‘It's a boy because he's painting a picture’: Age differences in children's conventional and unconventional gender schemas

Two studies investigated the development of children's gender knowledge using a procedure designed to tap into children's unconventional gender beliefs. Study 1 revealed a developmental progression with 34 3‐ to 4‐year‐old children providing more unconventional reasons than conventional reasons to explain the gender of a series of drawings. By contrast, 39 5‐ to 6‐year‐old and 42 7‐ to 8‐year‐old children provided more conventional than unconventional reasons. Study 2 found that a second sample of 42 3‐ to 4‐year‐old children mastered a close‐ended assessment of gender stereotyping, while they relied on unconventional and conventional reasoning equally when explaining the gender of a series of drawings displaying conventional cues only. This research supports the model that children's conventional gender schemas do not develop before their unconventional gender schemas.     

The Experiment of Foster Care

We sought to provide a new framework for understanding the training and ongoing support of foster parents. The experiences of authorized foster parents were viewed in the context of an experiment, whereby foster parents entered an out-of-home care placement with preconceived ideas and expectations of what the provision of care would be like. We have investigated the experience of foster care from the perspective of the foster parent who tests expectations of providing care as one might conduct any experiment. Focus group discussion yielded five global domains of foster care experience: birth family, motivation, agency influences, relationship impacts, and attachment. Foster carers commonly described these domains as central to the overall experience of providing foster care. Furthermore, specific experiences within each domain were seen to either encourage or discourage the further provision of foster care. Individual interviews regarding the practical experiences related to these domains uncovered struggles of foster parents who sought to understand their role identity as a “foster parent”, and their self identity as a “mother”. We discuss implications arising from the experience of these domains of care and their related struggles.     

Age-related quantitative and qualitative changes in decision making ability

The "frontal aging hypothesis" predicts that brain senescence affects predominantly the prefrontal regions. Preliminary evidence has recently been gathered in favour of an age-related change in a typically frontal process, i.e. decision making, using the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), but overall findings have been conflicting. Following the traditional scoring method, coupled with a qualitative analysis, in the present study we compared IGT performance of 40 young (mean age: 27.9+/-4.7) and 40 old (mean age: 65.4+/-8.6) healthy adults and of 18 patients affected by frontal lobe dementia of mild severity (mean age: 65.1+/-7.4, mean MMSE score: 24.1+/-3.9). Quantitative findings support the notion that decision making ability declines with age; moreover, it approximates the impairment observed in executive dysfunction due to neurodegeneration. Results of the qualitative analysis did not reach statistical significance for the motivational and learning decision making components considered, but approached significance for the attentional component for elderly versus young normals, suggesting a possible decrease in the ability to maintain sustained attention during complex and prolonged tasks as the putative deficit underlying impaired decision making in normal aging.     

Are phonological influences on lexical (mis)selection the result of a monitoring bias?

A monitoring bias account is often used to explain speech error patterns that seem to be the result of an interactive language production system, like phonological influences on lexical selection errors. A biased monitor is suggested to detect and covertly correct certain errors more often than others. For instance, this account predicts that errors that are phonologically similar to intended words are harder to detect than those that are phonologically dissimilar. To test this, we tried to elicit phonological errors under the same conditions as those that show other kinds of lexical selection errors. In five experiments, we presented participants with high cloze probability sentence fragments followed by a picture that was semantically related, a homophone of a semantically related word, or phonologically related to the (implicit) last word of the sentence. All experiments elicited semantic completions or homophones of semantic completions, but none elicited phonological completions. This finding is hard to reconcile with a monitoring bias account and is better explained with an interactive production system. Additionally, this finding constrains the amount of bottom-up information flow in interactive models.     

Taking a new look at looking at nothing

A crucial question in cognitive science is how linguistic and visual information are integrated. Previous research has shown that eye movements to objects in the visual environment are locked to linguistic input. More surprisingly, listeners fixate on now-empty regions that had previously been occupied by relevant objects. This 'looking at nothing' phenomenon has been linked to the claim that the visual system constructs sparse representations of the external world and relies on saccades and fixations to extract information in a just-in-time manner. Our model provides a different explanation: based on recent work in visual cognition and memory, it assumes that the visual system creates and stores detailed internal memory representations, and that looking at nothing facilitates retrieval of those representations.     

