Conservation or conversation? Contextual facilitation of inappropriate conservation judgments

Recent studies have shown that children who fail Piagetian conservation tasks may succeed if the transformation of materials is made to seem accidental, or incidental to some other activity. In the present study, 46 children, mean age 6 years, were randomly assigned to either a standard or a modified testing condition. In both, the child first made a judgment as to the equality in area of two square fields, each made up from eight interlinked fence sections. Then the child saw one of the fields transformed into a rectangle, without the fences being disconnected, and was asked for a second judgment as to the equality of the fields. In the modified condition the transformation made sense in terms of creating a space for the farmhouse. Significantly higher levels of “conserving” judgments were obtained in the modified than in the standard condition. However, it should be noted that area is not in fact conserved in this case. The implications of this for the status of precociously correct conservation judgments are discussed.     

Salience of stimulus and response features in choice-reaction tasks

A pattern of differential reaction time (RT) benefits obtained in spatial-precuing tasks has been attributed to translation processes that operate on mental codes formed to represent the-stimulus and response sets. According to the salient-features coding principle, the codes are based on the salient stimulus and response features, with RTs being fastest when the two sets of features correspond. Three experiments are reported in which the stimulus and response sets were manipulated using Gestalt grouping principles. In the first two experiments, stimuli and responses were grouped according to spatial proximity, whereas in the last experiment, they were grouped according to similarity. With both types of manipulations, the grouping of the stimulus set systematically affected the pattern of precuingbenefits. Thus, in these experiments, the organization of the stimulus set was the primary determinant of the features selected for coding the stimulus and response sets in the translation process.     

The Counselor as Consultant in the Collaborative School

A collaborative work environment has been consistently cited as a characteristic of schools that effectively respond to the diverse needs of students. Because of their role and related skills, counselors seem uniquely positioned to have a significant impact on the development or enhancement of team structures and staff relationships within a collaborative school. Educational collaboration and its relationship to school consultation as a structured planning, decision-making, and problem-solving process is described. Characteristics of a collaborative school and its organizational structures are identified. Roles and related skills the counselor can use in providing leadership in developing and implementing collaborative teams in the school are articulated.     

They're digging up the road again: the processing cost of institutional they

It is commonplace to use the pronoun they to refer to agents in certain situations without ever providing a referent, as in On the train, they served really bad coffee. Such an example we call “Institutional They”, because such defaults typically represent the actions of some agent tied stereotypically to a situation. These cases represent an important subset of unheralded pronouns (Gerrig, 1986), pronouns without any explicit antecedent. While in many situations, the occurrence of referential pronouns without explicit antecedents entails a processing cost, an eye-tracking experiment revealed no reliable detectable costs associated with Institutional They. However, there were for singular pronouns without antecedents in the same situations. We argue that Institutional They cases result from properties of plural pronouns (they and them). These will accept underspecified type-referents, while singular pronouns require specified token-referents. Failure to identify token-referents results in disruption of processing in the case of singulars, but not in the case of the plurals.     

Validation of the Wisconsin Personality Disorders Inventory-IV with the SCID-II

The Wisconsin Personality Disorders Inventory (WISPI-IV; Klein & Benjamin, 1996) is the latest version of a self-report measure of DSM-IV personality disorders (PDs) derived from an interpersonal perspective. When categorical diagnoses derived from the WISPI-IV were compared with independent SCID-II diagnoses, the majority of the kappas were poor (>.40). However, all but one of the effect sizes for the differences in WISPI-IV means between groups with and without SCID-II diagnoses were large (>.80). When SCID-II and WISPI-IV dimensional scores were considered, the average r between profiles was .61 (median = .58) and correlations between corresponding PD scales (mean diagonal r = .48; mean off-diagonal r = .18) indicated good convergent and discriminant validity for five of the WISPI-IV scales. These results add to the cumulating evidence suggesting greater reliability and validity of dimensional over categorical scores for PDs. Researchers and clinicians interested in having an efficient method of assessing PDs may consider using a dimensional approach such as the WISPI-IV as an alternative to diagnostic interview.     

