Adolescent Friendship as a Dynamic System: Entropy and Deviance in the Etiology and Course of Male Antisocial Behavior

A dynamic systems framework was applied to understand the influence of friendship on antisocial behavior from childhood (age 9-10) through adulthood (age 24-25) for Oregon Youth Study males (N = 206). Boys were videotaped interacting with a friend at ages 14, 16, and 18, and deviant content and interpersonal processes were independently coded. Conditional dyadic interpersonal processes were studied as a communication system and summarized by an index of information entropy (F. Attneave, 1959). High entropy scores represent disorganized, unpredictable patterns of interaction, whereas low entropy scores reflect an organized dialogue. Conversations of early-onset antisocial boys and their best friends were less organized and included more deviant content than those of well-adjusted controls. Prediction analyses, however, revealed an interaction between entropy and deviant talk. Consistent with expectation, males with well-organized interactions (i.e., low entropy) but elevated levels of deviant content were most likely to continue antisocial behavior into adulthood. Findings suggest that individual risk for maladaptation may be amplified by early adolescent friendship dynamics organized around deviance.     

On the auditory modality superiority effect in serial recall: separating input and output factors

The modality effect in immediate recall refers to superior recall of the last few items within lists presented in spoken as opposed to printed form. The locus of this well-known effect has been unclear. N. Cowan, J. S. Saults, E. M. Elliott, and M. Moreno (2002) introduced a new method to distinguish between the effects of input serial position, output serial position, and the number of items yet to be recalled and found that large modality effects occurred only in conditions in which delay and interference at output (from items already recalled) was high. The authors replicated that finding, even when the response period included output interference acoustically similar to the spoken stimuli to be recalled. However, the authors found that output delay and interference act only by lowering the level of performance to a more sensitive range. The modality effect thus originates during encoding of the list to be recalled, not during output.     

When children ask, "What is it?" what do they want to know about artifacts?

When children ask, "What is it?" are they seeking information about what something is called or what kind of thing it is? To find out, we gave 2-, 3-, and 4-year-olds (32 at each age) the opportunity to inquire about unfamiliar artifacts. An ambiguous question was answered with a name or with functional information, depending on the group to which the children were assigned. Children were inclined to follow up with additional questions about the object when they had been told its name, but seemed satisfied with the answer when they had been told the object's function. Moreover, children in the name condition tended to substitute questions about function for ambiguous questions over the course of the session. These results indicate that children are motivated to discover what kinds of things novel artifacts are, and that young children, like adults, conceive of artifact kinds in terms of their functions.     

Culture and language in the emergence of autobiographical memory

Current conceptualizations of childhood amnesia assume that there is a "barrier" to remembering early experiences that must be overcome in order for one to begin to accumulate autobiographical memories. In contrast, we present a social-cultural-developmental perspective on the emergence of autobiographical memory. We first demonstrate the gradual emergence of autobiographical memories across the preschool years and then relate this developmental process to specific developments in language, narrative, and understanding of self and other that vary among individuals, as well as by culture and gender.     

When visual and verbal memories compete: Evidence of cross-domain limits in working memory

Recently, investigators have suggested that visual working memory operates in a manner unaffected by the retention of verbal material. We question that conclusion on the basis of a simple dual-task experiment designed to rule out phonological memory and to identify a more central faculty as the source of a shared limitation. With a visual working memory task in which two arrays of color squares were to be compared, performance was unaffected by concurrent recitation of a two-digit list or a known seven-digit sequence. However, visual working memory performance decreased markedly when paired with a load of seven random digits. This was not a simple tradeoff, inasmuch as errors on the visual array and high digit load tasks tended to co-occur. Working memory for digits and visual information thus are both subject to at least one type of shared limit, not just domain-specific limitations. The nature of the shared limit is discussed.     

Reliability and validity of the Spanish Version of the Crisis in Family Systems-Revised

Increasing the representation of Spanish-speaking study participants requires development and dissemination of reliable and valid translated scales. In the urrent study the construct validity was assessed of the Spanish version of the Crisis n Family Systems-Revised, a measure of contemporary life stressors, with a convenience sample of 377 parents interviewed in a study of childhood asthma, although over half of the respondents did not have children with asthma. Most respondents were foreign-born women between 20 to 60 years old (M=35, SD=7). 52% had not completed high school or its equivalent, and 55% reported a household income of dollar 15,000 or less. For a subsample of 25 respondents test-retest reliability was .86 over 2 wk. Reporting more life stressors was associated with greater depressive symptomatology, poorer physical and mental health function, and lower household income. These relationships support the construct validity of the test in Spanish. This study provided strong evidence that this version is a valid and reliable measure of life stressors for a Spanish-speaking population living in the United States.     

Recursive reminding: Effects of repetition, printed frequency, connectivity, and set size on recognition and judgments of frequency

In the present experiments, predictions of common path and recursive-reminding models of recognition (RG) and judgments of frequency (JOFs) were contrasted. The results indicated that each task is affected by study frequency, printed frequency, and associative connectivity. However, effect size analyses indicated that study frequency and item attributes show a double dissociation over tasks. Study frequency has a greater effect on JOFs than on RG, whereas printed frequency and associative connectivity have greater effects on RG than on JOFs. The recursive-reminding model predicts differential effects of study frequency, because it assumes that although both tasks are influenced by familiarity, JOF is more likely to be affected by recollective reminding as a procedure for encoding event frequency. Associative set size effects were absent in each task, suggesting that competitors play no role in either task.     

When does grouping happen?

Recent research on perceptual grouping is described with particular emphasis on identifying the level(s) at which grouping factors operate. Contrary to the classical view of grouping as an early, two-dimensional, image-based process, recent experimental results show that it is strongly influenced by phenomena related to perceptual constancy, such as binocular depth perception, lightness constancy, amodal completion, and illusory contours. These findings imply that at least some grouping processes operate at the level of phenomenal perception rather than at the level of the retinal image. Preliminary evidence is reported showing that grouping can affect perceptual constancy, suggesting that grouping processes must also operate at an early, preconstancy level. If so, grouping may be a ubiquitous, ongoing aspect of visual organization that occurs for each level of representation rather than as a single stage that can be definitively localized relative to other perceptual processes.