Competing responses and the processing of irrelevant information

A number of studies have shown that performance of identification and discrimination tasks is detrimentally affected by irrelevant information, yet other studies have failed to find such decrements. It is suggested that these contradictory findings depend on whether S must make difficult discriminations among the relevant stimuli, the irrelevant stimuli, or between the relevant and irrelevant stimuli. The role of irrelevant information in these tasks is to enhance or amplify the competihg responses engendered by the difficult discriminations. Irrelevant information enhances competing responses by increasing the information processing requirements of a task. The results of various studies of irrelevant information seem to be in good agreement with the assertions.     

An Evaluation of a Brief Multiple-Stimulus Without Replacement Preference Assessment Conducted in an Electronic Pictorial Format

We compared the results of a brief electronic pictorial multiple-stimulus without replacement (EP-MSWO) preference assessment to a brief tangible MSWO preference assessment in five children with autism. Results of both assessments yielded a match between high preferred (HP) toys for four participants and low preferred toys for three participants. The overall correlation between assessments across participants was strong and statistically significant (ρ = .67, p < .01). A reinforcer assessment conducted with three participants confirmed HP toys identified in the EP-MSWO functioned as reinforcers.     

Parents’ Experiences of Nonsuicidal Self-Injury Among Adolescents and Young Adults

We assessed the impact of adolescent nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) on parents in two studies. In Study 1, 16 Australian parents of adolescents with a history of nonsuicidal self-injury responded to open-ended questions about their child’s nonsuicidal self-injury. Data from 10 of the adolescents were matched with parents’ responses regarding the nature and extent of nonsuicidal self-injury, revealing that parents underestimated the frequency of nonsuicidal self-injury, the age of onset, and the likelihood their child would continue to self-injure. In Study 2, 22 American parents of adolescents with a history of nonsuicidal self-injury participated in interviews about their experiences. Parents in both studies reported changes in the parent–adolescent relationship after self-injury, which posed challenges to the family unit. When professional help had been sought, experiences were largely negative. Results support further investigation into family-based interventions to equip parents with tools to better relate to, and communicate with, their adolescent following self-injury. Results also suggest that mental-health professionals and general practitioners may require further training for nonsuicidal self-injury.     

Pop-out and pop-in: Visual working memory advantages for unique items

Attentional control is thought to play a critical role in determining the amount of information that can be stored and retrieved from visual working memory (VWM). We tested whether and how task-irrelevant feature-based salience, known to affect the control of visual attention, affects VWM performance. Our results show that features of a task-irrelevant color singleton are more likely to be recalled from VWM than non-singleton items and that this increased memorability comes at a cost to the other items in the display. Furthermore, the singleton effect in VWM was negatively correlated with an individual’s baseline VWM capacity. Taken together, these results suggest that individual differences in VWM storage capacity may be partially attributable to the ability to ignore differences in task-irrelevant physical salience.     

The sexual dimorphic association of cardiorespiratory fitness to working memory in children

The present investigation examined the sexual dimorphic patterns of cardiorespiratory fitness to working memory in preadolescent children (age range: 7.7–10.9). Data were collected in three separate studies (Study 1: n = 97, 42 females; Study 2: n = 95, 45 females; Study 3: n = 84, 37 females). All participants completed a cardiorespiratory fitness assessment in addition to a specific measure of working memory (i.e. the operation span task, the n‐back task, or the Sternberg task). Results from all three samples revealed that higher cardiorespiratory fitness levels were associated with better working memory performance only for males with no such relation observed for females. In addition, the sexually dimorphic pattern was selective for the most challenging working memory conditions in each task. Together, these findings reveal new evidence that cardiorespiratory fitness is selectively related to better working memory performance for male children. This investigation provides additional insight into how interventions aimed at improving fitness may influence cognitive development differentially among preadolescent children.     

Information processing biases concurrently and prospectively predict depressive symptoms in adolescents: Evidence from a self-referent encoding task

Negative information processing biases have been hypothesised to serve as precursors for the development of depression. The current study examined negative self-referent information processing and depressive symptoms in a community sample of adolescents (N = 291, M_age at baseline = 12.34 ± 0.61, 53% female, 47.4% African-American, 49.5% Caucasian and 3.1% Biracial). Participants completed a computerised self-referent encoding task (SRET) and a measure of depressive symptoms at baseline and completed an additional measure of depressive symptoms nine months later. Several negative information processing biases on the SRET were associated with concurrent depressive symptoms and predicted increases in depressive symptoms at follow-up. Findings partially support the hypothesis that negative information processing biases are associated with depressive symptoms in a nonclinical sample of adolescents, and provide preliminary evidence that these biases prospectively predict increases in depressive symptoms.     

Familiality of mood repair responses among youth with and without histories of depression

Affect regulation skills develop in the context of the family environment, wherein youths are influenced by their parents', and possibly their siblings', regulatory responses and styles. Regulatory responses to sadness (mood repair) that exacerbate or prolong dysphoria (maladaptive mood repair) may represent one way in which depression is transmitted within families. We examined self-reported adaptive and maladaptive mood repair responses across cognitive, social and behavioural domains in Hungarian 11- to 19-year-old youth and their parents. Offspring included 214 probands with a history of childhood-onset depressive disorder, 200 never depressed siblings and 161 control peers. Probands reported the most problematic mood repair responses, with siblings reporting more modest differences from controls. Mood repair responses of parents and their offspring, as well as within sib-pairs, were related, although results differed as a function of the regulatory response domain. Results demonstrate familiality of maladaptive and adaptive mood repair responses in multiple samples. These familial associations suggest that relationships with parents and siblings within families may impact the development of affect regulation in youth.