On the development and mechanics of delayed matching-to-sample performance

Despite its frequent use to assess effects of environmental and pharmacological variables on short-term memory, little is known about the development of delayed matching-to-sample (DMTS) performance. This study was designed to examine the dimensions and dynamics of DMTS performance development over a long period of exposure to provide a more secure foundation for assessing stability in future research. Six pigeons were exposed to a DMTS task with variable delays for 300 sessions (i.e., 18,000 total trials; 3,600 trials per retention interval). Percent-correct and log-d measures used to quantify the development of conditional stimulus control under the procedure generally and at each of five retention intervals (0, 2, 4, 8 and 16-s) individually revealed that high levels of accuracy developed relatively quickly under the shorter retention intervals, but increases in accuracy under the longer retention intervals sometimes were not observed until 100-150 sessions had passed, with some still increasing at Session 300. Analyses of errors suggested that retention intervals induced biases by shifting control from the sample stimulus to control by position, something that was predicted by observed response biases during initial training. These results suggest that although it may require a great deal of exposure to DMTS prior to obtaining asymptotic steady state, quantification of model parameters may help predict trends when extended exposure is not feasible.     

Six-Year Sustainability of Evidence-Based Intervention Implementation Quality by Community-University Partnerships: The PROSPER Study

There is a knowledge gap concerning how well community-based teams fare in implementing evidence-based interventions (EBIs) over many years, a gap that is important to fill because sustained high quality EBI implementation is essential to public health impact. The current study addresses this gap by evaluating data from PROSPER, a community-university intervention partnership model, in the context of a randomized-control trial of 28 communities. Specifically, it examines community teams' sustainability of implementation quality on a range of measures, for both family-focused and school-based EBIs. Average adherence ratings approached 90% for family-focused and school-based EBIs, across as many as 6 implementation cohorts. Additional indicators of implementation quality similarly showed consistently positive results. Correlations of the implementation quality outcomes with a number of characteristics of community teams and intervention leaders were calculated to explore their potential relevance to sustained implementation quality. Though several relationships attained statistical significance at particular points in time, none were stable across cohorts. The role of PROSPER's continuous, proactive technical assistance in producing the positive results is discussed.     

Maternal Depressive Symptoms and Child Social Preference During the Early School Years: Mediation by Maternal Warmth and Child Emotion Regulation

This longitudinal study examined processes that mediate the association between maternal depressive symptoms and peer social preference during the early school years. Three hundred and fifty six kindergarten children (182 boys) and their mothers participated in the study. During kindergarten, mothers reported their level of depressive symptomatology. In first grade, teachers rated children’s emotion regulation at school and observers rated the affective quality of mother-child interactions. During second grade, children’s social preference was assessed by peer nomination. Results indicated that mothers’ level of depressive symptomatology negatively predicted their child’s social preference 2 years later, controlling for the family SES and teacher-rated social preference during kindergarten. Among European American families, the association between maternal depressive symptoms and social preference was partially mediated by maternal warmth and the child’s emotion regulation. Although the relation between maternal depressive symptoms and children peer preference was stronger among African American families than Europrean American families, its mediation by the maternal warmth and child’s emotion regulation was not found in African American families.     

Young infants' eye movements over "natural" scenes and "experimental" scenes

Eye movements of 30 4-month-olds were tracked as infants viewed animals and vehicles in “natural” scenes and, for comparison, in homogeneous “experimental” scenes. Infants showed equivalent looking time preferences for natural and experimental scenes overall, but fixated natural scenes and objects in natural scenes more than experimental scenes and objects in experimental scenes and shifted fixations between objects and contexts more in natural than in experimental scenes. The findings show how infants treat objects and contexts in natural scenes and suggest that they treat more commonly used experimental scenes differently.     

Is there an advantage for recognizing multi-modal emotional stimuli?

Emotions can be recognized whether conveyed by facial expressions, linguistic cues (semantics), or prosody (voice tone). However, few studies have empirically documented the extent to which multi-modal emotion perception differs from uni-modal emotion perception. Here, we tested whether emotion recognition is more accurate for multi-modal stimuli by presenting stimuli with different combinations of facial, semantic, and prosodic cues. Participants judged the emotion conveyed by short utterances in six channel conditions. Results indicated that emotion recognition is significantly better in response to multi-modal versus uni-modal stimuli. When stimuli contained only one emotional channel, recognition tended to be higher in the visual modality (i.e., facial expressions, semantic information conveyed by text) than in the auditory modality (prosody), although this pattern was not uniform across emotion categories. The advantage for multi-modal recognition may reflect the automatic integration of congruent emotional information across channels which enhances the accessibility of emotion-related knowledge in memory.     

Emotional speech processing: disentangling the effects of prosody and semantic cues

To inform how emotions in speech are implicitly processed and registered in memory, we compared how emotional prosody, emotional semantics, and both cues in tandem prime decisions about conjoined emotional faces. Fifty-two participants rendered facial affect decisions (Pell, 2005a), indicating whether a target face represented an emotion (happiness or sadness) or not (a facial grimace), after passively listening to happy, sad, or neutral prime utterances. Emotional information from primes was conveyed by: (1) prosody only; (2) semantic cues only; or (3) combined prosody and semantic cues. Results indicated that prosody, semantics, and combined prosody-semantic cues facilitate emotional decisions about target faces in an emotion-congruent manner. However, the magnitude of priming did not vary across tasks. Our findings highlight that emotional meanings of prosody and semantic cues are systematically registered during speech processing, but with similar effects on associative knowledge about emotions, which is presumably shared by prosody, semantics, and faces.     

What is Happening With Bill and Jane?

In this comment I applaud Goldner’s ability to capture couple experience and dynamics while emphasizing that coupling involves more than attachment. In my view, couple conflict and therapy involves attending not only to attachment, which involves closeness and the threat of separation, but also to issues of identity, self-definition, and shame. I point out how some of the interactions and dynamics in the case discussed involve a threat to identity through invalidation more than to attachment by abandonment. As Goldner notes, mutual recognition between people is the cornerstone of the relational ideal, and it is for recognition through being seen, and validated for which Bill and Jane fight so hard, not closeness. In my view not everything in couples is about regulating attachment; rather everything is probably about regulating affect. Attachment is one, but only one, of the ways couples regulate their affect.     

An Assessment of Time Involved in Pre-test Case Review and Counseling for a Whole Genome Sequencing Clinical Research Program

Whole genome sequencing (WGS) is being used for evaluation of individuals with undiagnosed disease of suspected genetic origin. Implementing WGS into clinical practice will place an increased burden upon care teams with regard to pre-test patient education and counseling about results. To quantitate the time needed for appropriate pre-test evaluation of participants in WGS testing, we documented the time spent by our clinical research group on various activities related to program preparation, participant screening, and consent prior to WGS. Participants were children or young adults with autism, intellectual or developmental disability, and/or congenital anomalies, who have remained undiagnosed despite previous evaluation, and their biologic parents. Results showed that significant time was spent in securing allocation of clinical research space to counsel participants and families, and in acquisition and review of participant’s medical records. Pre-enrollment chart review identified two individuals with existing diagnoses resulting in savings of $30,000 for the genome sequencing alone, as well as saving hours of personnel time for genome interpretation and communication of WGS results. New WGS programs should plan for costs associated with additional pre-test administrative planning and patient evaluation time that will be required to provide high quality care.