Generating Relations Elicits a Relational Mindset in Children

Relational reasoning is a hallmark of human higher cognition and creativity, yet it is notoriously difficult to encourage in abstract tasks, even in adults. Generally, young children initially focus more on objects, but with age become more focused on relations. While prerequisite knowledge and cognitive resource maturation partially explains this pattern, here we propose a new facet important for children's relational reasoning development: a general orientation to relational information, or a relational mindset. We demonstrate that a relational mindset can be elicited, even in 4‐year‐old children, yielding greater than expected spontaneous attention to relations. Children either generated or listened to an experimenter state the relationships between objects in a set of formal analogy problems, and then in a second task, selected object or relational matches according to their preference. Children tended to make object mappings, but those who generated relations on the first task selected relational matches more often on the second task, signaling that relational attention is malleable even in young children.     

Mother–Father–Child Triadic Interaction and Mother–Child Dyadic Interaction: Gender Differences Within and Between Contexts

Differences in mother and father behavior during a triadic interaction session, and differences in mothers’ behavior across triadic and dyadic interaction, were examined in 60 two-parent families with an 11- to 15-month-old child (30 boys, 30 girls). Results revealed that mothers were less involved, less sensitive, and more negative during triadic than during dyadic interaction. Mothers of sons displayed more emotion during triadic interaction than mothers of daughters did. Mothers were more involved with children than fathers were during triadic interaction, whereas fathers displayed more emotion than mothers did during triadic interaction. Fathers were more supportive of mothers, and mothers were more intrusive toward fathers, during triadic interaction. The results are discussed in terms of the role that context plays in gender-typed patterns of family interaction.     

Gender Differences in Mother-toddler and Father-toddler Verbal Initiations and Responses during a Caregiving and Play Context

Contextual variations in mother-child and father-child verbal communication were examined among 80 U.S. families from Kansas who were predominately Caucasian (85%) and middle-class. There were 41 girls and 39 boys between 15- and 18-months-old observed with their mothers and fathers in separate play and caregiving laboratory situations. Parent and child behaviors were coded for verbal initiation and response strategies. MANOVA’s revealed more differences between mother’s and father’s verbal communication strategies in the play context than the caregiving context. Boy’s and girl’s verbal communication was relatively similar across contexts. The interactions between gender and context are discussed in relation to gender role development in the family.     

Mother–child and father–child mutuality in two contexts: consequences for young children's peer relationships

This study examines the role that context plays in links between relative balance, or mutuality in parent–child interaction and children's social competence. Sixty‐three toddlers and their parents were observed in a laboratory play session and caregiving activity (i.e. eating snack). Mutuality was operationalised as the relative balance in (a) partners' compliance to initiations, and (b) partners' expression of positive emotion. Caregivers rated children's social competence with peers, and children's prosocial and aggressive behaviour with peers was observed in their childcare arrangement. Contextual differences were observed in the manifestation of parent–child mutuality, with both mother–child and father–child dyads displaying higher mutual compliance scores in the play context than in the caregiving context. Father–child dyads also displayed higher levels of shared positive emotion during play than during the caregiving context. There were no differences in a way that parent–child mutuality during play and caregiving was associated with children's social competence with peers. Overall, the results suggest that parent–child mutuality is a quality of parent–child interaction that has consistent links to children's peer competence regardless of the context in which it occurs. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The embodied nature of spatial perspective taking: Embodied transformation versus sensorimotor interference

Humans are able to mentally adopt the spatial perspective of others and understand the world from their point of view. We propose that spatial perspective taking (SPT) could have developed from the physical alignment of perspectives. This would support the notion that others have put forward claiming that SPT is an embodied cognitive process. We investigated this issue by contrasting several accounts in terms of the assumed processes and the nature of the embodiment. In a series of four experiments we found substantial evidence that the transformations during SPT comprise large parts of the body schema, which we did not observe for object rotation. We further conclude that the embodiment of SPT is best conceptualised as the self-initiated emulation of a body movement, supporting the notion of endogenous motoric embodiment. Overall our results are much more in agreement with an ‘embodied’ transformation account than with the notion of sensorimotor interference. Finally we discuss our findings in terms of SPT as a possible evolutionary stepping stone towards more complex alignments of socio-cognitive perspectives.     

