Time processing impairments in preschoolers at risk of developing difficulties in mathematics

The occurrence of time processing problems in individuals with Development Dyscalculia (DD) has favored the view of a general magnitude system devoted to both numerical and temporal information. Yet, this scenario has been partially challenged by studies indicating that time difficulties can be attributed to poor calculation or counting skills, which can support reasoning on time in school‐aged children and adults. Here, we tackle this debate by exploring the performance of young children before they fully develop the symbolic number system. Preschoolers at risk of developing DD were compared with typically developing children in a series of tasks investigating time processing and in their ‘sense of time’, evaluated by parents and teachers. Results yielded a poorer performance in time reproduction of 5‐second intervals and in time discrimination, as well as a weaker ‘sense of time’, in children at risk of DD. These findings provide evidence of a common magnitude system that would be responsible for deficits in both numerical and temporal domains, already at early stages of life.     

Theory of mind and joint action in Parkinson’s disease

It has been suggested that the Theory of Mind (ToM) may rely on more basic processes of social cognition, such as action control (e.g., joint action), even if little is known about this relationship. The relationship between ToM and joint action can be studied in patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD), because they are characterized not only by a deficit in ToM (and in its cognitive and affective subcomponents) but also by a deficit in the inhibition of competing responses. Sixty PD patients and 60 matched healthy controls (HCs) performed a go/no-go Flanker task in both joint and individual conditions. Cognitive (Advanced Test or AT) and affective (Emotion Attribution Task or EAT) ToM also were measured. Thirty-five PD patients and matched HCs also performed the standard Flanker task, as a control measure. In patients, only individuals with high AT scores exhibited a joint Flanker effect, whereas in HCs the joint effect was found irrespectively of AT score. Patients with low EAT scores showed a greater interference effect than patients with high scores, whereas the opposite pattern was found for HCs. In regression analysis AT and EAT scores predicted the Flanker effect in the joint condition only. In the standard task, both groups showed a Flanker effect. The role of different fronto-striatal circuits, especially in PD patients, could explain the different involvement of cognitive and affective ToM in joint tasks. The Flanker effect is discussed considering the referential coding account and the attention-focus account as possible candidates to explain joint action effects.     

Influence of time-of-day on joint Navon effect

The shared attention theory suggests that people devote greater cognitive resources to those features co-attended simultaneously with others, determining better performance in several types of tasks. When co-actors performed a go/no-go Navon task attending different features of target letters, the performance was impaired, reflecting a joint Navon effect (the representation of a co-actor’s attentional focus made it more difficult to select and apply one’s own focus of attention), probably due to asynchronous co-attention with a decrease in cognitive resources involved. Researches in chronobiology and chronopsychology demonstrated that not only selective attention (involved in a Navon task), but also cognitive resources have a daily fluctuations, mainly paralleling the circadian rhythm of body temperature (i.e. increasing values from the morning to evening with a subsequent decline in the night). The study was conducted to assess whether the presence of joint attention, as measured by the joint Navon effect, was influenced by the time-of-day. Sixteen pairs of participants sitting next to each other were required to respond to the identity letters in a go/no-go Navon task twice: in the morning (09:00–10:00) and early afternoon (13:00–14:00). The results showed a joint Navon effect in the morning session only, suggesting that joint attention was affected by the time-of-day effect on cognitive resources.     

Common mechanisms in error monitoring and action effect monitoring

In the present study, we considered error-related brain activity in event-related potentials, to investigate the relationship between error monitoring—that is, the detection and evaluation of erroneous responses—and action effect monitoring—that is, monitoring of the sensory consequences of behavior. To this end, participants worked on a task-switching paradigm that consisted of a free-choice task, in which a puzzle piece had to be attached to an existing one (the prime task), and a subsequent color flanker task (the probe task). We examined whether unexpected action effects in the prime task would affect the subsequent error monitoring in the probe task. We found the neural correlates of error monitoring during the probe task, the error-related negativity as well as the error positivity, to be increased after unexpected action effects in the prime task. In contrast, the neural correlates of visual attention were decreased after unexpected action effects, in line with recent findings on an attenuation of sensory processing after errors. Our results demonstrate a direct link between monitoring processes in the two tasks. We propose that both error monitoring and action effect monitoring rely on a common generic monitoring system related to novelty detection or affective processing. Preactivating this system by means of unexpected action effects increases the sensitivity for detecting an error in the subsequent task.     

Differences between children and adults in the recognition of enjoyment smiles

The authors investigated the differences between 8-year-olds (n=80) and adults (n=80) in recognition of felt versus faked enjoyment smiles by using a newly developed picture set that is based on the Facial Action Coding System. The authors tested the effect of different facial action units (AUs) on judgments of smile authenticity. Multiple regression showed that children base their judgment on AU intensity of both mouth and eyes, with relatively little distinction between the Duchenne marker (AU6 or "cheek raiser") and a different voluntary muscle that has a similar effect on eye aperture (AU7 or "lid tightener"). Adults discriminate well between AU6 and AU7 and seem to use eye-mouth discrepancy as a major cue of authenticity. Bared-teeth smiles (involving AU25) are particularly salient to both groups. The authors propose and discuss an initial developmental model of the smile recognition process.     

