The varying effects of age of acquisition

There are a number of theories that suggest that age of acquisition (AoA) effects are not uniform across different tasks. Catling and Johnston (2006a) found greater AoA effects within an object-naming task than in a semantic classification task. They explained these findings by suggesting that AoA effects might accumulate according to how many levels of representation a task necessitates access to. Brysbaert and Ghyselinck (2006) explain the difference in AoA effects by proposing two distinct types of AoA (frequency dependent and frequency independent), the first accounted for by a connectionist-type mechanism and the latter situated at the interface between semantics and word production. Moreover, Moore, Smith-Spark, and Valentine (2004) and Holmes and Ellis (2006) have suggested that there are two loci of AoA effects: at the phonological level and somewhere within the perceptual level of representation. Again, this could account for the varying degrees of AoA effects. This study sets about testing these ideas by assessing the effect size of AoA across a series of different tasks that necessitate access to various levels of representation. Experiments 1-4 demonstrate significant effects of AoA in a novel picture-picture verification task, an object classification task, a picture verification task, and an object-naming task. Experiment 5 showed no effects of initial phoneme on the naming of the critical objects used within Experiments 1-4. The implication of the varying AoA effect sizes found within Experiments 1-4 in relation to explanations of AoA are discussed.     

Resampling programs for multiway contingency tables with fixed marginal frequency totals

A resampling algorithm is presented for analyzing multiway contingency tables with fixed marginal frequency totals. Applications are illustrated with extensions of Fisher's exact, Pearson's chi-squared, and likelihood-ratio tests to three-way contingency tables.     

Screening Job Applicants: The Impact of Physical Attractiveness and Application Quality

The present study investigated the impact of physical attractiveness and résuméquality on the evaluation of job applicants in the screening phase of the selection process. One hundred and eighty participants were asked to imagine they were a recruiting officer and to screen an application for the position of graduate trainee manager. Participants read a job advertisement and one of two versions of a curriculum vitae, which differed in quality. Attached to the front page of each curriculum vitae was a passport-sized head-and-shoulders photograph of either an average or an attractive female. A control condition with no attached photograph was also included. Participants judged the likelihood with which they would offer an interview to the applicant, the quality of the application, and the likely starting salary they would offer the applicant. Results indicated that attractiveness had no impact when the quality of the application was high but that attractiveness was an advantage when the application was mediocre. When the résumé quality was average the attractive applicant was evaluated more positively than the control, no photograph, applicant; an attractive photograph boosted the evaluation of a mediocre application. Results are discussed in terms of discrimination and implications for the field of human resource management.     

Attentional Limitations in Doing Two Tasks at Once

ABSTRACT— People generally have difficulty doing two tasks at once. To explain this fact, theorists have proposed that central processing—the thought-like stages following perceptual encoding and preceding response processing—takes place for only one task at a time. Because this bottleneck imposes severe limits on human cognitive processes, research has attempted to find exceptions. There is now solid evidence that, at least in the laboratory, the entire bottleneck can be completely bypassed under favorable combinations of circumstances. While these findings provide a ray of hope for enabling parallel multitasking in real-world scenarios, it will not be easy to take advantage of the combination of conditions that appear to be necessary.     

Factors influencing young children's risk of unintentional injury: Parenting style and strategies for teaching about home safety

This study examined mothers' teaching about home-safety issues to 24–30 month and 36–42 month old children, explored the relationship of teaching strategies to parenting styles, and assessed how these factors are related to children's risk of unintentional injury. A structured interview assessed home-safety issues relevant to falls, burns, cuts, poisoning, and suffocation/strangulation/choking. Mothers identified safety issues relevant to her child, and indicated the type and extent to which she utilized teaching as a strategy to address each safety issue. Standardized questionnaires provided information about parenting style and children's history of injuries. Results revealed that mothers' endorsements of home-safety issues did not vary with child age, mothers used teaching to manage safety issues for all types of injuries, and type of teaching strategy (explanations, rules, behavior modification) varied with parenting style. Greater use of explaining and less rule usage was linked to permissive parenting; these teaching strategies predicted children's medically-attended injury among highly-permissive mothers. Thus, teaching about safety is a common risk-management strategy mothers use to address hazards in the home. However, the specific type of teaching strategy used varies with parenting style, which has implications for children's risk of injury.     

Predicting treatment response for childhood attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: Introduction of a heuristic model to guide research

Efficacious treatments for childhood attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have been clearly documented in the extant literature. However, significant challenges remain in delivering these treatments to the children and families they were developed to benefit. With the aim of better understanding the obstacles that impede delivery of treatments for ADHD, this paper reviews what is known regarding predictors of treatment acceptance, adherence, and success among families of children with ADHD. We identify several gaps in this literature, including the need for a strong, theoretically-driven model that encompasses parental cognitive variables in understanding the treatment experiences of these families.     

CHRONOMETRIC EVIDENCE FOR TWO TYPES OF ATTENTION

Abstract— Parallel processing in the human brain is subject to severe attention limits, but it is unclear whether such limits arise from a single intentional process or multiple distinct attention processes. We provide new evidence that two candidates, input attention and central attention, operate at different temporal stages of processing. This conclusion is supported by chronometric analyses showing that the same reference stage (letter identification) operates after the stage at which input attention operates, but prior to the stage at which central attention operates. The finding that attention operates at different temporal loci provides new support for the existence of distinct attentional processes.