Sensory information and associative cues used in food detection by wild vervet monkeys

Understanding animals’ spatial perception is a critical step toward discerning their cognitive processes. The spatial sense is multimodal and based on both the external world and mental representations of that world. Navigation in each species depends upon its evolutionary history, physiology, and ecological niche. We carried out foraging experiments on wild vervet monkeys (Chlorocebus pygerythrus) at Lake Nabugabo, Uganda, to determine the types of cues used to detect food and whether associative cues could be used to find hidden food. Our first and second set of experiments differentiated between vervets’ use of global spatial cues (including the arrangement of feeding platforms within the surrounding vegetation) and/or local layout cues (the position of platforms relative to one another), relative to the use of goal-object cues on each platform. Our third experiment provided an associative cue to the presence of food with global spatial, local layout, and goal-object cues disguised. Vervets located food above chance levels when goal-object cues and associative cues were present, and visual signals were the predominant goal-object cues that they attended to. With similar sample sizes and methods as previous studies on New World monkeys, vervets were not able to locate food using only global spatial cues and local layout cues, unlike all five species of platyrrhines thus far tested. Relative to these platyrrhines, the spatial location of food may need to stay the same for a longer time period before vervets encode this information, and goal-object cues may be more salient for them in small-scale space.     

A Game a Day Keeps Cognitive Decline Away? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Commercially-Available Brain Training Programs in Healthy and Cognitively Impaired Older Adults

Neuropsychology Review - The rising prevalence rates of age-related cognitive impairment are a worldwide public concern, bringing about a surge in the number of “brain training”...     

Responding to the Psychological Needs of Health-Care Workers During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Case Study from the Medical College of Wisconsin

With the advent of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, health-care workers have been faced with an inordinately high level of trauma as frontline providers. The Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW) partnered with affiliate hospitals and community partners to mobilize a matrix of available support and interventions to deliver psychological services to reach all levels of health-care providers in timely, accessible formats. While virtual peer support groups were the most utilized resource among the support group options, other opportunities also provided unique benefits to learners whose education had been disrupted by the pandemic. Mental health must be prioritized for health-care workers in the event of future public health crises. Lessons learned from this pandemic indicate that it is critical to involve learners early on in the process in order to meet their educational needs and to increase access to evidence-based care.

     

Frog embryos use multiple levels of temporal pattern in risk assessment for vibration-cued escape hatching

Animal Cognition - Stereotyped signals can be a fast, effective means of communicating danger, but animals assessing predation risk must often use more variable incidental cues. Red eyed-treefrog,...     

Low working memory capacity is only spuriously related to poor reading comprehension

Accounts of comprehension failure, whether in the case of readers with poor skill or when syntactic complexity is high, have overwhelmingly implicated working memory capacity as the key causal factor. However, extant research suggests that this position is not well supported by evidence on the span of active memory during online sentence processing, nor is it well motivated by models that make explicit claims about the memory mechanisms that support language processing. The current study suggests that sensitivity to interference from similar items in memory may provide a better explanation of comprehension failure. Through administration of a comprehensive skill battery, we found that the previously observed association of working memory with comprehension is likely due to the collinearity of working memory with many other reading-related skills, especially IQ. In analyses which removed variance shared with IQ, we found that receptive vocabulary knowledge was the only significant predictor of comprehension performance in our task out of a battery of 24 skill measures. In addition, receptive vocabulary and non-verbal memory for serial order—but not simple verbal memory or working memory—were the only predictors of reading times in the region where interference had its primary affect. We interpret these results in light of a model that emphasizes retrieval interference and the quality of lexical representations as key determinants of successful comprehension.     

Associations Between Maternal Mental Health and Child Emotional and Behavioral Problems: Does Prenatal Mental Health Matter?

This study examined associations between elevated symptoms of prenatal depression or anxiety and offspring emotional and behavioral problems during mid to late childhood taking into account the impact of later maternal mental health symptoms. The sample consisted of 2,891 women and their children (49 % male) from a prospective, community-based study, the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. Women completed measures of depressive (Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale) and anxious (Crown Crisp Experiential Index) symptoms at regular intervals beginning in pregnancy. Mothers and teachers assessed offspring emotional and behavioral problems using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire when children were 10–11 years old. Multivariable regression models were fit to address study hypotheses. Exposure to elevated symptoms of maternal depression during pregnancy was associated with increased total offspring emotional and behavioral problems, even after controlling for later maternal mental health problems and a range of sociodemographic and psychosocial characteristics, according to mothers’ but not teachers’ reports. Similarly, children exposed to elevated symptoms of maternal anxiety during pregnancy were reported to have increased total emotional and behavioral problems by mothers but not by teachers. We found support for modest associations between elevated symptoms of maternal depression and anxiety during the prenatal period and certain domains of offspring emotional and behavioral problems in mid to late childhood above and beyond the impact of later maternal mental health problems. These findings highlight the need for additional clinical and research attention to the prenatal period and to both maternal depression and anxiety.     

ACOUSTIC ANALYSIS OF ORAL PRODUCTIONS OF INFANTS LATER DIAGNOSED WITH AUTISM AND THEIR MOTHER

Research on early signs of autism in social interactions often focuses on infants’ motor behaviors; few studies have focused on speech characteristics. This study examines infant‐directed speech of mothers of infants later diagnosed with autism (LDA; n = 12) or of typically developing infants (TD; n = 11) as well as infants’ productions (13 LDA, 13 TD). Since LDA infants appear to behave differently in the first months of life, it can affect the functioning of dyadic interactions, especially the first vocal productions, sensitive to expressiveness and emotions sharing. We assumed that in the first 6 months of life, prosodic characteristics (mean duration, mean pitch, and intonative contour types) will be different in dyads with autism. We extracted infants’ and mothers’ vocal productions from family home movies and analyzed the mean duration and pitch as well as the pitch contours in interactive episodes. Results show that mothers of LDA infants use relatively shorter productions as compared to mothers talking to TD infants. LDA infants’ productions are not different in duration or pitch, but they use less complex modulated productions (i.e., those with more than two melodic modulations) than do TD. Further studies should focus on developmental profiles in the first year, analyzing prosody monthly.     

Psychological Entitlement and Ambivalent Sexism: Understanding the Role of Entitlement in Predicting Two Forms of Sexism

Recent research has shown that narcissistic men in the United States express more ambivalent sexism than their non-narcissistic counterparts. The present study sought to extend these findings by hypothesizing that psychological entitlement would be a predictor of ambivalent sexism but that that this relationship may vary by gender. Given entitlement’s associations with hostility and aggression and the previously established link between narcissism and sexism in men, we hypothesized that entitlement would predict hostile sexism in men. Given that entitlement is characterized by a pervasive sense of deservingness for special treatment and goods, we expected that entitled women would endorse attitudes of benevolent sexism. These hypotheses were tested using two cross-sectional samples in the U.S.—a sample of undergraduates from a private university in the Midwest (N?=?333) and a web-based sample of adults across the U.S. (N?=?437). Results from regression analyses confirmed that psychological entitlement is a robust predictor of ambivalent sexism, above and beyond known predictors of sexism such as low openness and relevant covariates such as impression management. In addition, entitlement was a consistent predictor of benevolent sexism in women, but not in men, and a consistent predictor of hostile sexism in men, but not in women. These relationships were largely robust, persisting even when relevant covariates (e.g., socially desirable responding, trait openness) were controlled statistically, although in one sample the link between entitlement and hostile sexism in men was reduced to non-significance when benevolent sexism was controlled for statistically. Implications of these findings are discussed.