The development of color categories in two languages: a longitudinal study

This study unites investigations into the linguistic relativity of color categories with research on children's category acquisition. Naming, comprehension, and memory for colors were tracked in 2 populations over a 3-year period. Children from a seminomadic equatorial African culture, whose language contains 5 color terms, were compared with a group of English children. Despite differences in visual environment, language, and education, they showed similar patterns of term acquisition. Both groups acquired color vocabulary slowly and with great individual variation. Those knowing no color terms made recognition errors based on perceptual distance, and the influence of naming on memory increased with age. An initial perceptually driven color continuum appears to be progressively organized into sets appropriate to each culture and language.     

Directed forgetting of related words: evidence for the inefficient inhibition hypothesis

Fifth-grade children and college students were asked to remember some words and to forget others in an item-cued-directed-forgetting task. Taxonomically related pairs of words and control pairs that were unrelated in meaning were used as stimuli. Children found it more difficult than did adults to ignore forget-cued words that followed associatively related words that were remember-cued. The results provide support for D. F. Bjorklund and K. K. Harnishfeger's (1990) inefficient inhibition hypothesis (i.e., that the efficiency of inhibitory mechanisms improves as children develop). The results also suggest that the inhibition is occurring primarily in the early stages of processing.     

Instrumental and Pavlovian incentive processes have dissociable effects on components of a heterogeneous instrumental chain

Two experiments compared the effects of Pavlovian stimuli and incentive learning on the performance of a heterogeneous chain of instrumental actions. Using a Pavlovian-instrumental transfer design, the authors found that only a stimulus paired with the same outcome as that earned by performance of the chain produced positive transfer, an effect that was restricted to the action in the chain most proximal to reward delivery. In contrast, after a shift to a nondeprived state, only animals that had previously consumed the instrumental outcome when they were nondeprived decreased instrumental performance. Furthermore, this effect of the incentive learning treatment was limited to performance of the distal action. Together these data suggest that Pavlovian and instrumental incentive manipulations have dissociable effects on instrumental performance.     

Event-related brain potential markers of high-language proficiency in adults

The central issue addressed is whether there are electrophysiological markers for high-language proficiency in adults. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded in 19 young adults who demonstrated either "normal" or "high" language proficiency. ERPs were obtained during a sentence-processing task and analyzed for specific response components elicited by different word types. The ERPs in the normal and high-language proficiency groups were similar for early sensory related processing but differed in the later components thought to be more closely related to lexical access and post-lexical processing. The findings for the ERP waveforms suggest that adults with high-language proficiency show slightly faster lexical access over left anterior brain regions for closed class items, and a reduced reliance on contextual information contained in sentences.     

Semantic processing of words, cognitive resources and N400: an event-related potentials study

The specificity of the right hemisphere (RH) contribution to the semantic processing of words is still debated. Indeed, the semantic impairments of right hemisphere damaged (RHD) subjects may be the expression of limited general cognitive resources rather than a specific impairment of semantic processing ([Monetta et al., 2001]; [Murray, 2000]). The purpose of this study was to evaluate the possibility that the N400 reflect the availability of cognitive resources through an analysis of its different amplitudes according to different semantic complexity level. Ten young adults without any history of neurological damage participated in a semantic categorization task with two different levels of difficulty based on prototypicality. Event related potential (ERP) signals from 64 electrodes were recorded. An N400 was observed during the processing of difficult words and distractors. The results show that the greatest N400 activation was observed during the processing of difficult words, thus reflecting a possible increase in the amount of required cognitive resources.     

Juror decision-making in a mock sexually violent predator trial: gender differences in the impact of divergent types of expert testimony

Despite widespread use of mental health testimony in cases where violence risk is at issue, relatively little is known about the impact of such information on juror decision-making. This study addressed the effects of testimony based on three types of risk assessment instrument or method (clinical opinion, actuarial assessment, and ratings of psychopathy) to examine whether they would have differential impact on jurors' perceptions of the defendant. In a mock sexually violent predator civil commitment trial, 172 undergraduates were presented a case summary that included prosecution and defense expert testimony related to violence risk based on one of the three methods noted above. Consistent with earlier research, the hypothesis that a defendant described as a "high risk psychopath" by the prosecution would be judged more severely than a defendant judged as "high risk" based on other evaluation procedures was supported, but only among female jurors. Unlike prior studies, little support was found for the hypothesis that clinical opinion testimony would be more influential than actuarially based testimony for either gender. Mechanisms that may underlie the observed gender differences are discussed, as are the potential implications of these findings for civil commitment proceedings.     

Constructing a short form of the Smoking Consequences Questionnaire with adolescents and young adults

The goal of the present studies was to construct and validate a short form of the 50-item Smoking Consequences Questionnaire (SCQ; T.H. Brandon & T. B. Baker, 1991), a measure of smoking outcome expectancies. In Study 1, a 21-item short form (S-SCQ) was derived from a sample of 107 young adults previously treated for substance abuse. In Study 2, the measure was cross-validated on 125 adolescents in treatment for substance abuse. Confirmatory factor analyses revealed good model fit and factorial invariance for the 4 S-SCQ subscales across both samples. Validation analyses on each sample found that subscale scores generally correlated significantly with smoking-related variables. The present studies provide initial evidence for the utility of the S-SCQ when used with young adults and adolescents.     

Evidence for abstract, schematic knowledge of three spatial diagram representations

Spatial diagram representations such as hierarchies, matrices, and networks are important tools for thinking. Our data suggest that college students possess abstract schemas for these representations that include at least rudimentary information about their applicability conditions. In Experiment 1, subjects were better able to select the appropriate spatial diagram representation for a problem when cued to use general category information in memory about those representations than when cued to use specific example problems given during the experiment. The results of Experiment 2 showed that the superior performance in the general category condition was not based on a comparison of the test problems with examples in memory. The results of Experiment 3 showed that the superior performance was not due to learning that occurred during the experiment or to transfer appropriate processing. The General Discussion section considers the nature of students' representation schemas and the question of why college students have only rudimentary schemas for common and widely applicable diagrammatic representations.     

Poignancy: mixed emotional experience in the face of meaningful endings

The experience of mixed emotions increases with age. Socioemotional selectivity theory suggests that mixed emotions are associated with shifting time horizons. Theoretically, perceived constraints on future time increase appreciation for life, which, in turn, elicits positive emotions such as happiness. Yet, the very same temporal constraints heighten awareness that these positive experiences come to an end, thus yielding mixed emotional states. In 2 studies, the authors examined the link between the awareness of anticipated endings and mixed emotional experience. In Study 1, participants repeatedly imagined being in a meaningful location. Participants in the experimental condition imagined being in the meaningful location for the final time. Only participants who imagined "last times" at meaningful locations experienced more mixed emotions. In Study 2, college seniors reported their emotions on graduation day. Mixed emotions were higher when participants were reminded of the ending that they were experiencing. Findings suggest that poignancy is an emotional experience associated with meaningful endings.