Young children’s analogical reasoning across cultures: Similarities and differences

A cross-cultural comparison between U.S. and Hong Kong preschoolers examined factors responsible for young children’s analogical reasoning errors. On a scene analogy task, both groups had adequate prerequisite knowledge of the key relations, were the same age, and showed similar baseline performance, yet Chinese children outperformed U.S. children on more relationally complex problems. Children from both groups were highly susceptible to choosing a perceptual or semantic distractor during reasoning when one was present. Taken together, these similarities and differences suggest that (a) cultural differences can facilitate better knowledge representations by allowing more efficient processing of relationally complex problems and (b) inhibitory control is an important factor in explaining the development of children’s analogical reasoning.     

Family-of-Origin,Sexual Attitudes,and Perceptions of Infidelity: A Mediation Analysis

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the influence family of origin and sexual attitudes have on perceptions of infidelity through a mediation analysis to test whether sexual attitudes mediates the relationship between family of origin attitudes and perceptions of infidelity. Results indicated that family of origin attitudes were linked with higher permissive sexual attitudes and lower perceptions of infidelity. Additionally, results indicated an indirect link between family of origin attitudes and perceptions of infidelity through sexual attitudes. These findings align with previous research examining how family of origin influences the occurrence of infidelity and provides insight to helping professionals as they address infidelity in romantic relationships.     

Operationalizing the Reciprocal Engagement Model of Genetic Counseling Practice: a Framework for the Scalable Delivery of Genomic Counseling and Testing

With the advent of widespread genomic testing for diagnostic indications and disease risk assessment, there is increased need to optimize genetic counseling services to support the scalable delivery of precision medicine. Here, we describe how we operationalized the reciprocal engagement model of genetic counseling practice to develop a framework of counseling components and strategies for the delivery of genomic results. This framework was constructed based upon qualitative research with patients receiving genomic counseling following online receipt of potentially actionable complex disease and pharmacogenomics reports. Consultation with a transdisciplinary group of investigators, including practicing genetic counselors, was sought to ensure broad scope and applicability of these strategies for use with any large-scale genomic testing effort. We preserve the provision of pre-test education and informed consent as established in Mendelian/single-gene disease genetic counseling practice. Following receipt of genomic results, patients are afforded the opportunity to tailor the counseling agenda by selecting the specific test results they wish to discuss, specifying questions for discussion, and indicating their preference for counseling modality. The genetic counselor uses these patient preferences to set the genomic counseling session and to personalize result communication and risk reduction recommendations. Tailored visual aids and result summary reports divide areas of risk (genetic variant, family history, lifestyle) for each disease to facilitate discussion of multiple disease risks. Post-counseling, session summary reports are actively routed to both the patient and their physician team to encourage review and follow-up. Given the breadth of genomic information potentially resulting from genomic testing, this framework is put forth as a starting point to meet the need for scalable genetic counseling services in the delivery of precision medicine.     

Effects of environmental support on overt and covert visuospatial rehearsal

People can rehearse to-be-remembered locations either overtly, using eye movements, or covertly, using only shifts of spatial attention. The present study examined whether the effectiveness of these two strategies depends on environmental support for rehearsal. In Experiment 1, when environmental support (i.e., the array of possible locations) was present and participants could engage in overt rehearsal during retention intervals, longer intervals resulted in larger spans, whereas in Experiment 2, when support was present but participants could only engage in covert rehearsal, longer intervals resulted in smaller spans. When environmental support was absent, however, longer retention intervals resulted in smaller memory spans regardless of which rehearsal strategies were available. In Experiment 3, analyses of participants’ eye movements revealed that the presence of support increased participants’ fixations of to-be-remembered target locations more than fixations of non-targets, and that this was associated with better memory performance. Further, although the total time fixating targets increased, individual target fixations were actually briefer. Taken together, the present findings suggest that in the presence of environmental support, overt rehearsal is more effective than covert rehearsal at maintaining to-be-remembered locations in working memory, and that having more time for overt rehearsal can actually increase visuospatial memory spans.