Infants of depressed mothers,although competent learners,fail to learn in response to their own mothers' infant-directed speech

Depressed mothers use less of the exaggerated prosody that is typical of infant-directed (ID) speech than do nondepressed mothers. We investigated the consequences of this reduced perceptual salience in ID speech for infant learning. Infants of nondepressed mothers readily learned that their mothers' speech signaled a face, whereas infants of depressed mothers failed to learn that their mothers' speech signaled the face. Infants of depressed mothers did, however, show strong learning in response to speech produced by an unfamiliar nondepressed mother. These outcomes indicate that the reduced perceptual salience of depressed mothers' ID speech could lead to deficient learning in otherwise competent learners.     

Why misinformation is more likely to be recognised over time: A source monitoring account

Although memory for actual events tends to be forgotten over time, memory for misinformation tends to be retrieved at a stable rate over long delays or at a rate greater than that found immediately after encoding. To examine whether source monitoring errors contribute to this phenomenon, two experiments investigated subjects' memory for the source of misinformation at different retention intervals. Subjects viewed a slide presentation, read a narrative containing misinformation, and, either 10 minutes or 1 week later, completed a recognition test about details seen in the slides and about the source of these details. After the longer retention interval in both experiments, participants were more likely to agree that they had seen misleading information and were also more likely to incorrectly associate the misinformation with the slide event. Theoretical implications of these findings are considered.     

Recognition memory for single items and for associations is similarly impaired following damage to the hippocampal region

The formation of new associations between items is critical for establishing episodic memories. It has been suggested that the hippocampus is essential for creating such associations but is not involved, or is much less involved, in memory for single items. In Experiment 1, we tested controls and amnesic patients with bilateral lesions thought to be limited primarily to the hippocampal region in both single-item and associative recognition memory tasks. In the single-item task, a conventional recognition memory task was administered in which participants studied either houses or faces and were tested for their ability to recognize the individual items. In the associative task, participants studied paired pictures of houses and faces with instructions that encouraged associating the two stimuli, and were tested for their ability to recognize the specific pairings that were presented at study. Like the controls, the amnesic patients performed more poorly on the associative task. Relative to the controls, the amnesic patients were impaired to a similar extent on the single-item and associative tasks. In Experiment 2, the performance of the amnesic patients was improved by increasing the number of presentations of the study lists (eight presentations instead of one). On both the single-item and associative tests, the performance of the amnesic patients after eight presentations was now identical to the performance of the controls who had been given only one presentation of the study list. Thus, the associative condition was not disproportionally difficult for the amnesic patients. These results are consistent with the idea that the hippocampus is similarly involved in single-item and associative memory.     

Police Officer Performance Under Stress: A Pilot Study on the Effects of Visuo-Motor Behavior Rehearsal

This study examined the effectiveness ofvisuo-motor behavior rehearsal(VMBR) as a method of reducing acute stress and improving police officer performance. Fifty-four recruits were randomly assigned to a treatment and a nontreatment condition prior to undergoing a highly stressful, critical event training scenario involving live fire. A manipulation check showed that participants who received VMBR displayed significantly lower scores on the cognitive state anxiety subscale of the Competitive State Anxiety Inventory-2; somatic state anxiety and self-confidence were unaffected by the VMBR treatment. Most importantly, participants in the VMBR training condition displayed better performance on the critical event scenario, including significantly more assailant hits. The findings are discussed with respect to the four-stage model of stress and human performance of Salas and colleagues.     

Psychosocial Treatment Strategies in the MTA Study: Rationale, Methods, and Critical Issues in Design and Implementation

The Collaborative Multimodal Treatment Study of Children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), the MTA, is the first multisite, cooperative agreement treatment study of children, and the largest psychiatric/psychological treatment trial ever conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health. It examines the effectiveness of Medication vs. Psychosocial treatment vs. their combination for treatment of ADHD and compares these experimental arms to each other and to routine community care. In a parallel group design, 579 (male and female) ADHD children, aged 7–9 years, 11 months, were randomly assigned to one of the four experimental arms, and then received 14 months of prescribed treatment (or community care) with periodic reassessments. After delineating the theoretical and empirical rationales for Psychosocial treatment of ADHD, we describe the MTA's Psychosocial Treatment strategy applied to all children in two of the four experimental arms (Psychosocial treatment alone; Combined treatment). Psychosocial treatment consisted of three major components: a Parent Training component, a two-part School Intervention component, and a child treatment component anchored in an intensive Summer Treatment Program. Components were selected based on evidence of treatment efficacy and because they address comprehensive symptom targets, settings, comorbidities, and functional domains. We delineate key conceptual and logistical issues faced by clinical researchers in design and implementation of Psychosocial research with examples of how these issues were addressed in the MTA study.Deceased