Relations between implicit measures of prejudice:what are we measuring?

Some recent findings suggest that different implicit measures of prejudice assess the same underlying construct, but other work suggests that they may not. In this experiment, White participants completed a version of a priming measure of racial attitudes that either encouraged categorization of the face primes in terms of race or did not encourage such categorization, and then completed the Implicit Association Test. Correspondence between the two measures was found only when categorization by race was required on the priming measure. Moreover, participants appeared more prejudiced when they were led to construe individuals in terms of race than when they were not so encouraged. The discussion focuses on the potential for dissociations between evaluations of a category and evaluations of members of the category.     

Beyond Discrete Categories: Studying Multiracial,Intersex, and Transgender Children Will Strengthen Basic Developmental Science

Developmental research on social categorization has overwhelmingly focused on perceptions about and experiences of individuals who are clear or prototypical members of discrete and usually dichotomous social categories. For example, studies of social categorization, stereotyping, prejudice, and social identity have generally explored how children reason about others who are gender-typical boys or girls or monoracial White or Black children. Similarly, research participants have generally been gender-typical and monoracial. However, our efforts to build theories that account for the true range of variation require acknowledging the increasing visibility of children who do not fit into these discrete categories and raise the question of whether existing theories can capture the dynamics that arise for them. Focusing on race and gender/sex, the social categories that have received the most attention in the developmental literature, we review research that has gone beyond simple dichotomies by including multiracial, gender-nonconforming, or intersex children, either as the targets of social perception or as participants themselves. We argue that this emerging work reveals problematic assumptions built into our theories and methods and highlights the value of building a more inclusive science.     

A comparison of the cognitive deficits in reading disability and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder

This study used a nonreferred sample of twins to contrast the performance of individuals with reading disability (RD; n = 93), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD; n = 52), RD and ADHD (n = 48), and neither RD nor ADHD (n = 121) on measures of phoneme awareness (PA) and executive functioning (EF). Exploratory factor analysis of the EF measures yielded underlying factors of working memory, inhibition, and set shifting. Results revealed that ADHD was associated with inhibition deficits, whereas RD was associated with significant deficits on measures of PA and verbal working memory. The RD + ADHD group was most impaired on virtually all measures, providing evidence against the phenocopy hypothesis as an explanation for comorbidity between RD and ADHD.     

Associative learning improves visual working memory performance

The ability to remember visual stimuli over a short delay period is limited by the small capacity of visual working memory (VWM). Here the authors investigate the role of learning in enhancing VWM. Participants saw 2 spatial arrays separated by a 1-s interval. The 2 arrays were identical except for 1 location. Participants had to detect the difference. Unknown to the participants, some spatial arrays would repeat once every dozen trials or so for up to 32 repetitions. Spatial VWM performance increased significantly when the same location changed across display repetitions, but not at all when different locations changed from one display repetition to another. The authors suggest that a major role of learning in VWM is to mediate which information gets retained, rather than to directly increase VWM capacity.     

Narrative and persistence

Many philosophers say that the nature of personal identity has to do with narratives: the stories we tell about ourselves. While different narrativists address different questions of personal identity, some propose narrativist accounts of personal identity over time. The paper argues that such accounts have troubling consequences about the beginning and end of our lives, lead to inconsistencies, and involve backwards causation. The problems can be solved, but only by modifying the accounts in ways that deprive them of their appeal.     

Finding Motivation to Learn: Exploring Achievement Goals in California Community College CalWORKs Students

This study investigated the achievement goals and motivations of California Community College CalWORKs students in an effort to better support student success and persistence. This study was guided by three research questions: (1) What type of achievement goals do CalWORKs students enter with? (2) What are their rationales for these types of achievement goals? (3) How malleable are these achievement goals? Interviews with 48 participants focused on better understanding the relationship between achievement goal type and motivation changes while in college. Findings indicate that CalWORKs students enter college with a range of goal types, but formany changes in goal type led to more intrinsic motivation and ultimately persistence toward graduation and career goals. Findings from this study also reveal thatexperiences highlighting students' ability to be competent as learners while balancing other roles helped catalyze change in achievement goal type and/or rationale. The results of this study emphasize that CalWORKs students' achievement goals are malleable, and particular college experiences can facilitate students' movement toward more academically focused goals. More specifically, placing more focus on additional student support programs that can foster peer networking, faculty interactions, and additional career exploration opportunities can lead to change in academic persistence.