A study of 60- to 89-mo.-old children's skill at writing numerals

The skill of writing numerals necessitates a certain developmental maturity. Studying the age at which children start to develop this skill and assessing problems they encounter while writing numerals should give direction to their training. From 8 schools a total of 267 children, ages 60 to 89 mo., were asked to write the numerals 1 to 9. Analysis showed that 80% of the children wrote most of the numerals correctly, 15% wrote inverted numerals, 2.0% wrote some numerals as letters, and 4% did not write certain numerals at all. In addition, 64% of children ages 60 to 65 mo. gave correct responses, and the perception of correct responses increased across age groups until 95% were correct in the group who were 84 to 89 mo. There was no significant difference between girls and boys in these writing skills.     

Emotional intelligence and social interaction

Two studies found positive relationships between the ability to manage emotions and the quality of social interactions, supporting the predictive and incremental validity of an ability measure of emotional intelligence, the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT). In a sample of 118 American college students (Study 1), higher scores on the managing emotions subscale of the MSCEIT were positively related to the quality of interactions with friends, evaluated separately by participants and two friends. In a diary study of social interaction with 103 German college students (Study 2), managing emotions scores were positively related to the perceived quality of interactions with opposite sex individuals. Scores on this subscale were also positively related to perceived success in impression management in social interactions with individuals of the opposite sex. In both studies, the main findings remained statistically significant after controlling for Big Five personality traits.     

Expression influences the recognition of familiar faces

Face recognition has been assumed to be independent of facial expression. We used familiar and unfamiliar faces that were morphed from a happy to an angry expression within a given identity. Participants performed speeded two-choice decisions according to whether or not a face was familiar. Consistent with earlier findings, reaction times for classifications of unfamiliar faces were independent of facial expressions. In contrast, expression clearly influenced the recognition of familiar faces. with fastest recognition for moderately happy expressions. This suggests that representations of familiar faces for recognition preserve some information about typical emotional expressions.     

Distance estimation in a dynamic simulated environment: a visual field dependence problem?

Egocentric distance estimation implies that the subject perceives his own location in the environment. In a simulated environment, subjects have to transpose perceptively their own observation point in order to assume their virtual body position. As only visual information specifies this position, their ability to perceive the camera viewpoint should be linked to the field dependence independence factor (FDI). Field-independent subjects underestimated the mid-distance between their own virtual body position and a far-located target; their bisection was located between the projective (2-D) and the simulated (3-D) mid-distance which indicates their difficulty in considering the in-depth simulated spatial references. High correlations between the vertical estimation in the rod-and-frame test and the egocentric-distance-estimation task (with shifted camera) suggest a similar perceptive process in both tasks. This result is confirmed by the better performances of the field-dependent subjects in this condition. In conclusion, we discuss the relationship between FDI and the sense of presence in virtual environments.     

Actions blind to conceptually overlapping stimuli

Participants are worse at identifying spatial symbols (arrowheads) while performing spatially compatible manual key presses. The present experiments investigated the generality of this blindness effect to response-compatible stimuli. In Experiment 1 a left key press deteriorated the identification of left-pointing arrows, and a right key press deteriorated the perception of right-pointing arrows, independent of the hands used to press the key. Thus the blindness effect is based on codes of the distal response location rather than on the body-intrinsic anatomical connection of the hands. Experiment 2 extended the blindness effect to verbal responses and written position words (left, right, up, down). Vocalizing a position word blinded to directly compatible position words (e.g., left-left), but not to orthogonally compatible position words (e.g., left-down). This result suggests that the use of identical stimulus-response codes, and not the use of saliency-matching but distinct codes, suffices to produce blindness effects. Finally, Experiment 3 extended the blindness phenomenon beyond the spatial domain by demonstrating blindness between saying color words and perceiving color patches. Altogether, the experiments revealed action-induced blindness to be a phenomenon of broad empirical validity occurring whenever action and perception afford simultaneous access to the same conceptual codes.     

Perceiving action identity: how pianists recognize their own performances

Can skilled performers, such as artists or athletes, recognize the products of their own actions? We recorded 12 pianists playing 12 mostly unfamiliar musical excerpts, half of them on a silent keyboard. Several months later, we played these performances back and asked the pianists to use a 5-point scale to rate whether they thought they were the person playing each excerpt (1 = no, 5 = yes). They gave their own performances significantly higher ratings than any other pianist's performances. In two later follow-up tests, we presented edited performances from which differences in tempo, overall dynamic (i.e., intensity) level, and dynamic nuances had been removed. The pianists' ratings did not change significantly, which suggests that the remaining information (expressive timing and articulation) was sufficient for self-recognition. Absence of sound during recording had no significant effect. These results are best explained by the hypothesis that an observer's action system is most strongly activated during perception of self-produced actions.     

Effects of redundant visual stimuli on temporal order judgments

Four experiments were conducted in order to compare the effects of stimulus redundancy on temporal order judgments (TOJs) and reaction times (RTs). In Experiments 1 and 2, participants were presented in each trial with a tone and either a single visual stimulus or two redundant visual stimuli. They were asked to judge whether the tone or the visual display was presented first. Judgments of the relative onset times of the visual and the auditory stimuli were virtually unaffected by the presentation of redundant, rather than single, visual stimuli. Experiments 3 and 4 used simple RT tasks with the same stimuli, and responses were much faster to redundant than to single visual stimuli. It appears that the traditional speedup of RT associated with redundant visual stimuli arises after the stimulus detection processes to which TOJs are sensitive.     

Quality of life assessment in Turkish patients with schizophrenia and their relatives

Quality of life of first-degree relatives living in the same household with patients having schizophrenia has not been sufficiently explored. 30 patients with schizophrenia (16 women, 14 men), diagnosed using DSM-IV criteria, 31 of their relatives (15 women, 16 men), and 34 control subjects (21 women, 13 men) were included in the study. The mean age of the patients, their relatives, and the control subects were 39.8 +/- 10.9, 58.1 +/- 12.5 and 37.3 +/- 17.0, respectively. The World Health Oranization Quality of Life-Brief Form was administered to all subjects. Quality of life was worse for the patient group than for their relatives and control subjects, but relatives of the patients and control subjects were not significantly different on Quality of life. Quality of life was negatively correlated with the severity of psychopathology and extrapyramidal side effects induced by antipsychotic drugs in the patients.     

Decision-making impairments in patients with Parkinson's disease

A high percentage of Parkinson's disease (PD) patients show cognitive impairments in addition to the cardinal motor symptoms. These deficits primarily concern executive functions most probably linked to dysfunctions in prefrontal regions due to decreased dopaminergic transmission in fronto-striatal loops. To investigate possible associations between decision-making and executive functions in PD, we examined 20 non-demented PD patients and 20 healthy control subjects with a neuropsychological test battery and the Game of Dice Task. In this computerised decision-making task, the rules for gains and losses and the winning probabilities are obvious and stable. Thus, strategic components besides feedback processing might influence decision-making in this task. We found that PD patients were impaired in the Game of Dice task performance and that the frequency of disadvantageous choices correlated with both executive functions and feedback processing. We suggest that decision-making deficits of PD patients in explicit gambling situations might be associated with dysfunctions in two different fronto-striatal loops: the limbic-orbitofrontal-striatal loop, involved in feedback processing, and the dorsolateral prefrontal-striatal loop, involved in executive functions.