difficulty have often been linked, but little is known of the nature of the supposed attentional disorder. The Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART; Robertson, Manly, Andrade, Baddeley, & Yiend, 1997) was designed as a measure of sustained attention and requires the withholding of responses to rare (one in nine) targets. To investigate the nature of the attentional disorder in dyslexia, this paper reports two studies that examined the performance of teenagers with dyslexia and their age-matched controls on the SART, the squiggle SART (a modification of the SART using novel and unlabellable stimuli rather than digits) and the go-gap-stop test of response inhibition (GGST). Teenagers with dyslexia made significantly more errors than controls on the original SART, but not on the squiggle SART. There were no group differences on the GGST. After controlling for speed of reaction time in a sequential multiple regression predicting SART false alarms, false alarms on the GGST accounted for up to 22 per cent extra variance in the control groups (although less on the squiggle SART) but negligible amounts of variance in the dyslexic groups. We interpret the results as reflecting a stimulus recognition automaticity deficit in dyslexia, rather than a sustained attention deficit. Furthermore, results suggest that response inhibition is an important component of performance on the standard SART when stimuli are recognised automatically.     

One Family at a Time: A Prevention Program for At‐Risk Parents

The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of a psychoeducational parenting program with at‐risk parents of young children. At‐risk was defined as excessive parental use of verbal and corporal punishment combined with low‐income status. All families were seen for 10 weeks, either individually or in very small groups. Results showed that compared with the control group, parents participating in the program significantly decreased their levels of verbal and corporal punishment, anger, stress, and reported child behavior problems; results were maintained at follow‐up. Implications for counselors are provided.     

The face of fear: Effects of eye gaze and emotion on visual attention

We investigated whether a fearful expression enhances the effect of another's gaze in directing the attention of an observer. Participants viewed photographs of faces whose gaze was directed ahead, to the left or to the right. Target letters then appeared unpredictably to the left or right. As expected, targets in the location indicated by gaze were detected more rapidly. In nonanxious volunteers the effects of fearful gaze did not differ from neutral gaze, but fearful expression had a more powerful influence in a selected high anxious group. Attention is thus more likely to be guided by the direction of fearful than neutral gaze, but only in anxiety-prone individuals.     

Probability, logic and the cognitive foundations of rational belief

Since Pascal introduced the idea of mathematical probability in the 17th century discussions of uncertainty and “rational” belief have been dogged by philosophical and technical disputes. Furthermore, the last quarter century has seen an explosion of new questions and ideas, stimulated by developments in the computer and cognitive sciences. Competing ideas about probability are often driven by different intuitions about the nature of belief that arise from the needs of different domains (e.g., economics, management theory, engineering, medicine, the life sciences etc). Taking medicine as our focus we develop three lines of argument (historical, practical and cognitive) that suggest that traditional views of probability cannot accommodate all the competing demands and diverse constraints that arise in complex real-world domains. A model of uncertain reasoning based on a form of logical argumentation appears to unify many diverse ideas. The model has precursors in informal discussions of argumentation due to Toulmin, and the notion of logical probability advocated by Keynes, but recent developments in artificial intelligence and cognitive science suggest ways of resolving epistemological and technical issues that they could not address.     

A Typology of LDS Sociopolitical Worldviews

Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons, Latter-Day Saints, or LDS) are sometimes thought of as a monolithic block of economic and social conservatives. This article addresses whether this is caused by strong religious effects, or whether it is an artifact of unrepresentative sampling. Q methodology is used to identify six "types" of political worldviews among a multinational and multiracial sample of active Latter-Day Saints. The six types reveal some interesting ideological variations among Mormons, particularly on economic issues, and even some unique LDS issues. A second-order factor analysis indicates a high level of commonality across types on social issues, but important differences on orientation toward government. I conclude that the failure to include racial and cultural variation in Mormon samples has led us to overestimate the otherwise significant influence of LDS doctrine on members' political views.     

Children's conceptions of mental illness: A naïve theory approach

This paper reports two studies that investigated children's conceptions of mental illness using a naïve theory approach, drawing upon a conceptual framework for analysing illness representations which distinguishes between the identity, causes, consequences, curability, and timeline of an illness. The studies utilized semi‐structured interviewing and card selection tasks to assess 6‐ to 11‐year‐old children's conceptions of the causes and consequences (Study 1) and the curability and timeline (Study 2) of different mental and physical illnesses/ailments. The studies revealed that, at all ages, the children held coherent causal–explanatory ideas about the causes, consequences, curability, and timeline of both mental and physical illnesses/ailments. However, while younger children tended to rely on their knowledge of common physical illnesses when thinking about mental illnesses, providing contagion and contamination explanations of cause, older children demonstrated differences in their thinking about mental and physical illnesses. No substantial gender differences were found in the children's thinking. It is argued that children hold coherent conceptions of mental illness at all ages, but that mental illness only emerges as an ontologically distinct conceptual domain by the end of middle childhood.     

Texture discrimination and the analysis of proximity.

A major theory of early visual processing has recently been proposed by Marr, which considers a number of aspects of visual perception in great detail, including grouping and texture discrimination. New phenomena associated with texture discrimination are described and experiments reported which allow a preliminary comparison of Marr's theory, as it applies to texture discrimination, with more established theories such as that due to Julesz. One experiment produced results which are clearly consistent with Marr's account, but the ability of his theory to deal with additional data on region suppression is not established. The theory of the analysis of proximity relations proposed by Fox offers a broadly satisfactory account of many texture perception results, while relying on the more fundamental parts of Marr's theory of primitive visual processes to deal with the remainder. A further attraction of proximity analysis is that it may shed new light on the classical paradox of symmetry perception. Some ways in which the preliminary proximity analysis model is incomplete are discussed, and it is concluded that development of the model may be profitable for theories of early visual processing.     

The use of structural diagnostics in recognition.

The suggestion of Krueger (1973) and other that wholistic processes underlie certain perceptual judgments is taken up in this paper. It is argued that properties such as bilateral symmetry can have a "diagnostic" significance for visual matching tasks. Diagnosticity means that if the property is present the appropriate response to a stimulus could theoretically be determined without any other analysis of the stimulus. Experiments 1 and 2 indicate that symmetry is exploited as a diagnostic property for the simultaneous same-different judgment. Displays that show the diagnostic form produce short reaction times. These experiments also show that the diagnosticity effect can be demonstrated independent of potentially confounding factors such as simplicity or redundancy. Experiments 3, 4, and 5 discount further confounding factors and also show that other properties, notably parallelism and colinearity of stimulus elements, can also be exploited as diagnostic in the simultaneous matching task. Diagnostics can have a structural or relational form. Diagnostic features are viewed as two-place structural predicates. Whether these diagnostics always have the same underlying form or not, the need for some representation of structure is a prerequisite for understanding even these simple recognition phenomena.