Thinking around the corner: the development of planning abilities

The ability to plan and search ahead is essential for problem solving in most situations in everyday life. To investigate the development of planning and related processes, a sample of four- and five-year-old children was examined in a variant of the Tower of London, a frequently used neuropsychological assessment tool of planning abilities. The applied problems either required searching ahead for optimal solution or were solvable by pure step-by-step forward processing. Furthermore, the ambiguity of subgoal ordering was varied.Results revealed an age-related effect of search depth: the four-year olds’ planning accuracy was particularly decreased in problems demanding search ahead, while five-year olds mastered both problem types equally well. Interestingly, this interaction between age and search depth could not be accounted for by measures of working memory and inhibition. Differential effects of age were also found for subgoal ordering with respect to initial planning and movement execution times. In sum, planning abilities showed considerable development during late kindergarten age that appeared to be specifically associated with the integration and back-validation of the anticipated consequences of internally modeled actions. The present study demonstrates that a careful consideration of problem structure may greatly enhance the insights gained from the application of a routinely used assessment tool, the Tower of London. This may be especially advantageous when addressing specific subpopulations such as children or clinical samples.     

Complex prospective memory: development across the lifespan and the role of task interruption

Prospective memory (PM) reflects the product of cognitive processes associated with the formation, retention, delayed initiation, and execution of intentions. It has been proposed that developmental changes in PM across the lifespan are heavily dependent upon the developmental trajectory of executive control functions. This study is the first to apply a complex PM task to children, young adults, and older adults. The procedure allows for the assessment of each of the 4 phases of PM. During intention execution, the authors additionally manipulated whether participants had to actively interrupt attention to the current 'ongoing' task in order to switch to the execution of the next intended task. Group differences mirroring inverted U-shaped functions were observed in those phases conceptualized as relying on executive control (intention formation, initiation, and execution). Age differences in intention execution were substantially greater when active task interruption was necessary. The current study provides the first evidence of growth and decline of complex PM across the lifespan and suggests that the degree of inhibitory control needed to succeed in the task may be one factor underlying this development.     

Cognitive Development in Young-old Type-2 Diabetes Patients: A Longitudinal Analysis From The “Interdisciplinary Longitudinal Study of Aging”

In the present study, we investigated cognitive status and cognitive development in young-old Type-2 diabetes patients. Extending previous research, using the sample of the ILSE study (“Interdisciplinary Longitudinal Study of Aging”), we applied a comprehensive cognitive test battery to 38 Type-2 diabetes patients (mean age at T1: 63 years) and 421 control participants and tested both cognitive status and longitudinal changes after four years in several cognitive domains (crystallized intelligence, verbal memory, visual memory, executive functioning, psychomotor speed, and fluid intelligence). Results revealed no cross-sectional group differences in any cognitive domain at T1 nor at T2. However, testing group differences in intraindividual change over time, reliable group differences in the change of crystallized intelligence and fluid intelligence were revealed. While controls improved in crystallized intelligence as well as in fluid intelligence over time, diabetes patients’ performance decreased. The results demonstrate that in young-old adults the effects of diabetes on cognition may only be detected by analyzing within-person changes instead of mean level differences.

Adult age differences in function concept learning

Function concept learning and knowledge use was explored across adulthood. During training older and younger adults predicted an amount of physiological arousal produced as a negative and positive function of a chemical substance. Knowledge use was evaluated with two transfer conditions requiring a switch between contextual contingencies: a relationship inversion, predicting the chemical amount given the physiological arousal, and a change from graphic based to text based stimuli. Older adults were impaired in applying the negative slope concept. However, there was no relative deficit in switching between the negative and positive function slopes or inverting the learned relationship. Our results suggest that age-related differences in relational reasoning tasks vary not only with processing efficiency, but also task related conceptual knowledge.     

Hormones and personality: Testosterone as a marker of individual differences

Recently, testosterone (T) has been linked to behaviors that are conceptually related to dominance as a personality characteristic. Although evidence for this association is growing, the psychometric properties of T as an individual difference variable have been largely neglected. For T to be considered a biological marker of dispositional dominance it is critical that it demonstrates high test–retest reliability and good convergent and discriminant validity. Two studies tested the temporal stability of salivary T in humans and the relationship between T and traditional measures of personality. Across both studies, test–retest reliability for T was high and comparable to the short-term stability of questionnaire-based and implicitly assessed personality assessment instruments. In being modestly correlated with self-reported dominance, T showed some evidence of convergent validity. In being statistically independent from conceptually unrelated personality constructs (such as Emotional Stability and Openness to Experience) it showed good evidence of discriminant validity. The findings strengthen the psychometric foundation for using T as a hormonal marker of individual differences.     

Mood regulation in depression: Differential effects of distraction and recall of happy memories on sad mood

Recent research suggests that the recall of positive memories plays an important role in mood regulation. In this study, the authors examined the ability of currently depressed, formerly depressed, and never-depressed participants to regulate sad mood through the recall of positive memories or through distraction. Although improvement in mood was found for all participants in response to distraction, under instructions to recall positive memories, never-depressed participants' moods improved, whereas formerly depressed participants' sad moods remained unchanged. It is important to note that depressed participants exhibited a worsening of their sad moods after recalling positive memories. These results suggest both that depression is associated with an impaired ability to use positive recall to regulate a sad mood and that this impairment continues to be evident following recovery.     

Emotions and appraisals: can you have one without the other?

In his commentary on M. Siemer and R. Reisenzein (2007), B. Parkinson (2007) raised a number of important questions concerning the process of emotion inference and the scope of appraisal theories. Siemer and Reisenzein first examine the alternative explanations of their findings proposed by Parkinson and then look at the alternative "situated" view of emotions proposed by him. The main conclusion is that the issues raised by Parkinson can be dealt with by (suitable extensions of) appraisal theory.     

Predicting voting behavior with implicit attitude measures: the 2002 German parliamentary election

Implicit measures of attitudes are commonly seen to be primarily capable of predicting spontaneous behavior. However, evidence exists that these measures can also improve the prediction of more deliberate behavior. In a prospective study we tested the hypothesis that Implicit Association Test (IAT) measures of the five major political parties in Germany would improve the prediction of voting behavior over and above explicit self-report measures in the 2002 parliamentary elections. Additionally we tested whether general interest in politics moderates the relationship between explicit and implicit attitude measures. The results support our hypotheses. Implications for predictive models of explicitly and implicitly measured attitudes are discussed.