Measuring the combined risk to young children's cognitive development: An alternative to cumulative indices

In studies of child development, the combined effect of multiple risks acting in unison has been represented in a variety of ways. This investigation builds upon this preceding work and presents a new procedure for capturing the combined effect of multiple risks. A representative sample of 2,899 British children had their cognitive development measured at 36 and 58 months of age along with 10 potential risks during this period of development. Comparing a cumulative index of these risks against the previously undocumented alternative of confirmatory factor analysis using formative measurement, this study found differences favouring the factor analysis. The factor analysis procedure demonstrated greater predictive power of children's cognitive development while it systematically tested two of the assumptions implicit in cumulative risk indices.     

Whole Lives and Good Deaths

This article discusses two views associated with narrative conceptions of the self. The first view asserts that our whole life is reasonably regarded as a single unit of meaning. A prominent strand of the philosophical narrative account of the self is the representative of this view. The second view—which has currency beyond the confines of the philosophical narrative account—is that the meaning of a life story is dependent on what happens at the end of it. The article argues that the connection between these two views is more tentative than often supposed: philosophical narrativists that see life as a single unit of value and meaning nonetheless provide grounds for arguing that the end of life is not the best and may be a particularly bad time to approach and intervene in the matter of how well one's life as a whole has gone.     

Why Should Nanoscience Students be Taught to be Ethically Competent?

During the education of scientists at the university level the students become more and more specialized. The specialization of the students is a consequence of the scientific research becoming specialized as well. In the interdisciplinary field of nanoscience the importance of specialization is also emphasized throughout the education. Being an interdisciplinary field of study the specialization in this area is not focused on scientific disciplines, but on the different branches of the research. Historically ethics has not been a priority in science education, however, in recent years the importance of such teachings has been highly recognize especially in medicine, biotechnology and engineering. The rapid development, the many new and unknown areas and the highly specialized focus of nanotechnology suggest the importance of having ethically competent researchers. In this article the importance of ethical competence in nanoscience research is argued for by an example of a dilemma that could occur in a research project. The dilemma is analyzed using two different ethical views, generating two different choices for action. It is seen that the dilemma can have more than one solution and that ethical competence can help in justifying the choice of solution in a specific situation. Furthermore it is suggested that a way to reach this competence is through education in ethics incorporated into the nanoscience education curriculum.     

Cognitive control deployment is flexibly modulated by social value in early adolescence

Recent mechanistic models of cognitive control define the normative level of control deployment as a function of the effort cost of exerting control balanced against the reward that can be attained by exerting control. Despite these models explaining empirical findings in adults, prior literature has suggested that adolescents may not adaptively integrate value into estimates of how much cognitive control they should deploy. Moreover, much work in adolescent neurodevelopment casts social valuation processes as competing with, and in many cases overwhelming, cognitive control in adolescence. Here, we test whether social incentives can adaptively increase cognitive control. Adolescents (M_age = 14.64, 44 male, N = 87) completed an incentivized cognitive control task in which they could exert cognitive control to receive rewards on behalf of real peers who were rated by all peers in their school grade as being of either high- or low-status. Using Bayesian modeling, we find robust evidence that adolescents exert more cognitive control for high- relative to low-status peers. Moreover, we demonstrate that social incentives, irrespective of their high- or low-status, boost adolescent cognitive control above baseline control where no incentives are offered. Findings support the hypothesis that the cognitive control system in early adolescence is flexibly modulated by social value.     

Performance gains from directed training do not transfer to untrained tasks

Given the increasing complexity of the tasks and skills needed in modern society, developing effective training strategies is of tremendous practical importance. Furthermore, training that improves performance of both trained and untrained tasks would be highly efficient. In the present study, we examined how directed training contributes to skill acquisition, and more importantly, to engendering transfer of training to untrained tasks. Participants learned a complex video game for 30 h (Space Fortress, Donchin, Fabiani, & Sanders, 1989) using one of two training regimens: Hybrid Variable-Priority Training (HVT), with a focus on improving specific skills and managing task priority, or Full Emphasis Training (FET) in which participants simply practiced the game to obtain the highest overall score. We compared game performance, retention of training gains, and transfer of training to untrained tasks as a function of the training regimen. Compared to FET, HVT learners reached higher levels of mastery on the game and HVT was particularly beneficial for initially poor performing participants. This benefit persisted seven months after training. However, contrary to expectation, both HVT and FET were unsuccessful in producing transfer to untrained tasks compared to a group that received limited game experience, suggesting that directed training and practice can produce task-specific improvements, but improvements do not necessarily transfer from trained to untrained tasks.     

Forced confabulation affects memory sensitivity as well as response bias

A signal detection analysis assessed the extent to which forced confabulation results from a change in memory sensitivity (d _a ), as well as response criterion (β). After viewing a crime video, participants answered 14 answerable and 6 unanswerable questions. Those in the voluntary guess condition had a “don’t know” response option; those in the forced guess condition did not. One week later, the same questions were answered using a recognition memory test that included each participant’s initial responses. As was predicted, on both answerable and unanswerable questions, participants in the forced guess condition had significantly lower response criteria than did those who voluntarily guessed. Furthermore, on both answerable and unanswerable questions, d _a scores were also significantly lower in the forced than in the voluntary guess condition. Thus, the forced confabulation effect is a real memory effect above and beyond the effects of response bias; forcing eyewitnesses to guess or speculate can actually change their memory.