A Theory of Risk and Resilience Factors in Military Families

This article discusses risk and resilience factors that may affect military families, with a focus on frequent relocation, deployment, exposure to combat and PTSD, and postdeployment reunion as possible risk factors influencing child psychosocial and academic outcome. Research findings are presented as supporting a theoretical pathway that suggests that the effects of military life on child outcome may follow an indirect pathway involving parental stress and psychopathology, rather than military life directly affecting children of military parents. The proposed pathway also serves to highlight the need for further research on understudied resilience factors and provides suggestions for interventions that may benefit military families.     

Activation of learned action sequences by auditory feedback

The present research addressed whether auditory feedback associated with a learned action sequence can activate the action representation of that sequence. Nonpianist participants learned to perform two melodies at a piano keyboard repeatedly during a trial. The participants heard feedback either from the melody they were performing (normal feedback) or from the other learned melody (termed alternate feedback). An additional tone functioned as an instruction cue to either switch melodies or continue the current melody. Following the instruction cues, participants typically paused just before switching, and paused similarly during trials with a continue cue. Participants paused longer after a continue cue when they experienced alternate rather than normal feedback. This effect was specific to instruction cues positioned at weak metrical accents—positions at which participants were less likely to switch overall. Feedback did not influence timing on switch trials. These findings indicate that influences of auditory feedback can activate learned action sequences, leading to longer latencies associated with cue evaluation.     

Evidence of fixed capacity in visual object categorization

How is visual object perception limited by divided attention? Whereas some theories have proposed that it is not limited at all (unlimited capacity), others have proposed that divided attention introduces restrictive capacity limitations or serial processing (fixed capacity). We addressed this question using a task in which observers searched for instances of particular object categories, such as a moose or squirrel. We applied an extended simultaneous-sequential paradigm to test the fixed-capacity and unlimited-capacity models (Experiment 1). The results were consistent with fixed capacity and rejected unlimited capacity. We ascertained that these results were due to attention, and not to sensory interactions such as crowding, by repeating the experiment using a cuing paradigm with physically identical displays (Experiment 2). The results from both experiments were consistent with theories of object perception that have fixed capacity, and they rejected theories with unlimited capacity. Both serial and parallel models with fixed capacity remain viable alternatives.     

Signal detection evidence for limited capacity in visual search

The nature of capacity limits (if any) in visual search has been a topic of controversy for decades. In 30 years of work, researchers have attempted to distinguish between two broad classes of visual search models. Attention-limited models have proposed two stages of perceptual processing: an unlimited-capacity preattentive stage, and a limited-capacity selective attention stage. Conversely, noise-limited models have proposed a single, unlimited-capacity perceptual processing stage, with decision processes influenced only by stochastic noise. Here, we use signal detection methods to test a strong prediction of attention-limited models. In standard attention-limited models, performance of some searches (feature searches) should only be limited by a preattentive stage. Other search tasks (e.g., spatial configuration search for a "2" among "5"s) should be additionally limited by an attentional bottleneck. We equated average accuracies for a feature and a spatial configuration search over set sizes of 1-8 for briefly presented stimuli. The strong prediction of attention-limited models is that, given overall equivalence in performance, accuracy should be better on the spatial configuration search than on the feature search for set size 1, and worse for set size 8. We confirm this crossover interaction and show that it is problematic for at least one class of one-stage decision models.