The role of chronic physical exercise and selective attention at encoding on implicit and explicit memory

Despite the evidence revealing benefits of chronic cardiovascular exercise on executive functions, little research has been conducted on long-term memory. We aimed to investigate the effect of physical exercise on implicit and explicit memory when attention was modulated at encoding in two groups of active and sedentary participants. With this purpose, attention was manipulated in a similar way in the implicit and explicit memory tasks by presenting picture outlines of two familiar objects, one in blue and the other in green, and participants were asked to pay attention only to one of them. Implicit memory was assessed through conceptual priming and explicit memory through a free recall task followed by recognition. The results did not reveal significant differences between groups in conceptual priming or free recall. However, in recognition, while both groups had similar discrimination for attended stimuli, active participants showed lower discrimination between unattended and new stimuli. These results suggested that exercise may have effects on specific cognitive processes, that is, that active participants may suppress non-relevant information better than sedentary participants, making the discrimination between unattended and new items more difficult.     

Effects of A Dual-Task Intervention in Postural Control and Cognitive Performance in Adolescents

Abstract

The aim was to assess dual- versus single-task training for motor performance and cognitive performance in adolescents. Two experiments were performed. In the first, 30 adolescents were randomized to three groups to determine the effect of dual-task difficulty on postural control: α-scaling and root mean square (RMS). In the second, 20 adolescents were randomized to two groups to determine the effect of dual-task practice to improve working memory. RMS in the post-test was lower than the pre-test in both dual-task groups, while α-scaling was lower in post-test than pre-test only in the high-difficulty dual-task group. A practice effect was observed on the percentage of correct answers only in the dual-task group (p?=?0.035). Thus, dual-task training could enhance motor and cognitive performance more than single-task training.     

Functioning of integration in Secondary School according to the teachers' perception

The main purpose of this article is to analyse integration in Compulsory Secondary School and the variables that teachers perceive as its indicators. More specifically, we wished to determine teachers' experience, their perceptions of integration students' achievement, participation, acceptance and involvement, and their appraisal of various measures in order to improve integration. Various preferred means of schooling and teachers' perception of the functioning of integration are analysed with a Likert-scaled questionnaire made up of 114 items. The sample comprised 242 secondary education teachers. The results show that the most poorly integrated group of students had behavioural problems and that a significant percentage of the teachers would prefer not to have these students in their classrooms. According to the teachers, integration does not work effectively with some groups of students, mainly due to the lack of resources and adequate strategies.     

The cognitive locus of distraction by acoustic novelty in the cross-modal oddball task

Unexpected stimuli are often able to distract us away from a task at hand. The present study seeks to explore some of the mechanisms underpinning this phenomenon. Studies of involuntary attention capture using the oddball task have repeatedly shown that infrequent auditory changes in a series of otherwise repeating sounds trigger an automatic response to the novel or deviant stimulus. This attention capture has been shown to disrupt participants' behavioral performance in a primary task, even when distractors and targets are asynchronous and presented in distinct sensory modalities. This distraction effect is generally considered as a by-product of the capture of attention by the novel or deviant stimulus, but the exact cognitive locus of this effect and the interplay between attention capture and target processing has remained relatively ignored. The present study reports three behavioral experiments using a cross-modal oddball task to examine whether the distraction triggered by auditory novelty affects the processing of the target stimuli. Our results showed that variations in the demands placed on the visual analysis (Experiment 1) or categorical processing of the target (Experiment 2) did not impact on distraction. Instead, the cancellation of distraction by the presentation of an irrelevant visual stimulus presented immediately before the visual target (Experiment 3) suggested that distraction originated in the shifts of attention occurring between attention capture and the onset of the target processing. Possible accounts of these shifts are discussed.     

