Identity but not expression memory for unfamiliar faces is affected by ageing

We examined age-related differences in memory for identity and emotional expression of unfamiliar faces. Younger and older adults were presented with happy and angry faces and were later asked to recognise the same faces displaying a neutral expression. When a face was recognised, they also had to remember what the initial expression of the face had been. In addition, states of awareness associated with both identity and expression memory were assessed with the remember/know/guess paradigm. Older adults showed less recollective experience than younger adults for identity but not for emotional expressions of the faces. This evidence indicates that age-related differences in memory may depend on the nature of the to-be-remembered information, with emotional/social information being remembered as well in older as in younger adults.     

The role of action effects in infants’ action control

In adults, the selection and the planning of actions are influenced by the anticipation of desired action effects. However, the role of action effects for action control in infants is still an unresolved issue. One important prerequisite for infants action control is that infants are able to relate certain movements to certain effects. To test this assumption, it was investigated how infants action control is affected by action effects. By applying an imitation paradigm, we studied 12- and 18-month-old infants who first observed an adult experimenter demonstrating a three-step action sequence on a toy bear. In three experimental groups, the second action step, the third action step, or no action step elicited an arbitrary sound as an additional acoustic action effect. It was coded how often each of the target actions was performed by the infant in a subsequent 90-s test phase. As predicted, the frequency of the infants target action varied depending on which action step elicited the action effect. In both age groups, the target action that was combined with an acoustical effect was not only produced more often but also occurred with lower latency and was in most cases the first target action shown by the infants. These results are interpreted as evidence of the important role of action effects in infants action control.     

The role of nonautomatic processes in activity regulation: from Lipps to Galperin

The authors present the historical analysis of one of the central questions in psychology: how and why the nonautomatic, psychological level of regulation (in contrast to automatic physiological processes) emerges both in evolution and in everyday context of activity. They discuss several approaches (by Lipps, Groos, Stern, James, Dewey, Claparède, Pavlov, and Leontiev) that culminated in the system of ideas developed by Galperin, one of the key figures in the cultural -historical activity theory. The authors analyze the relation of Galperin's ideas to Vygotsky's theoretical framework and then focus on Galperin's account of the origin and functions of mental activity. Galperin's contribution is highly relevant for understanding the role of psychological regulation and for contemporary research on cognition, consciousness, and conscious awareness.     

Emotional stroop performance for masked angry faces: it's BAS, not BIS

Theoretical models concerning selective attention to emotional stimuli predict heightened vigilance to angry faces in people with heightened trait anxiety or greater activity of the Behavioral Inhibition System (BIS). Recent evidence from electroencephalographic lateralization and affect studies and from studies assessing attentional biases to angry faces suggest, however, that heightened anger and activity of the Behavioral Activation System (BAS) should predict vigilant responding to angry faces. Social anxiety should predict avoidance of angry faces. Results from a masked emotional Stroop task verified these hypotheses, but an unmasked emotional Stroop provided no reliable relations. This dissociation confirms earlier claims that masked emotional Stroop performance is impervious to conscious control over the cognitive-emotional processes, as measured by the Stroop task.     

What schools can do to help gay/lesbian/bisexual youth: a harm

In recognition of the fact that heterosexism is one of the most significant realities of adolescents' day-to-day experiences in school, this paper examines the school environment in terms of disempowering and empowering aspects. It is argued that failure to take a proactive stance to help youth with gender identity issues is a major cause of psychological problems, leading in some cases to suicide, alcohol and other drug abuse, and homelessness.     

The normative development of child and adolescent problem behavior

The aim of this study was to identify normative developmental trajectories of parent-reported problems assessed with the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL; T. M. Achenbach, 1991) in a representative sample of 2,076 children aged 4 to 18 years from the general population. The trajectories were determined by multilevel growth curve analyses on the CBCL syndromes in a Longitudinal multiple birth-cohort sample that was assessed 5 times with 2-year intervals. Most syndromes showed a linear increase or decrease with age or a curvilinear trajectory, except for thought problems. Trajectories for most syndromes differed for boys versus girls, except those for withdrawn, social problems, and thought problems. These normative developmental trajectories provide information against which developmental deviance in childhood and adolescence can be detected.     

Cooperation,Knowledge, and Time: Alternating-time Temporal Epistemic Logic and its Applications

Branching-time temporal logics have proved to be an extraordinarily successful tool in the formal specification and verification of distributed systems. Much of their success stems from the tractability of the model checking problem for the branching time logic CTL, which has made it possible to implement tools that allow designers to automatically verify that systems satisfy requirements expressed in CTL. Recently, CTL was generalised by Alur, Henzinger, and Kupferman in a logic known as Alternating-time Temporal Logic (ATL). The key insight in ATL is that the path quantifiers of CTL could be replaced by cooperation modalities, of the form , where is a set of agents. The intended interpretation of an ATL formula is that the agents can cooperate to ensure that holds (equivalently, that have a winning strategy for ). In this paper, we extend ATL with knowledge modalities, of the kind made popular in the work of Fagin, Halpern, Moses, Vardi and colleagues. Combining these knowledge modalities with ATL, it becomes possible to express such properties as group can cooperate to bring about iff it is common knowledge in that . The resulting logic — Alternating-time Temporal Epistemic Logic (ATEL) — shares the tractability of model checking with its ATL parent, and is a succinct and expressive language for reasoning about game-like multiagent systems.     

The influence of morphological information on cataphoric pronoun assignment

In 3 eye-tracking experiments, the authors investigated the use of morphological information during pronoun resolution. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that disruption occurred when a preferred assignment was inconsistent with gender information. Experiment 2 ensured that this difficulty was not due to the introduction of a new discourse entity. Experiment 3 showed that disruption also occurred when number information was inconsistent with the preferred assignment. The results indicate that the use of morphological information is delayed until after the computation of coreference relations.     

Dissociation and memory fragmentation: experimental effects on meta-memory but not on actual memory performance

The relation between state dissociation and fragmentary memory was investigated by assessing both actual memory performance and meta-memory. From a sample of 330 normal subjects, two subsamples were selected on basis of trait dissociation, as measured by the Dissociative Experience Scale. Twenty subjects scoring above 30 and 20 subjects scoring below 10 were selected. Subjects watched an extremely aversive film, after which state dissociation was measured by the Peri-traumatic Dissociative Experience Scale. Four hours later memory fragmentation was assessed in two ways. Actual fragmentation was measured by a sequential memory task, and perceived fragmentation (meta-memory) was measured using a visual analogue scale. Subjects who tended to dissociate during the film judged their recollections of the film as more fragmentary. Although this finding is in line with clinical reports given by trauma victims, it was not sustained by objective evidence. That is, no effect was observed of state dissociation on the sequential memory task. The present findings suggest that the claim that dissociation induces memory fragmentation may have to be confined to meta-memory. Implications of this divergence between actual memory and meta-memory are discussed.