The Development of Media Sign Literacy—A Longitudinal Study With 4-Year-Old Children

In a longitudinal study, 137 children at the age of 4 years were tested for media sign literacy, intelligence, and several precursors of academically relevant skills, such as phonological awareness and preschool quantity-number competencies. The children were tested four times over two years, measuring the development of these skills every six months. The purpose of the study was to explore whether children’s level of media sign literacy helps them acquire academically relevant symbolic skills like reading and mathematical competencies. The results indicate that media sign literacy as well as intelligence predict mathematical and linguistic competencies. Longitudinal findings indicate that children with higher levels of media sign literacy also achieve higher scores in precursors of mathematical and reading and writing skills, and structural equation modeling revealed a rich interconnectedness between media sign literacy and intelligence. Media sign literacy had a direct and significant effect on mathematical competencies at measurement point 2 and indirect effects on the precursors of reading and writing skills at measurement point 4.     

Performance on phonological and grammatical awareness metalinguistic tasks by children who stutter and their fluent peers

This study was undertaken to examine the performance of 23 children who stutter (CWS) and 23 children who do not stutter (CWNS) on three metalinguistic tasks. These included two phonological awareness assessment procedures (The Lindamood Auditory Conceptualization Test (LAC) and a Phoneme Reversal Task) and one modified Grammar Judgments Task where syntactic and semantic appropriateness of sentences was evaluated. Differences between groups were significant for the grammar judgment task, where CWNS outperformed CWS in judging syntactically and semantically anomalous sentences. Group differences were not significant for the phonological awareness tasks. The results underscore the importance of examining metalinguistic abilities of CWS through a variety of tasks. EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES: The reader will learn about and be able to: (1) recognize the relevance of examining metalinguistic abilities within the context of research on language-stuttering dynamics; and (2) identify measures of metalinguistic abilities that can be used to compare the performances of CWS and CWNS.     

What does visual agnosia tell us about perceptual organization and its relationship to object perception?

The authors studied 2 patients, S.M. and R.N., to examine perceptual organization and its relationship to object recognition. Both patients had normal, low-level vision and performed simple grouping operations normally but were unable to apprehend a multielement stimulus as a whole. R.N. failed to derive global structure even under optimal stimulus conditions, was less sensitive to grouping by closure, and was more impaired in object recognition than S.M. These findings suggest that perceptual organization involves a multiplicity of processes, some of which are simpler and are instantiated in lower order areas of visual cortex (e.g., collinearity). Other processes are more complex and rely on higher order visual areas (e.g., closure and shape formation). The failure to exploit these latter configural processes adversely affects object recognition.     

Images of Women in General Interest and Fashion Magazine Advertisements from 1955 to 2002

This study was designed to examine the portrayal of women in advertisements in a general interest magazine (i.e., Time) and a women's fashion magazine (i.e., Vogue) over the last 50 years. The coding scheme used for this analysis was based on the one developed by sociologist Erving Goffman in the 1970s, which focuses primarily on the subtle and underlying clues in the picture content of advertisements that contain messages in terms of (stereotypical) gender roles. The results of this study show that, overall, advertisements in Vogue, a magazine geared toward a female audience,depict women more stereotypically than do those in Time, a magazine with the general public as a target audience. In addition, only a slight decrease in the stereotypical depiction of women was found over time, despite the influence of the Women's Movement.     

Role of Attention and Perceptual Grouping in Visual Statistical Learning

Statistical learning has been widely proposed as a mechanism by which observers learn to decompose complex sensory scenes. To determine how robust statistical learning is, we investigated the impact of attention and perceptual grouping on statistical learning of visual shapes. Observers were presented with stimuli containing two shapes that were either connected by a bar or unconnected. When observers were required to attend to both locations at which shapes were presented, the degree of statistical learning was unaffected by whether the shapes were connected or not. However, when observers were required to attend to just one of the shapes' locations, statistical learning was observed only when the shapes were connected. These results demonstrate that visual statistical learning is not just a passive process. It can be modulated by both attention and connectedness, and in natural scenes these factors may constrain the role of stimulus statistics in learning.     

