Large errors, but no depth compression, in walked indications of exocentric extent

Observers can sight a target 20 m away or more and then walk to it accurately without vision. In contrast to this good performance, this article shows that walked indications of the exocentric separation of two locations exceed the required values by over 70% when vision is obscured. Significantly, these large errors are coupled with a robust lack of depth foreshortening, even under conditions in which visual matches and verbal estimates of extent exhibit strong evidence of depth compression. This article presents evidence that the overshooting errors are due largely to recalibration of locomotor control produced by prolonged exposure to nonvisual walking. The robust lack of depth foreshortening, meanwhile, could reflect a corresponding isotropy in the spatial representation controlling the walking response. More research is needed to confirm this interpretation, however.     

Grandfamilies and the Opioid Epidemic: A Systemic Perspective and Future Priorities

Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review - As a result of the devastating impact of the opioid epidemic, increased numbers of children are being raised by their grandparents in what are known as...     

Verb frame preferences: Descriptive norms

This paper presents normative data about the frequency with which college students construct sentences with different syntactically defined frames for 127 English verbs. The norms are intended to be of use to experimenters in preparing materials to study sentence comprehension.     

Effects of hierarchical organization on children's judgments of distance and direction

The impact of the hierarchical organization of a space on judgments of direction and distance was assessed in two studies using two-dimensional models analogous to those used by A. Stevens and P. Coupe (1978, Cognitive Psychology, 10, 422–437). In each study the models contained two stars and were divided into two parts by a curved boundary line. In the Homogeneous condition the stars were located in the same subsection. In the Congruent condition the leftmost star was in the left subsection and the rightmost star was in the right subsection. In the Incongruent condition the rightmost star was in the left subsection and the leftmost star was in the right subsection. In Experiment 1 first graders, third graders, and college students were required to remember the location of the stars. Results indicated that the first and third graders tended to use the relationship between the subsections as a clue to the relationship between the sites within them, thus extending the results of Stevens and Coupe (1978) to children. In Experiment 2 preschoolers, first, and third graders were asked to judge with the materials directly in front of them, which of the two stars was closer to a site located in one of the subsections. Results indicated that the Incongruent condition led to errors among the preschoolers and first graders but not the third graders, thus indicating that these groups tended to judge as closer the site within the same subsection even though it was really farther away. The results of both studies are discussed as indicative of a tendency among young children to impose organization on information encoded in memory and in relation to increases in metric accuracy, decentration, and efficient scanning which enable them to more accurately evaluate when such organization is and is not appropriate. Implications for behavior in large-scale environments are also discussed, with particular reference to the effect of barriers on perceptions of distance and direction.     

Testing measures of the quality of residential care: A pilot study

This paper summarizes the results from a pilot study, designed to test a method of measuring the quality of care provided in two residential units for severely mentally handicapped children. The overall aim has been to devise general measures of the learning conditions (the quality of care) within residential units, which relate to groups of clients, and which are equally applicable at different times of the waking day. Such measures will only constitute a helpful monitoring instrument if they are shown to be reliable; to have, at least, face-validity: to be based upon representative and accurate data; and if they differentiate between settings which, intuitively, appear to differ in the extent to which the clients' appropriate behaviour is prompted and reinforced.     

Getting There (Slowly)

The general foundations for a theory of human sentence processing and the basic goals and questions of the 1960s are argued to be solid and still very relevant today, even if the particular processing model of the time (the clausal model) does not hold up. Today there is considerable agreement that sentence processing is both fast and grammatically controlled from the outset, and that minimal structure and recent attachments are favored across a diverse range of languages. Parsing is not purely bottom-up but instead allows phrases to be postulated before all daughters have been parsed; it works similarly for head-initial and head-final languages. The parser takes as input a rich prosodic/intonational representation which influences processing in ways that extend far beyond use of intonational boundaries as local (juncture) cues. It is argued that psycholinguistic evidence disconfirms the use of prepackaged fully articulated X templates for identifying phrase structure, instead supporting the extended projections of Grimshaw (1991). Further, considerable evidence shows that the processor respects grammatical distinctions among types of dependencies, as indicated by differential processing effects for antecedent-government chains versus binding relations, by the processing difficulty of composite dependencies involving more than one grammatical type of dependency, and by distinctions between deep and surface anaphora. The central problem for future theories of sentence processing is claimed to be the development of theories of sentence interpretation. Various possible approaches are discussed, including parallel computation of alternatives with subsequent selection, a task-driven interpretive system, and underspecification. The question is raised whether sentence-level psycholinguistics is in the middle of a paradigm shift from models with symbolic representations and an intrinsically serial (Von Neumann) architecture to constraint-satisfaction/connectionist models with inherently parallel architectures. Reasons are offered for rejecting current constraint-satisfaction models, including lack of supporting evidence discriminating between constraint-satisfaction and conventional models, serious problems with the use of prepackaged X templates for identifying phrase structure (the only proposal to date for handling syntactic structures in constraint-based models) and an inability to deal with cross-language generalizations. Pure connectionist models are unlikely to fare better in the future for two reasons. They are apparently unable to handle restricted universal quantification (Marcus, 1998)which clearly lies within the capacity of the human sentence processor. Further, competition between alternatives lies at the very heart of such models. Maximal competition should occur in processing fully ambiguous sentences and thus they are predicted to take longer to process than biased or temporarily ambiguous ones (Frazier & Clifton, 1997). But the empirical evidence suggests that fully ambiguous sentences are not systematically harder to process than their disambiguated counterparts.