Handwriting or Typewriting? The Influence of Pen- or Keyboard-Based Writing Training on Reading and Writing Performance in Preschool Children

Digital writing devices associated with the use of computers, tablet PCs, or mobile phones are increasingly replacing writing by hand. It is, however, controversially discussed how writing modes influence reading and writing performance in children at the start of literacy. On the one hand, the easiness of typing on digital devices may accelerate reading and writing in young children, who have less developed sensory-motor skills. On the other hand, the meaningful coupling between action and perception during handwriting, which establishes sensory-motor memory traces, could facilitate written language acquisition. In order to decide between these theoretical alternatives, for the present study, we developed an intense training program for preschool children attending the German kindergarten with 16 training sessions. Using closely matched letter learning games, eight letters of the German alphabet were trained either by handwriting with a pen on a sheet of paper or by typing on a computer keyboard. Letter recognition, naming, and writing performance as well as word reading and writing performance were assessed. Results did not indicate a superiority of typing training over handwriting training in any of these tasks. In contrast, handwriting training was superior to typing training in word writing, and, as a tendency, in word reading. The results of our study, therefore, support theories of action-perception coupling assuming a facilitatory influence of sensory-motor representations established during handwriting on reading and writing.     

Perspectives of children and adolescents on the perceived determinants of physical activity during recess

Promotion of healthy lifestyles in youth focuses on school-based interventions with the aim to increase physical activity (PA) during school days. Drawing on seventeen focus group discussions from three purposively selected Estonian schools, we explored factors that perceivably affect students’ recess physical activity (RPA). Both inductive and deductive principles of data analysis were used to extract major and subthemes related to factors that inhibit or enhance RPA. Participants identified barriers and facilitators to recess PA as originating mainly from physical and organizational school environment. Also, unsuitable weather was described as a barrier to being active. Additionally, feelings, behavioral and normative beliefs were described as constraining or facilitating RPA. Results highlighted two culture-specific unique perceived determinants of RPA that need to be addressed during the development of school-based interventions to increase PA.     

Duration perception of emotional stimuli: Using evaluative conditioning to avoid sensory confounds

It has been found that emotional pictures are estimated to last longer than neutral ones. However, emotional and neutral stimuli often differ in their physical characteristics, too. Since this might also affect time perception, we present a method disentangling a possible confounding regarding the processing of physically different stimulus material. In the evaluative condition paradigm, participants, at first, learnt the association of neutral images with a certain Landolt ring and of emotional images with another Landolt ring with a different gap position. The conditioned Landolt rings were subsequently used in a temporal bisection task. In two experiments, the results revealed a temporal overestimation of Landolt rings conditioned with emotional pictures compared to neutral pictures showing that the temporal overestimation of emotional stimuli cannot be attributed to perceptual differences between neutral and emotional stimuli. The method provides the potential for investigating emotional effects on various perceptual processes.     

Cultural variation in the correlates of flashbulb memories: an investigation in five countries

Flashbulb memory (FBM) refers to the vivid memory for the context of learning about a public news event. Past research has identified a number of factors that influence the formation of FBM, such as the importance of the event, the experience of intense emotions, and the amount of post-event rehearsal. Although such factors may be universal in predicting FBM formation across cultures, they may differentially impact FBM given different cultural belief systems and practices. In the present study we investigated the moderating effect of culture for various predictors of FBM in five countries: China, Germany, Turkey, the UK, and the USA. Results indicated that the effects of national importance and rehearsal of the reception context were consistent across cultures. In contrast, culture moderated the effects of personal importance, emotionality, surprise, and event rehearsal. In all cases the effects of these variables were significantly smaller in the Chinese sample.     

Decision-making under risk conditions is susceptible to interference by a secondary executive task

Recent research suggests two ways of making decisions: an intuitive and an analytical one. The current study examines whether a secondary executive task interferes with advantageous decision-making in the Game of Dice Task (GDT), a decision-making task with explicit and stable rules that taps executive functioning. One group of participants performed the original GDT solely, two groups performed either the GDT and a 1-back or a 2-back working memory task as a secondary task simultaneously. Results show that the group which performed the GDT and the secondary task with high executive load (2-back) decided less advantageously than the group which did not perform a secondary executive task. These findings give further evidence for the view that decision-making under risky conditions taps into the rational-analytical system which acts in a serial and not parallel way as performance on the GDT is disturbed by a parallel task that also requires executive resources.     

