Extending Research on a Computer-Based Sight-Word Reading Intervention to a Student with Autism

A multiple-baseline design across tasks (i.e., word lists) was used to evaluate the effects of a computer-based sight-word reading intervention (CBSWRI) on the sight-word reading of a sixth-grade student with Autism. Across 3 lists of primer and first-grade Dolch words, the student showed immediate increases in sight-word reading after the CBSWRI was applied. As the student learned 25 words in 16 brief (i.e., 200 s) sessions, the efficiency and sustainability of the CBSWRI are discussed along with future research.     

Trial-by-trial adjustments of top-down set modulate oculomotor capture

The role of top-down control in visual search has been a subject of much debate. Recent research has focused on whether attentional and oculomotor capture by irrelevant salient distractors can be modulated through top-down control, and if so, whether top-down control can be rapidly initiated based on current task goals. In the present study, participants searched for a unique shape in an array containing otherwise homogeneous shapes. A cue prior to each trial indicated the probability that an irrelevant color singleton distractor would appear on that trial. Initial saccades were less likely to land on the target and participants took longer to initiate a saccade to the target when a color distractor was present than when it was absent; this cost was greatly reduced on trials in which the probability that a distractor would appear was high, as compared to when the probability was low. These results suggest that top-down control can modulate oculomotor capture in visual search, even in a singleton search task in which distractors are known to readily capture both attention and the eyes. Furthermore, the results show that top-down distractor suppression mechanisms can be initiated quickly in anticipation of irrelevant salient distractors and can be adjusted on a trial-by-trial basis.     

Conceptualizing the autism spectrum in terms of natural selection and behavioral ecology: The solitary forager hypothesis

This article reviews etiological and comparative evidence supporting the hypothesis that some genes associated with the autism spectrum were naturally selected and represent the adaptive benefits of being cognitively suited for solitary foraging. People on the autism spectrum are conceptualized here as ecologically competent individuals that could have been adept at learning and implementing hunting and gathering skills in the ancestral environment. Upon independence from their mothers, individuals on the autism spectrum may have been psychologically predisposed toward a different life-history strategy, common among mammals and even some primates, to hunt and gather primarily on their own. Many of the behavioral and cognitive tendencies that autistic individuals exhibit are viewed here as adaptations that would have complemented a solitary lifestyle. For example, the obsessive, repetitive and systemizing tendencies in autism, which can be mistakenly applied toward activities such as block stacking today, may have been focused by hunger and thirst toward successful food procurement in the ancestral past. Both solitary mammals and autistic individuals are low on measures of gregariousness, socialization, direct gazing, eye contact, facial expression, facial recognition, emotional engagement, affiliative need and other social behaviors. The evolution of the neurological tendencies in solitary species that predispose them toward being introverted and reclusive may hold important clues for the evolution of the autism spectrum and the natural selection of autism genes. Solitary animals are thought to eschew unnecessary social contact as part of a foraging strategy often due to scarcity and wide dispersal of food in their native environments. It is thought that the human ancestral environment was often nutritionally sparse as well, and this may have driven human parties to periodically disband. Inconsistencies in group size must have led to inconsistencies in the manner in which natural selection fashioned the social minds of humans, which in turn may well be responsible for the large variation in social abilities seen in human populations. This article emphasizes that individuals on the autism spectrum may have only been partially solitary, that natural selection may have only favored subclinical autistic traits and that the most severe cases of autism may be due to assortative mating.     

What do the TOSCA guilt and shame scales really measure: Affect or action?

Psychologists have long used the Test of Self-Conscious Affect (TOSCA) as an instrument for empirically distinguishing between trait emotions of guilt and shame. Recent assessments of the internal structure of the TOSCA guilt scale suggest that it may not measure the experience of guilt, but rather motivation to make amends for personal wrongdoing. In contrast, TOSCA shame may better assess the tendency to experience negative self-conscious affect. Previous research did not take into account that TOSCA guilt theoretically should only predict emotions in a situation of wrongdoing; we put this idea to the test in two studies. Experimental, but not control, participants received believable feedback that they had shown involuntary prejudice towards a member of a minority group. In both studies TOSCA guilt predicted reparative action after feedback was given, including expressing non-prejudiced views and recommending financial compensation to the minority group. However, TOSCA guilt had no relationship with feelings of guilt or shame after expressing prejudice. In contrast, TOSCA shame was a better predictor of feelings of guilt, shame and other self-critical emotions, but did not predict compensatory action. These findings suggest motivation rather than emotion as a mechanism behind past findings involving TOSCA guilt.     

Attributional biases about the origins of attitudes: externality,emotionality, and rationality

Pilot work and 3 studies investigated the ways people explain the origins of attitudes. Study I examined the use of 3 dimensions (externality, rationality, emotionality) to explain the origin of people's own, in-group, and out-group attitudes. Attributions for own attitudes were the least externally and emotionally based and the most rationally based. By comparison with the out-group, less externality, less emotionality, and more rationality also were attributed to in-group attitudes. Studies 2 and 3 examined the effects of intergroup threat on attributions for in- and out-group attitude positions. Under high threat, more externality and emotionality but less rationality were attributed to out-group attitudes than under low threat. Intergroup differentiation mediated the difference between out-group attributions under high and low threat.     

