Rate and accuracy of vowel recognition as a function of spoken reinforcers and age

Developmental differences among the effectiveness of three spoken reinforcers were evaluated by measuring rate and accuracy of performance on a vowel recognition task. Eighty-seven males were selected from grades 1 to 3, 6 to 7, and 11 to 12 of a predominantly urban, Black, parochial school. The effectiveness of approval and affirmation of correctness was related to grade level for accuracy of performance, but not for rate. For accuracy of performance a decreasing linear trend was found when approval effectiveness was evaluated across grades. For correctness, an increasing linear trend was found. The results were discussed in terms of a developmental hierarchy of reinforcers and information processing.     

Some Results from an Automated Statewide Comparison among Attempted,Committed, and Nonsuicidal Patients

ABSTRACT: In the Missouri Division of Mental Health statewide automated Standard System of Psychiatry, 151 patients who had attempted suicide were compared with 424 who had not and with 97 who had committed suicide. Much of the data was provided from relatives using an automated history. Compared with nonattempters, attempters were younger and more often female, depressed, assaultive, and had a family history of suicide. Actual suicides were more often male, better educated, and in general more resembled the attempters than nonattempters.     

Functional and anatomical profile of visual motion impairments in stroke patients correlate with fMRI in normal subjects

We used six psychophysical tasks to measure sensitivity to different types of global motion in 45 healthy adults and in 57 stroke patients who had recovered from the initial results of the stroke, but a large subset of them had enduring deficits on selective visual motion perception tasks. The patients were divided into four groups on the basis of the location of their cortical lesion: occipito-temporal, occipito-parietal, rostro-dorsal parietal, or frontal-prefrontal. The six tasks were: direction discrimination, speed discrimination, motion coherence, motion discontinuity, two-dimensional form-from-motion, and motion coherence – radial. We found both qualitative and quantitative differences among the motion impairments in the four groups: patients with frontal lesions or occipito-temporal lesions were not impaired on any task. The other two groups had substantial impairments, most severe in the group with occipito-parietal damage. We also tested eight healthy control subjects on the same tasks while they were scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging. The BOLD signal provoked by the different tasks correlated well with the locus of the lesions that led to impairments among the different tasks. The results highlight the advantage of using psychophysical techniques and a variety of visual tasks with neurological patients to tease apart the contribution of different cortical areas to motion processing.     

Advancing Developmental Science via Unmoderated Remote Research with Children

ABSTRACT

This article introduces an accessible approach to implementing unmoderated remote research in developmental science – research in which children and families participate in studies remotely and independently, without directly interacting with researchers. Unmoderated remote research has the potential to strengthen developmental science by: (1) facilitating the implementation of studies that are easily replicable, (2) allowing for new approaches to longitudinal studies and studies of parent-child interaction, and (3) including families from more diverse backgrounds and children growing up in more diverse environments in research. We describe an approach we have used to design and implement unmoderated remote research that is accessible to researchers with limited programming expertise, and we describe the resources we have made available on a new website (discoveriesonline.org) to help researchers get started with implementing this approach. We discuss the potential of this method for developmental science and highlight some challenges still to be overcome to harness the power of unmoderated remote research for advancing the field.     

PHONOLOGICAL CONTRASTS AND WORD‐DECODING SKILLS OF THE READER OF ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE

ABSTRACT

The purpose of the following study was to investigate the extent to which phoneme and grapheme‐phoneme contrasts between English and Spanish are associated with word‐decoding problems in Spanish‐speaking adults who are early readers of English. To test whether such a co‐occurrence exists, word‐decoding exercises were administered to four groups of Spanish‐speaking subjects. The groups were organized on the basis of English‐language proficiency. Significant differences in word‐decoding performance appeared between words containing letter‐sounds found in both Spanish and English and those with letter‐sounds not found in Spanish.