Executive function deficits in autism spectrum disorders and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: examining profiles across domains and ages

Deficits in 'executive function' (EF) are characteristic of several clinical disorders, most notably Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). In this study, age- and IQ-matched groups with ASD, ADHD, or typical development (TD) were compared on a battery of EF tasks tapping three core domains: response selection/inhibition, flexibility, and planning/working memory. Relations between EF, age and everyday difficulties (rated by parents and teachers) were also examined. Both clinical groups showed significant EF impairments compared with TD peers. The ADHD group showed greater inhibitory problems on a Go-no-Go task, while the ASD group was significantly worse on response selection/monitoring in a cognitive estimates task. Age-related improvements were clearer in ASD and TD than in ADHD. At older (but not younger) ages, the ASD group outperformed the ADHD group, performing as well as the TD group on many EF measures. EF scores were related to specific aspects of communicative and social adaptation, and negatively correlated with hyperactivity in ASD and TD. Within the present groups, the overall findings suggested less severe and persistent EF deficits in ASD (including Asperger Syndrome) than in ADHD.     

Adolescents' self-efficacy to communicate about sex: its role in condom attitudes, commitment, and use

This study examined whether and how self-efficacy to communicate with parents and peers about sex relate to sexually experienced adolescent males' and females' (N= 144, 112) condom attitudes, intentions, and use. Results showed that males who reported greater self-efficacy to communicate with parents used condoms more frequently; and both males and females who can communicate with peers used condoms more frequently. Self-efficacy to communicate with peers was related to more positive condom attitudes, which in turn were associated with greater condom commitment and use. Greater ability to communicate with parents was also related to greater condom commitment and use among males. These results suggest the importance of designing interventions that give adolescents the skills they need to feel efficacious in their ability to communicate about sex and contraception.     

Self-reported comfort in athletic training to same- and opposite-sex athletes

To assess the comfort of athletic trainers in providing care to athletes of the same- and opposite-sex, the Gender Comfort in Athletic Training Questionnaire was developed. Cronbach alpha was .72. The 8-item questionnaire was mailed to 235 participants, who were senior athletic training students and clinical instructors affiliated with 14 university athletic training programs. 192 questionnaires were returned (82%). Only one t test showed a significant mean difference in reported comfort between women (n= 103, M=2.8, SD= 0.8; disagree) and men (n= 89, M=3.1, SD=0.8; neutral) on the statement: I feel more comfortable providing athletic training services to male athletes than female athletes. The women and men in this sample were similar in their self-ratings of comfort in providing athletic training services to male and female athletes.     

Modality-specificity effects in priming of visual and auditory word-fragment completion

In this study, the researchers examined modality-specificity effects in priming of visual and auditory word-fragment completion by the presentation of visual or auditory primes. In 2 experiments, within-modality priming and cross-modality priming were observed, with greater priming observed in the within-modality conditions. The prime was presented in a word list in Experiment 1 and either presented or inferred in priming sentences in Experiment 2. Inferring a target that was not actually presented in the sentences resulted in priming of fragment completion but not in modality specificity. These results, coupled with comparisons to explicit cued fragment completion, support the interpretation that priming of word-fragment completion is owing to both a perceptual and a nonperceptual component. This latter component may be different than the conceptual processes used for explicit memory, which did show modality specificity for inferred targets.     

Variation in cue duration reveals top-down modulation of involuntary orienting to uninformative symbolic cues

This article reports three experiments in which the effects of cue duration on involuntary orienting to uninformative symbolic cues (arrows presented at fixation) were investigated. Experiment 1 showed that symbolic cues had less effect on involuntary orienting when they were presented for only 25 msec than when they were presented for 200 msec across a range of stimulus onset asynchronies. Experiment 2 suggested that the effect of cue duration on involuntary orienting was due primarily to top-down strategic factors, rather than to bottom-up stimulus factors, and Experiment 3 suggested that these strategic factors may involve differences in how the cue is processed. Altogether, the present findings are important because they emphasize the distinction between cue processing and the putative involuntary orienting that results from such processing in the symbolic-cuing paradigm. In so doing, the present results help resolve discrepant findings that have been reported across previous studies.     

