The roles of handedness and stimulus asymmetry in aesthetic preference.

When some pictures are mirror reversed, aesthetic evaluations of them change dramatically. Stimulus features that may be important in contributing to this effect are: (a) location of areas of principal interest or weight in the picture space, (b) cues that suggest a direction of motion within the picture. Dextrals and inverted sinistrals preferred paintings with cues suggesting motion proceeding from left to right over their mirror-reversed versions and also preferred those with weight concentrated in the left portions of the picture space. The explanation that best fits these data is that preference is promoted when the picture content encourages attention to its rightmost portions, thus placing a majority of the picture in the left visual field where it is directly processed by the right hemisphere.     

‘He's got his father's bias’: Parental influence on weight bias in young children

Our aim was to explore the role of parents in the transmission of stereotypical body size attitudes and awareness of weight loss strategies to preschool children. Participants were 279 3‐year‐old children and their parents, who provided data at baseline and 1 year later. Parents completed self‐report body size attitude and dieting measures. Child weight bias and awareness of weight loss strategies were assessed through interview. Over time, negative associations with large bodies and awareness of weight loss strategies increased. Fathers’ attitudes prospectively predicted boys’ weight bias and awareness of weight loss strategies. Among girls, parental attitudes were less predictive. Findings confirm the importance of fathers in the development of boys’ body attitudes and inform prevention programmes.     

Attributional Style and Engagement/Disengagement Responses in the Chinese Workforce

Internal attribution for bad events, along with stable and global attributions, has been regarded as a component of pessimism, a precursor of negative work outcomes. Most evidence in support of this conceptualisation has come from research conducted in individualist cultures. We questioned if internal attribution has the same pessimistic implication in a collectivist culture. Findings from two studies conducted on Chinese employees supported our expectations that the stability and globality dimensions (but not the internality dimension) would predict disengagement responses (such as quitting and being neglectful at work) and lack of engagement responses (such as voicing suggestions and being loyal to the organisation). A reconceptualisation of pessimism in the workplace is therefore necessary. A dimensional, rather than a composite, scoring method is proposed for maintaining the predictive and construct validities of attributional style as an indicator of pessimism.     

Cognitive Neuropsychology and Developmental Disorders: Uncomfortable Bedfellows

Cognitive neuropsychology provides a theoretical framework and methods that can be of value in the study of developmental disorders, but the "dissociation" logic at the centre of this approach is not well suited to the developmental context. This is illustrated with examples from specific language impairment. Within the developing language system there is ample evidence for interaction between levels of representation, with modularity emerging in the course of development. This means that one typically is seeking to explain a complex pattern of associated impairments, rather than highly selective deficits. For instance, a selective impairment in auditory processing can have repercussions through the language system and may lead to distinctive syntactic deficits that are seen in written as well as spoken language. Changes in the nature of representations and in the relationships between components of a developing system mean that cross-sectional data at a single point in development may be misleading indicators of the primary deficit. Furthermore, traditional cognitive neuropsychology places a disproportionate emphasis on representational (competence) deficits, with processing (performance) deficits being relatively neglected. Methods for distinguishing these two kinds of impairment are discussed, as well as other approaches for elucidating the underlying nature of developmental disorders.     

Preschool children's eye‐movements during pictorial recall

We investigated eye‐movements during preschool children's pictorial recall of seen objects. Thirteen 3‐ to 4‐year‐old children completed a perceptual encoding and a pictorial recall task. First, they were exposed to 16 pictorial objects, which were positioned in one of four distinct areas on the computer screen. Subsequently, they had to recall these pictorial objects from memory in order to respond to specific questions about visual details. We found that children spent more time fixating the areas in which the pictorial objects were previously displayed. We conclude that as early as age 3–4 years old, children show specific eye‐movements when they recall pictorial contents of previously seen objects.     

Evidence for disproportionate dual-task costs in older adults for episodic but not semantic memory

Previous research demonstrates that older adults are poor at dual tasking, but there is less agreement on whether their decrement is worse than that predicted from single-task performance. This study investigated whether task domain moderates dual-task costs in old age. In two experiments, young and older adults retrieved either previously learned associates (episodic retrieval) or overlearned category members (semantic retrieval) under single or working-memory load conditions, using cued recall (Experiment 1) and recognition (Experiment 2) procedures. In both experiments the proportional costs of dual tasking were age invariant for semantic retrieval but were particularly marked for episodic retrieval, although the size of the age effect was reduced in recognition compared to cued recall. The data suggest that age effects in dual tasking may be domain specific.