Location of a missing object and detection of its absence by infants: Contribution of an eye‐tracking system to the understanding of infants' strategies

Previous research has demonstrated infants' capacity to discriminate between situations in which all the objects successively hidden behind a screen are present, or not, after the removal of the screen. Two types of interpretation have been proposed: counting capacity or object memorization capacity. In the usual paradigm, the missing object in the impossible event is usually the last object which is placed behind the screen. Following this, a third interpretation can be offered: infants' exploration is first directed to this object's location, and its presence or absence is noticed. Two experiments using Wynn's (Nature 1992; 358 :749) paradigm were performed to test the third hypothesis. The first experiment involved four objects (teddy bears) placed in four squares. Infants looked longer at the impossible event (3 objects, the last one missing) than at the possible event (4 objects) when the impossible event was presented first. No difference in looking duration was observed for the opposite order. In the second experiment, the four objects were disposed in a line and an eye‐tracking system was used. No difference in the number of looks was observed between the impossible event (3 objects, the second one missing) and the possible event (4 objects). Therefore, it appears that at least in this complex situation (4 objects used instead of 2 usually), the location of the missing object is a key factor for event discrimination. Eye‐tracking also indicated in the second experiment that infants looked less at the second location during an impossible event (object missing) than during the possible event (object present), indicating that the impossibility of the event was not a determining factor for looking durations. Altogether, the data indicate the potential usefulness of eye‐tracking analysis in this type of situation. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Team climate,climate strength and team performance. A longitudinal study

We tested the hypothesis that the relationship between team climate and team performance is moderated by climate strength. The study sample was composed of 155 bank branches, and a two‐wave panel design was implemented. We measured four team climate facets (support, innovation, goal achievement and enabling formalization). We obtained two subjective indicators of team performance (ratings provided by team members and by team managers) and a financial indicator of team performance. Seven out of the 12 interaction effects tested were statistically significant and showed the expected sign. When financial team performance was the criterion, only the interaction term was significant. This suggests that only strong climates are related to financial team performance over time.     

ENSEMBLE RECORDINGS IN AWAKE RATS: ACHIEVING BEHAVIORAL REGULARITY DURING MULTIMODAL STIMULUS PROCESSING AND DISCRIMINATIVE LEARNING

To meet an increasing need to examine the neurophysiological underpinnings of behavior in rats, we developed a behavioral system for studying sensory processing, attention and discrimination learning in rats while recording firing patterns of neurons in one or more brain areas of interest. Because neuronal activity is sensitive to variations in behavior which may confound the identification of neural correlates, a specific aim of the study was to allow rats to sample sensory stimuli under conditions of strong behavioral regularity. Our behavioral system allows multimodal stimulus presentation and is coupled to modules for delivering reinforcement, simultaneous monitoring of behavior and recording of ensembles of well isolated single neurons. Using training protocols for simple and compound discrimination, we validated the behavioral system with a group of 4 rats. Within these tasks, a majority of medial prefrontal neurons showed significant firing‐rate changes correlated to one or more trial events that could not be explained from significant variation in head position. Thus, ensemble recordings can be combined with discriminative learning tasks under conditions of strong behavioral regularity.     

Priming Sentence Production in Adolescents and Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyper-Activity Disorder

Theoretical accounts of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) posit a prominent role for problems in response inhibition (Nigg 2006). A key avenue for impulsivity in children with ADHD is inappropriate language expression. In this study, we sought to determine whether poor inhibitory control affects language production in adolescents and adults with ADHD. One hundred and ninety-five participants (13–35 years old; 65% male) were presented with two pictures and a verb, and their task was to form a sentence. If deficits in response inhibition affect language production, then participants with ADHD should be more likely than non-ADHD controls to begin speaking before having formulated a plan that will allow a grammatical continuation. The results showed that the ADHD-combined subtype, in particular, was more likely to produce an ungrammatical sequence. Effects were not moderated by age or gender. These data suggest that response suppression deficits in ADHD adversely affect the basic processes of sentence formation.