Validation of the modified version of the Conflict Tactics Scale (M-CTS) in a Spanish population of youths

The modified version of the Conflict Tactics Scale (M-CTS), originally created by Straus in 1979, is one of the most extensively used instruments to detect violent verbal and physical behaviours in youths' and adolescents' dating relations. The aim of the present work was to analyze the psychometric properties of the instrument and to validate its adequacy in the Spanish population. The sample was made up of 5,355 Spanish youths from the Community of Madrid, ages between 16 and 26 years. By means of confirmatory factor analysis, four factors that were consistent with the theory and with previous research were identified: arguments, psychological/verbal aggression, slight physical aggression, and severe physical aggression. It is concluded that the scale assesses the presence of various types of aggression in youths' and adolescents' dating relationships with sufficient psychometric guarantees.     

The performance of school integration according to the perception of specialist teachers in therapeutic pedagogy

The main purpose of this article is to analyse the perception that specialist teachers in therapeutic pedagogy have of the integration of students with specific needs for educational support. Diverse groups of students are differentiated. More specifically, it aims to know how teachers perceive students' performance and participation, and also certain attitudes towards the students (acceptance, involvement of fellow students…). Teachers' opinions of various measures to improve integration are also analysed as are the diverse preferred means of schooling and support. For this purpose, a 114-item Lickert-type questionnaire, with 8 additional personal identification items, was used. The sample comprised 106 specialist teachers who work in Asturias, out of an entire sample of 406. The results reveal that specialist teachers do not perceive the same attitudes in the different groups studied. Students with behaviour disorders are the most rejected and the ones from whom teachers can expect the least. The group of ethnic minorities needs to improve family involvement. The specialists demand more human and physical resources and most of them think that ordinary centres provide the most suitable form of schooling.     

In hindsight, life flows from left to right

Three experiments investigated the mental representation of meaningful event sequences. Experiment 1 used extended (5 min long) naturalistic scenes excerpted from commercial movies. Experiments 2 and 3 presented everyday activities by means of sequences of six photographs. All experiments found both left–right and distance effects in an order decision task, suggesting that when contemplated in hindsight, experienced events unfold along a left-to-right analogical mental line. Present results are discussed in the context of the mental representation of other kinds of ordinal sequences, and other left–right effects reported in non-ordinal domains.     

Hypocrites or maligned cooperative participants? Experimenter induced normative conflict in zero-sum situations

The failure to recognize the influence of two distinct forms of moral norms can lead to the misattribution of moral behavior to egoistic motives. This is illustrated in the research of Batson and his colleagues (e.g., Batson, Kobrynowicz, Dinnerstein, Kampf, & Wilson, 1997). They reported the appearance of moral failure and hypocrisy motivation in several experiments employing essentially the same “zero-sum” experimental situation. They cited as evidence the discrepancy between participants’ apparently self-serving private acts and their subsequent public ratings of the morality of what they had done as well as their recognition of the “most” moral way to behave. The research reported here supported an alternative explanation that located the experimenter’s implicit and explicit instructions as the source of the discrepancy between the participants’ private acts and their public ratings. The findings confirmed the hypothesis that Batson and his colleagues had not merely made moral norms “salient”. They had actually presented their participants with contradictory “demands”: explicitly inviting them to meet the norm of justified self-interest in private but then give public lip-service to the experimenter’s instructions as to a supererogatory way to behave. When either of the demands was removed, the “hypocrisy” no longer occurred.     

EmoFinder: The meeting point for Spanish emotional words

We present here emoFinder (http://usc.es/pcc/emofinder), a Web-based search engine for Spanish word properties taken from different normative databases. The tool incorporates several subjective word properties for 16,375 distinct words. Although it focuses particularly on normative ratings for emotional dimensions (e.g., valence and arousal) and discrete emotional categories (fear, disgust, anger, happiness, and sadness), it also makes available ratings for other word properties that are known to affect word processing (e.g., concreteness, familiarity, contextual availability, and age of acquisition). The tool provides two main functionalities: Users can search for words matched on specific criteria with regard to the selected properties, or users can obtain the properties for a set of words. The output from emoFinder is highly customizable and can be accessed online or exported to a computer. The tool architecture is easily scalable, so that it can be updated to include word properties from new Spanish normative databases as they become available.