Role of mothers in the acquisition of tool-use behaviours by captive infant chimpanzees

This article explores the maternal role in the acquisition of tool-use behaviours by infant chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). A honey-fishing task, simulating ant/termite fishing found in the wild, was introduced to three dyads of experienced mother and naïve infant chimpanzees. Four fishing sites and eight sets of 20 objects to be used as tools, not all appropriate, were available. Two of the mothers constantly performed the task, using primarily two kinds of tools; the three infants observed them. The infants, regardless of the amount of time spent observing, successfully performed the task around the age of 20–22 months, which is earlier than has been recorded in the wild. Two of the infants used the same types of tools that the adults predominantly used, suggesting that tool selectivity is transmitted. The results also show that adults are tolerant of infants, even if unrelated; infants were sometimes permitted to lick the tools, or were given the tools, usually without honey, as well as permitted to observe the adult performances closely.Electronic Supplementary Material Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at     

Perceptual and lexical components of auditory repetition priming in young and older adults

In the present study, we examined whether age modulates the processing of lexical and perceptual information in auditory implicit and explicit memory tests. Young and older adults performed a surface encoding task on spoken and printed words and then either identified degraded words or made explicit recognition judgments. The implicit test of perceptual identification yielded no evidence of age-related declines in the processing of either lexical information or coarse perceptual details (modality of presentation). The same test, however, produced marked age-related declines in the processing of fine-grained perceptual details (voice) when subjects were not familiarized with the talkers' voices prior to the encoding task. Marked age differences were also observed in recognition memory. These findings suggest that although aging preserves the encoding and incidental retrieval of lexical and coarse perceptual information, it affects the encoding of fine-grained perceptual information and deliberate retrieval processes.     

Maternal Avoidant Coping Mediates the Effect of Parenting Stress on Depressive Symptoms during Early Adolescence

We examined maternal avoidant coping as a mediator between maternal parenting stress and maternal depressive symptoms during early adolescence. Three years of self-report data were collected from 173 mothers, beginning when mothers’ adolescents were in 6th grade and aged 11–13 years. Utilizing longitudinal path analysis, results indicated that avoidant coping at time two mediated the association between parenting stress at time one and depressive symptoms at time three. Additionally, the reverse direction of effects was examined, revealing that the relation between parenting stress and avoidant coping was unidirectional, while the relation between avoidant coping and depressive symptoms was bidirectional. Our results suggest that during early adolescence, mothers who experience more stress in the parenting role are more likely to engage in higher levels of avoidant coping when faced with parenting problems. In turn, a mother’s long-term avoidant reactions to parenting problems may predict increases in depressive symptoms. Moreover, our findings of a bidirectional relation between avoidant coping and depressive symptoms suggest that prior levels of depression might serve as a barrier to efficient and effective coping. The present study may inform preventive intervention efforts aimed at decreasing the use of avoidance in response to parenting stressors by increasing adaptive parental coping with stressors, and providing appropriate support and resources for parents.     

Exploration of an adaptive training regimen that can target the secondary memory component of working memory capacity

The dual-component model contends that working memory (WM) capacity consists of two components. The first is a flexible attention component that involves the active maintenance of a limited amount of information in primary memory (PM), and the second is a controlled retrieval component that involves a cue-dependent search of secondary memory (SM) for information that has been lost from PM. Recent evidence has suggested that the adaptive WM training regimen known as “Cogmed-RM” is not optimally designed, because it only targets PM abilities, not SM abilities. The present study was conducted to investigate whether Cogmed-RM could be modified to target SM abilities by decreasing the recall accuracy threshold that defines individual ability during training. The main findings suggested that the SM component of WM capacity could be targeted by lowering the recall accuracy threshold. The present findings are important because they suggest that adaptive training regimens can be designed that selectively target specific components of WM capacity, and they raise the possibility that the potency of existing training regimens can be increased.     

Component analysis of verbal versus spatial working memory training in adolescents with ADHD: A randomized,controlled trial

Adaptive training of working memory (WM) using the Cogmed-RM intervention has recently shown some efficacy as an alternative treatment for ADHD, but this intervention may not be optimally designed. A recent component analysis of WM has suggested that maintenance in primary memory (PM) appears to be largely intact whereas recall from secondary memory (SM) appears to be deficient in ADHD relative to age-matched controls. However, extrapolating from basic research, there is reason to believe that Cogmed-RM may target the PM component more than the SM component; though training with spatial exercises may target the SM component more than training with verbal exercises. To investigate, participants diagnosed with ADHD were randomly assigned to either a verbal training condition (n?=?24) or a spatial training condition (n?=?23) using a randomized, controlled design, and both groups were instructed to complete at least 20 days of training. The PM and SM components of WM were assessed immediately before and after training using both verbal and spatial free recall tasks. The main findings showed that both versions of the intervention enhanced the maintenance of information in PM regardless of test modality, but not the recall of information from SM. Therefore, the component of WM that is improved by Cogmed-RM is not the same component of WM that is deficient in ADHD.     