Optimism, pessimism, and gambling: the downside of optimism

Three studies examined the relation between dispositional optimism and gambling. In Study 1, optimists were more likely than pessimists to have positive gambling expectations and report maintaining these expectations following losses. They also were more likely to indicate that winning money was a primary motivation for their gambling. Study 2 demonstrated that pessimists but not optimists reduce their betting and expectations after poor gaming performance. Study 3 replicated this effect using a more controlled experiment and showed that after losing, optimists report remembering more near wins than do pessimists. Thus, all three studies suggest that optimists, more than pessimists, maintain positive expectations and continue gambling after experiencing negative gaming outcomes. The authors suggest that despite optimism's many benefits, there are common situations in which the pessimistic tendency to disengage is beneficial.     

Processing relative clauses in Chinese

This paper reports results from a self-paced reading study in Chinese that demonstrates that object-extracted relative clause structures are less complex than corresponding subject-extracted structures. These results contrast with results from processing other Subject-Verb-Object languages like English, in which object-extracted structures are more complex than subject-extracted structures. A key word-order difference between Chinese and other Subject-Verb-Object languages is that Chinese relative clauses precede their head nouns. Because of this word order difference, the results follow from a resource-based theory of sentence complexity, according to which there is a storage cost associated with predicting syntactic heads in order to form a grammatical sentence. The results are also consistent with a theory according to which people have less difficulty processing embedded clauses whose word order matches the word order in main clauses. Some corpus analyses of Chinese texts provide results that constrain the classes of possible frequency-based theories. Critically, these results demonstrate that there is nothing intrinsically easy about extracting from subject position: depending on the word order in the main clause and in a relative clause, extraction from object position can be easier to process in some circumstances.     

Robust nonorthogonal analyses revisited: An update based on trimmed means

Three approaches to the analysis of main and interaction effect hypotheses in nonorthogonal designs were compared in a 2×2 design for data that was neither normal in form nor equal in variance. The approaches involved either least squares or robust estimators of central tendency and variability and/or a test statistic that either pools or does not pool sources of variance. Specifically, we compared the ANOVA F test which used trimmed means and Winsorized variances, the Welch-James test with the usual least squares estimators for central tendency and variability and the Welch-James test using trimmed means and Winsorized variances. As hypothesized, we found that the latter approach provided excellent Type I error control, whereas the former two did not.Financial support for this research was provided by grants to the first author from the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (#OGP0015855) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (#410-95-0006). The authors would like to express their appreciation to the Associate Editor as well as the reviewers who provided valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper.     

Processing empty categories: A parallel approach

In many current theories of human sentence processing, the mechanisms and principles proposed to account for data related to processing (1) long-distance dependencies and (2) structural ambiguities, such as garden-path sentences, are independent, despite the fact that deciding whether or not to posit a gap is just a special case of ambiguity resolution. In this paper we demonstrate how the parallel parsing theory proposed by Gibson (1991, in press)—which was developed to account for nongap ambiguity resolution data—also explains a number of gap-positing facts, without additional strategies. In particular, we show how this theory correctly explains filled-object-gap effects and the lack of filled-subject-gap effects in English, as well as certain gap-processing effects in Dutch.     

MUST FIGURE-GROUND ORGANIZATION PRECEDE OBJECT RECOGNITION?

The assumption that figure-ground segmentation must precede object or shape recognition has been central to theories of visual perception We showed that assumption to be incorrect in an experiment in which observers reported the first perceived figure–ground organization of briefly exposed stimuli depicting two regions sharing a figure–ground border We manipulated the symmetry of the two regions and their orientation-dependent denotivity (roughly, their meaningfulness), and measured how each of these variables influenced figure–ground reports when the stimuli were exposed for 14, 28, 57, 86, or 100 ms, and followed immediately by a mask Influences on figure–ground organization from both symmetry and orientation-dependent object recognition processes were found, both were observed first in the 28-ms condition Object recognition inputs did not dominate symmetry inputs We suggest that object recognition processes may operate simultaneously on both sides of edges detected before figure–ground relationships are determined