Adaptive and maladaptive components of rumination? Diagnostic specificity and relation to depressive biases

The present study investigated the validity of the two-factor solution of items selected from the Rumination Scale of the Response Style Questionnaire proposed by Treynor, Gonzalez, and Nolen-Hoeksema (2003). In the first part of this study we used samples of currently depressed (MDD), formerly depressed (FD), socially anxious (SP), and healthy control participants to examine whether the brooding and reflective pondering components differentiate participants with an anxiety disorder from participants with depression. In the second part of this study we examined whether these components of rumination were differentially related to cognitive biases in depression. Overall, the MDD group exhibited higher brooding scores than did all other groups; SP and FD groups did not differ from each other but obtained higher brooding scores than did the control participants. Only the MDD and the control groups differed on the reflective pondering factor. Importantly, brooding and reflective pondering were differentially related to cognitive biases. Specifically, the correlation between brooding/reflective pondering and memory bias was not significant when depressive symptoms were partialed out. The correlation between brooding and attentional bias for sad faces, however, remained significant even when current depressive symptoms were taken into account. In sum, our results support the formulation that rumination is composed of an adaptive reflective pondering factor and a maladaptive brooding factor.     

On the dimensionality of the System Usability Scale: a test of alternative measurement models

The System Usability Scale (SUS), developed by Brooke (Usability evaluation in industry, Taylor & Francis, London, pp 189–194, 1996), had a great success among usability practitioners since it is a quick and easy to use measure for collecting users’ usability evaluation of a system. Recently, Lewis and Sauro (Proceedings of the human computer interaction international conference (HCII 2009), San Diego CA, USA, 2009) have proposed a two-factor structure—Usability (8 items) and Learnability (2 items)—suggesting that practitioners might take advantage of these new factors to extract additional information from SUS data. In order to verify the dimensionality in the SUS’ two-component structure, we estimated the parameters and tested with a structural equation model the SUS structure on a sample of 196 university users. Our data indicated that both the unidimensional model and the two-factor model with uncorrelated factors proposed by Lewis and Sauro (Proceedings of the human computer interaction international conference (HCII 2009), San Diego CA, USA, 2009) had a not satisfactory fit to the data. We thus released the hypothesis that Usability and Learnability are independent components of SUS ratings and tested a less restrictive model with correlated factors. This model not only yielded a good fit to the data, but it was also significantly more appropriate to represent the structure of SUS ratings.

Individual Differences in Risky Decision Making: A Meta‐analysis of Sensation Seeking and Impulsivity with the Balloon Analogue Risk Task

To represent the state‐of‐the‐art in an effort to understand the relation between personality and risk taking, we selected a popular decision task with characteristics that parallel risk taking in the real world and two personality traits commonly believed to influence risk taking. A meta‐analysis is presented based on 22 studies of the Balloon Analogue Risk Task from which correlations with sensation seeking and impulsivity assessments could be obtained. Results calculated on a total of 2120 participants showed that effect size for the relation of sensation seeking with risk taking was in the small–moderate range ( = .14), whereas the effect size for impulsivity was just around the small effect size threshold ( = .10). Although we considered participants' demographics as moderators, we found only significantly larger effect sizes for the older adolescents and young adults compared with other ages. The findings of the present review supported the view that inconsistencies in personality–risk research were mostly due to random fluctuations of specific effect sizes, rather than to lack of theoretical ties or to measurement unreliability. It is also concluded that studies aimed at relating individual differences in personality to performance in experimental decision tasks need an appropriate sample size to achieve the power to produce significant results. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Implicit affective evaluation of visual symmetry

Symmetry and beauty are strongly linked, but is the positive response to visual symmetry automatic? We used the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to measure the valence of visual regularities in the absence of overt judgments. In our first experiment, participants classified dot patterns as random or having an axis of reflection, and words as positive or negative. When the same button was used to report reflection and positive words, responses were faster than when the same button was used to report reflection and negative words. We take this association to indicate an implicit preference for reflectional patterns. In subsequent experiments, a reflected pattern was preferred to a rotation or translation, and a rotational pattern was preferred to random patterns. In some cases these results were not in agreement with verbally reported preferences, but implicit preferences were always predicted by the speed at which patterns could be identified. We conclude that the IAT can unearth an automatic affective response produced by perceptual fluency. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

The perceived structural shape of thin (wire-like) objects is different from that of silhouettes

Observers are faster at judging the position of convex vertices compared to concave vertices. This is believed to be due to an explicit representation of position for visual parts. The best evidence comes from comparing the same contours perceived as either figures or holes, because this is a pure figure ground reversal (Bertamini and Croucher, 2003 Cognition 87 33 - 54; Bertamini and Mosca, 2004 Perception 33 35-48). Specifically, an interaction is present between type of object (object or hole) and shape. One assumption is that the contour of a silhouette is perceived as the rim of a solid object. It follows that a different pattern should be found for thin (wire-like) objects compared to silhouettes. We confirm this difference in three experiments. We argue that this is due to the perceived parts when contours can be interpreted as self-occlusion rims.