A comparison of prompting methods to teach sight words to students with autism spectrum disorder

Time delay procedures are one of the most commonly used and effective strategies for teaching sight words to learners with disabilities. However, less is known about whether they are differentially effective and efficient with learners. This study compared the effectiveness and efficiency of progressive time delay and simultaneous prompting on sight word acquisition among three learners with autism spectrum disorder using an adapted alternating treatments design across word sets. For two participants, both procedures led to skill acquisition with no clear differences in efficiency. For the remaining participant, neither procedure was effective; therefore, the reading task was changed to a receptive one, and a stimulus fading intervention package was implemented.     

How do personality disorders modify suicide risk?

There is a lack of psychological autopsy studies assessing the influence of axis II disorders on other risk factors for suicide. Therefore, we investigated if the estimated suicide risk for axis I disorders and socio-demographic factors was modified by personality disorders. Psychiatric disorders were evaluated by a semi-structured interview including the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Axis I (SCID-I) and Personality Disorders (SCID-II) by psychological autopsy method in 163 completed suicides and by personal interview in 396 population-based control persons. Personality disorders modify suicide risk, differently for affective disorders, substance use disorders, smoking, life events during the last three months, and socio-demographic factors such as being single. Estimated suicide risk for socio-demographic factors and life events is not substantially altered following adjustment for affective disorders or substance use disorders. These findings suggest that treatment of personality disorders is essential for suicide prevention.     

Sound source location modulates the irrelevant-sound effect

Participants memorized lists of visually presented digits in silence or while ignoring distractor sounds that either came from the front and thus from the direction in which participants' attention was oriented, or from behind. Distractor sounds impaired recall performance, but the largest impairment was observed when the sound source was directionally close to the frontal visual target display. The results are consistent with the assumption of cross-modal attentional links in models of attention, and they are problematic for explanations of the irrelevant-sound effect within working memory models that do not specify an explicit role of attention in the maintenance of information for immediate serial recall.     

On the different uses of linguistic abstractness: from LIB to LEB and beyond

Linguistic abstractness has been shown to mediate persuasive and attributional effects of communication. The linguistic intergroup bias (LIB) refers to the tendency to describe positive ingroup and negative outgroup behaviors more abstractly than negative ingroup and positive outgroup behavior. Recently, the LIB was shown to reflect to a large extent a linguistic expectancy bias (LEB). Abstract language need not have an ingroup‐serving function, but may be used to communicate expected information in a concise and condensed manner. The present research shows that the reverse may also be true. When the interaction goal is not merely to convey information that is shared anyway because it is typical of the communication target but to transmit unshared information (known to the communicator but new to the recipient), then it may be necessary to express (explain, teach, interpret) unexpected ideas or deviant attitudes in abstract, interpretive terms. The joint operation of both principles was demonstrated within the same experimental task. In communications about East Germans, more abstract predicates were used in typically East German domains (LEB). However, more abstract terms were also used when messages deviated from the recipient's prior attitude. A conceptual framework is proposed to integrate these findings. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Individual differences in conflict-monitoring: testing means and covariance hypothesis about the Simon and the Eriksen Flanker task

Conflict and context slow-down have been proposed as indicators of a conflict-monitoring system that initiates cognitive control to resolve conflicts in information processing. We investigated individual differences in conflict-monitoring and their associations with working memory (WM) and impulsivity. A total of 150 adults completed a Simon and an Eriksen flanker task, together with measures of WM and impulsivity. On both tasks, responses were slower and less accurate on incompatible than on compatible trials (conflict effect), and the conflict effect was larger when the preceding trial was compatible than when it was incompatible (context effect). Stimulus repetition did not explain the context effect. Individual differences could be attributed to three separable factors for each task: general speeded performance, conflict effect, and context effect. Evidence for across-task generality of these factors was sparse. Associations of these factors with impulsivity were weak at best. WM was correlated with general speed, and also with some but not all factors reflecting conflict-related processes.     

Sequential or parallel decomposed processing of two-digit numbers? Evidence from eye-tracking

While reaction time data have shown that decomposed processing of two-digit numbers occurs, there is little evidence about how decomposed processing functions. Poltrock and Schwartz (1984) argued that multi-digit numbers are compared in a sequential digit-by-digit fashion starting at the leftmost digit pair. In contrast, Nuerk and Willmes (2005) favoured parallel processing of the digits constituting a number. These models (i.e., sequential decomposition, parallel decomposition) make different predictions regarding the fixation pattern in a two-digit number magnitude comparison task and can therefore be differentiated by eye fixation data. We tested these models by evaluating participants' eye fixation behaviour while selecting the larger of two numbers. The stimulus set consisted of within-decade comparisons (e.g., 53_57) and between-decade comparisons (e.g., 42_57). The between-decade comparisons were further divided into compatible and incompatible trials (cf. Nuerk, Weger, & Willmes, 2001) and trials with different decade and unit distances. The observed fixation pattern implies that the comparison of two-digit numbers is not executed by sequentially comparing decade and unit digits as proposed by Poltrock and Schwartz (1984) but rather in a decomposed but parallel fashion. Moreover, the present fixation data provide first evidence that digit processing in multi-digit numbers is not a pure bottom-up effect, but is also influenced by top-down factors. Finally, implications for multi-digit number processing beyond the range of two-digit numbers are discussed.