Perceiving parts and shapes from concave surfaces

“A hole is nothing at all, but it can break your neck.” In a similar fashion to the danger illustrated by this folk paradox, concave regions pose difficulties to theories of visual shape perception. We can readily identify their shapes, but according to principles of how observers determine part boundaries, concavities in a planar surface should have very different figural shapes from the ones that we perceive. In three experiments, we tested the hypothesis that observers perceive local image features differently in simulated 3-D concave and convex regions but use them to arrive at similar shape percepts. Stimuli were shape-from-shading images containing regions that appeared either concave or convex in depth, depending on their orientation in the picture plane. The results show that concavities did not benefit from the same global object-based attention or holistic shape encoding as convexities and that the participants relied on separable spatial dimensions to judge figural shape in concavities. Concavities may exploit a secondary process for shape perception that allows regions composed of perceptually independent features to ultimately be perceived as gestalts.     

The Application of Behavior Change Theory to Family-Based Services: Improving Parent Empowerment in Children’s Mental Health

We describe the development of a parent empowerment program (PEP) using a community-based participatory research approach. In collaboration with a group of dedicated family advocates working with the Mental Health Association of New York City and state policy makers, academic researchers took an iterative approach to crafting and refining PEP to better prepare family advocates to help bridge the gaps in service access among children with emotional and behavioral problems. Despite the growth of family-led, family support programs nationally, research that demonstrates the positive benefits of such programs is scarce in the children’s mental health literature. The PEP model is based on research data about barriers families face in mental health service utilization (e.g., stigma, perceptions of providers, attitudes towards mental illness, service availability, etc.). PEP is premised on (a) the concept of empowerment as a process, (b) the need to engage parents in becoming active agents of change, and (c) the application of an integrated framework to empower parents, called the Parents as Agents of Change model. Our paper focuses on describing the application of a Unified Theory of Behavior Change as a theoretical framework to help activate parents as change agents in meeting their children’s mental health needs. Based on an integrated model of grassroots driven Principles of Parent Support and research-based Unified Theory of Behavior Change, PEP’s Parents as Agents of Change model provides a conceptual framework for testing the effectiveness of family support services in children’s mental health, a much-needed area for future research.     

Attention Bias Modification Treatment for Adolescents With Social Anxiety Disorder

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) tends to emerge during the early teenage years and is particularly refractory to change even when standard evidence-based CBT treatments are delivered. Efforts have been made to develop novel, mechanistic-driven interventions for this disorder. In the present study, we examined Attention Bias Modification Treatment (ABMT) for youth with SAD. Participants were 58 adolescents (mean age = 14.29 years) who met diagnostic criteria for SAD and who were randomized to ABMT or a placebo control condition, Attention Control Training (ACT). We predicted that ABMT would result in greater changes in both threat biases and social anxiety symptoms. We also explored potential moderators of change including the severity of social anxiety symptoms, the level of threat bias at pretreatment, and the degree of temperament-defined attention control. Contrary to our hypotheses, changes in attention bias were not observed in either condition, changes in social anxiety symptoms and diagnosis were small, and significant differences were not observed between the ABMT and ACT conditions. Little support for the proposed moderators was obtained. Reasons for our failure to find support for ABMT and its potential moderators are explored and recommendations for changes in the ABMT paradigm are suggested.     

Does text–picture integration also occur with longer text segments?

Text–picture integration is one of the most important cognitive processes when reading illustrated text. There is empirical evidence that text‐picture integration takes place when learning with pictures combined with single sentences. The present experiment investigated whether text–picture integration also takes place when the single sentences are embedded into longer text segments and hence when materials become more complex. In a within‐subjects design, 43 participants read an illustrated story, in which the different combinations of general and specific sentences and pictures, respectively, were embedded. In line with previous findings, participants were more likely to falsely recognize specific versions of the sentences after having studied their general versions combined with specific pictures. Thus, the experiment shows that text–picture integration also occurs when learners have to read longer text passages combined with pictures.