Facial expressions and the ability to recognize emotions from the eyes or mouth: A comparison among old adults,young adults,and children

The aim of the present study was to contribute to the literature on the ability to recognize anger, happiness, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, and neutral emotions from facial information (whole face, eye region, mouth region). More specifically, the aim was to investigate older adults' performance in emotions recognition using the same tool used in the previous studies on children and adults’ performance and verify if the pattern of emotions recognition show differences compared with the other two groups. Results showed that happiness is among the easiest emotions to recognize while the disgust is always among the most difficult emotions to recognize for older adults. The findings seem to indicate that is more easily recognizing emotions when pictures represent the whole face; compared with the specific region (eye and mouth regions), older participants seems to recognize more easily emotions when the mouth region is presented. In general, the results of the study did not detect a decay in the ability to recognize emotions from the face, eyes, or mouth. The performance of the old adults is statistically worse than the other two groups in only a few cases: in anger and disgust recognition from the whole face; in anger recognition from the eye region; and in disgust, fear, and neutral emotion recognition from mouth region.     

Identity and the Theory of Planned Behavior: Predicting Maintenance of Volunteering After Three Years

Is identity an important predictor of social behavior? The present longitudinal study is focused on identity in order to understand why people continue to volunteer over an extended period of time. The theory of planned behavior and the role identity model of volunteering are used as theoretical framework. Two hundred thirty Italian volunteers were sampled and followed for 3 years. We analyzed functions of role identity as a volunteer. Results showed a significant impact of role identity in predicting volunteer performance after 3 years, mediated through behavioral intentions. Role identity fully mediated the relationships between behavioral intention and attitude, social norms, past behavior and parental modelling.     

Enduring deficits in contextual and auditory fear conditioning after adolescent, not adult, social instability stress in male rats

Adolescence is a time of developmental changes and reorganization in the brain and stress systems, thus, adolescents may be more vulnerable than adults to the effects of chronic mild stressors. Most studies, however, have not directly compared stress experienced in adolescence to the same stress experience in adulthood. In the present study, adolescent (n=46) and adult (n=48) male rats underwent 16 days of social instability stress (daily 1h isolation and change of cage partners) or were non-stress controls. Rats were then tested on the strength of acquired contextual and cued fear conditioning, as well as extinction learning, beginning either the day after the stress procedure or 3 weeks later. No difference was found among the groups during the Training Phase of conditioning. Irrespective of the time between the social stress experience and fear conditioning, rats stressed in adolescence had decreased context and cue memory, and cue generalization compared to control rats, as measured by the percentage of time spent freezing in tests. Social instability stress in adulthood had no effect on any measure of fear conditioning. The results support the hypothesis that adolescence is a time of heightened vulnerability to stressors.     

Component analysis of simple span vs. complex span adaptive working memory exercises: A randomized,controlled trial

There has been growing interest in using adaptive training interventions such as Cogmed-RM to increase the capacity of working memory (WM), but this intervention may not be optimally designed. For instance, Cogmed-RM can target the primary memory (PM) component of WM capacity, but not the secondary memory (SM) component. The present study hypothesized that Cogmed-RM does not target SM capacity because the simple span exercises it uses may not cause a sufficient amount of information to be lost from PM during training. To investigate, we randomly assigned participants to either a standard (simple span; N = 31) or a modified (complex span; N = 30) training condition. The main findings showed that SM capacity did not improve, even in the modified training condition. Hence, the potency of span-based WM interventions cannot be increased simply by converting simple span exercises into complex span exercises.     

Randomised trial of expressive writing for distressed metastatic breast cancer patients

Women with metastatic breast cancer and significant psychological distress (N?=?87) were assigned randomly to engage in four home-based sessions of expressive writing or neutral writing. Women in the expressive writing group wrote about their deepest thoughts and feelings regarding their cancer, whereas women in the neutral writing group wrote about their daily activities in a factual manner. No statistically significant group differences in existential and psychological well-being, fatigue and sleep quality were found at 8-weeks post-writing. However, the expressive writing group reported significantly greater use of mental health services during the study than the neutral writing group (55% vs. 26%, respectively; p?相似文献