The role of within-category variability in category-based induction: a developmental study

The present studies tested the hypothesis that strong assumptions about within-category homogeneity impede children's recognition of the inductive value of diverse samples of evidence. In Study 1a, children (7-year-olds) and adults were randomly assigned to receive a prime emphasizing within-category variability, a prime emphasizing within-category similarities, or to not receive a prime. Only following the variability prime, children demonstrated a reliable preference for evaluating diverse over nondiverse samples to determine whether there is support for a category-wide generalization. Adults demonstrated a robust preference for diverse samples in all conditions. These effects extended beyond the specific categories included in the prime, as well as to multiple types of test questions. Study 1b demonstrated that priming variability leads children to select diverse samples only when doing so is informative for induction. Implications for conceptual development are discussed.     

The impact of value-directed remembering on the own-race bias

Learners demonstrate superior recognition of faces of their own race or ethnicity, compared to faces of other races or ethnicities; a finding termed the own-race bias. Accounts of the own-race bias differ on whether the effect reflects acquired expertise with own-race faces or enhanced motivation to individuate own-race faces. Learners have previously been motivated to demonstrate increased recall for highly important items through a value-based paradigm, in which item importance is designated using high (vs. low) point values. Learners receive point values by correctly recalling the corresponding items at test, and are given the goal of achieving a high total point score. In two experiments we examined whether a value-based paradigm can motivate learners to differentiate between other-race faces, reducing or eliminating the own-race bias. In Experiment 1, participants studied own- and other-race faces paired with high or low point values. High point values (12-point) indicated that face was highly important to learn, whereas low point values (1-point) indicated that face was less important to learn. Participants demonstrated increased recognition for high-value own-race (but not other-race) faces, suggesting that motivation alone is not enough to reduce the own-race bias. In Experiment 2, we examined whether participants could use value to enhance recognition when permitted to self-pace their study. Recognition did not differ between high-value own- and other-race faces, reducing the own-race bias. Such data suggest that motivation can influence the own-race bias when participants can control encoding.     

Change detection in the flicker paradigm: Do faces have an advantage?

Changes to a scene that occur during an eye movement, image flicker, or movie cut are difficult to detect. One way to measure change detection performance is with the flicker paradigm, where changes between two images are introduced during a brief blank screen, which causes the images to “flicker”. Ro, Russell, and Lavie (2001) presented flickering displays consisting of one face and five different common objects. They found that changes to faces were detected both more rapidly and more accurately than changes to objects and suggested that faces capture attention due to their biological significance. In the present studies, we found that changes to objects were more readily detected than changes to faces when displays consisted of an object among a number of faces. That is, a change detection advantage was observed for the “odd-one-out” in the array, regardless of its significance. Therefore, faces may not have a special status for change detection.     

Have you got the look? Gaze direction affects judgements of facial attractiveness

Much is known about the attractiveness of physical attributes, such as symmetry and averageness. Here we examine the effect of a social cue, eye-gaze direction, on facial attractiveness. Given that direct gaze signals social engagement, we predicted that faces showing direct gaze would be preferred to faces showing averted gaze. Thirty-two males completed two tasks designed to assess preferences for female faces displaying a neutral expression. Participants were more likely to select the face with direct gaze, when choosing the more attractive face from direct- and averted-gaze versions of the same face. This direct-gaze preference was stronger for high-attractive than low-attractive face sets, but was present for both. Attractiveness ratings were also higher for faces with direct than averted gaze. Interestingly, stimulus inversion weakened the preference for inverted faces, which suggests the preference does not simply reflect a bilateral symmetry bias.     

Predicting mothers' reports of children's mental health three years after Hurricane Katrina

This study explored pathways through which hurricane-related stressors affected the psychological functioning of elementary school aged children who survived Hurricane Katrina. Participants included 184 mothers from the New Orleans area who completed assessments one year pre-disaster (Time 1), and one and three years post-disaster (Time 2 and Time 3, respectively). Mothers rated their children's behavior problems at Time 3 only (n = 251 children; 53.0% male; mean age: 10.19 years, SD = 1.68 years). A path analytic model indicated that hurricane-related stressors were associated with increased maternal psychological distress and school mobility in the first post-disaster year, which were associated with higher child internalizing and externalizing symptoms three years post-disaster. Mediation analysis indicated that hurricane-related stressors were associated with child symptoms indirectly, through their impact on maternal psychological distress. Findings underscore the importance of interventions that boost maternal and child mental health and support children through post-disaster school transitions.     

General knowledge norms: Updated and expanded from the Nelson and Narens (1980) norms

The Nelson and Narens (Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 19:338–368, 1980) general knowledge norms have been valuable to researchers in many fields. However, much has changed over the 32 years since the 1980 norms. For example, in 1980, most people knew the answer to the question “What is the name of the Lone Ranger’s Indian sidekick?” (answer: Tonto), whereas in 2012, few people know this answer. Thus, we updated the 1980 norms and expanded them by providing new measures. In particular, we report two new metacognitive measures (confidence judgments and peer judgments) and provide a detailed report of commission errors. Each of these measures will be valuable to researchers, and together they are likely to facilitate future research in a number of fields, such as research investigating memory illusions, metamemory processes, and error correction. The presence of substantial generational shifts from 1980 to 2012 necessitates the use of updated norms.     

Examining differences in the levels of false memories in children and adults using child-normed lists

Several previous studies have demonstrated that children, when compared with adults, exhibit both lower levels of veridical memory and fewer intrusions when given semantically associated lists. However, researchers have drawn these conclusions using semantically associated word lists that were normed with adults, which may not lead to the same level of activation or gist generation in children. In the current study, the authors used similar associative word lists normed with children and then evaluated the memory of children and adults using these newly normed lists as well as the typical adult-normed lists. Results indicate that children showed lower true and false memories with both the child-normed and adult-normed lists. Thus, these data suggest that the negative relationship between age and false memories in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM; J. Deese, 1959; H. L. Roediger & K. B. McDermott, 1995) paradigm is not an artifact of the age group used to construct the lists.     

Associative recognition of face pairs by younger and older adults: the role of familiarity-based processing

Previous research suggested that older adults have a specific impairment in remembering verbal associative information, but it is unclear how elaboration and familiarity might influence this deficit in situations that involve perceptual processing. In the present experiments, younger and older participants studied male-female pairs of faces. Participants were then administered an associative recognition test consisting of previously studied pairs, pairs that contained previously studied items that were not studied together (i.e., conjunction pairs), and entirely new pairs of faces, and participants were instructed to identify pairs that had been presented together at study. Overall, participants were successful at recognizing previously presented pairs but were highly likely to mistakenly endorse conjunction pairs. This pattern was more pronounced for older adults, especially when items were repeated at encoding. Such data suggest that memory for face pairs relies largely on the familiarity of each face and not on a more precise recollection of associative information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved).     

Fitting the child's mind to the world: adaptive norm-based coding of facial identity in 8-year-olds

In adults, facial identity is coded by opponent processes relative to an average face or norm, as evidenced by the face identity aftereffect: adapting to a face biases perception towards the opposite identity, so that a previously neutral face (e.g. the average) resembles the identity of the computationally opposite face. We investigated whether children as young as 8 use adaptive norm-based coding to represent faces, a question of interest because 8-year-olds are less accurate than adults at recognizing faces and do not show the adult neural markers of face expertise. We found comparable face identity aftereffects in 8-year-olds and adults: perception of identity in both groups shifted in the direction predicted by norm-based coding. This finding suggests that, by 8 years of age, the adaptive computational mechanisms used to code facial identity are like those of adults and hence that children's immaturities in face processing arise from another source.