The effects of cue modality on the quality of personal memories retrieved

We investigated the effect of cue modality on the specificity, speed, vividness, and age of autobiographical memory retrieval. Cues were presented as either an odour, a visual image, or a word label. Odour-cued memories were older, more likely to be categoric, and were slower to be retrieved. Few gender differences were found although females reported more vivid memories than males. We suggest that cue modality directly affects retrieval processes; odour cues are more likely to initiate a perceptual search strategy, in contrast to memories cued by visual images and words, which are usually conceptually/verbally mediated.     

The epidemiology of autistic spectrum disorders: is the prevalence rising?

For decades after Kanner's original paper on the subject was published in 1943, autism was generally considered to be a rare condition with a prevalence of around 2-4 per 10,000 children. Then, studies carried out in the late 1990s and the present century reported annual rises in incidence of autism in pre-school children, based on age of diagnosis, and increases in the age-specific prevalence rates in children. Prevalence rates of up to 60 per 10,000 for autism and even more for the whole autistic spectrum were reported. Reasons for these increases are discussed. They include changes in diagnostic criteria, development of the concept of the wide autistic spectrum, different methods used in studies, growing awareness and knowledge among parents and professional workers and the development of specialist services, as well as the possibility of a true increase in numbers. Various environmental causes for a genuine rise in incidence have been suggested, including the triple vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR]. Not one of the possible environmental causes, including MMR, has been confirmed by independent scientific investigation, whereas there is strong evidence that complex genetic factors play a major role in etiology. The evidence suggests that the majority, if not all, of the reported rise in incidence and prevalence is due to changes in diagnostic criteria and increasing awareness and recognition of autistic spectrum disorders. Whether there is also a genuine rise in incidence remains an open question.     

Verbal memory abilities of children with brain tumors.

Several critical neuroanatomical structures and pathways for memory performance are located in the third ventricle region. This led us to predict that verbal memory abilities would be more impaired in children treated for third ventricle tumors compared to those treated for cerebellar tumors. Archival data was obtained from 24 pediatric patients with third ventricle region tumors and 18 pediatric patients with cerebellar tumors. Neuroradiological verifications of tumor involvement and hydrocephalus severity (i.e., Evans Index) on preoperative scans and MRIs proximal to the time of the neuropsychological evaluation were conducted. The potential confounds of hydrocephalus severity, seizure medication, age, radiation treatment, and chemotherapy were addressed. Verbal IQ was comparable between tumor groups and in the Average range. The third ventricle region group performed significantly worse on list learning and delayed list recall compared to the cerebellar group. Their mean performance was in the clinically impaired range on both trials. The third ventricle region tumor group performed better than the cerebellar tumor group on Digit Span, a basic repetition, attention span task. These findings support the hypothesis that pediatric patients with third ventricle region brain tumors are more likely to be impaired on verbal recall tasks compared to pediatric patients with cerebellar brain tumors. In contrast, patients who were treated for cerebellar tumors were more impaired on the basic repetition, attention span task compared to patients who were treated for third ventricle tumors. Future studies should examine the specific neuroanatomical structures and pathways that are damaged and may influence differential cognitive impairments in children.     

A Cross‐National Comparison of Suicide Attempts,Drug Use,and Depressed Mood Among Dominican Youth

We compared suicide attempts, depressed mood, and drug use of 1,710 Dominican public high school students in New York City (NYC) and 9,573 in the Dominican Republic (DR) in 2009. Compared to DR Dominicans, NYC Dominicans were more likely to have reported lifetime marijuana use (27.6% vs. 1.5%), lifetime inhalant use (11.0% vs. 7.6%), lifetime other drug use (9.9% vs. 3.0%), depressed mood (31.3% vs. 27.2%), and suicide attempt (13.8% vs. 8.8%). The results of this study supported the hypothesis that substantial increases in illicit drug use, especially cocaine, heroin, ecstasy, and methamphetamines, among NYC Dominican youth account for their increased risk for suicide attempts compared to their DR Dominican counterparts. It also identified suicide attempts as a public health problem among NYC Dominicans, the largest NYC Latino immigrant population.