Quantitative and qualitative evaluation of neuromotor behaviour in children with a specific speech and language disorder

Several studies have described problems in a wide area of motor functions in language impaired children. The purpose of this study was to identify the nature of the motor deficits in two subgroups of language impaired children. A standard neurological examination was performed on 18 children with an expressive language disorder and 21 children with a receptive language disorder. The motor performance of the language disordered children was compared with the motor performance of 23 normal children. The standard neurological examination allowed for a qualitative and quantitative assessment of five specific neurological subsystems. Handedness was determined for all children. The language impaired children had more motor problems than the control children on most neurological subsystems. There were few statistically significant differences between the two groups of language impaired children. An excess in left‐handedness was established in the group of children with a receptive language disorder. There was a co‐occurrence of verbal and non‐verbal deficits in language impaired children. As these motor problems put an additional burden on the development of language impaired children, they should be diagnosed as early as possible. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cortical plasticity associated with stuttering therapy

Neuroimaging studies have indicated that persistent developmental stuttering (PDS) may be associated both with an abnormality in white matter of left-hemispheric speech areas and a right-hemispheric hyperactivity. The latter may compensate for the deficient structural connectivity in the left hemisphere. To investigate the effects of stuttering therapy on brain activity nine male adults with PDS underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) before and within 12 weeks after fluency shaping therapy. Brain response differences during overt sentence reading before and after therapy were assessed by utilizing random effects analyses. After therapy, a more widespread activation was observed in frontal speech and language regions and temporal areas of both hemispheres, particularly and more pronounced on the left side. Interestingly, distinct posttreatment left-sided activation increases were located directly adjacent to a recently detected area of white matter anomaly [M. Sommer, M.A. Koch, W. Paulus, C. Weiller, C. Buchel (2002). Disconnection of speech-relevant brain areas in persistent developmental stuttering. The Lancet, 360, 380-383] suggesting that fluency shaping techniques reorganize neuronal communication between left-sided speech motor planning, motor execution, and temporal areas. Hence, a therapeutic mechanism can be assumed to remodel brain circuitry close to the source of the dysfunction instead of reinforcing compensation via homologous contralateral brain networks. EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES: The reader will learn about and be able to: (1) describe brain activation changes detected shortly after fluency-shaping therapy; (2) identify left-hemispheric regions where a (re)functionalization after fluency-shaping therapy seems to occur adjacent to a recently described abnormal white matter region in PDS subjects; and (3) discuss how an effective cerebral compensation mechanism for stuttering could work.     

Coordination in arm movements during crawl stroke in elite swimmers with a loco-motor disability

The purpose of this study was to investigate selected kinematics parameters of the arm stroke in crawl swimmers with disabilities and to examine the potential use of an index of arm coordination (IdC) to evaluate the stroking technique of swimmers with diverse functional abilities. The degree of overlap in the propulsive phases (superposition model) and lag time between the propulsive phases (catch-up model) was examined in 18 well-trained swimmers with loco-motor disabilities, 9 females and 9 males, from functional classes S3-S10 with S10 being most functional. Based on the results, correct coordination appears to be fundamental to swimming crawl stroke in both able-bodied swimmers as well as swimmers with a disability. Some swimmers with disabilities examined here exhibited extreme values at both ends of the index scale. This might be essential to maintaining balance while swimming when not all limb activity contributes to the forward movement.     

Cortico-subcortical contributions to executive control

The term "executive functions" refers to a range of cognitive processes, their common feature being the coordination of information processing and action control. Cortico-subcortical circuits which connect the prefrontal cortex (PFC), the basal ganglia and the cerebellum via the thalamus are believed to serve as neuroanatomical substrates of executive processing. This paper focuses on information processing related to executive functions by the PFC and related subcortical regions. Findings are mainly derived from neuropsychological investigations of brain-damaged patients but also from imaging studies in healthy subjects. There is evidence for subtle differences between these regions with respect to the cognitive mechanisms contributing to inhibition of habitual responses, task management/multitasking and set shifting, although the data base is sparse so far.