Abstracting Psychological Literature,Especially Non-English,in the 1990s

The cessation of non-English materials in Psychological Abstracts in 1988 resulted in a crisis, yet to be resolved, in the international exchange of information. As a long-term solution we favour founding International Psychological Abstracts, with the responsibility for preparation of the abstracts to be shared by the international psychological community. It is hoped that the compact-disc versions of the databases will become affordable to institutions around the world. In this communication, in addition to the abstract system of the American Psychological Association, attention will be given to other abstract journals in English as well as in French, German, and Russian.     

The Effect of Research with Teenage Mothers on the Development of Their Infants1

Mother-infant interaction of 14 teenage mothers and 12 women 20 years or older was observed and recorded in the laboratory or the home when the infants were 16, 20, 24, and 52 weeks of age. In order to assess the possible effect of the research intervention on the maternal behavior and on the infants' development, a control group of teenage mothers and their infants was seen only at the end of the study when the infant was 52 weeks old. At 12 months the Home Observation Measure of the Environment Inventory (HOME) was administered and infants were assessed with the Bayley Scales of Infant Development (motor and mental scales) and the Ainsworth Strange Situation procedure. On all measures the observation groups scored significantly higher than the control group. The significant aspects of the research intervention are discussed.     

Thinking around the corner: the development of planning abilities

The ability to plan and search ahead is essential for problem solving in most situations in everyday life. To investigate the development of planning and related processes, a sample of four- and five-year-old children was examined in a variant of the Tower of London, a frequently used neuropsychological assessment tool of planning abilities. The applied problems either required searching ahead for optimal solution or were solvable by pure step-by-step forward processing. Furthermore, the ambiguity of subgoal ordering was varied.Results revealed an age-related effect of search depth: the four-year olds’ planning accuracy was particularly decreased in problems demanding search ahead, while five-year olds mastered both problem types equally well. Interestingly, this interaction between age and search depth could not be accounted for by measures of working memory and inhibition. Differential effects of age were also found for subgoal ordering with respect to initial planning and movement execution times. In sum, planning abilities showed considerable development during late kindergarten age that appeared to be specifically associated with the integration and back-validation of the anticipated consequences of internally modeled actions. The present study demonstrates that a careful consideration of problem structure may greatly enhance the insights gained from the application of a routinely used assessment tool, the Tower of London. This may be especially advantageous when addressing specific subpopulations such as children or clinical samples.     

The curious incident of the photo that was accused of being false: issues of domain specificity in development, autism, and brain imaging

We resume an exchange of ideas with Uta Frith that started before the turn of the century. The curious incident responsible for this exchange was the finding that children with autism fail tests of false belief, while they pass Zaitchik's (1990) photograph task (Leekam & Perner, 1991). This finding led to the conclusion that children with autism have a domain-specific impairment in Theory of Mind (mental representations), because the photograph task and the false-belief task are structurally equivalent except for the nonmental character of photographs. In this paper we argue that the false-belief task and the false-photograph task are not structurally equivalent and are not empirically associated. Instead a truly structurally equivalent task is the false-sign task. Performance on this task is strongly associated with the false-belief task. A version of this task, the misleading-signal task, also poses severe problems for children with autism (Bowler, Briskman, Gurvidi, & Fornells-Ambrojo, 2005). These new findings therefore challenge the earlier interpretation of a domain-specific difficulty in inferring mental states and suggest that children with autism also have difficulty understanding misleading nonmental objects. Brain imaging data using false-belief, "false"-photo, and false-sign scenarios provide further supporting evidence for our conclusions.     

How to support learning from multiple hypertext sources

In the present study, we investigated three factors that were assumed to have a significant influence on the success of learning from multiple hypertexts, and on the construction of a documents model in particular. These factors were task (argumentative vs. narrative), available text material (with vs. without primary sources), and presentation format (active vs. static). The study was conducted with the help of the combination of three tools (DEWEX, Chemnitz LogAnalyzer, and SummTool) developed for Web-based experimenting. The results show that the task is the most important factor for successful learning from multiple hypertexts. Depending on the task, the participants were either able or unable to apply adequate strategies, such as considering the source information. It was also observed that argumentative tasks were supported by an active hypertext presentation format, whereas performance on narrative tasks increased with a passive presentation format. No effect was shown for the type of texts available.     

Detection costs and contingent attentional capture

Peripheral cues reduce reaction times (RTs) to targets at the cued location with short cue-target SOAs (cueing benefits) but increase RTs at long SOAs (cueing costs or inhibition of return). In detection tasks, cueing costs occur at shorter SOAs and are larger compared with identification tasks. To account for effects of task, detection cost theory claims that the integration of cue and target into an object file makes it more difficult to detect the target as a new event, which is the principal task-requirement in detection tasks. The integration of cue and target is expected to increase when cue and target are similar. We provided evidence for detection cost theory in the modified spatial cueing paradigm. Two types of cues (onset, color) were paired with two types of targets (onset, color) in separate blocks of trials. In the identification task, we found cueing benefits with matching (i.e., similar) cue-target pairs (onset-onset, color-color) and no cueing effects with nonmatching cue-target pairs (onset-color, color-onset), which replicates previous work. In the detection task, cueing effects with matching cues were reduced and even turned into cueing costs for onset cues with onset targets, suggesting that cue-target integration made it more difficult to detect targets at the cued location as new events. In contrast, the results for nonmatching cue-target pairs were not affected by task. Furthermore, the pattern of false alarms in the detection task provides a measure of similarity that may explain the size of cueing benefits and costs.     

The relationship between DSM-IV cluster B personality disorders and psychopathy according to Hare's criteria: clarification and resolution of previous contradictions

This study examines the relationship between DSM-cluster B personality disorders (PDs) and psychopaths according to Hare's criteria as detected by the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL:SV) in 299 violent offenders. To clarify some contradictions among several previous studies on this issue, individual cluster B PDs were looked at alone, excluding any cases of comorbidity with other PDs of this cluster. We found highly significant relationships between antisocial and borderline PD and Factor II of the PCL and a highly significant correlation between narcissistic PD and Factor I of the PCL. These results were to be expected from the theoretical basis of the development of the PCL and provide a contribution to the construct validity of the PCL, which until now has not been validated on such a large sample in Germany.     

DEWEX: A system for designing and conducting Web-based experiments

DEWEX is a server-based environment for developing Web-based experiments. It provides many features for creating and running complex experimental designs on a local server. It is freeware and allows for both using default features, for which only text input is necessary, and easy configurations that can be set up by the experimenter. The tool also provides log files on the local server that can be interpreted and analyzed very easily. As an illustration of how DEWEX can be used, a recent study is presented that demonstrates the system’s most important features. This study investigated learning from multiple hypertext sources and shows the influences of task, source of information, and hypertext presentation format on the construction of mental representations of a hypertext about a historical event.     

A time–cost optimization of the national postal distribution network

The postal distribution network in the Czech Republic consists actually of 69 local transit centres (according to the administrative division of the Czech Republic). Each of them operates the post offices in the given region. Some of the important local transit centres can be selected as sorting centres—transhipment points for postal consignments. The aim of this paper is to present a bicriterial optimization model for the selection of the subset of transhipment points from the set of transit centres and choosing their appropriate equipment, such as sorting machines. Another important output of the model is the assignment of the transit centres to the sorting centres. There are two basic optimization criteria defined in this model: minimization of the sum of investment and operational costs connected with building and operating of the sorting centres and the maximization of the percentage of postal consignments delivered to the appropriate post office in the desired time (next day). The proposed model contains several thousands of zero‐one variables and constraints. The model has been verified, and the results accepted. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.