Studying the grammatical aspects of word recognition: lexical priming,parsing, and syntactic ambiguity resolution

Two experiments are reported examining the relationship between lexical and syntactic processing during language comprehension, combining techniques common to the on-line study of syntactic ambiguity resolution with priming techniques common to the study of lexical processing. By manipulating grammatical properties of lexical primes, we explore how lexically based knowledge is activated and guides combinatory sentence processing. Particularly, we find that nouns (like verbs, see Trueswell & Kim, 1998) can activate detailed lexically specific syntactic information and that these representations guide the resolution of relevant syntactic ambiguities pertaining to verb argument structure. These findings suggest that certain principles of knowledge representation common to theories of lexical knowledge—such as overlapping and distributed representations—also characterize grammatical knowledge. Additionally, observations from an auditory comprehension study suggest similar conclusions about the lexical nature of parsing in spoken language comprehension. They also suggest that thematic role and syntactic preferences are activated during word recognition and that both influence combinatory processing.     

Reformed and Radically Orthodox?: Participatory Metaphysics,Reformed Scholasticism and Radical Orthodoxy's Critique of Modernity

Radical Orthodoxy locates the intellectual roots of secular modernity in the attenuation of Thomistic participatory metaphysics in the late medieval period. John Milbank implicates Reformational theologies in this unintentionally secularizing movement. I examine seventeenth‐century Reformed scholastic Stephen Charnock, contending that he articulates an account of participatory metaphysics similar to Thomas Aquinas, and even further, fails to exhibit the negative trends which Milbank and Catherine Pickstock associate with Scotus and the via moderna. This analysis of Charnock calls into question the location of Reformed theology in Radical Orthodoxy's genealogy of secular modernity, and opens up possibilities for rapprochement between Reformed theology and Radical Orthodoxy.     

Development of a Response Inconsistency Scale for the Personality Inventory for DSM–5

The advent of a dimensional model of personality disorder included in DSM–5 has necessitated the development of a new measurement scheme, specifically a self-report questionnaire termed the Personality Inventory for DSM–5 (PID–5; Krueger, Derringer, Markon, Watson, &; Skodol, 2012 Krueger, R. F., Derringer, J., Markon, K. E., Watson, D., &; Skodol, A. E. (2012). Initial construction of a maladaptive personality trait model and inventory for DSM–5. Psychological Medicine, 42, 1879–1890. doi:10.1017/S0033291711002674[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). However, there are many threats to the validity of a self-report measure, including response inconsistency. This study outlines the development of an inconsistency scale for the PID–5. Across both college student and clinical samples, the inconsistency scale was able to reliably differentiate real from random responding. Random responses led to increased scores on the PID–5 facets, indicating the importance of detecting inconsistent responding prior to test interpretation. Thus, this inconsistency scale could be of use to researchers and clinicians in detecting inconsistent responses to this new personality disorder measure.     

Cross-Community Contact, Perceived Status Differences, and Intergroup Attitudes in Northern Ireland: The Mediating Roles of Individual-level versus Group-level Threats and the Moderating Role of Social Identification

We tested a model which examined the relationship between contact quantity and quality, relative ingroup status, and intergroup attitudes in Northern Ireland. Intergroup anxiety was considered an individual-level mediator and realistic and symbolic threat as group-level mediators in the model. We examined the idea that the strength of ingroup identification moderates the predictive power of individual- versus group-level variables. Both contact and relative ingroup status predicted anxiety and perceived threats to the ingroup, which were significant mediators in the model. Our results also suggest that while anxiety predicts attitudes for low but not high identifiers, symbolic threats to the ingroup are more important for high than for low identifiers. There was also some evidence indicating that status perceptions moderate contact effects. We discuss these results in terms of their implications for intergroup relations in Northern Ireland.     

The activation of phonological representations by bilinguals while reading silently: evidence from interlingual homophones

These experiments investigated whether bilinguals activate phonological representations from both of their languages when reading silently in one. The critical stimuli were interlingual homophones (e.g., sank in English and cinq in French). French-English and English-French bilinguals completed an English lexical decision task. Decisions made by French-English bilinguals were significantly faster and more accurate for interlingual homophones than for matched English control words. In subsequent experiments, the homophone facilitation effect in the latency data disappeared when distractors were changed to pseudohomophones, when cognates and interlingual homographs were added to the experiment, and when the proportion of critical stimuli was decreased. However, the homophone effect in the error data remained. In contrast, English-French bilinguals revealed little evidence of an interlingual homophone effect. Several attempts were made to increase the saliency of the nontarget language, however these manipulations produced only a small effect in the error data. These results indicate that the activation of phonological representations can appear to be both language-specific and nonspecific depending on the proficiency of the bilinguals and whether they are reading in their weaker or stronger language.